Books Archives

Tracking a Moroccan ghost

More from Books

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up. Try moxibustion, epizoic, parallactical, aleatory, anastomosing and vaticinal for starters, all beyond this reviewer and, gratifyingly, the (admittedly limited) range of his laptop dictionary. On the second page he muses on the ‘pleasing orbitality’ of food and its terminology.

Andro Linklater

A place in the sun

More from Books

In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five of them. ‘It is almost impossible to get at them to exterminate the lot,’ he wrote apologetically to his father, ‘though they get some pretty hot lessons occasionally for they are always shot like dogs when seen.’ A couple of years later, he improved his score by slaughtering almost 100 from a community that failed to provide the food he wanted. Out of such violence was born the colony of Kenya.

Francis King

Mombasa and Zanzibar

More from Books

The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit Muslim community: dominant themes of Abdul-razak Gurnah’s former novels are gathered together in this one. Since, though not abnormally long, his book ranges over such a wealth of material, there are inevitably occasions when its usually grave, deliberate pace quickens to a scurry, making one wish to shout out at him, ‘Whoa! Not so fast! Not so fast!’ At the start of the narrative, a devout Muslim shopkeeper, Hassanali, in an obscure town along the coast from Mombasa, sets off early one morning in 1899 for the nearby mosque.

Jonathan Mirsky

A low opinion of human nature

More from Books

I feel slightly cornered by the blurbs on the jacket of this book. On the front, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, says, ‘This is my favourite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge.’ On the back, Lisa Appignanesi suggests we ‘imagine Svevo taking David Lodge to China and bumping into Confucius who had just finished reading Balzac’. In the foreword, Yale’s Jonathan Spence calls Fortress Besieged ‘a novel of originality and spirit, of wit and integrity, one that has clearly earned its place amongst the masterworks of 20th-century Chinese literature’.

Robert Stewart

Murder made easy

More from Books

What is one to make of this little book? There is much that is good in it, about new handguns, their use in crime and warfare and their role as fashionable accessories (notably in portraiture) of the rich and proud; about the ‘spinning’ rife in Renaissance pamphlet wars; and about that age’s wantonly cruel methods of torture and execution. But does it make sense? Its central contention, that the assassination in 1584 of William of Orange was a landmark in history because it was carried out with a pistol, is more asserted than argued and it remains highly dubious.

Elfreda Pownall

Food for plutocrats and the people

More from Books

The New English Kitchenby Rose PrinceFourth Estate, £18.99, pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448 The Dinner Ladyby Jeanette OrreyBantam, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0593054296 If a Martian were to read these three recently published cookery books, his postcard home would conclude that for Earthlings money is the root of all cooking. Alain Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine is huge and enormously heavy, (it weighs 111/2 lb). Ducasse is considered by his peers one of the three greatest chefs of the 20th century (with Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse). He has been awarded three Michelin stars for two restaurants at once (the Louis XV in Monte Carlo and the Plaza Athénée in Paris).

Caroline Moorehead

The questions dated, the answers fresh

More from Books

Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would give an excuse to write about her novels. It turns out, however, to be hugely enjoyable in its own right. Curious Pursuits reminds one that Atwood is a superbly funny (as well as serious) writer: her wit is winningly relaxed and genial as well as sharp. It is odd how often her humour is dis- regarded, particularly when she is routinely read in relation to the Women’s Movement.

Interconnect

The last refuge of a scoundrel

More from Books

To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he did and what the forces were that drove him onwards. Some degree of sympathy is essential, and the less appealing the subject, the more difficult the task will be. The difficulty is compounded if the biographer has been previously required to approach the material from a different angle: the facts are the same but the point of view sometimes means that they can seem startlingly different.

7 May 2005

Ian Garrick-Mason

Lord of misrule

More from Books

According to the business press, the age of the ‘imperial CEO’ is now behind us, swept away by a wave of scandals and collapsing stock prices. But for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Eisner was an emperor’s emperor. Recruited from Paramount in 1984, the Walt Disney Company’s new chairman and chief executive officer immediately set about shaking up the poorly performing company. He boosted cash flow by significantly increasing theme park admission prices. He released Disney’s classic animated features as home videos, realising hundreds of millions of dollars of value from the Disney library. He launched a highly successful chain of stand-alone retail stores.

Raymond Carr

The slog of high command

More from Books

Almost every day throughout the Great War of 1914 to 1918 Douglas Haig kept a diary which its editors describe as ‘an understated account of the day-to-day slog of high command’. It consists of often brief notes of operations and their outcome. Magnificently edited as it is, without maps with arrows showing the directions of attacks and the ground lost or gained in the great battles, the reader is lost in a welter of obscure place names. Haig was not, Bourne and Sheffield remark, ‘a man for reflecting on his own motives and performance’, but he does often supply observations of the motives and performance of others. They add a human interest to a mere account of operations.

