Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Digby Durrant

Return of the native

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We know the pressures the steady flow of immigrants has caused in our society though we hear less about the benefits of having them here; nor do we have much idea what they think about us. Lev, the Polish migrant in Rose Tremain’s new book, expected to find men who looked like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai but found they were slovenly geezers with shaven heads and garish tattoos and not so different from those he worked alongside in the sawmills back home before losing his job. The early death of his wife, his responsibility for his adored small daughter and his ageing mother, the need of money in a decaying village persuade Lev to leave for London.

Andrew Barrow

A female Colossus

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During the post-war years, the author of this book was a much-talked about variety artiste, famous for breaking ten-inch nails, bending steel bars in her teeth and throwing Bob Hope over her shoulder. Billed as the Mighty Mannequin, Joan Rhodes enhanced her appeal by looking and dressing as if she had stepped out of the chorus line — at the height of her fame she had a 20-inch waist — and accompanying her feats of strength with plaintive little odes delivered in a girlish voice which apparently made her sound ‘like the bleedin’ Queen’.

Sophia Waugh

Just the one regret

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Is he a monster, saint, genius or lunatic? In this massive book Naim Attallah attempts to lay to rest the gossip, slander and misconceptions that have dogged him for much of his life, while also coming clean about his own mistakes and failures. I have to declare an interest. I was, in the 1980s, one of ‘Naim’s girls’; I am very fond of him indeed, and for several years my father, Auberon Waugh, edited the magazine he once owned, the Literary Review. ‘Naim’s girls’ were a part of London’s social scene and provided Private Eye with one of many reasons to mock ‘Naim Attallah-Disgusting’. We were young, pretty, had ‘names’ and we loved parties. We were not paid very much but we certainly enjoyed ourselves.

Anne Applebaum

The children of Marx

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Italian intellectuals, Cambodian peasants, Hungarian workers, Russian colonels, Angolan insurgents, French philosophes, American actors, British miners, Chinese craftsmen, Nicaraguan labourers: over the years, the adherents of the international communist movement have been so geographically and socially diverse as to defy classification. During the 100-odd years of the movement’s existence, nations as different as Czarist Russia, semi-feudal China and post- colonial Cuba subsequently developed into communist states. Marxist literature has been translated into hundreds of languages and read, by somebody, in all of them. Perhaps as a result of this diversity, the literature on the international communist movement is stunningly weak.

M R-D-Foot

Decryption and deception

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Two books just out from small publishers throw interesting light on the more secret corners of the British handling of the world war against Hitler’s Germany. Each covers a subject that was deadly secret at the time, but of critical importance for winning the war. Joan Bright Astley’s war autobiography, published to much less acclaim than it deserved in 1971, is now reprinted for a fresh generation to read; Robin Denniston describes his father’s life’s work in decipher. The Reverend Robin Denniston, publisher turned country priest, has written a work of filial piety — a charming, even old-fashioned gesture, but one that deals with a subject of both topical and historical weight. A. G.

Lloyd Evans

The food of love

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‘Painting with money’ is how Michael Winner described making films. And if the money runs out you can always turn your script into a novel. Ken Russell’s Beethoven Confidential was to have starred Anthony Hopkins in the title role with Glenda Jackson and Jodie Foster as a couple of swooning aristos eager to sponsor the fuming maestro. Quite how that Oscar-encrusted team ran out of backers is a mystery Russell doesn’t address. And his prose still bears the traces of its celluloid origins: Chapter Two. Moonlight filtering through elegant windows hints at surroundings of great luxury. In silhouette, a pretty teenager is seated at the piano playing music that seems to be a manifestation of the atmosphere itself. The effect is the opposite of a film.

