Edmund Burke is one of the most difficult thinkers to write about. His philosophy defies easy summary. His career, while noble, was not glittering. Many details that he exhausted himself over — such as the impeachment of Warren Hastings — were arcana before he was dead. And hardest of all is that Burke’s prose style is among the best in the language.

Writing about Burke’s prose is like singing about Maria Callas’s voice. On each re-acquaintance with it you wonder why you don’t read Burke all the time. There was hardly a subject he tackled which he did not master, and not a register that he did not perfect. In A Letter to a Noble Lord he writes of one detractor:

The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he, he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray.

Shortly afterwards, in the same work, he refers to the recent death of his own son, Richard:

I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.

Hazlitt (himself no Burkean) wrote: ‘If there are greater prose-writers than Burke, they either lie out of my course of studyor are beyond my sphere of comprehension.’

Burke is even more tricky as a subject because the tradition he essentially founded is — and always has been — a neglected one. Perhaps that is why Jesse Norman has chosen to divide his book into two parts. The first is a fine and bracing account of his subject’s life; the second a consideration of Burke’s philosophy and the lessons which we might take from it today. So, part history, part Burkean manifesto.

This is less horrible than it might sound, although the book does have some small stylistic problems. Norman is undoubtedly a fluent and deep thinker, but he takes a little time to find his style. There is an early lapse into a sub-Churchillian tone (‘It is not given to us to predict the course of our own existence on earth’). However, this settles down, and his account of Burke’s life and career is as good as any of equal length on the subject.

The second section takes a stylistic leap into the register of the lecture hall (‘We shall see in the next chapter’, ‘To this we now turn’.) But this keeps the pace moving and makes for an interesting and enviably wide-ranging survey of what can be learned from Burke.

Norman has been the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010, and his book benefits from certain insights and sympathies gained in the Commons as well as those from the scholarship acquired during his spell in academia. Though the Labour benches have a fair few doctrinaire followers of various thinkers, the Conservative benches do not — which is a sign of the Burkean principle in itself. British conservatism has always been scared of ideas, which — despite some leftist taunting — is not so unwise. As Burke showed in his masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Conservatives ought to know not only how easily bad ideas can be picked up but where they irrevocably lead.

At the close of his book Norman lists six key lessons we might take from his hero: that extreme liberalism is in crisis; that Burkeanism could address that crisis; that Burke provided a model of political leadership; that excessive power and its abuse should be opposed wherever it comes from; that the best bulwark against such abuse is the rule of law and working representative government; and finally that Burke provides ‘a context within which to understand the loss and recovery of social value’.

Burke famously understood the social contract to be between the dead, the living and those yet to be born. Jesse Norman is not alone in his suspicion that at least two parties to this contract have been ignored of late. But he differs from some of his erstwhile colleagues in refusing to be downbeat about the possibilities for reasserting a Burkean proportion in things.

For Norman, as for Burke, the key is the rejection of the damage wrought by Rousseau. The ideas that ‘reason’ alone is enough, or that given enough freedom we will become good are fallacies, perhaps even more mainstream now than they were in Burke’s day. The appeal of the gospel of original non-sin is especially considerable. Its attractions — not least to the lazy — are obvious. It remains so much easier to talk of freedom than to talk of restraint, to write of liberty rather than of law and institutions. Yet without precisely those restraints, which Conservatives presently find it so hard to argue for, we will encounter exactly those excesses that Burke was pilloried for identifying but incomparably foresaw.

Norman is not only brave but right to argue that conservatism must not respond to these challenges by being opposed to ideas but rather by having the right ideas and ensuring they are founded in philosophy, precedent and principle. Today, as in Burke’s time, the people who do the necessary thinking and the necessary learning from that thinking are not always the people who rise to the top in politics. But perhaps, as some have predicted, Jesse Norman will. He certainly demonstrated an ability not just to think but act like his hero last year when he led a rebellion against Nick Clegg’s attempt to ‘reform’ the House of Lords in a way that would have made things even worse. As a result, this magazine named him ‘parliamentarian of the year’. The Prime Minister recently awarded him a ‘policy adviser’ role. Whether this is an opening or a gagging we must wait to see.

But after finishing Norman’s admirable book I felt heartened that we have such a member of the Commons with not only good ideas but the right hero. If I could add a seventh lesson to Norman’s list it would be one taken from Burke’s life and posthumous reputation: a reiteration to MPs to avoid the siren calls of their profession. For though Burke never gained the positions of state that his talents undoubtedly deserved, who now remembers or reveres — let alone would wish to write books about — many of those who did?

