Culture

Culture

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

Interconnect

The war and a sprained ankle

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The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling. From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family (he married when he was 21) by articles and reviews, a staggering number of these, and by prose books of various kinds, more than 40 of them; the thought of the work rate gives one a headache and certainly maddened him. Some were editions of poets, with long introductions, some historical, most were about the countryside, and belonged to what he contemptuously called ‘the Norfolk-jacket school of writing’.

Peter Clark

A breeze with a hint of rain

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Diplomat, soldier, diplomat again, humanitarian, environmentalist: you cannot plan a career like that today. But that has been the CV of John Henniker, otherwise Major Henniker-Major MC, now the eighth Lord Henniker, who, in his late eighties, has written a modest and readable account of his life and work. Born in 1916, and following a conventional education, he had an exciting war. He is the last survivor of that sparky band of officers — Evelyn Waugh, Bill Deakin, Randolph Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean — who were parachuted into Yugoslavia to establish contact with Tito. Resuming a Foreign Office career, he opened a post-war embassy in Belgrade before transfer to London, to work in Ernest Bevin’s Private Office.

John De-Falbe

A thoughtful trip to the seaside

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Set in Anatolia in 1922, The Maze describes the retreat of a Greek brigade to the sea. Under the questionable guidance of a brigadier addicted to morphine and a hypocritical priest without the slightest understanding of their parlous situation, the detachment is lost in the arid landscape. Thanks to the trail of droppings left by a runaway horse, they reach a town where we are introduced to a venal mayor, a schoolmaster, an Armenian grocer, a French whore and various others. A mysterious spate of thefts is explained, and the man responsible for spreading seditious pamphlets is identified. Accompanied by civilians of the professional classes, the brigade then makes its way to the sea, leaving behind the Turkish underclass. It is not immediately clear why this is such a good novel.

Philip Hensher

Roller-coaster of a ride

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David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published as recently as 1999, and Cloud Atlas is only his third. Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, number9dream, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His novels have a gleefully kleptomaniac air, moving from the most tawdry thrills to thunderous, visionary spectacle; they are unlike anything else, and you emerge from them dazed, amazed, unsure of the exact nature of the overwhelming experience. Cloud Atlas is a tremendous novel, but I’m not entirely sure why. Ghostwritten had a very original structure, one evidently congenial to Mitchell.

7 February 2004

Michael Tanner

Fated and enchanted love

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Wagner’s masterpiece, Tristan, has now a considerable literature of its own, with books devoted to its harmonic structure, its baleful influence on artists of various kinds, its philosophical significance, its sources in the mediaeval literature of courtly love, its phonographic history, and plenty of other things.

Interconnect

A heist too far

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When I first met Terry Smith ten years ago, in the library of Long Lartin top security prison in Worcestershire, he was part of a cockney criminal elite as exclusive and self-perpetuating as the Whig junta that once controlled England. Along the austere corridors in that microcosm of misanthropy and discontent, Smith and his ilk cut quite a dash in their Day-glo designer sportswear, dispensing favours here, meting out summary justice there, employing the less prosperous prisoners amongst us to fetch and carry after regular Lucullan repasts and hooch-fuelled revelries. ‘We were the living embodiment of extroversion,’ Smith suggests in retrospect. ‘A collection of colourful crooks [who] loved to brag and flaunt our natural style, flair and wealth.

Frank Field

A love of God and the ballet

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There was a time when the Catholic party of the Church of England was not consumed by the latest ecclesiastical millinery. Its driving force then was a passion for social righteousness. It was also fun in the hands of perhaps the most flamboyant of Christian Socialists, Stuart Headlam. Headlam is still sometimes remembered for standing bail for Oscar Wilde. But there is much more to him than this characteristic act of bravery. Headlam was born into a Liverpool stockbroking family. It was at Eton where his father, an evangelical, noticed what was to him his son’s worrying liking for High Church ritual. But it was in the marrying of F. D. Maurice’s theology to beautiful ceremonial that Headlam made his unique contribution to public life.

Humphrey Stone

Snapshots of the city

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Six CDs, 75 minutes eachwww.csaword.co.uk Lying stock-still with a bandage over your eyes for several weeks has its bonuses. In the bookshelves downstairs sit all those spines that for years have been gazing at you reproachfully, pleading ‘when are you going to take me down and read me?’ Help is at hand. You don’t have to exhaust the eyes staring at their type. You can be read to. Ever since my father would read aloud, usually Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, every evening in winter to anyone who wanted to listen, I have loved being read to. So what better thing to do than to plug into talking-book cassettes (which must be unabridged)? I started with Proust, appropriately, because lying there in bed it was as if I were the author himself, immersed in his world.

Rupert Christiansen

Composing for dear life

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Ever since the posthumous publication in 1979 of Testimony, his volume of memoirs, ‘as related to and edited by Solmon Volkov’, Dmitri Shostakovich has ranked not only as a great Russian composer but also as a great figure of Russian literature — sullenly truculent, cynically embittered and permanently disappointed. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so far as to claim that the Shostakovich of Testimony was in effect a fictional creation, based on Volkov’s fraudulent claim to be the composer’s close friend and largely designed to please a Cold War audience who needed to think of him and his music as fervently anti-communist.

