Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Richard Davenporthines

‘Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff’, by Cathryn J. Prince – review

Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi leader in Switzerland, who was shot dead in his Davos apartment by a Croatian Jewish medical student in 1936. Hitler at the ensuing state funeral promised that Gustloff would remain ‘immortal’ under the Third Reich. But his name is now only remembered because it was bestowed on a ship which later sank with the highest loss of life in maritime history. The torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945 took an estimated 9,400 lives. This is double the number who perished with the Doña Paz in the Philippines in 1987, and far outstrips the 1,523 lost on Titanic in 1912. The Nazis

Clare Mulley

‘Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees’, by Edward Stourton – review

‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this same glorious setting. ‘There is no neat way of telling this piece of history’, Stourton concedes; ‘it is a jumble of individual lives’. Collectively these brief glimpses tell the story of the perilous passages over the mountains between France and Spain during the second world war. Stourton is on a mission to ‘unlock the secrets

Mark Fisher

‘A is a Critic: Writings from The Spectator’, by Andrew Lambirth – review

The following novel re-assessment is typical of Andrew Lambirth: Although Eileen Agar exhibited with Miro, Magritte and Ernst, she was never a ‘card-carrying surrealist’. The origins of her work were rooted in ‘the great English Romantic tradition’ — medieval illumination, William Blake, Edward Lear. Lambirth approaches painters and paintings not through the prism of current fashion but in the light of his extensive knowledge and through looking, intently and without prejudice. It is what makes his weekly judgments in The Spectator always refreshing and his writing unlike that of any other critic since David Sylvester. This collection of his interviews, exhibition reviews and ‘reflections’, taken from his Spectator pieces over

Wynn Wheldon

‘Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls’, by David Sedaris – review

David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh. Which is not to say that there isn’t at least a chuckle or two and usually a guffaw in each of the 26 pieces that comprise this book. While studying Life in the UK in order to apply for Indefinite Leave to stay here, Sedaris learns much that the rest of us do not know: ‘I

Peter J. Conradi

‘Imagined Greetings: Poetic Engagements with R.S. Thomas’, by David Lloyd – review

There is a much reproduced image of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas towards the end of his life. A gaunt and angular figure leans defiantly out over the half-gate of his cottage on the Llyn peninsula, wild of hair, curmudgeonly and altogether unwelcoming. The photograph, taken after Thomas’s retirement as vicar of the fishing village of Aberdaron and relocation to nearby Rhiw, reveals a man at war with the world — and with himself too. Tourists passing through the Welsh-speaking region who asked him for directions encountered the baffling response: ‘No English’. He would return indoors to relish the joke with his monoglot English wife Elsi. She shared his

Owen Bennett-Jones

‘Ask Forgiveness Not Permission’, by Howard Leedham – review

At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert assault on the port of Aqabar: ‘We are like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said.‘Now let’s find our Aqabar.’ You might think that the US military high command would have identified a target before deploying a military force to attack it. But in the aftermath of 9/11 the normal rules did not apply. In theory, Leedham’s

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air’, by Richard Holmes – review

‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ was the phrase blazoned on the side of the Royal Vauxhall, an 80-foot, red and white candy-striped coal gas balloon launched from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836 to fly overnight from London to the continent. The motto is from Ovid: ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’ It well captures the exuberantly adventurous temper of the early days of ballooning, that gorgeous dead-end in the history of human aviation. Richard Holmes himself caught the ballooning bug in a Norfolk fairground aged four, he tells us, when his RAF pilot uncle fastened a red party balloon to the top button of his aertex

Wednesday

Nigel Jones

Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker, and the Dreyfus Affair by J. Robert Maguire – review

The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker – the central figure of  J. Robert Maguire’s research for more than half a century – rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde’s many biographies. Yet, as Maguire conclusively demonstrates, he is no footnote. Blacker, a handsome man of Latin extraction, knew Wilde in the days of his London pomp, was a witness at the writer’s wedding to the long-suffering Constance Lloyd, and often saw his friend on a daily basis. Wilde’s own testimony after his fall is ample

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

The Gamal by Ciarán Collins – review

My editor told me to read this book and write this review. Six hundred words, he said. Just like the psychiatrist Dr. Quinn instructed Charlie, the protagonist of said book, to write one thousand words a day. Therapy apparently. The big reveal is exactly why Charlie needs therapy. The suspense is meant to keep you reading. Charlie is known locally in the village of Ballyronan, Cork where he lives as a ‘gamal’ (‘a bit of God help us’). In medical speak that’s ODD. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. In practical terms it means he can’t resist reminding us how little he wants to be writing what we’re reading and what a waste