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Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which shares with the poet an aesthetic of the transfixed gaze, of remote history running under everything. Robert Liddell wrote a restrained, elegant life of the poet — oddly dismissed by this translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, as ‘workmanlike.’ More hauntingly, Liddell wrote a novel, not apparently known to Mendelsohn at all, in which Cavafy lives on into the second world war, developing a fixation for Canadian airmen. Unreal City is sceptical about Cavafy: it is the ironic English gaze directed towards a rapturous, unmoving, pretentious, lyric presence. Liddell clearly found his subject infuriating, but impossible to ignore.

I rather agree. Cavafy’s hieratic exclamations about the forgotten greatness of Greece, his cryptic little poems about obscure corners of Byzantine history, about kisses and gazes showered in the past upon lost and beautiful men — all this is potentially infuriating. Cavafy could never have written a novel. His sensibility depends on the thing rhapsodised over not moving. It is impossible to imagine any of those beautiful men getting up and saying anything in response. As soon as you think of a real person as the possessor of ‘the beauty of unusual allures/with those flawless lips of his that bring/pleasure to the body that it cherishes/with those flawless limbs of his, made for beds/called shameless by the commonplace morality’ (from one of the weaker poems), you have to admit that it would quickly exhaust the subject to be adored like this.

Cavafy, in my view, had a temperament not far from that of a rapist — he doesn’t seem to care much what his adored ones think of him, and it is beyond their capacity to surprise other than by getting themselves killed. At this distance, it hardly matters. Mendelsohn seems surprised that the details of Cavafy’s anonymous encounters have not emerged by now, as if there were anywhere for them to emerge from — ‘a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, inasmuch as there was content, remains largely unknown to us’. The quality of gazing, transfixed, is nicely and amusingly captured by Forster’s famous description of Cavafy as ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’. In one poem, one is tempted to think he is describing himself as an ‘ancient mirror’ in a hallway who once was thrilled to have a strikingly beautiful boy stand before him; the ‘ancient mirror now became elated,/inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself/perfect beauty, for a few minutes.’

The corpus of work is complex. There are those poems prepared for publication by Cavafy, which appeared in a collection of 1935. All of these have been translated into English surprisingly often. The interest and value of this latest edition, however, is the inclusion of a number of poems of more marginal status. These are labelled, first, as ‘repudiated poems’ — early, largely dispensable published poems, written under the influence of Wilde and the English aesthetes before 1898. There are also the ‘unpublished poems’, written before 1923 but left in a publishable state by Cavafy, which appeared — in Greek — in 1968.

Finally, for the first time in English, there is a group of major ‘unfinished poems’. Cavafy was an inveterate reviser, though not always an effectual one: the notes to this volume sometimes reveal an earlier draft that is clearly superior to the final version — as in ‘It must have been the spirits’. What is generally meant by ‘unfinished’ is ‘not approved for eventual publication’;  but these poems often have a polish and resonance that place them among the best.

Cavafy thought of himself as the last of the Greeks, and in an unbroken line from the ancients; he dwelt on the Byzantine succession as if on a chain of command. His presence in Alexandria was important: on the perimeter of the Greek world of his day, he also felt himself on the remotest outskirts of history. There is a fine and extraordinary poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, in which a beleaguered civilisation finds itself distraught at the loss of the barbarians outside the gates. The barbarians are what that civilisation has always defined itself by — ‘they were a solution of sorts’. What is civilisation without them? Has civilisation itself lapsed into barbarity? The solitary poet, working during the day at the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, writing scraps of perfect Greek verse on the back of cigarette packets, wonders much the same about himself.

It would have been easy for a nostalgist like Cavafy to write in the literary Greek taught in schools, and not in the demotic; his conscious play between the two — so Greek readers tell us — is at the heart of his fascination. It both preserves and moves boldly forward. ‘[Alexandria] speaks our language still/Throughout the Greek world it’s destined to fade away/but here it’s still holding up as best it can,’ says one of the unfinished poems.

It’s a beautiful body of work, given its generalisations and its single mood of rapt gazing. European literature of the period is full of interesting poets on homosexual themes: the German anarchist John Henry Mackay, Verlaine and Rimbaud, or the English poets A.E. Housman (repressed and noble) or E.E. Bradford (carefree and enjoyably tawdry). Cavafy was detached from his literature by time, geography and personal circumstances; that detachment persuaded him into a fascinating frankness of observation. If his poetry can, in the end, be boiled down to the observation on a blacksmith (from ‘Days of 1909, ’10 and ’11’) ‘I ask myself whether in antique times/glorious Alexandria possessed a youth more beauteous/ a lad more perfect than he…’, the lyric power of the vision remains undiminished. Here the ancient and Byzantine worlds wash up in a forgotten and provincial city, in tatters and unnoticed, except by the entranced and aristocratic eye of the isolated and lonely poet.

