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Books of the Year

Spectator reviewers

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

A further selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors

To be fair to Etti, she does have a few amusing anecdotes and some juicy morsels of gossip, among them Louise de Vilmorin’s boast about the Duff Coopers — ‘I had Duff, I had Diana, but never together’ — but there are so many unconsciously priceless fragments, way beyond parody. Page 71: ‘Pali [Count Pali Palffy, her second husband] was kind and easy to get along with.’ Page 72: ‘One night ... Pali got so annoyed that he picked up one of the musicians and threw him out of the window.’ ‘I thought [Hermann] Göring was charming if fat, while Goebbels I must say, was likeable and intelligent.’ ‘It is only about 10 years ago that I realised that servants had days off.’ ‘I have always advised girls that if they want to marry a rich man they must go to the best hotel in the city.’ ‘[Rosemarie Kanzler] and I came from very different backgrounds, which is to say that Rosemarie had no background at all.’ And:

Enid, Lady Kenmare was a great friend with an intriguing past. Willie Maugham nicknamed her ‘Lady Killmore’ as she was rumoured to have murdered as many as three former husbands.

I think Countess Etti should have written a book called Etti-quette.

Andrew Taylor

On one level, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) by David Peace is a murder mystery; on another it is a grimly effective exploration of Tokyo a year after the end of the second world war. Peace creates — or recreates? — a nightmarish vision of a society in disintegration, both physically and morally. Not for the squeamish, but this is a book that travels deep into its very own heart of darkness.

A different sort of darkness is investigated in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter in the Dark (Orion, £9.99), whose central character is a Miami crime scene investigator and part-time psychopathic killer. With ingredients like that, the novel should be both nauseating and derivative, but it’s neither. It is dark, original, and often very funny — like the Dexter

series as a whole.

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