Books Archives

A love story

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The pilots called it ‘the Spit’, ‘my personal swallow’, ‘a real lady’, or, simply, ‘the fabulous Spitfire’. It was not a perfect machine. Due to its long nose, forward visibility during take-off was poor; it was freezing cold in the cockpit, and so small that the pilot did not have room to wear a bulky flight suit. He had to make do with chamois leather gloves and wool socks. Yet all who flew it marvelled at its grace and power, and it was equally adored by those on the ground.

Allan Massie

The enduring mystery of Mrs Bathurst

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A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result: precisely the same.’ Wodehouse is not alone in finding the story baffling. At once rambling and compressed, told entirely in reminiscent and speculative conversation, it is powerful but murky. You may feel it is a masterpiece yet be unable to determine just what happens. Summarising it is difficult, but, for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the story, here goes.

1 December 2007

Samuel Brittan

Mill! thou shouldst be living at this hour

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Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances dominated the more intelligent public debates of the mid-19th century — predictably he was keenly studied by Gladstone and mocked by Disraeli. In the last year of his life he was persuaded to be godfather to the infant Bertrand Russell, who was the nearest runner-up in the UK public intellectual stake. Mill’s own influence was on the wane for much of the 20th century when Marx became the centre of attention. But it has been rekindled in the past few decades as faith in collectivist nostrums has evaporated and there have been numerous academic studies of different aspects of his work.

Bevis Hillier

Christmas funny books

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Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but only by unstoppering a phial and waggling it under a person’s nose can you convey what the scent is like. It’s a similar case with poetry.

Graham Stewart

A criminal waste

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With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has been allowed to watch its citizens so comprehensively in this way rests with the claim that CCTV is a protection rather than an intrusion. Only the guilty should fear the all-seeing eye. Those with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. It is tempting to imagine this is what Calvin’s Geneva might have been like if only the technology had been the equal of the theology. Except, of course, the inner cities of 21st- century Britain are patently not where the Godly Elect hang out on a Saturday night. The creation of this surveillance society shows scant sign of making us conform to the orderly sobriety of the Swiss.

Alan Brownjohn

Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism

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Alan Brownjohn Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism Shows in the delicate way he rests his head — Despite every fear that she will remove it — On the shoulder of Miss Chiang to watch Duck Soup, The video, from his reproduction sofa. The alarm clock rings beside the bed of the man Made President with the aid of American money In the person of Margaret Dumont, and the lovely Miss Chiang Is completely puzzled by Mr Groucho Marx. ‘This gentleman — he is really President?’ she asks. Ludbrooke needs to lift his romantic head To look at her, and answer. As he tries to explain That this is not quite like life, her mobile rings; As it does three times on the way back to Finchley Central.

Charlotte Mitchell

His own short story

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This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44 at the hands of a German sniper at Beaumont Hamel in 1916. Its ten chapters include four which focus mainly on the fiction, but the other chapters, which are mainly biographical and arranged more or less chronologically, also include copious references to his writings. Like most of Saki’s fans, Professor Byrne is curious about his life, which is badly documented and enigmatic.

Frank Field

A false dawn

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Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth consecutive election victory. As Lee’s outstanding book makes plain, the Prime Minister’s immediate political task is to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of the Blair legacy without falling into the hole Al Gore dug for himself. Brown’s task is much more difficult, however. No one thought Gore had much influence on US politics. No one could believe the same here, with Brown’s unparalleled imperial power over home policy. The Prime Minister has also to deal with the Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath Question. This strategy coalesces around attempts to develop a new sense of Britishness.

Charlotte Moore

The parent trap

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Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read music magazines, sports reports, pornography and cereal packets, but they are notoriously averse to reading — or rather, finishing — books. Can Hornby break the habit, or lack of habit? Slam’s main subjects are sex and skateboarding, both calculated to have instant appeal for the target audience, but Hornby’s treatment of them is thoughtful, careful and wholly untitillating. Instead of pandering to youthful fantasies of conquest and glory, he sets out, in the nicest possible way, to expose the gap between fantasy and reality.

Oliver Gilmour

The call of the wild

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Jean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky (‘with his stillborn affectations’) or the artificial contrivances of Arnold Schönberg. Sibelius was his own man, and a deeply human one, moved and moulded by the harsh Finnish landscape. This gave his music a rugged and austere quality, prompting the composer to reflect, ‘My orchestration is better than Beethoven’s and I have better themes than his. But he was born in a wine country — I in a land where surmjölk [curdled milk] is in charge.’ Sibelius was not an arrogant man. As Andrew Barnett reveals in this fine biography, he was full of contradictions and self-doubt.