It is difficult for a non-Greek speaker to comment on the accuracy or sympathy of the translation. Cavafy’s poetry is always said to be extraordinarily elegant and refined, and this version has a present-day conversational manner. Mendelsohn, an American journalist, attempts various renderings of Cavafy’s technique, such as reflecting the change from demotic to classical Greek with changes from American to English spellings,. There are, too, various Housman-ish or archaic words and phrases to reflect particular original effects, such as ‘lad’, ‘goodly’ and ‘innermost depths’. But Cavafy is by far from being the first author to write better than his translator, and it is very good to have the powerful ‘unfinished poems’ in English at all.

Cavafy’s flat in Alexandria — famously ugly, filled with hideous enormous vases — is now a museum, and one of the most evocative of any writer’s place I know.

The post The last of the Greeks appeared first on The Spectator.

The politician in him can’t resist the opportunity to attack his former colleagues. He shoves the knife into David Laws for admiring George Osborne and for advocating ‘faster and deeper’ cuts to the deficit. When Laws wrote a book on the same subject, 22 Days in May, he suppressed the Lib Dems’ draft agreement with Labour. Adonis publishes it here purely to embarrass Clegg and co with the infamous clause 3.4, ‘a commitment not to raise the cap on tuition fees’.

Adonis also tries to stir it up between Clegg and Vince Cable by re-announcing their well-known dislike of each other. Cable was once a Labour councillor in Glasgow, while Clegg is represented as a natural Home Counties Tory who declined to join the Conservatives because his cosmopolitan background would have precluded him from securing a Conservative seat. Adonis genuinely believes that having a Spanish wife, a Russian grandmother and being fluent in several languages is enough to convince most Tory activists that you’re some kind of Communist double agent. This barmy verdict suggests that Adonis has a stupefyingly blinkered view of his political opponents.

The book catalogues every meeting between the Labour and Lib Dem negotiators during those frantic five days, but the cascade of details will seem irrelevant to anyone but the most obsessive political wonk. The book’s centre of gravity is not the telling of recent history but the management of the near future. In effect, it’s a primer for party leaders hoping to form a coalition after a future hung parliament. Adonis has three key rules.

1. Keep your troops disciplined.
2. Intervene early to shape public opinion and optimise your negotiating position.
3. Bid high when haggling for cabinet seats.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems ignored these strictures in 2010. Gordon Brown’s attempts to broker a deal were seriously undermined by two of Labour’s scaliest old dinosaurs, David Blunkett and John Reid, who attacked him for disregarding the verdict of the electorate and failing to withdraw from the field. Tory MPs, by contrast, observed a dignified silence which vastly strengthened Cameron’s hand. Adonis argues that Brown blundered by not offering to quit immediately. Had he resigned as Labour leader on Friday 7 May, and promised to leave No. 10 as soon as a new government was in place, a Lib-Lab coalition would have been possible.

Finally, he suggests that Clegg botched the horse-trading over cabinet positions. Clegg took charge of no ministry and instead accepted the swanky but vacuous title of deputy prime minister. And he declared himself the champion of constitutional reform and promised an upheaval as magnificent and far-reaching as that of 1832. And we all know how that turned out.

Adonis finishes by making a coded offer to the Lib Dems in 2015. He asks them to take either the Foreign Office or the Home Office and to choose three more departments from the following: Health, Education, Transport, Defence or Climate Change. This is a much juicier deal than the contract agreed between Cameron and Clegg.

The book closes with a chapter entitled ‘From Coalition to One Nation’ where Adonis repeatedly uses the label ‘One- Nation Labour’ as if it were the party’s new title. And his earnest plea for a Labour majority in 2015 includes this strange equivocation:

This makes it all the more important for Labour to seek to win the next election on its own, as a broad One Nation coalition.

It’s significant that his criticism of Clegg never reaches the point of outright condemnation. Clearly he sees him as a usefully indistinct figure who can successfully unite the right and left wings of his party. As Clegg reads this book — and much of it is addressed directly to him — he will rub his hands with a rising sense of hope and anticipation.

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It’s an intriguing set-up. There are some very ruthless people waiting for Bernie in Smolensk.The book has two particular strengths: Kerr’s detailed and nuanced portrait of Nazi Germany and his use of Bernie to provide a perspective on it. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is Bernie’s continuing survival. And Goebbels’s epigraph? ‘A nation without religion — that is like a man without breath.’