Monday

Christopher Fletcher

The Secret Lives of Books – occasional tales from the Bodleian

Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the 1790s by an anonymous Botanist who roamed the south of England looking for specimens and noting them down with meticulous care in an exact italic. The volume, snapped up from the Norfolk dealer Sam Gedge, contains some 75 alphabetically arranged pages, each including the plant’s Linnaean name, English name, the place where it was found

Friday

David Blackburn

The power of Granta’s gift to British writers

Philip Hensher was one of Granta’s 20 under forty in 2003, so what does he make of the new list? Writing in this week’s Spectator, he says that there are a dozen competent to superb writers on the list but you can keep the rest. ‘When you look at the seven truly regrettable inclusions it is hard to know what the judges were thinking of.’ Philip’s view is that the list ‘seems to have sprung from a list-making corporate machine’ in favour of bland orthodoxy. Philip writes: ‘Previous British lists have had the genuine air of discovery, sometimes uncomfortably so, as the magazine had to feature writers with more comic

Peter Robins

A.D. Harvey in The Spectator – a little tribute to Eric Naiman’s ‘When Dickens met Dostoevsky’

Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already. At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian named A.D. Harvey, and a bewildering variety of other names from letters pages and scholarly journals – Stephanie Harvey, John Schellenberger, Trevor McGovern, Leo Bellingham – that may or may not belong to him. The piece raises all sorts of questions. If you work for a magazine, however, it raises one question with particular urgency:

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Life’s too short to read tedious books

‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’ I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who can’t have been much older than fifty. Those of you who feel inspired to do your own calculations might feel depressed by how few books you’ve got left, or overwhelmed by how many you’ve yet to read. At 29 years old, I’m not so far from the beginning of my reading life and it feels

Rupert Christiansen

Bookends: Byronic intensity

A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy —  ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it  — is as vividly evident as his relentless egocentricity and unctuous if irresistible charm. Topics range from Beethoven’s Seventh to West Side Story via Mahler and Glenn Gould, but although Cott poses deft and intelligent questions, little emerges in the way of sustained musical analysis or original insight, and Bernstein proves much more engaging and illuminating when he is

Victoria Glendinning

‘Trespassers: A Memoir’, by Julia O¹Faolain

In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter when they leave home. Julia O’Faolain certainly left home geographically. Over a long life she has lived in London, Dublin, Rome, Florence, Paris, Los Angeles, Portland, New York and Venice. Yet on the evidence of this succinct memoir, she remains the daughter. There is as much about her father in this book as there is

Geoffrey Owen

‘The Branded Gentry’, by Charles Vallance and David Hopper

We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has the same name as the person who owns and runs it? The answer is not obvious. Entrepreneurs often choose to use an invented brand name rather than their own. Branson Atlantic sounds less inviting than Virgin Atlantic, and Apple might not be the company that it is today if it had followed the example of

Philip Hensher

‘Best of Young British Novelists 4’, by John Freeman (ed)

The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were some novelists there that anyone could have spotted at the time, such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, but the judges also impressively noticed Kazuo Ishiguro after a single book and Rose Tremain long before she substantially justified it. Ten years later, the exercise was repeated, with another brilliant group including A.L.Kennedy, Louis

Juliet Townsend

‘The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling’, by Thomas Pinney (ed)

The last time I heard Kipling read aloud was last week at a Scout Gang Show. It was the grand finale. Centre stage on a dais stood a serving soldier and noble looking ancient veteran. On either side, a group of Scouts, an organisation dear to Kipling’s heart, stood with outflung arms indicating these heroes, while somebody read ‘If’. In the background one was vaguely aware of ‘Nimrod’ playing. All the clichés were there, yet it was strangely touching. One of Kipling’s gifts as a writer, both of prose and poetry, was his ability to connect with his audience, confirmed when, a few years ago, ‘If’ was voted the nation’s

Ian Thomson

‘The Making of a Minister’, by Roy Kerridge

Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general. The Making of a Minister, written (apparently) in the late 1960s, is a period piece, which alludes to ‘coloured men’ and unfolds round London’s Caribbean quarter — its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson reviews ‘C.S. Lewis: A Life’, by Alister McGrath

C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject. Lewis was an Ulsterman, and prone to the melancholy of his race, though without their bitter prejudices. The principal figures in his life were all unattractive. First was his father, whom Lewis disliked intensely and felt horrible guilt about his lack of love. Second was Mrs Moore, widow of