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War Words

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War Words I heard the other day of soldiers back from serving in the fighting in Iraq, not wounded bodily but suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ — ‘bomb- happy’s’ what they called it in the war on Hitler; ‘shell-shock’ in the one before. And then I thought, Ah yes, I can recall D-Day, June the sixth in forty-four, wading through chest-high waves to reach the shore (the stretch I later learned was called Sword Beach, a place I didn’t really wish to reach). What I that day with many others shared was ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’, or, as specialists might say, we were ‘shit-scared’.

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Good account of bad times

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Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should have not had their war against the coalowners in 1926, precipitating the abortive General Strike, because it was the wrong time. Hattersley could have told them that, had it not happened six years before he was born. But by heavens, he tells them now. ‘It was a bad moment for the miners to choose,’ he intones gravely. They were ‘too proud for their own good,’ a fine old northern expression.

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The final curtain?

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This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran, E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a novel of Jewish life and then all but forgotten when he puzzlingly fails to produce the expected successor. Lonoff enjoys a ménage à trois with a long-suffering wife and a mysterious foreign woman, Amy, his student and muse, to whom Zuckerman is instantly attracted and whom he half believes to be Anna Frank, living incognito in America. Now in Exit Ghost (stage direction from Hamlet), the series comes full circle.

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A painter goes blind

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I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is called Hélène, then on pages 5, 6, and 7 she is called Helena, then reverts to Hélène for the rest of the book. Why? In the first few pages Peter is in the garden with his daughter while it gets dark. Some time later Peter is painting in his studio when he notices that it is getting dark. This sort of thing keeps happening.

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Black men in England

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Caryl Phillips has found his niche, as a master of historical ‘re-imaginings’. To blend real sources and fictional interpretations into a continuous narrative requires expert control, and he has it. Foreigners tells the heartbreaking stories of three black men struggling, and ultimately failing, to find their footing in England. It follows Dancing in the Dark (2005), which employed a similar hotchpotch of fictional and factual voices to tell the story of the black US entertainer Bert Williams. In the interim, Phillips has refined this distinctive technique to devastating effect. First up is Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s beloved servant, who was a former slave and ended his life ruined in an asylum despite having been left money by Johnson.

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Where there’s a Will . . .

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Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from Shakespeare scholars such as Stanley Wells, Frank Kermode and Stephen Greenblatt, and from knowledgeable non-specialists such as Peter Ackroyd.

Alexander Masters

The language of mathematics

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‘I find that the earth is not as round as it is described, but it is shaped like a pear,’ Christopher Columbus wrote after his return from America, ‘with a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and nearest heaven.’ Determining the shape of the surface on which we live is, as Donal O’Shea observes in this historically minded little book, a delicate matter. Columbus’s idea was not (at least, not only) the lascivious fantasy of a hoary sea dog. He believed that he had reached India, not America. But he also knew that he had completed the journey much more quickly than the accepted size of the world allowed: the well-travelled southern route suggested Asia was thousands of miles further away.

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Was Anna Karenina always beautiful?

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It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything is vile and all must be reworked and rewritten, everything that has been printed needs to be crossed out, dropped and disavowed. Such were the agonies of Leo Tolstoy about one of his two great novels, with whose central character, writes Viktor Shklovsky, the great man fell in love — as have many readers. Later he said, ‘I am proud of its architecture; the structure is unified not through plot or the relations of the characters, but through an inner unity.

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Recent crime novels | 22 September 2007

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David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on from the Japanese surrender. The first of a projected trilogy, the novel deals with the murder of two young geishas strangled with their own shawls. Detective Minami of the beleaguered Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned the investigation, a task he accepts with what proves to be well-founded reluctance. The Department itself is in crisis, its personnel living in fear of another purge by the occupying authorities.

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Alternative reading | 22 September 2007

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The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a spacefarer returning from his wanderings finds that he is no longer suited for any earthly employment, and kills himself. The title story, ‘Escape to Hell’ (great title for Hollywood), is told in the voice of a Bedouin who finds that hell is more to his taste than modern urban life: I will now tell you the story of my experiences when I made that journey, that escape to hell.