Richard Shone

Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider

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As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for Stevenson too can be stylish and sharp. Anyone who knows the engrossing volume of Burra’s letters Well, Dearie!, edited by his lifelong friend William Chappell, will surely pounce on this new book to reacquaint themselves with those letters already published and laugh aloud at extracts that will be new to them. A Burra letter is a joy forever: droll, delicately malicious, irrepressibly camp, full of forensic observations.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Disgusted of Donegal

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There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela’s Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but Patricia Craig had her problems. In 1959, because of the ‘corrupting influence’ of her misbehaviour, the Dominican nuns expelled her at the age of 16 from their convent school in Belfast, and she was barred from other Catholic schools in the neighbourhood of the Falls Road. Now a respected literary critic, anthologist and broadcaster, Craig reminisces in unequivocal prose that expresses a sturdy and benign temperament. In retaliation back then in Ireland’s medieval era in the middle of the 20th century, she expelled Catholicism from her life. For her, apostasy was liberation.

Nicholas Harman

The loss of enchantment

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Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes the rabbit out of the hat. Manual illusions have been overtaken by the digital kind, and traditional conjuring is mostly for the nostalgia market. But it finds its niches; Michael Bailey, a former chairman of the Magic Circle (the illusionists’ upmarket trade union) who has written its centennial history, modestly describes himself as ‘the leading British corporate magician’. Far from restoring the fortunes of companies that someone has sawn in half, he helps senior managers with the arcane business of bonding. Conjuring has gone respectable. For much of its long history it was anything but that.

Simon Baker

A very English domesticity

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Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse — largely because it wasn’t a movement in the formal sense — and short-lived, but its members’ early work marked the transitional stage in literature between patrician romanticism and demotic, illusion-free modernism.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 1 December 2007

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A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt’s novels are The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan and The World of Null-A. He also produced this little book, published in 1992 but conceived much earlier, a pre-feminist and pre-pop-biology attempt to pin down the problem of the violent male, or as he also termed it, the ‘right man’ — ‘right’ in the sense of wishing always to be right. The ‘right man’ is abusive towards women, is prone to outbursts of jealous rage, has a secret death-wish, and can be found at the helm of ‘all Communist countries’.

26 November 2007

Alex Massie

Romney’s Plan for Washington

Andy Ferguson's article on the ghastliness of presidential campaign books isn't quite vintage Ferguson. for one thing he ignores the awkward fact that by all accounts Barack Obama did actually write his own book, something which is far from the worst reason for supporting him. Still, Ferguson's account of Mitt Romney's Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games is another welcome reminder of Mitt's Gruesomeness: Turnaround looks like a business book, reads like a business book, and is as boring as a business book, stomped flat by excruciating accounts of sales pitches, budget meetings, brainstorming sessions, PowerPoint presentations, and marketing strategies.

24 November 2007

Matthew Parris

A guide to ‘gaffes’, and why, in truth, they are always to be found in the eye of the beholder

Columns

Among the silly expressions that may one day be associated with our era — and I hope buried with it — is the little word ‘gaffe’. I ought to know, having been indicted often enough myself for the crime, and having just co-edited and published a whole book, Mission Accomplished, of so-called gaffes committed by politicians and world leaders. Yet the moment you start to examine in a thoughtful way the things we call gaffes, the concept disintegrates into a clutch of very different types of utterances, some of which are wholly commendable. All that such utterances have in common is that they are regretted. I do not even say ‘regrettable’ because in politics honesty, though often regretted, cannot be regrettable.

Paul Johnson

In salons for writers, beware giving a black eye to literature

Any other business

Students of words enjoy the way in which adjectives normally used to describe reprehensible actions are whitewashed to become terms of praise. One instance, which has caught my eye recently, is ‘aggressive’. In the past few days I have seen a firm’s brochure praising its ‘aggressive approach to the worldwide sale of megayachts’, a reference to a writer of semi-pornographic novels as ‘skilfully and slyly aggressive’ and a rising politician as ‘charming Congress with his verbal aggression’. Such usage is not all that new. ‘Aggressive’ can be defined (OED meaning 2c) as self-assertive, pushful, energetic and enterprising.

Sam Leith

The volcano’s resonant rumble

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In the cartoonist Martin Rowson’s comic strip critique-cum-spoof of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound appeared in cameo as ‘Idaho Ez’ — a sort of demented janitor shuffling through the middle of the action, muttering to himself and pushing a broom. This captures, albeit cruelly, a version of the way his reputation survives: opaque, marginal, bonkers — his primary importance in 20th-century poetry if not actually janitorial then that of a curator. The other side of his image, of course, is as a comic turn in the lives of his contemporaries, whether as the loony old anti-Semite in St Elizabeth’s or as the attention-seeking young flâneur described fancifully by Ford Madox Ford: Ezra . . .

Rupert Christiansen

Lives less ordinary

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Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish. In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties.

Raymond Carr

Portrait of a lady

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Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance,’ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs.