Allan Massie

The phantoms of the opera

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No doubt Mr Blair will soon be at work on his memoirs; or perhaps his ghost will. Ghosts play a necessary role in the publishing business. Indeed all those firms who rely for their profits on the autobiographies — and even occasionally the novels — of celebrities might collapse without the work of these industrious spectres. Till quite recently their existence was veiled in obscurity and the pretence was maintained that politicians, actors, singers and sportspersons were indeed the authors of the books which appeared under their name. This make-believe is no longer sustainable. Too many so-called authors have casually remarked in interviews that they haven’t actually read their own book. (No politician has yet been honest enough to make this admission.

Rod Liddle

No one deserves a knighthood more

Features

At last an issue to unite all of us — right, left, Muslim, Christian and Hindu, liberal and conservative. The decision to knight the author Salman Rushdie has brought together, in angry concordat, almost the entire world. There are those who, even now, may be strapping on the semtex to deliver to Rushdie the righteous vengeance of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH). And there are others who will merely write nasty stuff about him for the Guardian and the Evening Standard and maybe cheer quietly if he is, in the end, blown to smithereens by an altogether more proactive and engaged opponent. Rushdie is loathed — and not just by the mediaevally minded bigots of Islamabad, Tehran and the Finsbury Park mosque. He seems to be loathed by everyone else, too.

16 June 2007

The Spectator

A novel knighthood

Salman Rushdie's knighthood is bound to be criticised in some quarters, but, in its way, it is a historic moment, a collective rite of recognition for an author who paid a terrible personal price for his readiness to write candidly about the problems, confusions and vibrant possibilities of our post-colonial, mixed-up, multi-faith world. Midnight's Children is still the best exploration of the pressures of these themes, and The Satanic Verses tackled the phenomenon of Islamism long before 9/11 and starred a Bollywood actor long before Shilpa won Big Brother. Click here for an article in which I argued that the Rushdie Affair was the moment the long war really began. Arise, Sir Salman - and congratulations.

James Forsyth

The odd couple

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The more you reflect on the Clintons’ story, the more remarkable it becomes. A boy and a girl meet at a prestigious Ivy League law school, fall in love not so much with each other as with the concept of themselves as a couple, leave their sophisticated world to go back to his Southern backwater and despite him never controlling his roving eye and hands climb the political ladder and make it to the White House. Once there, he suffers one of the most crushing mid-term reverses of any president but still wins re-election at a canter. He gets impeached but still leaves office as one of the most popular presidents on record. She is responsible for many of the biggest political blunders of his administration but still salvages his presidency.

Philip Mansel

The Viennese charades

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Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other. Letters copied for the Austrian police tell us who slipped up which staircase, or quarrelled between which polonaises. ‘You, always you, nothing but you,’ wrote Metternich to the Duchess of Sagan, while ‘all Europe’ waited in his antechamber. Their love affair seemed to concern him more than ‘the affairs of the world,’ complained his secretary Friedrich von Gentz.

A.N. Wilson

Risen from the ashes

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Many of us Europeans have visited the Smithsonian Insti- tution in Washington DC, and most of us have not the foggiest idea how it got its name. If quizzed, we should probably hazard a guess that Smithson was some rich old American codger, earlier in vintage than Frick or Pierpont Morgan, who had endowed one of the great museums of the world in the way that Americans do. But if we thought that, we should be wrong. James Smithson, who for 35 of his 66 years was known as Macie, was an Englishman who had never been to America in his life. He was the son of the first Duke of Northumberland, but illegitimate, and as far as is known he never met his father.

Melvyn Bragg

William carries on

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This richly detailed and engrossing biography, a fine companion volume to William Hague’s life of Pitt, will still many arguments and feed others. Two hundred years ago the Act abolishing the slave trade was, as it remains, a beacon of humanitarian legislation, a defining moment when morality met commerce in open battle and won a famous victory. The anniversary has loosed a flood of opinions, apologies and accusations and too often the voice of William Wilberforce has been drowned. Hague restores him to his proper place, as lynchpin of the movement, though he was certainly one man among many. Thomas Clarkson did far more research, for instance.