Interconnect

Psychic jaunts and jollities

More from Books

It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes Beyond Black, a long, dense and complicated work which combines almost forensic accounts of the modern medium in action with some rapt reportage from in and around the M25 corridor, while leaving the reader in no doubt that these two kinds of banality are somehow connected.

Anne Somerset

Tricky regime change

More from Books

At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in April 1603, the predominant emotion among the spectators was relief. For the past 45 years her subjects had lived in continual terror of being engulfed in civil war when the childless queen died, leaving behind her a disputed succession. There were as many as 12 possible claimants to the throne and since Elizabeth had never made clear her own preference, it was far from obvious which one would triumph. Elizabeth had forbidden discussion of the matter on pain of death, but while this silenced speculation, it could not stop her subjects worrying about what would happen after she was gone. Upon her death, however, there had been no resistance when James VI of Scotland had been proclaimed King of England.

Digby Durrant

Love lies bleeding

More from Books

A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they join Gauguin and others at Pont-Aven. And then one misty morning by a river down in deepest Devon Bron, too, sees a girl on a bridge and he knows exactly what Marotte felt. Flora is no unworldly Kate. Everyone’s enjoyed her, including Mick Jagger and David Bailey, and she has husband problems. Now she’s through with love. Yet when Bron suddenly quotes Lauren Bacall’s famous lines from To Have and to Have Not, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?

Patrick Skene-Catling

Fine and mellow

More from Books

Having obsessively admired Billie Holiday’s singing for 50 years or so, having seen her perform whenever possible, having listened to her recordings again and again, and having read hundreds of thousands of words about her, I received Julia Blackburn’s With Billie in a mood of blasé scepticism. It is a pleasure to report that this is a really marvellous book, the most uninhibitedly intimate portrayal ever of the short, hard life and overall musical triumph of Lady Day. Though not as orderly as Stuart Nicholson’s 1995 biography, for example, With Billie more vividly reflects the chaos that Billie Holiday was born into and only rarely escaped from.

30 April 2005

Caroline Moorehead

The boy done good

More from Books

The saga of Naim Attallah and his writing career continues. For readers who have just joined, Attallah’s short morality tale about his simple and happy childhood with his good and loving grandmother and great-aunt, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, appeared last year. It came swiftly on the heels of Jennie Erdal’s entertainting memoir, Ghosting. In this, she revealed that Attallah’s immense and impressive literary output — articles, collections of interviews, book reviews, erotic novels — had in fact been written not by him, but by her. For over 20 years, she had been his full-time ghost. Now, in another extremely short space of time, Attallah has produced the second volume in what is planned as a quartet of memoirs.

Patricia Daunt

Intrepid sisters of the Service

More from Books

Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as a masterpiece. It’s not; but it’s fun and I suspect it of being quite a spoof too.

John Mortimer

The shaky scales of justice

More from Books

Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular. More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By introducing imprisonment without trial and attacking the golden threads of British justice such as the presumption of innocence which means that the burden of proof should always be on the prosecution, the present Labour government, through its disastrous home secretaries, has demeaned our judicial system. It is hoped that they will pay the penalty for this at the forthcoming election.

Olivia Glazebrook

Learning how to swim

More from Books

The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible. Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal, selfish and irresponsible alcoholic. His wife Mary Rose is a painter who detests domestic chores and has an attitude towards her children as robust as her husband’s. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she says, and expects them to find their own food, and fight their own battles. Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maur- een learn harsh lessons about self- sufficiency from the earliest age imaginable.

William Reesmogg

Practising to deceive

More from Books

There are two views about the morality of political lying. The first is the classical British view that politicians should always tell the truth, as people should in private life. This view is usually qualified, as William Waldegrave qualified it before the Treasury and Civil Services Committee of the House of Commons: ‘In exceptional circumstances it is necessary to say something that is untrue to the House of Commons. The House of Commons understands that and accepts that.’ Such lies are only justified to protect a major public interest, where a refusal to answer would be taken as a confirmation of the fact, as in devaluation of the currency.

Rupert Christiansen

A master of ambiguities

More from Books

School reports can be remarkably prescient. William Empson’s headmaster noted, ‘He has a good deal of originality and enterprise: I hope he is learning also to discipline his vagaries.’ It’s a judgment which could serve as an epigraph for this massive first volume of John Haffenden’s long-awaited, long-meditated biography, in which the great literary critic and poet indeed shows ‘a good deal of originality and enterprise’, but rather heroically fails ‘to discipline his vagaries’. I remember Empson only as an old man, when he came to Cambridge to deliver the Clark Lectures in 1974. They were not considered a success, though at the opening he made everyone laugh by slyly announcing that ‘the cloud cast over literature by T. S.

Sandy Balfour

A long and winding road

More from Books

Having read The Prester Quest almost at a single sitting, I think I can say without fear of contradiction or a libel suit that Nicholas Jubber is full of it. But his is a most passionate, exuberant and charming kind of ‘it’, and his account of travels in Italy, the Levant, Sudan and Ethiopia in search of — well, in search of something — is a delight. Nominally he is trying to nail down the myths that surround Prester John, the ‘Priest-King of the Indies’ and master of an earthly paradise located somewhere between Turkey and China. We do not know precisely where, but Ethiopia seems like a good bet. My television company once produced a documentary film based on the same dubious premise about King Solomon’s mines.