Sarah Burton

Inscrutable lords of the deep

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The sperm whale, more than any other whale, has captured the public’s imagination, to the point that when the average person envisions a whale, it is the sperm whale that they most often see. As a child I definitely saw, in my mind’s eye, the whale that swallowed Jonah as a sperm whale (although I may have conflated this monster with the beast that swallowed Disney’s Pinocchio). Moby Dick was a sperm whale. The huge head, the low, long, tooth-studded jaw, the oddly placed eye, the fountainous blowhole, the massive flukes, and the legendary power of the sperm whale (the only whale known to have deliberately sunk ships) all combine to make it, as Dolin puts it, ‘the whale’s whale’.

Anthony Daniels

No simple solutions

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The epidemic of Aids among heterosexuals of which we were once warned by public health officials is now almost as forgotten as the global freezing of which the environmentalists in the 1970s also warned us. Only in Africa has Aids spread through the general population, reducing the already low life expectancies of several countries still further. The African exception has long puzzled doctors. Why should Africa be the exception? Various theories have been put forward, from general malnutrition to the prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases that facilitate the entry of the virus into the body and the polio immunisation experiments conducted in the 1950s in the Congo.

Stephen Abell

Borders of the possible

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The original title for this novel was Jews with Swords, which perfectly captures its spirit as well as its subject. It also, incidentally, suggests a good literary parlour game, in which classic works are simplistically renamed to reflect their content: Day Out in Dublin, for Ulysses, or Beautiful Child Abuse, for Lolita, perhaps. In any case, the original title for Gentlemen of the Road is apposite, because it at once points to a historical period of weapon-wielding (10th-century Khazaria, as it happens) and offers a clue to the exuberant manner in which the tale is told. Michael Chabon is a literary novelist, but has here ‘gone off in search of a little adventure’ with a pleasurable crack at swashbuckling genre fiction.

John De-Falbe

A one off

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Late in My Tango with Barbara Strozzi, Phil Ockerman, the main narrator, goes to Diamond Heart in Scotland, ‘a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move’. He is the stand-in writer to teach a course on ‘The Search For Page One’. If Russell Hoban finds it difficult to get started on a novel then I suspect he refers back to something like this: Girl meets Boy; people may be drawn in more than one direction at once; they often have their own agendas: love is not simple. Will he/she, won’t he/she? Characters from other books wander in to say hello; images recur. Phil reminds us that we were introduced to Diamond Heart in Her Name Was Lola — ‘Bloomsbury, 2003’.

Interconnect

Adjustment

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Adjustment So much for the ineffectual sandbags: we were put in touch with the loss adjuster, who came when the ‘black water’ had retired. They would indeed replace the white goods (for which we’d better find the lost receipts) but, with a droll glance at the furniture, he let us know that didn’t mean what was wrecked already might be redeemed nor that the house would be caulked and fitted out with gopher wood against a future flood. He must have seen a rainbow smudge of expectation in our eyes. His soles scuffed the buckled floor boards — the alluvia of silvered dust, clay, gravel, seeds and spores still promising the new, the better life.

Justin Marozzi

His own man

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What little most of us know about Omar Khayyam can be summarised in two words: the Rubaiyat, a collection of his free-spirited quatrains made famous around the world by the translations of the 19th-century poet Edward Fitzgerald. It has been said that these immensely popular books, first published in 1859 and running into numerous editions, contributed more phrases to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined. Hazhir Teimourian, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, has offered readers a much broader study of this 11th-century polymath in a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy.

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books | 24 November 2007

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Celebrity gardeners are what publishers are banking on this year. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, known in New York as ‘the high priestess of historic garden design’, has given us her gardening autobiography. A Gardener’s Life (Frances Lincoln, £35) is illustrated by another aristocrat, Derry Moore — in private life Lord Drogheda. The book looks as beautiful as the gardens that the Marchioness makes. Her famous style of scholarly nostalgia can be seen in Ireland, France, Italy and America, as well as at Highgrove and in many English gardens, including her own newest venture, on a Chelsea roof. Cranborne remains for me the dream garden and Hatfield, perhaps her greatest achievement, appears all ‘luxe, calme et volupté’.

Allan Massie

Norman at the Ritz

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Andrew O’Hagan wrote a very nice piece about Norman Mailer in the Daily Telegraph last week. Affectionate and admiring, it was just the sort of tribute a young writer should pay to a senior one, and it was pleasant to learn how encouraging Mailer had been to O’Hagan and indeed to other young writers. This is as it should be — a handing on of the torch. No doubt this was easier for Mailer than for less successful elderly writers who find themselves elbowed out of the way by younger generations, and quite possibly dropped by their publishers. Nevertheless it’s commendable, jealousy or envy being sins to which writers are prone. I only once saw Mailer.