Imogen Robertson’s previous crime novels were set in the 18th century. The Paris Winter (Headline Review, £14.99) leaps forward to the Belle Epoque. Maud Heighton leaves her unhappy family in Darlington and comes to Paris to study art. Living on the edge of poverty, she is forced to take a job as a companion to Sylvie Morel, a young woman addicted to opium, who lives in an opulent apartment with her suspiciously obliging brother. As winter tightens its grip on the glittering city, Maud is drawn into a conspiracy involving deception, robbery and murder. Despite her vulnerability, however, she has more than her fair share of Yorkshire grit and some very good friends. The narrative builds to a climax during the Paris floods of 1910.

All the while, Maud continues to paint, and her work runs through the core of this unfailingly interesting crime novel. One of its strongest features is its solidly realised historical context. Perhaps the real story here is that of women struggling to establish careers as artists in Paris 100 years ago. The book is none the worse for that.

Lindsey Davis has now written 20 novels about Falco, a wisecracking private eye in first-century Rome, so it’s understandable that she, if not her readers, would like a change. The Ides of April (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) is the first in a projected series about Flavia Albia, Falco’s adopted daughter.

Albia has already had a varied life: she was abandoned as a baby in the ruins of Londinium, abused as a child, adopted by Falco and his wife Helena, married, widowed and is now practising as a private investigator in her own right. The sprawling metropolis of Rome is a character in its own right. Vespasian, Falco’s patron, is now dead, and the empire is ruled by Domitian, a paranoid despot whose death squads terrorise the city. But the administration of law and order must continue. A mass murderer is preying apparently at random on victims who seem unaware they have been attacked. Hired by a dead client’s heir to find the murderer, Albia plunges into a dangerous world where powerful officials and corrupt police officers take a rather different view of the case.

An appealing blend of toughness and vulnerability, Albia is sufficiently different from her father to make this format work as an independent series. As a bonus to Falco fans, the setting remains familiar, and so does the combination of wry humour and the sort of history that few of us were lucky enough to learn at school.

Sophie Hannah’s The Carrier (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), unpicks the tangled relationships of a group of people. One of them, stroke-victim Francine, has been murdered just before the start of the narrative. Another, Gaby, encounters Lauren, a hysterical young woman, at Dusseldorf airport. It’s then that she learns of Francine’s death. Tim, Francine’s husband, has confessed to the crime. But Lauren says Tim is innocent.

Lauren’s presence in Gaby’s life is no accident. The narrative cuts between the investigating police detectives (Hannah’s usual team of officers feature here), Gaby’s attempts to help Tim (her one and only love) and various flashbacks (often in the form of documents that have now become police exhibits) to past events. Poems play a significant part, too.

Hannah has established herself as a leading writer of psychological suspense, though in some ways her books are so distinctive that they deserve to be placed in a separate sub-genre of their own. This novel is never less than readable, though its impact suffers from a rather fragmented and contrived narrative. Still, as ever Hannah excels at sharp, almost Pinteresque dialogue — mannered, perhaps, but always a pleasure.

The post Recent crime fiction appeared first on The Spectator.

I started the book thinking that courage is the ability to do something you think is right, even when you’re scared. It means not wavering from your core beliefs, or feelings, when things get difficult or dangerous. Think of the word core. Think of the French word coeur. It’s all about heart, about solidity, about being firm and steadfast. When you think about it like this, it seems to be a rather conservative thing; it even has something in common with being stubborn. Of course, being stubborn is a good thing, if you’re right.

Morland interviews Colonel Tim Collins, famous for the eve-of-battle speech he gave British troops in Iraq in 2003. He says that, before you go into battle, you close certain doors in your mind. Then, when you come back, it’s not easy to open them again. Which suggests that, in one sense, you can learn how to be brave — you can, as it were, pre-set your controls. So when the crucial moment arrives, when you need courage, it’s already there; it’s not a matter of girding your loins against novel terror, but more like following a programme. Perhaps the moment of courage happens while you are pre-setting your controls; this is where the real sacrifice occurs.

Strong hearts, girded loins — it’s hard to separate the idea of courage from the idea of the body and its vulnerability. And wounds loom large in this book. In one of the best sequences, Morland tells the story of a group of British soldiers in Afghanistan. One is blown up in a minefield and loses his legs. The next day, others must retrieve his mine-detecting equipment, to keep it out of enemy hands. Three soldiers move slowly into the minefield. They have one mine-detector between them. One guy finds a severed leg. ‘He wrapped it in plastic and put it in his rucksack.’ Then another mine goes off; the man with the mine-detector loses his legs.