23 April 2005

Jonathan Keates

Coming to a bad end

More from Books

Something very important in the history of England happened on 24 January 1536, when King Henry VIII, celebrating the vigil of the feast of St Paul’s conversion, staged a splendid tournament in the tiltyard of his palace at Greenwich. The monarch, ‘mounted on a great horse to run at the lists’, was unseated by an opponent’s lance. As Henry staggered to his feet the heavily armoured charger fell on top of him, causing severe concussion and the opening of a varicose ulcer for which he had been treated ten years earlier.

Martin Vander Weyer

Masters of the chain gangs

More from Books

Recent research tells us that the average British shopper is destined to spend two years of his or her life inside a supermarket. Ever since ‘Mr Alan’ Sainsbury, third-generation head of the grocery dynasty, converted his Croydon branch to self-service in 1950 — and despite the fact that one of the first customers threw her wire basket at him in disgust — these cathedrals to consumer choice and convenience have loomed larger and larger in the national landscape. They have hollowed out our town centres and surrounded them with graceless hangars in giant car parks. They have become an irresistible force in the economics of farming. They have broadened our eating habits and destroyed our cooking skills.

Nicholas Harman

Memoirs of a workaholic Scot

More from Books

They are a puzzle, those Victorian ancestors, gazing through their beards stock-still to keep the image sharp. How did they move when the photographer had left, how uncomfortable were their bulky coats? The Airds found out. Charles (1831-1910) wrote a memoir in his retirement, and his grandson and great-granddaughter have piously transcribed and published it. The family memorials include the first Aswan Dam, the West Highland Railway, the sewers of Copenhagen and Berlin, and the gasworks at Kingston-upon-Thames. Here are the private thoughts and doings of one of those Scotsmen who literally built the Empire. Less partial editors would have cut the boring bits, thought of a better title and generally smartened it up. That would have been a pity.

Interconnect

Scanning the far horizon

More from Books

Following his previous three novels — the work upon which much of Winton’s international acclaim rests — the 17 interconnected stories of The Turning come as something of a revelation. Those previous works, to this reviewer’s mind, have tended towards being overwritten and over-embellished (give-away epithets such as ‘lyrical’, ‘exuberant’, ‘inventive’ and ‘gutsy’ commonly recur). In The Turning, however, Winton has spectacularly reinvented himself and reined in his writing to create a world of pared-down, stunning and entirely believable completeness and complexity; a world at once exotically alien and instantly knowable.

Anna Reid

A herdsman’s lot is not a happy one

More from Books

Piers Vitebsky is Head of Anthropology and Russian North- ern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, an appealing Cambridge institution whose lecture halls are hung with polar bear skins and whose staff and students are summoned to tea and biscuits every morning by the ship’s bell of the Terra Nova. Part memoir, part social study, his book is a warm and lucid tribute to the Eveny, a 17,000-strong reindeer-herding people from the far north-east of Siberia. Vitebsky has been visiting them since 1988, and thus witnessed the tail-end of the old Soviet system for dealing with the Siberian minorities and its replacement, amidst the chaos of the Nineties, with free enterprise and an embryonic native-rights movement.

16 April 2005

Zenga Longmore

The ghosts that haunt Brick Lane

More from Books

What an extraordinary book. It reminds me of a magnificently woven carpet whose eclectic style combines oriental, East- ern European and Hebraic adornments. Threads are abruptly snipped and left dangling. Curry and blood-stains are spattered upon it, causing confusion and alarm. Gavron’s work defies categorisation. It is not a collection of short stories. It is not fact and it is not quite fiction. The single theme that binds this cleverly researched book together is East London’s Brick Lane. The author includes sagas of silk weavers, manuscripts from the Civil War, Elizabethan poems, short stories, cartoon strips and newspaper quotations concerning the grisly ‘plasticater’ Gunther von Hagens.

Tony Gould

A blot on the imperial escutcheon

More from Books

The massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians and the wounding of over 1,000 others in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (a barren enclosure walled in by houses) on the unlucky 13 April 1919 has a far greater historical resonance than the incident would seem to merit. This is not to make light of what the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, called ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in sinister isolation’, accusing the perpetrator of the deed, Brigadier-General Dyer, of ‘frightfulness’ (a word then redolent of German atrocities in the first world war).

Interconnect

Darkness in the background

More from Books

The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’ Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up a parallel world to the novels that Jane Austen was very much aware of, lurking around the margins of ‘the two inches of ivory and fine brush’ she used for the tiny events of Georgian family life. Fullerton early became interested in the connections of the Austen family to Australia, as others have done: there is even the novel imagining Jane Austen living there.