Method acting with a vengeance
More from BooksTwo of a good thing is usually better than one — unless, of course, the good thing in question is you. Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s new novel, The Double, is built around just such a premise.
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Stifled at birth
More from BooksThis is a reissue in paperback of a novel that utterly vanished on its first publication in 1998. Since it is exceptionally good, it is worth explaining its disappearance. Review copies were sent out by Bellew, its original publisher, and copies were sent to the Society of Authors for submission to their Sagittarius Prize (best first novel by an author aged 60 and over), but ten days later Bellew went bust. The receivers sold all the stock to a remainders firm who took the view that The Danube Testament was unsaleable and pulped the whole edition. No copies went to bookshops. This does not quite explain why it was never reviewed if it is so good, but fiction from a small press has to fight hard for space in newspapers and bookshops.
The acceptable face of crime
More from BooksIt was no fun being captured by pirates. Hanging from the yardarm or walking the plank was the least of your worries. According to Alexander Exque- melin’s eye-witness account in Buccaneers of America: Amongst other tortures then used, one was to stretch [the victims’] limbs with cords and at the same time beat them with sticks and other instruments. Others had burning matches placed between their fingers, others had slender cords twisted about their heads, till their eyes burst out of their skull.
Health, money, recipes and gossip
More from BooksIn 1799 Susan O’Brien underwent an operation for breast cancer. She was 56 and, her sister having died of the disease, she nerved herself for the knife. The doctors insisted on blindfolding her during the operation, but she took nothing to ease the pain and remained fully conscious throughout. She was convinced that the operation would kill her, so she saw it rather like a public execution, and determined to die with dignity. She didn’t scream or weep once. The operation was a complete success, and she lived on for another 28 years. This and many other plums are tightly packed into Joanna Martin’s book.
One man and his dog
More from BooksSix weeks after the defeat of the Taleban Rory Stewart started to walk across Afghanistan. He took the direct route through the central mountains from Herat to Kabul when there was still deep snow on the paths and ice cracking underfoot. The chances of surviving the weather, the Pashtun, Taleban and al-Qua’eda while entrusting himself to the hospitality of whichever villagers, mullahs and trigger-happy warriors he came across were not high. ‘I worried’, he says, ‘that when I was killed people would think I was foolhardy.’ Crazy would have been the right word. But thank goodness for brave people doing crazy things and for a writer in the tradition of Thesiger and Thubron.
The cured man of Europe?
More from BooksMustapha Kemal, otherwise Ataturk, took the corpse of the Ottoman empire and re- animated it as Turkey. Break-ing both the old sultanate and the hold of Islam, he laid the foundation of a democratic state. It was an extraordinary achievement, not to be witnessed again until Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Soviet Union and the hold of the Communist party — and that was more by accident than design. In 1950 Turkey became the first Muslim country in history to replace its government through a free election. Politics since then, it is true, have been more a matter of strong personality than party and platform. As the guardian of Kemalist secular and nationalist virtues, the army has staged three coups. One unfortunate prime minister, Adnan Menderes, was hanged.
14 August 2004
A fastidious disdain of poetry
More from BooksIf William Coldstream (1909-87) was a dull painter, as he is sometimes thought to be, he was most certainly not a dull man. An artist who spent much of his life in a three-piece suit, an administrator with ‘an irresistible urge to turn a serious story into farce’, he was captivating in conversation, a natural entertainer whose slightly shrivelled charm reminded more than one person of Fred Astaire. Described by his friend W. H. Auden as one ‘whose tongue is the most malicious I know’, Coldstream was also self-effacing as a teacher, modest, inhibited, given to depression and nervous breakdown, intimidating to some, fascinating, kindly.
