I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not a professional writer, or because all his royalties will go to charity. Perhaps Courage was a dramatically better book. Wartime Courage, though, is lame.
And I’m not just saying that because Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has caused me such misery. Nor just because as a starving author (late of his publisher, Bloomsbury) I deeply resent the allocation by the publishing industry of time, money, space and attention to people who can barely write and anyway have well remunerated day-jobs. I say it mainly because I’m at least as interested as Brown is in the wartime heroes and heroines whose exploits he describes here, and they deserve much better than this leaden, clunken-fisted cuttings job.
He has chosen his subjects well, I’ll give him that. They include Uncle Bill Slim, our greatest second world war general, the athlete, Eric Liddell, who did much to make life bearable in a vile Japanese internment camp (and was portrayed in the film, Chariots of Fire), Stanley Hollis, the only D-Day VC, the SOE agent, Violette Szabo, and the railwaymen who in 1944 saved Soham in Cambridgeshire from a burning wagon-load of 400 tons of high explosive.
But the fact that these stories are intrinsically so thrilling makes it all the less excusable that Brown has made them seem so dull. After reading his account of what Lt Richard Stannard RNR got up to on his converted steam trawler during the evacuation of Namsos in Norway in 1940, I remained at a loss to understand quite which extraordinary feat won the man his VC. That is not poor Lt Stannard’s fault, I’m sure, but that of his potted-biographer to grasp what makes a good story. Much of the book reads like a barely fleshed-out version of one of those restrained and arid medal citations from the London Gazette.
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marion hebblethwaite
December 8th, 2008 4:22pmYou may like to know that at least two researchers who told me they were working "on the book Gordon Brown is writing" did most of the research for this book. As the author of a series on the George Cross they asked me for "everything I had on the lives of ..." I naturally declined and suggested they buy my books. But how Gordon would have had the time to write them anyway beats me. He has just regurgitated previously published material on people who have already had much written about them. He should have chosen some unknown heroes instead and written it himself.
Unimpressed and certainly will not buy the book.
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Ted Tedford
November 20th, 2008 10:18amI doubt Mr Brown wrote any of this other than the opening and concluding essays. After all, *Courage* was researched and written in large part by others.
Churning out these books look like a waste of public money, as well as of trees, in yet another totalitarian vanity project for our narcissistic Dear Leader.
Like the servicemen he eulogises, the Prime Minister is in theory never off-duty, so this book - at least the portion for which he was responsible - was written on the taxpayers' time. His salary is paid - from our pockets - so he can try to sort out the mess he's made of the country, not so he can satisfy his fragile ego by moonlighting as an author, whether the profits go to charity or not.
And, if he's got time to write a book, he's got time to attend the House and actually answer questions on his catastrophic spell of economic mismanagement for more than 30 minutes each week.
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