Philip Ziegler

An early search for WMD

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Any author who subtitles his book ‘The true story of …’ this, that or the other inspires some disquiet in the reviewer. If this is the true story, then the implication is that previous versions have been, if not untrue, then at least seriously misinformed. In his history of the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4, Charles Allen maintains that earlier writers ‘without exception, have accepted the self-serving line first given out by Sir Francis Younghusband’. In so doing, they have done grave injustice to the military commander of the expedition, General Macdonald, who is usually represented as cowardly and indecisive, while in fact he was merely prudent and responsible. Peter Fleming and Patrick French are the two precursors whom Allen singles out.

31 January 2004

Piers Paul-Read

A very errant knight

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Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is the communist regime in East Germany. The story opens when Peter Hithersay, a pupil at an English public school, is summoned home to celebrate his 16th birthday. There his mother tells him that his real father is not her husband, Rodney — an ‘affable and diffident’ commercial artist — but a fugitive East German political prisoner whom she had harboured for one night while competing in a choral competition in Leipzig.

Katie Grant

Plumbing the depths

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The sea frightens me. It seems so cold and cruel, even when it looks warm and inviting. It was with some wariness, therefore, that I approached David Austin’s first novel, in which the sea, or the Sea, as it is sometimes called in this book, is a major player. Robert Radnor has returned from India ‘with a little splash of publicity’ generated through his being the only survivor of the Golden Delta, a rusty tramp steamer ‘blown round the world by the winds of whatever trade could be found’ and finally obliterated by a tidal wave.

Judith Flanders

An innocent at large in dystopia

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Turgenev wrote, ‘Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: “Great God, grant that twice two be not four.”’ Pete Dexter starts from the other end. His characters know that, whatever they pray for, twice two will always be four — and it will always be held against them, and they will have to pay for it. It is 1953. Train is a black teenager who caddies at a white golf club, an inspired innocent who carries grass seed back to the ghetto to grow a lawn, who feeds a literally lame duck he names Marliss. Miller Packard is a police sergeant who discovers in Train the most naturally gifted golfer he has ever seen.

Theodore Dalrymple

Pioneer in a peculiar science

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The first distinguished person I ever met told me that he preferred funerals to weddings. ‘Weddings,’ he said, ‘are so final.’ It is true that many changes take place to the human body after death, practically all of them of surpassing unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why no one before Professor Bass had the idea of observing the decomposition of human corpses under various conditions (or at least the determination to carry it out). He created an academic institution devoted exclusively to this purpose, the only one of its type in the world. Until then, knowledge of human decomposition was purely adventitious, the product of accumulated chance observations.

Olivia Glazebrook

Forward to the past

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If time travel were possible, surely there’d be people from the future causing mischief in the present? Well, not necessarily: perhaps when you travel back in time you visit a parallel universe and therefore can’t muck about with history, even if you try to. Alternatively there might already be time travellers dotted about, but when they start talking about coming from the future we think they’re bonkers and cart them off to the friendly hospital — like Andrew Carlssin, arrested in New York in January 2003 on insider-trader charges after turning $800 into $350 million in two weeks.

Ian Garrick-Mason

Moving swiftly on . . .

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Titles that begin with the phrase A Brief History of … are no doubt written that way to connote a certain sense of humility, as if the author has been engaged in a casual endeavour and can offer no guarantee that the results will be definitive. The roots of this trend go a few decades back, when titles beginning with the oak-ribbed phrase The History of … — the kind of title that condemned Edward Gibbon to 12 years of writing and his readers to six volumes of reading — were gradually outnumbered by titles beginning with the rather more plastic A History of …. It was all but inevitable that someone would eventually spot the benefits that an adjective like ‘Brief’ could bring to the mix.

Alan Judd

A smile, a figure, a flair

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It’s hard to find an exciting biographical subject who has not been done and on whom sufficient unpublished papers and records exist (not to mention alluring photographs). By good fortune, persistence and enthusiasm, Miranda Seymour has done just that with Hélène Delangle. Who she? Well, she was born in 1900 (her preferred date was 1905) as the cuckoo in the nest of a rural French postmaster and his wife. She had a smile to set a thousand Bugattis roaring, a figure to match and the zest and daring of a corps of cavalry.

Allan Mallinson

Quite the most delightful clergyman

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Simon Phipps, says the cover of this slim but engaging volume, was ‘the last of his breed of Bishop’. One hopes not. Does Eton, the Guards and Cambridge now preclude preferment in the Anglican episcopacy? This aside, what is the edification or entertainment in recollections by the great and the good of the varied life of the Right Reverend Simon Phipps MC? Could Eamonn Andrews have made an audience of millions feel better for having heard ‘Simon Phipps, This is Your Life’? One hopes so.