Judi Bevan

Moral superiority in cheap plastic bottles

Any other business

As the train trundled down to Littlehampton one warm summer afternoon in 1988, I was filled with excitement at the thought of meeting Anita Roddick. I had arranged to interview her for a book called The New Tycoons, which I was writing with my Sunday Times colleague John Jay, now my husband. Roddick was already a household name even though the Body Shop had only been in existence for 12 years. When its shares were floated on the Unlisted Securities Market in 1984 they nearly doubled from 95p to 160p on the first day — and she became Britain’s fourth richest woman.

18 September 2007

The Spectator

The Namier de nos jours

Last night, The Spectator hosted its first book launch at our new home in Old Queen Street. And how apt that it should be in honour of The Triumph of The Political Class (Simon and Schuster, £18.99), by our very own Contributing Editor, Peter Oborne. You can read some of the arguments advanced in this splendid book in this week's Spectator - a cover piece which has already ruffled many a ministerial feather. Peter is emerging as the Namier de nos jours: a meticulous and fearless analyst of the social and political structures of our time, as well as a fearless truth-teller.

15 September 2007

Jonathan Sumption

From outsider to insider

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V. S. Naipaul is one of the more striking figures of the great Indian literary diaspora. Yet he was not born in India and has never lived there. His family were originally impoverished high-caste peasants from the region of Gorakhpur. His grandfather migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant at the end of the 19th century. His father was a small-time journalist and author of unsuccessful fiction and much worldly advice, on whom Naipaul based the eponymous hero of A House for Mr Biswas, his first famous novel and probably still his best. As for Naipaul himself, he came to England in 1950 on a government scholarship to Oxford, and has stayed ever since.

Anthony Daniels

Taking courage from the Dutch

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Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on to the Philippines, Macau and Canton with the same aim in view. Vaccination arrived about the same time in Java by way of Mauritius. No modern consumer product has spread more rapidly. Vaccination, however, was late in reaching Japan. This was not because there was no need for it: on the contrary, it has been estimated that about a fifth of Japanese children died of smallpox before the age of five.

Andro Linklater

For the love (and hate) of Mike

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The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The combination of these qualities makes General Sir Mike Jackson’s autobiography utterly compelling. Not since Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery in the 1940s has any head of the army been better known to the public or aroused more passionate love and loathing within the service.

Sara Maitland

Not much good clean fun

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In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary twist: all the characters tell stories about themselves. This is a book of fictional gossip, all first- person and poor-little-me. Or rather not ‘poor’ at all.

Gilbert Adair

When murderers knew their place

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Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’. That title, in fact, could not have got it more hopelessly wrong. Surely Wilson was capable of understanding that, of course, nobody cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. That’s the point, for goodness’ sake! Agatha Christie irrelevant?

Charlotte Moore

By their clothes shall you know them

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Ursula’s story begins at dawn on the day her ex-husband is to marry his new love. Ursula lies awake, alone with her bitter thoughts, until a reporter rings seeking her reaction to the wedding. For Bill Osborne is no ordinary ex; he edits a national newspaper and hosts a popular television series, while his new bride is a cabinet minister, no less. If the intrusive journalist wants a co-operative response, why ring at 6 a.m.? And why hasn’t Ursula changed her telephone number? Such questions remain unanswered, and indeed Sandra Howard has surprisingly little to say about living one’s life in the public gaze, other than to point out that it’s a pain. Ursula won’t spill any beans, but waits for the next call, from her lover, Julian.

Kate Chisholm

Tunes of a misspent youth

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Lavinia Greenlaw’s clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers (a misogynistic group who believe that an obsession with pop and rock is strictly for boys) is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies to the accompaniment of T. Rex and War’s ‘Me and My Baby Brother’. Music, she writes, has shaped her life since she was old enough to stand up and dance: My father must have hummed a tune as I stood on his shoes and he waltzed me, but what I remember are the giant steps I was suddenly making … the world pulled and shoved while I lurched and stretched. Greenlaw appears to have been lurching against obstacles and stretching the rules ever since. At four, she fell off a slide while sucking on a bamboo garden cane.

Cressida Connolly

To know him is to love him, usually

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The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction: There’s a love story, a horror story, a sequel, sort of, to The Commitments. Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here . . . Today, one in ten people living in Ireland wasn’t born here. The story — someone new meets someone old — has become an unavoidable one. No one could say this is a bad premise for a book.

