Sam Leith

Charles Greville? you may wonder. ‘Who he? — Ed.’ Ed, decently enough, supplies us with the answer. Greville was an idler, a gambler, a political spectator, a cold fish, and a toff’s toff: a political diarist with Alan Clark’s sharpness if not his ambition, who lived from 1794-1865, and wrote from 1814-1860. Greville had a ringside seat for the Reform Bill, a more than nodding acquaintance with Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Louis Napoleon, and all the English monarchs of his age. He barely noticed the Peterloo massacre, was anxious about Catholic emancipation and the French revolution, was able to see both sides of the slavery issue, and lost, without much apparent regret, a favourite nephew in the Crimean war.

‘Roy Hattersley,’ said Becky, tilting her head on one side to read the spine of the thick red book I had brought away with me to the house party. ‘The Edwardians. Are there four more depressing words in the language?’ Now, that’s not fair. He may be a bit of a windbag, but he’s our windbag, and he has obviously done a good deal of work on a book about a lively period in our history. His tour d’horizon of the Edwardian age takes in 360 degrees of horizon.

Two 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.

Visits from the Drowned Girl starts out with a gripping idea as old as crime fiction: the bystander. Benny Poteat climbs communications masts for a living. One day, from the top of such a mast out in the back- country, he looks down and sees a girl set up a video-camera on a tripod by the side of a river. The girl, as he watches, powerless to intervene, takes off all her clothes in front of the camera, walks unhesitatingly into the rushing floodwater, and dis- appears from sight. When Benny climbs down the mast and reaches the site of her suicide, he finds alongside her clothes a rucksack full of videotapes, and a business card. He knows he should call the police. But somehow he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the videos home and starts his own investigations.

‘They can’t like us a whole lot,’ was the report of one American soldier. ‘If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ That was Vietnam. Even the well-intentioned imperialist, as Niall Ferguson puts it, is ‘seldom loved’. Ferguson is both a lucid and prolific newspaper commentator and a historian whose book-length specialisms have been money, and empire. So he is well-positioned to consider the place of the United States in the world just now — a time when it seems to have more of both than most nations would decently know what to do with.

'Reviewers,' laments the Dr Cake of Andrew Motion's title, 'they are devils. Devils. I have seen good men, good authors, broken by their deprecations. The worst of it is their presumption in supposing that those they chastise do not know their own faults, and admonish themselves with a ferocity others can only imagine.' From a Laureate whose (admittedly rotten) recent poems have been kicked gleefully to death in the public prints, this has the ring of something profoundly felt. There's a later, rueful allusion to the superiority of the young Wordsworth over the old Wordsworth - 'the Laureate who now preaches at us'. There is another reason to be wary of approaching this novel as a reviewer: how to do so without giving away the central surprise in the plot?