Three men in a minefield. One: legless, and ‘bleeding out’. The other two: rooted to the spot. The senior man tells the junior man to stay still while he creeps back out of the minefield and returns with more equipment. But the other guy, Private Martin Bell, can’t bear to do this. He disobeys the order. He walks across the minefield. He applies tourniquets to the wounded man’s legs. He saves his life. Having done this, he steps on a mine. And is killed.

Martin Bell’s act was against orders. He gambled. He lost the gamble. But he saved his friend’s life. This, surely, is the most courageous act in the book, I thought. Bell had time to think, and took a risk. But what he did was not conservative — it was, in most ways, the opposite of conservative. It was, as Morland points out, doing the wrong thing, in order to save a life. Bell won the George Medal, posthumously.

Now I’m confused. Courage is sticking to your guns. But it’s also taking a calculated risk on the spur of the moment.

Certainly, it’s the ability to wrestle with fear, and win. Morland introduces us to people who are terminally ill, and getting on with life as best they can. That’s courage. But then she also introduces us to people who don’t just face down fear, but who live for it. What about those surfers who yearn to ride monster waves, relishing the danger? What about Alain Robert, the French guy who climbs to the top of skyscrapers without any ropes? Or the famous daredevil Dean Potter, who appears to need fear in order to feel alive?

Well, these people might not be displaying courage, but a related quality we call bravado. And some might be addicted to danger in the way other people are addicted to drugs. Fear makes you focus. When you focus, you block out your demons. When you face fear and win, you feel high. You can see why some people love fear. And why the concept of courage is so confusing.

Morland is clear about one thing. Of all the virtues, courage is, culturally speaking, the most resilient. We all love courage, and hate the lack of it. After all, when people do evil things, we have no hesitation in calling them cowards.   

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Considering a joint project, I asked him over lunch to tell me all the amazing people he had met. He demurred, but later that afternoon I got a 20-page handwritten document and on page one the names included John Kennedy, Svetlana Stalin, Picasso and Elvis.

But Nicky is perhaps better known to Spectator readers as a contributor of meticulous, gossipy, beautifully crafted, super-well-informed and often rather saucy accounts of what used to be called high society. But how to describe the man to a reader who has not met him? He is elegant, witty, exquisitely mannered, enjoys a party and is generous as a host.

Naturally, he has a good eye, whose vision he applies to himself. The Nicky of the Eighties was a sleekly silver-haired Pimlico decorator-type in a proper suit and statement tie. The Nicky of today, shown as a sort of frontispiece to his delightful new book, has become a high-concept gardener.

In between, there have been other episodes in personal style. I once asked where he got his jacket, a curiosity in metallic turquoise plastic, or some such aesthetic atrocity. ‘Zara, darling. Twelve quid’ he twinkled back at me. He delights in chance finds and has a genius for assembly. In his punk phase, which he entered as a man of mature years, he confided to my wife that he had dyed his pubic hair purple. At the time, he also had a purple car. With this interior designer, the urge to style is total. Recently, he has expanded his repertoire to include crooning jazz standards, many by his old chum Cole Porter.

Folly de Grandeur is a book about Nicky’s own country house, a heartbreakingly beautiful 1740s hunting lodge on the Dogmersfield Park Estate near Odiham in Hampshire. In fact, a fussy small cottage disguised by Jacobean gables in prettily faded red-brick, in 40 years of ownership it has been fettled and expanded, furnished and, generally, advanced to publishable gorgeousness. Interior designers often make books about their homes, not least because it makes soft-furnishings tax-deductible, but, Nicky Haslam being Nicky Haslam, there is rather more going on here.

In an early conversation I discovered a shared passion for Mario Praz’s The House of Life (1958 in Italian, Englished six years later), an account of decorating an apartment in Rome, but in fact about a great deal more. Praz was a Haslamesque exotic, a linguist and cultural historian, author also of The Romantic Agony, who, bizarrely, found himself in the chair of Italian at Liverpool University in the Thirties. I see Folly de Grandeur in this genre of house decoration as intellectual autobiography (with knobs on).

The Hunting Lodge was given to the National Trust in the Seventies by John Fowler, whose social promotion from the furniture floor of Peter Jones led to the creation of Colefax & Fowler, the pioneer firm of interior designers which represents the gold (or perhaps more appropriately ‘gilt’) standard of the business. Since Nicky acquired the lease from the Trust, his 40-year adventure has represented a continuation of a tradition.