Delusions and delights
More from BooksDisney hijacked Margery Sharp. The novelist, who died in 1991, is remembered chiefly for her series of (now animated) children’s books, The Rescuers. Sharp wrote The Eye of Love, one of 26 adult novels, half a century ago. It is a bittersweet comedy that encompasses intimations of tragedy — the ‘wrong’ outcome is never impossible here — and, as its title suggests, elements of romance. But it is not romantic fiction and its principal players fall short of the status of romantic hero and heroine. Miss Diver approaches 40, raven-haired and wraith-like in her thinness. Harry Gibson is stout and down-at-heel, his Kensington-based furriers failing as the Depression bites and it becomes ‘the thing to go shabby’.
Vanity fair and foul
More from BooksThe plumber came this morning — £75 including VAT. He was still expensively engaged when a bike brought Frederic Raphael’s Rough Copy in a paperback version whose glued spine is in constant contest with the reader. Anyway, surely an opportunity to recoup the plumber’s fee. Strangely, the author himself raises the question of my financial plight on page 164 — I was into the index in a flash — when he disobligingly records that in 1973 I had ‘no income whatsoever’, despite mouths to feed. And, he adds, I have been unemployed ever since. Admittedly FR is merely reporting the confidences of the famous Professor X, but with no palpable reluctance.
‘Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought’
More from BooksOne February day in 1845 a well-dressed young man walked into Gallery Nine of the British Museum and hurled a lump of sculpture at a glass case. He smashed the case and shattered its contents — the Portland Vase, a famous piece of Roman glass. The vase was broken into 200 pieces. The vandal turned out to be a mentally unstable Irish student, and for this mindless crime he was committed to two months’ hard labour. The Portland Vase was glued together again, and returned to its glass case. It still stands in the Museum today — a small, dumpy, blue-glass vase carved with white cameo figures. It isn’t particularly beautiful, but for centuries it has been a Grade-A classical treasure, bought by the ultra-rich and coveted by scholars who have tried to explain it.
Great — but uneven like the Andes
More from BooksPablo Neruda had three houses in Chile, the most lovely of them at La Isla Negra, on the Pacific coast near Valparaiso. This house is Neruda’s love-song to the sea that inspired so many of his poems. Like a stranded boat on the beach, its timbers creak, a collection of figure-heads loom from the rafters and miniature ships in bottles are lined against the windows.
The dark side of laughter
More from BooksAs a rule, I disapprove of reviews which review the author and not the book, but some occasions demand it. The British, I don’t know why, are notoriously myopic, mean-spirited even, about multiple talents. In France one could be a poet and a stripper and be taken equally seriously as either. David Baddiel is best known as a comedian and thus his chances of being read as anything but a comic novelist will be compromised. I know this, for I was guilty of the prejudice myself when I served as a Man Booker judge in 2002 and learned that David was to be a colleague. He was, I presumed, to be the media floozy; I could hardly have been more wrong.
The pros and cons of Euromarriage
More from BooksTimothy Garton Ash has become a bishop. In Free World, he has written something which is less a work of political analysis than an extended sermon about the value of political liberty and international co-operation between Western states. Of course, no one is against these admirable things, but they sometimes come at too high a price. Yet there is not much about the price in this worthy and rather parsonical volume, which manages to fill 250 pages while paying only the most perfunctory attention to the difficulties or the side-effects of our good intentions. The argument goes like this. Britain’s political classes are divided into two camps: the Europhiles and the Atlanticists. This is profoundly tragic and unnecessary.
The return of the native
More from Books‘When you look at families, there is no such thing as normal.’ Indeed not. Justin Cartwright gives us the Judds, an apparently ordinary English middle-class family, and examines their response to a private catastrophe. The book begins as Juliet Judd, eldest child and ‘prodigal daughter’, is released from prison in America. She has been locked up for two years, jailed for selling a valuable stained-glass window which she knew to be stolen. Juliet’s prison sentence cast her whole family into a state of suspended emotional animation from which they now begin to stir, as Juliet makes her way home. This awakening is a painful process. Juliet’s father, Charles, is bewildered by the turn of events which landed his favourite child in an American jail.
