More from Books

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).

Nicholas Harman

Deceiving only those who want to believe

Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills and violate the sanctity of property, until photolithography, then typing, devalued the uniqueness of the handwritten text. But a modern forger can still make a decent profit by turning out the fake-historical or fake-literary stuff that collectors strangely hanker for, and news- papers sometimes eagerly swallow. This book about Mark Hofmann, a leading forger and a real-life weirdo worthy of the great Elmore Leonard's inventions, uncovers an especially American world in which literature, religion, lying, cheating, greed, gullibility and, eventually, murder are combined. The murders are shocking.

Christopher Woodward

How the master of landscape was transformed

In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading 'Mr Gainsborough, Painter'. The artist's showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister's millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled with the oil paint drying on masterpieces such as 'Countess Howe' and 'The Byam Family'. In London, prints publicised an artist; in the crowded winter resort a showroom invited visitors with time and money on their hands to judge the likeness of a celebrity who might have been glimpsed in the Pump Room a few minutes before. If tempted, the client ascended to the artist's studio on the floor above.

Magnus Linklater

Raw skin over bone

At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist - it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in peasants. Indeed, he believes that it is only by studying the character of the peasant class, those who are conditioned by the land on which they live and work, that we can reach an understanding of the character of a nation - in this case, Scotland.

Interconnect

As sharp as cut tin

In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt's latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts pile and then, a few moments later, in a spirit of mild bewilderment, putting it back. Read cold by someone unfamiliar with the dazzling encomia that litter Nicola Barker's book jackets, Behindlings, you fear, would produce a similar result. Two years back Miss Barker's Wide Open won the IMPAC award, 'the English-speaking world's largest prize for a single work of fiction'.

Teresa Waugh

A new lease of life

The heroine of Margaret Drabble's new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening part of The Seven Sisters is in the form of Candida Wilton's diary, written from the time she moves to a modest flat in London after the break-up of her marriage. Despite her incongruously glamorous name, she is the middle-aged, discarded wife of a headmaster from Suffolk. Her children, whom she doesn't like, are grown up and have, surprisingly, sided with their father in the divorce. She has very little money and, apart from being a headmaster's wife and bringing up her three daughters, her only work has been filling in to teach the occasional French lesson. This presumably explains why she maddeningly peppers her journal with the interpolation 'en effet'.

Frederic Raphael

Unblinking, even for a second

Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be 'about' paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert's passion as a metaphor for the Master's onomastic infatuation with America (does anyone accuse Yeats of having validated copulation with swans because he made Leda the subject of a poem?). Platform has been admired, as was the same author's Atomised, by worthy sponsors. Clearly they detect merits that go beyond the blow-by-blow sexual activity calculated - others might say - to service those who, as Rousseau said, 'read with one hand'.

Juliet Townsend

He is cheap, he is pure, he is capable – and he isn’t doomed

In any discussion about the English judicial system with foreigners, they are always amazed to learn that more than 90 per cent of the criminal cases in this country are tried by unpaid lay magistrates. In a society where an applicant for the most unskilled job is required to be able to produce some paper qualification, the magistracy sails on with a magnificent disregard for such irrelevancies. Its requirements are simple but demanding: good character, common sense, fairness and good judgment, and it expects and largely succeeds in finding these qualities in people from widely varying backgrounds. Magistrates have never had a good press. People identify more readily with juries, knowing that next week they could find themselves serving on one.

Interconnect

When inner and outer reality collide

Coleridge's Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied selection, 1794 to 1820, from his 22nd year to his 48th. By that time he had become the loquacious Sage of Highgate, 'an archangel, a little damaged'. To the end he was a self-observer, still making, as it were, entries in his Notebooks, although it was now up to others to write them down.

Andrew Robinson

The heart of the master

THE HUMOUR AND THE PITY: ESSAYS ON V. S. NAIPAULedited by Amitava KumarBuffalo Books, in association with the British Council, New Delhi, Rs 175, pp. 174, ISBN 8187890029 In 'London', a short essay written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1958, the up-and-coming V. S. Naipaul accurately analysed why his fictions about the Caribbean would never be bestsellers in England. First, I cannot write Sex. I haven't the skill, or the wide experience which is necessary if one's work is to have variety. And then I would be embarrassed even at the moment of writing. My friends would laugh. My mother would be shocked, and with reason. Secondly, he was unwilling to introduce an English or American character and write the story around him, as in the movies. 'It is good business, but bad art.