Often I wonder what exactly interior design is. A profession, agency, art, craft or trade? Maybe it is a therapy or a psychosis. Clearly, considerable ego and confidence are involved. It is not just nature that abhors vacuums; interior designers abhor them too, rushing to fill emptiness with meaningful things. In this way, the Hunting Lodge’s rambling and expanding room-plan and gardens are chapters in which Nicky talks us through, if not the meaning of life itself, then the meaning of the author’s own version of existence. And very beguiling it is too.

The Hunting Lodge speaks in words and pictures. And in Folly de Grandeur the reader learns about artifice and facsimile. You have the coup d’oeil created by unexpected changes of scale. We learn how to marble-ise with a felt tip pen and why a fake door is just the thing. Who would have thought MDF panels attached to the walls and finished with scumbled paint could be so attractive? Certainly, if there are any modernist purists left, they will be outraged by being instructed to paint little blue circles on tripod tables to make them jolly. And one day, as a test, I will ask Terence Conran what he thinks about the ‘spiky dahlia lamp base’ that Nicky so cheerfully recommends.

This is a pleasurable book about pleasure. If it has a fault, I felt a slight want of the mischievous guidance that Nicky customarily distributes to his friends: ‘Coloured fireworks are common’ is, for example, a favourite of mine. And while the literary style is mellifluous and intelligent, the notion that visual motifs should ‘echo’ each other grates because ‘reflect’ is the correct term. And I suppose jealous or insecure readers should be warned to expect frequent phrases such as ‘in the 1960s, at my Arizona ranch….’

But that’s Nicky for you. For those not lucky enough to know this wonderfully engaging man, this book about his equally engaging house is the next best thing.

The post Small is heartbreakingly beautiful appeared first on The Spectator.

There’s been a little spate of these lately, the most interesting and unbalanced having been Public Enemies, in which Michel Houellebecq brilliantly began the exchange by telling Bernard Henri-Levy that what they had in common was that they were both a bit contemptible, a bond from which BHL tried unsuccessfully to extract himself for the rest of their collaboration.

Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had read each other’s work for years but only met for the first time in February 2008, when they were both in their sixties. It seems it was the senior writer Coetzee who proposed this correspondence to Auster in a letter not included in the book, which begins instead with a formal discussion of the nature of friendship and its representation in literature by Coetzee, to which Auster responds much more loosely, talking eagerly about his own work and his own life in a way that Coetzee never does.

Coetzee has long been a superbly unforthcoming interviewee, often courteously refusing to accept the terms of a question when he does submit to the process. He doesn’t explain himself or his novels much outside his novels. That makes the fact that he does discuss subjects quite close to his work here extremely interesting; and we can be grateful to Auster for having played the part of correspondent well enough to have permitted this exchange at all, even though it doesn’t flow, and consists mainly of Coetzee announcing what he has on his mind and Auster attempting to respond satisfactorily, while intruding his own books and experiences into the discussion wherever possible.

After one such letter, Auster even says: ‘I realise that I often respond to your remarks with stories about myself. Understand: I am not interested in myself. I am giving you case studies, stories about anyone.’ We may not be convinced but we can sympathise. Becoming Coetzee’s chosen interlocutor was always going to be, to say the least, a ticklish assignment.

They are so plainly not equals.  Although both writers owe their very being to Beckett, it is Coetzee who is more than just Beckettian. During the course of these letters, James Wood’s highly damaging essay ‘Paul Auster’s Shallowness’ appeared, which Auster attempts to laugh off as coming from ‘a man whose name suggests that one day he will be eaten by termites’.

But he endeavours to return the ball. After their initial discussion of friendship, Coetzee sends Auster a letter about the credit crunch, arguing that the huge numbers involved are mere signs and could be discarded:

Why not, I ask, simply throw away this particular set of numbers, numbers that make us unhappy and don’t reflect a reality anyway, and make up new numbers for ourselves, perhaps numbers that show us to be richer than we used to be, though it might be better to make up numbers that show us exactly as we are, with our well-stocked larders and our tight roofs and our hinterland full of productive factories and farms?

The idea is at once visionary and completely crackers. Auster bravely replies:

I agree with you that the crisis seems unreal, unmoored to any concrete facts… Your idea of making up a new set of numbers might be a beginning.

They discuss their mutual love of watching sport more evenly, although even here it is Coetzee who makes the unexpected and original remarks. He reprimands himself for wasting time watching cricket on TV: ‘Is sport simply like sin: one disapproves of it but one yields because the flesh is weak?’ He celebrates a Federer cross-court backhand volley:

One starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends up neither envying nor admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a human being — a being like oneself — can do.

And he observes: ‘Sport teaches us more about losing than about winning, simply because so many of us don’t win.’