Allan Massie

Sources of inspiration

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‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ ‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ Then, in four stanzas he has Shakespeare reveal originals of his most famous female characters: Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, until: ‘London wakened and he, imperturbable, /Passed from waking to hurry after shadows . . . / Busied upon shows of no earthly importance?/ Yes, but he knew it!

8 September 2007

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 8 September 2007

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Alternative reading Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives by E. Annie Proulx E Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain: she has also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Award and the Dos Passos Prize, and is thus one of the most lauded of all American writers. But her literary apprenticeship was spent writing a number of practical self-help manuals. They include Sweet and Hard Cider: Making It, Using It and Enjoying It; The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook: How to Make Everything from Cheese to Custard in Your Kitchen; The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results; and Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives.

Philip Hensher

Flights upon the banks

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Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd For some reason, the sight of the sea or a river in any historical film always strikes the viewer with a shock, as though some gross anachronism had been committed. It looks frankly very odd to see people walking along a beach, or even by the side of many rivers, in Elizabethan dress. It’s quite irrational, but it does suggest that, fundamentally, we don’t think of bodies of water in historical terms. They seem, as embankments and hills do not, like projections of the unconscious mind, and perpetually contemporary. The Thames is, in geographical terms, not much of a river.

Sebastian Smee

Once more with less feeling

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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the main character, David Lurie, helps to put down homeless dogs. He places their remains in black plastic bags and takes them to the incinerator. Until then, Lurie has not shown himself to be the most sympathetic character; but now, as he performs his grim task, he tries ‘to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love.’ The main character in Coetzee’s latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, dreams about a woman coming to ‘soften the impact of his death’.

Victoria Glendinning

Agony of the aunts

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Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls told the assembled sixth form, ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry.’ She was right. Nearly three quarters of a million young British men died in the Great War. Girls born around the turn of the century had been reared to assume that marriage and motherhood were their natural destiny. Even before the war there were more women than men, and post-war the problem of the ‘surplus women’ became a public issue. Women had worked in factories and the trades during the war, but the returning soldiers wanted their jobs back.

Antonia Fraser

The last of Rebus?

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Exit Music by Ian Rankin ‘You ... are ... history.’ Approx- imately halfway through Ian Rankin’s latest and surely most brilliant thriller Exit Music, these appalling words are spoken to D. I. John Rebus by his superior. What is worse, Chief Constable James Corbyn means it. He’s not simply referring to the fact that Rebus is within an ace of his 60th birthday (bad enough) but also going much, much further: ‘I know you’ve got three days left until retirement but you’re going to spend them on suspension.’ When Rebus counters, ‘Isn’t that just a tiny bit petty and pathetic, sir?

Alan Wall

Safe for the kiddies

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The Golden Age of Censorship by Paul Hoffman T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the word ‘taboo’ purely negatively. The word ‘censor’ is surely similar: the notion that any person or society could survive for long without some forms of censorship is fatuous, and yet it is something that tends to arouse disapproval. It implies political oppression, sexual squeamishness, or even worse, the meddling in other people’s psyches in order to ‘put them right’. We are far more likely to protest about it than celebrate its achievements. The Lord Chamberlain’s office became a byword for the kind of fatuity that John Osborne spent decades lampooning. So Paul Hoffman’s title might seem inherently paradoxical. But no.

Jane Rye

The measure of the man

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Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings Catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert; Essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert Whether we know it or not ‘we crave the inexpressive in art’, Bernard Berenson wrote, as an antidote to the sensationalism of ‘the representational arts most alive, the cinema and the illustrated press’. He was writing about Euan Uglow’s great hero Piero della Francesca in an essay called The Ineloquent in Art, which came out in 1954, the year Uglow left the Slade, and made a deep impression on him: ‘There’s something about the title — the fact that there’s more force in controlled passion than in exuberant passion. That’s the idea I like. I like it slowly to creep out on you.

Byron Rogers

Welsh wizard prang

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A Pembrokeshire Pioneer by Roscoe Howells In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their fathers told them that a local carpenter, Bill Frost, flew seven years before the Wrights. The author of this book, Roscoe Howells, novelist, local historian and farmer, is 87. I must declare an interest at this point. I came across the story about 15 years ago, and wrote about it. In the course of my meeting Mr Howells and many other OAPs what staggered me was the off-hand way they all talked about the event. ‘Oh yes, old Bill Frost. He kept goats, you know.