Jane Gardam

Hide and seek

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The constant command in the works of Alberto Manguel is ‘look closer’. From his terrifying novel, News from a Foreign Country Came to his A History of Reading and Reading Pictures, A History of Love and Hate and Into the Looking Glass Wood and his book of notes that analyse the film The Bride of Frankenstein he surprises, shocks and awakens us. He is both the wizard releasing coloured doves from a black top hat and the dedicated scholar soberly at desk. He is fascinated by duality (duality is the whole message of his early novel) and it is everybody’s duality that is the subject of this new story.

Philip Hensher

The sleep of reason

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Like Francis Wheen’s other books, this one ends in a deliriously funny index, which is worth the cover price on its own. One entry: Blair, Tony; claims descent from Abraham; defends secondary picketing; defends teaching of creationism; displays coathangers; emotional guy; explores Third Way; likes chocolate-cake recipe; sneers at market forces; takes mud-bath in Mexico; venerates Princess Diana; worships management gurus. Or, on the other side of the political spectrum: Thatcher, Margaret; chooses market-minded Archbishop; economic delusions; enjoys ‘electric baths’; quotes St Francis; quotes St Paul; revives Victorian values; sides with good against evil; supports terrorism; thinks the unthinkable.

24 January 2004

Anne Somerset

The woman in black

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Catherine de Medici was, quite literally, the original black widow. After her husband, King Henri II of France, was accidentally killed in a jousting contest in 1559, she always dressed in black, despite the fact that French queens traditionally wore white mourning. Figuratively the term might seem equally apt, for Catherine has customarily been depicted as black-hearted, as well as black-garbed. However, as Leonie Frieda shows in this absorbing biography, Catherine was a well-intentioned woman who resorted to extreme measures only under pressure. Prior to 1559 Catherine had been a neglected queen consort, overshadowed by her husband’s mistress, but the king’s fatal accident transformed her into a pivotal figure in 16th-century Europe.

Kate Chisholm

Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky

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The engagement diary of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) reads like a Victorian Who’s Who. Dickens, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell were all among her acquaintance. While holidaying on the Isle of Wight she went on long walks with Tennyson, struggling to keep up with the poet, ‘listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliffs, and the poet’s cloak flapped time to the gusts of the wet wind’. She was photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, met Gladstone for breakfast, spent a weekend with Charles Darwin just a few days before he died, and was entertained by Ruskin at Brantwood.

Jan Morris

A prickly but noble nation

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To my mind one of the relatively few happy circumstances of our time, as we grope into the 21st century, is the condition of Wales. By no means all Welsh people would agree with me. Those who love the Welsh language above all else must still fight their heroic battle in its defence. Those who think politically are dissatisfied with devolution and the febrile dullness of the National Assembly. The flood of English incomers is a curse on several levels. Many of my countrymen are in sackcloth and ashes over the state of Welsh rugby, and rather fewer, perhaps, are mourning the virtual dissolution of the chapels. But I prefer to take the big view, the long view, and all in all it seems to me the condition of Wales is on the mend.

Toby Young

Strutting their stuff

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H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else. Mencken’s thoroughbreds are now so rare that when you come across one it’s like encountering a unicorn. Michael Wolff is one such creature. He’s been throwing custard pies at the rich and powerful since he was appointed New York magazine’s media columnist in 1998. His willingness to skewer the robber barons of the media-industrial complex has made him one of the most famous journalists in America and Autumn of the Moguls is his greatest hits collection.

Olivia Glazebrook

Lucky to be alive?

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Oracle Night describes a nine-day episode in the life of a writer, Sidney Orr. Orr is recovering from a long illness after a sudden collapse resulted in critical head injuries. He has been lucky to escape with his life — or, to put it another way, he should be dead. Eight months after the accident Orr drifts around Brooklyn on daily recuperative walks, a shadow of his former self: he is light-headed, detached from the clamour of city life. One morning he buys a blue notebook and starts writing again, curiously absorbed. And then, as if by magic, his life begins to unravel. Certainties become uncertain, trust becomes mistrust, an ordered life turns to disorder, to panic and finally to tragedy. But there are many more stories within this curious book.

17 January 2004

James Fleming

Can you forgive him?

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The story is a good one. Lady Anne was born in 1837 and died, in Egypt, in 1917. Her mother, Ada, who was connected with Babbage and his prototype computer, was Byron’s only legitimate child. Aged 32 and wealthy, Lady Anne was plucked off the shelf by the poet and philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. After miscarrying several times, in 1873 she gave birth to their only living child, Judith, later Lady Wentworth. The Blunts then set out on their Arabian adventures, she being the first European woman to cross the northern desert. They met real danger and hardship. Winstone is excellent on these journeys, which undoubtedly had a profound cultural influence on Lady Anne.

Lee Langley

Cola versus curry

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Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first volume of short stories. The Namesake is her first novel, graceful, funny and sad, its theme dislocation and the pain of building a new life in a different world. In building that new life, something must also be destroyed. After an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave Calcutta to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When, some years later, they take the family to India for a holiday, the couple sink happily into the old culture, but for their children, born in the US, America is home: they yearn for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza. Bengalis, the author tells us, are given two names: a pet name to be used by family and friends and a ‘proper’ name for outside use.