Culture

I really wanted to like this book. After the dire Eragon, which has now been made into a worse film, and this year’s The Meaning of Night, with its coy Victorianisms and pointless footnotes, I was longing for a ‘fantasy’ that would enchant and amuse in delicious detail. And somewhere, in the 750-odd pages of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, there might be such a book. The novel starts off fairly promisingly, with the heroine, Miss Celestial Temple, chasing after the stuffed-shirt fiancé who dumped her. She stumbles across a party which is a cover for a deadly ‘Process’ run by a cabal of people with silly, unconvincing names like Xonq or Lacquer-Sforza.

It would be hard to exaggerate just how good — or for those who have never read Christopher Rush — what a surprise and relief this book is. In the usual course of events there are few things to lower the spirits like a Scottish memoir, but here in the generosity, invention, compassion and wit of a story of an east coast childhood is the perfect antidote to that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the crofting world that seems to form the dismal staple of contemporary Scottish memory. Christopher Rush was born in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland in 1944, the son of a local girl and an English brute of a father just back from the war.

Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all chanted praises. He was married to Edie, the daughter of the chairman of Vickers-Armstrong, and had performed for the royal family at Windsor. But still Charles sensed a flaw in the crystal. At least in his own eyes time was to prove him right. ‘Discovery of the truth about him set the compass for my life.

Monarchy, monarchy, monarchy. Are we so addicted to it that we want to read the life of a boy who came to the throne at the age of nine and died six years later? Chris Skidmore seems to think so. His purpose, he says, is to rescue the ‘lost’ Edward VI from the obscurity to which negligent historians have consigned him and resurrect him as ‘a central figure in the Tudor age’. Can it be done? Amid the contest between the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, and his rivals (first his younger brother, Edward Seymour, and then John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick) for control of the Council which governed England during his minority, was there a role of any significance for Edward to play? Skidmore makes a half-hearted stab at suggesting that there was.

Contemporary Australian fiction, like Australian film, is known more for its exuberance and antic energy than its reticence and restraint. Deborah Robertson’s Careless, a first novel that has already won her acclaim in her own country, is a marvellous correction to the stereotype. Robertson’s ingredients are simple, but disparate: right to the end, one is not quite sure how they are going to combine. This uncertainty gives the novel an intricate atmosphere of floating suspense. In a moment of murderous rage and insanity, a man drives his truck into a children’s playgroup. Among those killed is the young son of Lily, a neglectful single mother. His older sister, Pearl, survives, and much of the novel is concerned with how Pearl comes to terms with what has happened.

Who is the greatest male film star of all time? Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Hum- phrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Al Pacino are all contenders and each in his time has topped at least one poll. But my vote would go to James Stewart (or the more familiar ‘Jimmy’, as his biographer, Marc Eliot insists on calling him). Compared with other actors whose careers lasted over 30 years, Stewart starred in the largest number of films that were actually good, and, by good, I mean memorable. When Robert Mitchum, who was himself a considerable star, died the some month as Stewart, in 1997, it was hard to recall more than six films he’d been in, whereas one could name a dozen of Stewart’s without difficulty.

‘If ‘justice were done’, writes Norman Davies in this fascinating and infuriating work, ‘all books on the second world war in Europe would devote perhaps three quarters of their contents to the Eastern Front.’ In the real world, of course, the victors dispense the justice and write the history afterwards. So it is gratifying that there is a scholar around with the skill and passion of Norman Davies to change perspectives about the war and shift the centre of gravity eastwards. Here, rather more than 75 per cent of the action takes place in East/Central Europe, where on a body count most of the lives were lost and on a misery index the greatest suffering took place.

First, the necessary declaration of interest. The author and I were, at the age of five, at nursery school in New York together for a couple of terms. But as in the intervening 60 years I have seen him barely half a dozen times, in crowded rooms, I feel free to say that he is in my view the best drama critic and showbiz profile-writer we have. Partly, I have to add, this is the luck of the draw: at the New Yorker where he now works, he is given a couple of pages a week to expand on a single Broadway first night, and even better, given three or four months to write a profile of several thousand words. Fourteen of these are reprinted here; the author himself calls them ‘mini-biographies’ and he is not far wrong.