He has an incisive paragraph in the same vein about Israel and Palestine, a paragraph that only he could have written.

There is such a thing as defeat, and the Palestinians have been defeated. Bitter though such a fate may be, they must taste it, call it by its true name, swallow it. They must accept defeat, and accept it constructively. The alternative, unconstructive way is to go on nourishing revanchist dreams of a tomorrow when all wrongs, by some miracle, will be righted. For a constructive way of accepting defeat they might look to Germany post-1945.

Coetzee says that ‘wandering into language is always a trespass’, that he doesn’t have much faith that his work will endure, and that he gets little pleasure from novels. ‘Faced with a choice between reading a run-of-the-mill novel and raking leaves in the garden, I think I would go for raking leaves.’

But he shows a flash of pride when he admits that he spends hours polishing pieces of prose, though ‘few readers are going to appreciate what goes into getting a paragraph exactly right’.

He says his excuse would be that, just as he is not the kind of person who gets off his bicycle and walks up a hill, even when no one is looking, so he is ‘not the kind of person who puts defective prose out into the world’. It makes everything Coetzee writes valuable, even this odd little book — which Paul Auster can congratulate himself on for having assisted.

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The siblings grew up in LA, their dysfunctional family life paralleled, almost parodied, in Joint Custody, a prime-time television drama scripted by Travis Appaloosa, their smarmy, self-aggrandising father. This prolonged and subtle betrayal drives Pandora to seek anonymity in quiet Iowa, while Edison, in bohemian New York, craves public attention, and trades on his father’s fame to attain it. Edison uses the stagey ‘Appaloosa’ as his surname, while Pandora sticks with the cumbersome but authentic ‘Halfdanarson’.

But the roles find a way of reversing themselves. Pandora, as an only half-affectionate joke against her control-freak husband Fletcher, invents a ring-pull doll, a mini-me tailored to mimic the verbal tics and catch-phrases of the recipient. She seems unaware that her dolls potentially undermine the morale of the people they satirise, just as her father’s scripts undermined her own sense of self.

But the gimmick catches on, and Pandora finds herself rich and feted, in awkward contrast to Fletcher, who toils in the basement making exquisite pieces of furniture which no one in Iowa wants to buy. As Pandora’s success grows, her husband literally dwindles; he becomes a ‘nutritional Nazi’, inflicting his broccoli-and-brown-rice regime on his resentful teenage children and cycling obsessively to shed every microbe of body fat; ‘simply being in his physical presence made me feel chided’.

Thus the balance of power in the household is already wobbling when Edison, who has run out of luck and into debt, arrives for a long stay.

Pandora hasn’t seen her brother for four years.Collecting him from the airport, she finds Edison ‘or the creature that had swallowed Edison’ rolling towards her in an extra-wide wheelchair. ‘It was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry.’ Edison has put on 200 pounds. Pandora has always looked up to him, figuratively and physically, but obesity has compressed his spine by three inches, and now they are on a level. Edison has become an embodiment of the sickness of American society.

Towards the end, a strange thing happens, or doesn’t happen, forcing the reader to reassess all that has gone before; I can’t tell any more of the story without giving this away. But I can tell you what interests Shriver. This bold, brave book is about the emptiness that is both caused and masked by affluence. It’s about the erosion of personality that occurs in an age of geographical and moral rootlessness; it’s about hiding, and storytelling, and the danger of self-invention. It’s about the way people use food — preparing it, eating it, clearing up after it — as displacement activity; as Pandora says: ‘I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.’

Shriver, whose own brother died of obesity-related illness, has a thesis, which she puts into Pandora’s mouth: ‘The very failure of food to reward is what drives us to eat more of it.’ She attacks ‘the baffling lassitude of affluence’, and concludes: ‘We are meant to be hungry.’

But Big Brother is neither preachy nor judgemental. It is uncomfortable to read — sometimes because it’s physically revolting, more often because our capacity for tolerance, for, as it were, loving our neighbour, is constantly tested. Edison is a repulsive character. He is as self-centred as a baby without any of a baby’s charms. His slang (‘hip’, ‘cat’, ‘dig’ etc) grates and his boastful monologues are exhausting. What is to be done with such a burden? That’s a question to which neither Pandora nor the reader can find a satisfactory answer.

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The story begins with the election of 1830, which was called because of the accession of King William IV. The Tories, who had been in power for virtually 60 years, scraped in with a flaky majority. The Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, declared in the House of Lords that he was utterly opposed to any reform of parliament.

