Culture

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.

The best personal account of tank warfare in the Western Desert is generally reckoned to be Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas. It is indeed a great book, telling in spare, sensitive, limpid prose how it feels to turn from being a young man with romantic illusions about the nobility of war into a batttle-hardened tank veteran. But because it was written by an upper-class poet there are some elements that are missing. For example, Douglas never mentions how you can tell if a soldier on leave has been involved in a tank battle: for days afterwards, thanks to the constant inhalation of shell fumes in a confined space, he will fart the smell of cordite.

‘Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?’ demands the splash across the front cover of the latest book by George Walden. It is therefore something of a surprise in the pages that follow to find the former Conservative minister discoursing at length on the problems of immigration, terrorism, crime and house prices — all familiar mainstays of the modern conversational canon. To be fair, it is Walden’s contention that these are but contributing factors to a national malaise manifesting itself in the under-reported fact that so many Britons want to leave the country of their birth. What is more, it is not our cleaners, plumbers and fruit-pickers who are throwing in the towel in the face of cut-throat competition from the Polish diaspora.

Stand in the Corinthian portico of the National Gallery’s main building and look due south beyond Nelson’s Column into Whitehall. Your gaze lights upon Hubert Le Sueur’s Baroque equestrian statue of King Charles I, and if your eyesight is especially keen, you might just glimpse a projecting corner of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. In this trio of eye-catchers lies the fons et origo of our national collection, at least according to Jonathan Conlin in the opening pages of The Nation’s Mantelpiece. For scarcely had Charles stepped out from the Banqueting Hall for his beheading in 1649 than his stupendous assemblage of pictures, with its Raphaels, Titians and Mantegnas, was broken up and sold.

Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, ‘No, I listen to the traffic.’ The remark, often quoted, was less sententious than this abbreviated form would imply. Typically Cage, more interested in communicating than teasing despite his reputation as one of the funniest conversationalists, continued with an explanation: ‘I live in the Sixth Avenue area in New York, and there is lots of noise there. That is my music.’ Ever the pioneer, Cage (1912-92) influenced a generation of composers and artists inspired by his experimentalism. Everything he did was new. Most was little understood at the time outside his immediate circle. He used chance, via the I Ching, and electronics.

This is the fourth of Fred Vargas’s crime thrillers to be published in English — the third, The Three Evangelists, won last year’s inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger for translated crime fiction. Vargas is the pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian. Don’t let the ‘Fred’ mislead you about her gender. Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands features Vargas’s series hero Commissaire Adamsberg, a Parisian detective who puts intuition above logic and evidence, and who blunders through his investigations with a blend of obstinacy and integrity. The novel opens with him in the grip of mysterious terrors. Eventually Adamsberg attributes his mental state to the news that a woman’s body has been discovered near Strasbourg.

J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic convert D. B. Wyndham Lewis (‘the wrong Wyndham Lewis’, according to the tiresome Sitwells) as ‘Beachcomber’ in 1924 and wrote the ‘By the Way’ column in the Daily Express for more than 50 years. He eventually signed off in 1975, aged 82, and died four years later. To Morton and Wyndham Lewis (who later became ‘Timothy Shy’ on the lamented News Chronicle) we must give thanks for introducing to newspapers what Michael Frayn, editor of The Best of Beachcomber, described as ‘the superb anarchy of the English nonsense-writing tradition, the brief, devastating parody and the permanent stuff of characters’.

‘Walter Scott is unjust towards love; there is no force or colour in his account of it, no energy. One can see that he has studied it in books and not in his own heart.’ That was Stendhal’s opinion, and many even of Scott’s most devoted readers would not dissent from it. Dialogues between his young lovers are, to put it mildly, rarely satisfactory. The idea of his young heroines may be pleasing. One can understand why Victorian schoolboys are said to have fallen in love with Diana Vernon in Rob Roy; she is beautiful, lively and resourceful, a fine horsewoman and gallant Jacobite.