Lucy Beresford

Too much in the sun

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Reading this languid, chapterless novel is like spending the summer in Tuscany. The plot drifts along, punctuated by a few sharp shocks, just as a day at the villa might combine exquisite lethargy with a brisk dip in the pool or sumptuous meals. Sometimes there’s an obvious sting in the tail for such indolence: the cost, the sunburn, the extra calories consumed. In Esther Freud’s latest, set in the Tuscan hills, the sting is more subtle, less conclusive: avoiding responsibility can have consequences. Lara is invited by her historian father Lambert to stay a few weeks at the villa of an old friend. Even though Lara is now 17, she has spent little time in Lambert’s company. For most of the book she remains gawky around him.

Pj Kavanagh

Fresh woods and pastors new

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It is good to be reminded of the left-wing writers of the 1930s who took arms against the injustices of a society in which they were themselves privileged members. Sometimes they were over-hectic preachers — Take off your coat: grow lean:Suffer humiliation: Patrol the passes aloneAnd eat your iron ration. — but there was nobility in their cause. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked: is any biography of a near-contemporary writer anything but an example of the Higher Gossip? Curiosity about the life can masquerade as revived interest in the work. This careful account of one such life can on the whole be absolved.

Anthony Thwaite

The space between

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Tonight I heard again the rat in the roof, Fidgeting stuff about with a dry scuff, Pausing in silence, then scratching away Above my head, above the ceiling’s thin Skin that separates his life from mine. So shall I let him be, roaming so narrowly In a few finger-widths of carpentry? The evening passes by. I sit and write And hear him skittering here and there in flight From nothing. Maybe he hears My scratching pen, my intermittent cough, Below the frail thin lath that keeps me off From harming him, as it too keeps him there, Heard but unseen in narrow strips of air.

Stuart Wheeler

Roll over, Mozart

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The author is nothing if not versatile. Apart from being the Observer’s music critic he has written books on a very wide variety of subjects. This book is about his experiences in the world of poker, specifically the form of poker that has taken the world by storm, No Limit Texas Hold’em. There is much good stuff. Poker players can be single-track-minded. ‘Who in the hell is this guy Saddam Hussein?’ asks one of the top poker pros. It reminded me of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer many years ago asking me where I came from. ‘England’, I told her. ‘Oh, that’s in Paris, isn’t it?’ she replied. The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King.

William Brett

Children of the night

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‘Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,’ a bartender says in Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel. And it’s not just time that can seem out of joint during the witching hours, Murakami suggests. After Dark explores the ways in which the night can heighten our sense of isolation, and threaten our conception of reality. It’s also an engrossing story and an easy read, yet another example of the much-admired Japanese author’s skill in couching challenging, intricate themes within beguilingly simple narratives. The story centres on the lives of two young sisters over the course of one night in Tokyo, between midnight and daybreak. One, Eri Asai, is sleeping a ‘too pure, too perfect’ sleep, and has been for months.

Edward Norman

The way, the truth and the life

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It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography.

15 June 2007

The Spectator

How will Harry Potter end?

Slate has a fun, little piece up on a possible ending to the final Harry Potter story. I expect we’ll see a lot more of these before the book comes out on the 21st of July. Indeed, William Hill are even running a book on who might kill Harry Potter with Voldemort the favourite at 2/1. Personally, I have a suspicion that Harry might just make it through.

9 June 2007

Andrew Taylor

A cut and dried case?

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The modern crime novel tends to be a serious matter involving body parts and serial killers, sometimes with a spot of social analysis thrown in for good measure. It was not always like this, and Simon Brett is among the handful of distinguished contemporary crime writers who remind us of those far-off days of innocence when detective stories were meant to be fun. Death Under the Dryer is the latest title in Brett’s ‘Fethering mysteries’. Fethering, a fortunately fictional seaside town in West Sussex, has the sort of murder rate that used to distinguish Miss Marple’s village of St Mary’s Mead. It has two resident sleuths, ladies of a certain age whom one character describes as Fethering’s very own Marple Twins.