Short on names, tall on tales
More from BooksTwo or three years ago, I was invited with my rather posh then girlfriend to a grand party up in Yorkshire somewhere, and we were billeted for the night with a fellow guest who lived nearby. Our host was one Sir Tatton Sykes, Bt — known around those parts, as ‘Sir Satin Tights’ — an immensely dapper and personable toff, who showed not a flicker of dismay at our dishevelled clothes and overnight luggage scrunched up into old Woolworths bags. His ancestral pile was really something, too. It seemed to be filled with four-poster beds, cooked breakfasts, servants, eccentrically decorated private chapels and enormous cast-iron Victorian bathtubs with gurgling pipes and weird metal columns instead of plugs.
7 August 2004
The impact of the immigrants
More from BooksIn New York in 1920 the writer Hattie Mayer, under her pen name Anzia Yezierska, published her first collection of short stories, entitled Hungry Hearts. Poignant sketches of Jewish family life among the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, they gain additional impact from the reader’s continuing awareness that English is not the author’s first language. She grew up in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement speaking Yiddish and Polish, and made the transatlantic voyage with her parents in the wake of Tsar Nicholas’s pogroms. Given such experience, the final story, ‘How I Found America’, seems, for all its sentimentality, the most moving.
Escaping the gallows — and classification
More from BooksIf any of Byron’s contemporaries at Cambridge had been asked to nominate The Man Most Likely To, it is a safe bet that it would have been William Bankes, and while things did not turn out quite as any but his immediate set might have guessed, that hardly detracts from his biographical appeal. Rich, clever and brave, a much lionised traveller, an inspired collector and generous patron, ‘Nubian’ Bankes would seem to have had it all, when a meeting with a guardsman in a convenience ‘that afforded accommodation for only one individual’ threatened him with disgrace and the gallows. In the same year that a Captain Henry Nicholls was hanged for sodomy, Bankes was lucky to get away with an improbable acquittal, but caution had never been his longest suit.
Limping to the holy presence
More from BooksA 12th-century eyewitness at Sant- iago de Compostela described his fellow pilgrims: Some, such as the Greeks, hold the image of the cross in their hands; others distribute their possessions to the poor; some carry iron or lead for the construction of the basilica of the Apostle James; and others, who have been liberated by the Apostle from the prisons of the wicked, bear their shackles and manacles upon their shoulders. Conrad Rudolph bore neither iron nor shackles on his 1,000-mile walk from Le Puy through the Pyrenees to Santiago. His 20lb-pack held a light sleeping-bag, a bottle of water, a towel, soap, lip-balm, nail-clippers, a first-aid item called Second Skin for blisters, a pocket knife and plastic spoon.
Goodies and baddies galore
More from BooksCarlos Ruiz Zaf.
The past as good entertainment
More from BooksThe main lesson of history is that we do not learn the lessons of history. Did (for example) anyone at the Pentagon heed the wisdom of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, soundly advising against the military occupation of Iraq? Of course not. That was way back, buddy: this is now. Experience teaches, time and again — and again. The present volume accepts the pragmatic irrelevance of history, and celebrates Clio, a muse. It has historians owning up to the fact that history is good entertainment, with some figures from journalism and the entertainment industry affirming that historians indeed possess the extra-mural potential to fill airtime and column space.
31 July 2004
Stranded by the tide of fashion
More from BooksColin Wilson is a very great man, ‘the only important writer in Europe’. That is his own estimation, and I do not quarrel with it because Wilson’s self-esteem is not just vanity but necessary to his career. As he sees it, the pattern of our lives is created by ourselves through the use of imagination and will. At the age of 13 he decided to become the greatest writer of all times. His first project, never completed, was an encyclopaedia of science, literature and all human knowledge. In preparation for this, he studied geology, biology and astronomy, mastered the whole of philosophy and psychology and read through the imaginative literature of Europe, with special attention to the Russians.
