More from Books

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Tales of the expected unexpected

'Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant,' promises the jacket. The heroines of Fay Weldon's short stories 'offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation'. It's not the done thing to start a review by quoting the blurb, but this one unwittingly helps to establish why these stories ought to be good, and why, on the whole, they are not. Most stick to the 'twist in the tail' formula bequeathed to short-story writers by Saki and too rarely discarded since. A faked Early Christian cross works healing miracles, a dowdy book illustrator turns the tables on a smooth-talking con-man, a china-smashing poltergeist shows a displaced Jewish girl the way back to her roots. Whatever expectations are raised, you can guarantee they'll be overturned.

Philip Hensher

Third time unlucky

£14.99 for individual volumes The single problem facing any translator of Proust is that there is, really, no equivalent of his style in English. He is at once classical and idiosyncratic; the rhythms and proportions of classical French style are followed faithfully in every sentence, and over the whole book. The end result looks so alarmingly new, however, because the proportions and rhythms are employed on an unprecedented scale. The novel really is one novel, and not, like Anthony Powell, a sequence of novels; his sentences are always immense, balanced epigrams. The novel has an essential orthodox classicism which emerges, on such a scale, as revolutionary audacity.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Our man in the thick of it

There he is on the cover, our handsome 57-year-old Boys' Own adventurer, probably doing a piece to camera, cheered on by the locals who have come along to revel in the BBC's long-awaited liberation of Kabul last November. Why couldn't he have arrived a few years earlier, they're probably wondering. It could all have been so much easier. No beastly Taliban. No need even for America's B52s and the Northern Alliance. There was always a far better and infinitely more elegant solution to the interminable Afghan conundrum. Send for Simpson. Of the BBC's big guns, they don't come any bigger than Simpson. Revolution in Serbia? Put Simpson on a plane. Trouble in Tiananmen Square? Simpson's got it covered.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Too much and too late

By the criteria of the day before yesterday, the late William Whitelaw, a much loved Tory politician who served as Mrs Thatcher's deputy leader, must have seemed a good circulation bet for a successful biography. Most people, after all, would have heard of him, if only because of Mrs Thatcher's memorable remark that 'every prime minister needs a Willie'.

Hugh Massingberd

Gentleman and player

During my brief stint as a showbiz scribe - which unfortunately came to an end when I expressed a preference for profiling Gerald Harper rather than Jean-Claude Van Damme - I had the privilege of interviewing George Baker (celebrated as Chief Inspector Wexford in ITV's The Ruth Rendell Mysteries), whom I had admired since his days as a clean-cut, young officer in British films of the Fifties. What struck me most about this unusually tall actor was his impeccable courtesy. I arrived disgracefully late for our lunch in Soho, and we were then pestered by one of the neighbourhood topers, but Baker's beautiful manners were a humbling object lesson in good behaviour.

Jeremy Treglown

Past glories prove elusive

Despite many allusions to Virgil and a diligent summary of various interpretations of Poussin's 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie', Ben Okri's main sense of Arcadia, with its 'star-dust magic', seems to be derived from pop music lite. 'We are stardust, golden', sang Eva Cassidy in Woodstock, 'and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.' Anyone who has been tempted to replace this with 'We've got to get back to the weedin' ' will know what's missing from Okri's view of nature. Realism apart, In Arcadia has no narrative tension and the characters are ciphers.

Miranda Seymour

Well met by moonlight

One of the best permanent shows in London is the Science Museum's collection of electrical and magnetic instruments commissioned by George III. Here, gathered in one room, you can see orreries, Leyden jars, air pumps and - my favourite - electrostatic spangles flickering like lightning in the glass pillars of a temple intended to stand as the centrepiece of a dining-table. You could, until 1993, combine the joys of this collection with a visit to the museum's history of electricity, laid out in darkened tableaux to make theatre of the lacemaker's pin-pricked candleshade, the shock of the first arc-light. I mourn its passing; these are the places which bring us into imaginative connection with the extraordinary world of the Lunar men.

Jane Ridley

The Margot and Henry show

The publicity material likens this book to The Forsyte Saga, but in fact it's far more gripping than fiction: the true story of a larger-than-life political dynasty. The diaries of Margot Asquith form the core of the book. For too long Margot's voluminous diaries have been unavailable, and Colin Clifford is the first biographer to gain unrestricted access. He has put them to excellent use. Daughter of the fabulously rich Sir Charles Tennant ('the Bart'), Margot took London by storm with her energy and outrageous wit. Her diaries reveal a less attractive side. She emerges as self-obsessed, with an irritating habit of detailing pert exchanges with the great and the good in which she always comes out best.

Robert Edric

No petticoat long unlifted

Few admirers of Faber's recent spate of tales and novellas - the spacious and admirably unadorned The Courage Consort and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, for instance - will be prepared for the solid and all-inclusive recreation of (an echo here of Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings) The Crimson Petal and the White. Twenty years in the making, Faber's latest work boldly proclaims itself and its High Victorian intentions from the outset.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Big little man

'What a swankpot!' Sir Norman Wisdom pseudo-modestly pseudo-rebukes himself after listing some of the trophies in a display cabinet at home on the Isle of Man. 'But why not?' he asks, almost disarmingly. 'I did get 'em, didn't I?' This is ventriloquial star-speak by William Hall, an expert writer-with, whose credits include biographies of Michael Caine, James Dean, Frankie Howerd, Larry Adler and Dick Emery. Wisdom's cabinet contains a British Academy Award, seven trophies for Britain's Top Comedian, seven engraved silver spoons from John Paddy Carstairs, one for each Norman Wisdom film he directed, emblems of the Golden Flame from Argentina and the Lifetime Achievement Award from his fellow British comics. Is Little Norm proud? Cor, not 'arf!