Wellington, as Fraser writes, suffered from ‘the isolation which haunts the very grand’. He was a poor speaker, and he badly misjudged the public mood, which strongly supported reform. His government fell. The mob took to the streets, and Wellington ordered armed men to defend the windows of Apsley House. The Whigs, who had been out of power for so long that they seemed condemned to permanent opposition, took office. Lord Grey formed a minority government, pledged to the reform of parliament.

Academic historians have analysed the complexities of the unreformed voting system, with its rotten boroughs and medieval franchises. Fraser wastes no time going down rotten burrows (as 1066 and All That described them), but cuts straight to the chase of the parliamentary drama. And what a drama it was.

The hero of this book is the Whig Prime Minister Lord Grey — who is usually portrayed (at least in middle age, after his scandalous affair with Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire) as rather an old stick. Fraser brings him to life as no one has done before. A lifelong advocate of the reform of parliament, Grey was a tall, elegant 66-year-old with a splendidly domed bald forehead. He groaned when he was forced to uproot himself from his beloved Howick in Northumberland and trundle down to London by coach. But this was a pretence; he knew that Wellington’s fall gave him the chance he was waiting for. Like an old war horse scenting battle, he was energised by the crisis.

His government was one of the most aristocratic and nepotistic ever formed. Grey gave office to one son, three sons-in-law and two brothers-in-law, not to mention numerous cousins. But these Whig toffs proved to be unexpectedly effective reformers.

One son-in-law, ‘Radical Jack’ Lambton, Earl of Durham, was put in charge of the committee of four which drafted the Reform Bill. Spectacularly handsome but emotionally volatile, Durham was a spoilt, coal-rich posh boy. During the crisis his beautiful 13-year-old son — immortalised by Sir Thomas Lawrence in the painting of ‘The Red Boy’ — was slowly dying from consumption, and this made Durham mad with grief, and even more foul-tempered than usual. But, as Fraser says, his title ‘Radical Jack’ was well-earned, as it was his sulking and goading in Cabinet which kept Grey on course for reform.

In the Commons, the bill was introduced by Lord John Russell, a tiny man with a huge head: he spoke in a high-pitched voice with a stammer and an old-fashioned Whig accent. The Leader of the House, ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp, heir to Lord Spencer, another member of the Whig cousinhood, seemed a bovine character; addicted to bull-breeding, he was always threatening to quit politics for the country. But, as Fraser shows, he was (like many Spencers) cleverer than he seemed. He had a first-class degree in maths, and his role in pushing the bill through the Commons was crucial.

The bill passed the Commons by a majority of one vote in March 1831, but the government was defeated shortly afterwards. The King agreed to dissolve parliament, and the election returned a House of Commons which was overwhelmingly in favour of reform, but the House of Lords was recalcitrant. In spite of a brilliant three-hour speech by the bottle-nosed Lord Chancellor Brougham, heavily fortified by alcohol (‘perhaps the allusion to a bottle was justified’), the peers threw out the bill. The mob exploded into violence, and in the Bristol riots as many as 400 were killed.

To get the bill through the House of Lords, Grey needed to persuade the King to create peers. William IV features as a shadowy figure in most accounts of the crisis, but Fraser characterises him vividly, and she is right to do so, as the role of the monarch has been underestimated. Aged 66, William was anxious to do the right thing, apt to fall asleep after dinner and, being an uxorious character, inclined to listen too much to his younger wife, the 38-year-old Queen Adelaide.

The latter presided over a dull, puritanical court — ladies who wore décolletage were ‘told sharply to cover up’ — and she had strong political views. Reared in the tiny German principality of Meiningen in the shadow of the French Revolution, she was a German princess with a horror of reform and little grasp of English politics. Vilified for her Tory sympathies and German accent, Queen ‘Addle-head’ did indeed attempt to hatch secret plots with the Tories.

The final chapters of the book read like a thriller. The crisis came in early May 1832. Again, the House of Lords threw out the bill. But still the King refused to create peers. Would there be revolution? The demonstrations and uproar, orchestrated brilliantly by the radical tailor Francis Place, frightened the middle classes. The Duke of Wellington attempted and failed to form a government. Eventually the King gave way. Grey resumed office,William agreed to create peers, and the Lords passed the Bill.

Fraser gives credit for this firmly to Grey, whose strategy paid off. But this is not old-style, judgemental Whig history. On the contrary, it is a superb account of the human, as well as the political, drama. That a privileged elite could put its own house in order so effectively — cutting against its class interest — is a striking achievement by any standards.

The book should be required reading for today’s millionaire ministers who seem sadly lily-livered by contrast with Grey and his Whigs. This is history as it should be written: lively, witty and, above all, a cracking good read. I found it almost impossible to put down.

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