Saturday

David Caute

Plucking at the sighing harp of time

William Trevor is the voice of a civilised Anglo-Ireland capable of apologising for ancient privileges and extensive estates while discreetly lamenting their departure. Laying out and constantly refolding a finely observed landscape (County Cork) of water, rock and sand, of religious divide and class deference, Trevor conveys the baffled rage of Fenian fire-bombers and the sighing flight of their victims to relatives in Wiltshire. Deft touches of irony abound; the upright Gault clan, we are told, have gambled away much of their land to the neighbouring O'Reillys at the card table.

Sam Phipps

Grimly comic menace

Porno is billed as 'the sequel to Trainspotting', which immediately is a worrying sign, like the blow-up doll that stares out from the front cover. Why is Irvine Welsh returning to the territory of his phenomenal debut after all these years? Does it mean he has run out of ideas? And does anyone really want or need another fix of Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie, the drug-addled radges who put a largely hidden Edinburgh on the map nearly a decade ago? These kind of doubts all swirl around as you pitch into Porno. The quotation from Nietzsche that prefaces the book - 'without cruelty there is no festival' - adds to the general feeling of advance queasiness. It turns out to be far from misplaced.

A.N. Wilson

A phoenix rising from European ashes

It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill's writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had to put it in a phrase, it would be: what we all lost when we lost our religion, and, at the same time, became deaf to the voices of our ancestors, their literature, their lives and thought-processes. But one can't put it in a phrase, and that is the point. Here comes our poet-sage 'to bring recollection found, weeping with rage'. There is no one alive writing in our language about deeper or more important matters, no one saying such interesting things.

Digby Anderson

Sniggling with a darning needle

I have always counted myself a loyal, even an enthusiastic eel fan. I seek them out and buy them whenever I can find them live: they deteriorate quickly and should be killed just before cooking. The French like to buy them skinned. This is a culinary error and usually, though not necessarily, means they are bought dead. I keep them in the bath with the cold tap just dripping. I like cutting them up holding the body with the women's pages of the Daily Telegraph and watching the advice about alternative health disintegrating in a mess of blood and slime while the severed head watches, approvingly winking and squirming in sympathy. I like eels fried with olive oil and garlic or with ginger or jellied or matelote or stewed with parsley liquor.

Saturday

Charles Allen

A second passage to India

In September 1946 a 23-year-old Englishwoman sailed for India in one of the first passenger liners to be reconverted from a trooper. She spent the following Cold Weather as the dogsbody with a documentary unit making films about tea gardens in Assam. Fifty-four years on she would describe this excursion into Asia as 'a huge surprise' for which she was totally unprepared: 'I went down the gangplank at Bombay, and India burst upon me with the force of an explosion.' All but overwhelmed, she determined 'to capture the wonder of that experience, to pin it down, so that not a single iota of it could escape me and be forgotten ... and I scribbled, scribbled accordingly.

Miranda Seymour

Regret, guilt and exhilaration

EDITH WHARTON'S FRENCH RIVIERAby Philippe Collas and Eric VilledaryFlammarion, £22.50, pp. 149, ISBN 2080107224 London, even in normal years, is rained on for 150 days to Nice's 60; it receives a paltry 1,500 hours of sunlight in comparison to Nice's enviable 2,700.

William Feaver

A set of linked doodles

The niceties of Saul Steinberg's cartoon drawings are doodle-related. Figures begin at the nose, become elaborately hatted and shod and strut like clockwork toys; words are transformed into free-standing objects; horizontal lines denote runways or table edges. Often, it seems, the draughtsman's pen went on automatic, pen-pushing the same old absurdities, perplexities and double-takes on increasingly expensive paper. Steinberg liked to think that his drawings possessed 'poetic strangeness'. Indeed they do, often enough, partly because he never quite erased from his work the sense of his being a stranger in foreign parts. Born in 1914, in Ramnicul-Sarat, Romania, he grew up against the background of his father's fancy cardboard-box factory.

Francis King

This side of greatness

If Kafka had never existed, critics might now be using the word Warneresque, instead of Kafkaesque, to describe the sort of fiction represented by the three remarkable early novels for which Rex Warner is now chiefly remembered. But then, if Kafka had never existed, perhaps The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor and The Aerodrome would never have existed either. In the way of writers who owe a conspicuous debt to a predecessor, Warner always downplayed his debt to Kafka. But his reading of The Castle in Willa and Edwin Muir's translation of 1930 was clearly one of the decisive events of his life. Another decisive event was his despatch by the British Council to Athens to open an institute in the immediate aftermath of the war. Tabachnick remarks, 'Rex's job was something of a sinecure.

Rupert Christiansen

Swagger, colour and dash

A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, 'born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth'. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life - gas-lit station waiting-rooms, cream jugs covered with beaded cloths - and memories of actual survivors, too. 'When I went up to Oxford in 1969,' he tells us in the introduction, 'there were at least two pair of spinster sisters, the Misses Butler and Deneke, who could remember tea parties with Lewis Carroll.