Hugh Massingberd

Better than chocolate

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Surely the most sought after among what Lord David Cecil described as ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (a lecture title that lured John Betjeman in the expectation of a paean to the architectural delights of Berkshire’s county town) is the moment when an author articulates a feeling that you imagined was peculiar to yourself, expresses an emotion that you have carefully suppressed. In Michael Simkins’s extremely enjoyable memoir of his lifelong obsession with the ‘summer game’, this moment occurred on the very first page where he confesses to constantly making the evocative sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat.

James Buchan

The great negotiator

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Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Talleyrand of our age, was for over 20 years the dominant personality in Arab relations with the English-speaking countries. Born into the obscurest royal poverty, Bandar turned himself into a fighter pilot of dash and elan (if not of the very first proficiency), before serving as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington from 1983 until 2005. He is now secretary-general of something called the Saudi National Security Council, but it is hard to descry through the desert sand and wind his latter-day power and influence. This biography, written by a British classmate from the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, is the usual courtier’s mixture of hero-worship and good information. The challenge is to tell them apart.

Andrew Lambirth

Simplicity and strength

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Some of the best and most effective of 20th-century English posters were designed by the American, Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954). Born in Montana, he was the only child of German and Swedish immigrants. His parents divorced, and young Ted Kauffer was put in an orphanage, where drawing became a release from what he described as a ‘lonely, nostalgic and uninspiring’ childhood. When his mother re-married, his stepfather encouraged the boy’s artistic inclinations, including his passionate transcriptions of Frederic Remington’s cowboys and Indians paintings. He became an itinerant stage scenery painter before knuckling down to some serious study at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and meeting the man whose name he was to adopt, Joseph E.

Caroline Moorehead

Lost and found

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When Starbucks in the United States decided to promote Ishmael Beah’s memoir of life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone it seemed to many a surprising choice. A Long Way Gone, with its descriptions of atrocities and terror, is a far cry from the daily travails of footballers’ wives and celebratory chefs. But stories of boy soldiers, casualties of the civil wars endemic across parts of Africa and Asia, have, in recent years, become a growing branch of disaster literature, alongside memoirs of the Holocaust in occupied Europe, the great famine in China, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the contemporary tales of loss and abuse in Western life. Savagery and trauma are now popular reading. Ishmael Beah writes simply and well.

Jonathan Sumption

Coping with a continent

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Has there ever been a better time to be alive than the 18th century, provided that one were rich, healthy, literate and European? One would not necessarily have to be a Duke of Newcastle or a Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, although either would be nice. Many of the things which make life agreeable for humbler mortals originate in their modern form in this fascinating period: passable roads, fire insurance, tea, novels, newspapers, street lighting and innoculation to suggest only some random examples. At a more elevated level, an age which began with Bach, Newton and Racine and ended with Mozart, Hume and Beaumarchais plainly has much to be said for it. But there is of course another 18th century.

Bevis Hillier

A big talent spotted

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In the late 1960s I was reviewing books in the Sunday Times alongside the great Cyril Connolly, and got to know him a bit. He said that the moment which compensated for the acres of tripe he had had to plough through in his career as a critic was when one of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels landed on his desk. He recognised genius. In over 40 years of reviewing I have been waiting for that ‘A star is born’ moment, and I think it has now come. I could be making as big a howler as Gertrude Stein when she claimed that Sir Francis Rose was an artist in the same league as Picasso; but Anne Lambton’s short stories — her first book — strike me as of superfine quality: the emotional insight of Katherine Mansfield, the satirical edge of Angus Wilson.

Allan Massie

Paradise before the guns opened fire

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Reviewing recently a new English version of Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, I was happy and relieved to find that it retains its magic. It has entranced generations of adolescents, not all of them French, but I had wondered if it would still appeal after so many years. It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed, reminding one that Alain-Fournier, though only 26 when the novel appeared, was no provincial innocent, but already belonged to the literary establishment.