Saturday

Graham Stewart

Pedalling into politics

Perhaps it is not a good idea to call Dervla Murphy 'redoubtable'. She is a strident anti-militarist and might not enjoy being given the sort of name that could so easily belong to an old dreadnought or hunter-killer submarine. But the 71-year-old cycling grandmother can hardly be thought of as anything less. While half the population of her age retreat into a world of sheltered accommodation and televised snooker, she has opted instead to pedal against the steep mountain inclines of the Balkans. Needless to say, the terrain proves to be by no means the most arduous or dangerous part of the odyssey. Like anyone who has witnessed the humanitarian disaster of that part of the world over the last decade, Dervla Murphy has some strong views about the politics that underscored it.

Interconnect

Not one to be stared down

No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he did: stubborn, scornful of frills and too intelligent to be dull; a man (a boy) who could stick up for himself. At 19, in 1987, while still at Cambridge, he was already playing for Lancashire, causing resentment. Someone daubed FEC on his locker, which did not mean 'Future England Captain' (the E stood for 'educated'). In only his third match for the county he put some wet clothes in the pavilion dryer and Paul Allott, a senior player, took them out and threw in his own. Atherton took out Allott's and replaced his. It will stand for an image of his whole career: no one was ever going to stare him down.

Interconnect

Boots, boots, boots, boots

KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers. As such it recapitulates, and to a limited degree extends, a saga that sports journalists have been amusing themselves with for nearly 40 years, certainly long before the celebrated joint appearance in the 1966 World Cup final. On the surface - a surface diligently polished by the sports writers and professional colleagues - the story of the Charltons is one of diametrical opposites.

Paul Binding

Singing for your supper

On 23 February l937 a small boy of seven arrives at Victoria station, London. Here he is met, as arranged, by his uncle, a man he has never seen before though he has heard an intriguing plenty about him - that he is very amusing and also famous, a national hero. The boy doesn't understand his own present situation. Why has he had to come to this distant foreign country and undergo an immediate name-change, from Andrei to Andrew? Why did his father, who travelled with him for a whole fatiguing week across Europe from Romania, abandon him in Paris, rather than accompany him to London himself? Why did he have no proper leave-taking with his mother, that affectionate, devout woman, mysteriously referred to in some quarters as the 'Debt-Collector's daughter'?

Jonathan Mirsky

Out of the bottom drawer?

Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin's earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning it by listening to the World Service, came to the US in 1985 when he was 29. Waiting won the National Book Award. One of the reasons I liked that book was Ha's creation of a world in which people acted naturally, like real Chinese, as their gripping story unfolded. The problem with The Crazed is that the same Chinese habits are there, right down to smells, noises and stains, but the story, such as it is, plods.

Andrew Barrow

The way to the tomb

This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Its hero is an intensely innocent young railway apprentice, who dreams of becoming an engine driver 'of the better sort', and its villains - or so it seems - are a bunch of hard-bitten, foul-mouthed colleagues who are apparently up to something dark and dirty. Set during the closing months of 1903, this book is, as its publishers rightly claim, 'fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail', but this backdrop material is so skilfully woven into the story that it comes across as playfully invented rather than laboriously researched.

Robert Edric

A world of drivers and passengers

VJ night, the war in the Pacific is finally over, and in William Kennedy's Albany the war of senatorial election is about to begin. The candidates stand up to be counted and the consequences of their election are considered. Small crooks fresh out of crook school and the army rise into the lower reaches of these considerations. Bigger crooks and politicians start to circle each other and to watch their backs.

Susan Greenfield

Nature versus Nurture: the state of play

The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that in the eternal Nature-Nurture debate the scales tip heavily in favour of the environment: when it comes to the human mind, nothing is left to the caprice of genes. Steven Pinker, well known for The Language Instinct and to a lesser extent How the Mind Works, devotes some 500 pages to refuting this stance. Effectively, then, this book is all about human nature - its validation, characterisation, and neurological basis, along with all its wider moral, political and social baggage.

Saturday

Fatema Ahmed

A bleak kind of optimism

After several acclaimed novels, including last year's Pulitzer prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has now produced a volume of short stories. However, the qualities which endear the novels to their readers - a wry sense of humour, vivid characterisation and the sense of lives being lived over time - are less apparent here; the shorter form has created a sterner and more uncomfortable writer. In the title story, 'the whore's child' is an elderly Belgian nun who joins the narrator's creative-writing class. Sister Ursula writes several accounts of her own life, the unchanging details of which are that she is the daughter of a prostitute, and that she was sent to a convent by a father she hardly knew and has spent the rest of her life worshipping.

Philip Ziegler

No room at the top

In the years following the second world war, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey either became Labour Members of Parliament or worked closely with the Labour party. Few parties in so short a time can have gathered three recruits so obviously of prime-ministerial calibre. No other party could have so contrived things that none of them attained that office. The parallels between the three are almost unnerving. Crosland's family was socially a cut above the other two, but none of them was grand and none penurious. All were at Oxford immediately before the war, were involved in politics and were on the Left (unsurprisingly, since out of an undergraduate body of 4,500 a third were members of the Labour Club).