Erudition without tears
More from BooksThere never was a ticket with the word ‘POSH’ stamped on it by the P&O shipping line, which meant a passenger to India went out on the port side and returned on the starboard and got the best of the cooling breezes. So, where did the word come from? Michael Quinion says humans fear the unfamiliar and will go to great lengths to discover how a word or phrase came into being and remove its mystery. The mixture of laboured logic and startling inventiveness that gave birth to the word ‘posh’, though, is not completely unfounded. ‘Posh’ was originally the Romany for halfpenny and though it would have taken sackfuls of the stuff to get to India and back it was money.
When the (fish and) chips are down
More from BooksThere is much to commend this book. Charles Clover lays bare the depths of a neglected subject — the rape of our seas — to expose the destruction caused by modern technological fishing. This is an issue which needs populist exposure; Clover has done it admirably. I hope it will attract readers who might otherwise have shown no interest in the subject. The framework of his book is a series of visits to selected fisheries around the world and the lessons he gleaned from them. Every visit seemed to have a gruesomely early start, and to involve eating delicious fish; the author’s obvious pleasure was then mitigated by his guilt. Later he expiates this with fierce criticism of celebrity chefs who seem oblivious to the growing crisis he identifies.
Pioneer in whodunnit country
More from BooksA crime novel by Chekhov? Professor John Sutherland positively chortles in the introduction at his readers’ likely surprise. Indeed, any novel by Chekhov is probably news for those readers, and Sutherland, who delights in literary mysteries, waves in front of our eyes the date of the only previous translation: 1962. It was the date of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose sensational solution this novel anticipates. And he has a point, even if he does refer to Hercule Poirot as an ‘amateur sleuth’: The Shooting Party is awash with tricks of the detective-story trade, then (1885) in its infancy.
That woman again
More from BooksThe meteoric rise and swift fall of Anne Boleyn, she of the thousand days, has gripped the imagination even of sober-minded academic historians, Eric Ives describing it as ‘the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history’. Much of the fascination derives from the fact that the evidence is confusing, and no explanation appears to reconcile all contradictions. Even her contemporaries could not agree about her. Was she a delicate beauty, as Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry suggests, and as she herself insinuated in her allusion to her long slender neck ever so convenient for the headsman? Or was she only moderately attractive, as some foreign diplomats reported in their dispatches home?
An enemy of stuff and nonsense
More from BooksJust how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous of his friendship with Lady Harriet Ashburton, he was either morosely taciturn or explosively violent. This new collection of Jane’s letters — a one-volume offshoot of the gigantic and still incomplete Duke edition — follows a revisionist line and paints a more ambiguous picture. Jane’s warmer feelings towards Lady Harriet are presented, and her possibly lesbian inclinations explored (to no plausible end).
Axeman on the rampage
More from BooksA curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I mean, I’d be thrilled if anyone were interested in my views of Dale Peck’s views of Sven Birkerts’s views of Robert Musil, but you could perfectly well go and read Musil yourself, so let’s not kid ourselves.) The point about Dale Peck is that he has earned himself a notoriety by writing some fairly unforgiving book reviews.
24 July 2004
Tales of a Scottish spa
More from BooksI will cheerfully own to having struggled in the past with Ronald Frame’s novels. Brooding once over a stack of photographs brought back from a fortnight’s holiday in Kerry, I realised that lurking among the margins of practically every snap — here flung down on a bathing-towel, there wedged beneath the picnic basket — was a copy of Penelope’s Hat, read at an ever more slower rate, and ultimately very nearly chucked into the Atlantic. Frame’s short stories, on the other hand, are a different matter.
Upstaging the Prussians
More from Books‘The victor writes the history,’ says Peter Hofschröer in his latest attempt to rewrite it himself. ‘Rarely has this old adage been more apposite than when applied to Wellington and Waterloo.’ In his two previous books, the second of which is called 1815, The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory, he argued that the Duke of Wellington deliberately let the initial French attack fall on the Prussians, dallying at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball instead of going to their assistance, then subsequently concealing the evidence and claiming the victory at Waterloo three days later entirely for himself and British arms, whereas the battle was won by increasing pressure from the Prussians on the French right, and by the German troops in British pay.