Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Diana Hendry

The French connection

If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. What you’d expect, picking up Lisa Hilton’s The House with Blue Shutters and seeing, on the front, a nondescript young woman contemplating a blue-shuttered house, is romantic fiction. Historical, claims the blurb. Indeed there’s both romance and history here in a novel that moves between German-occupied France of 1939 and today’s France of second homes and holiday gites. But overall

Blair Worden

A place in the Pantheon?

Hugh Trevor-Roper might have been a great historian, taking his place in the Pantheon alongside the great historians of the past, from Xenophon to Macaulay. But the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject that he has made his own. By this exacting standard [Trevor-Roper] failed. Adam Sisman’s assessment, in his compelling new biography (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Weidenfeld, £25), though I dissent from it, is a measured one. It is balanced by recognition of the extent of Trevor-Roper’s achievements. Many of Sisman’s reviewers have been less measured. In the New Statesman, Anthony Howard, after pronouncing ‘the real failure’ of Trevor-Roper’s career to have lain

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Heffer’s Style Notes

This is good: the Daily Telegraph has published Simon Heffer’s back-catalogue of style notes in which, with exasperated patience, he points out the paper’s mistakes. Read too many of them and you might form the impression that the Telegraph no longer employs sub-editors. Nevertheless, Heffer’s advice is mostly good and, I’m pleased to see, the subject of a new book. I particularly enjoyed the note which began: There are many reasons to avoid using long sentences when writing. An obvious one is that the message is transmitted to the readers most easily when it is concise. Another is that an array of clauses can sometimes cause confusion. When we wrote

Saturday

Taki

Six of the best | 31 July 2010

On board s/y Bushido ‘Trimming the Jib’ is a short essay by Ernest Hemingway and it has to do with the sea. And love. And passion. He wrote it shortly before The Old Man and the Sea, which helped land him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here it is in its entirety: He ran aground on the same reef as before. Pablo was drunk and dreaming of Conchita. He was always dreaming of Conchita. When he wasn’t dreaming of her he would avoid the reef. But he was always dreaming. And drinking. The reef was hard, not made of mud or sand, but rock. Pablo was old, and his legs

Philip Hensher

A world in a handful of words

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories. Her field is awkwardness, social ‘leakage’, as sociologists say, and the often bad fit between acts and speech, language and meaning. There is a certain delectable inappropriateness in the fact that some readers (like me) will first have encountered her as one of the translators of Penguin’s 2002 Proust. She did an accurate job, but as a writer herself she could not be much further from that great but voluble and frequently casual writer (your punctuation, Marcel,

Chris Patten

L’homme qui dit non

The study of history is a subversive calling. All countries make up a story that suits their idea of themselves. Authoritarians stamp out independent historical scholarship; extreme nationalists simply vilify those who try to tell the tale of what really happened. Charles de Gaulle stands at the heart of what France likes to think about itself; Winston Churchill plays a similar role on this side of the Channel. Even a Francophile like me concedes that there is a deal more fiction about the French story than the British. The distinguished historian Robert Gildea has helped to tear the covers of what he has called the ‘redeeming, unifying heroic story’ of

Patrick Skene-Catling

Mud, blood and jungle rot

The Matterhorn, at 14,679 feet in the Alps, is said to be very difficult to climb. It is an apt military designation for a (fictional) jungle peak that United States Marines were ordered to assault, abandon and assault once more, against fierce opposition, to establish an artillery base near the North Vietnamese border during the Vietnam war. Matterhorn is also a suitable title for a formidable epic novel, which is arduous reading but well worth taking on, especially if there is any need for further testimony that war is a criminal waste of time, money and men. About 60,000 Americans died in Vietnam to prove the point. It is being

Anne Chisholm

No love lost | 31 July 2010

There is chick lit, or witless, ill-written, juvenile popular fiction, and then there is superior chick lit, which is smart and amusing and written for grown ups. Both these novels fall into the latter category, both are second books by well-regarded journalists and both are worth taking into the garden or on the plane this summer. Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times stays in the office, where her first hilarious satire of corporate life and the pompous executive male, Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry? was located. This time, her target is the tragi-comedy of the office affair, and revolves around the ill-judged but irresistible romantic adventures of two women,

Philip Ziegler

The invisible man

Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is a specimen of that now relatively rare but still far from endangered species, the ‘political’ biography. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is a specimen of that now relatively rare but still far from endangered species, the ‘political’ biography. It pays scant attention to anything except Attlee’s political career, and rigorously eschews any prying into whatever dark corners there may have been in his private life. Some may think that no politician’s career can fully be understood unless it is viewed in the context of what was going on in his domestic setting. Usually this is a point of view I would defend.

Benjamin Moorehead

Over and out?

Cricket writing, in the age of professionalism, affords less room to dreamy scribes. Fact and revelation are preferred to style and reflection. The roaming tour diary is rare, ghosted autobiographies rife. There are notable exceptions, of course, and we can happily toss Duncan Hamilton among them. Hamilton is on a roll. He has won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year twice, in 2007 and 2009, the latter for his biography of Harold Larwood, chief executioner — and victim — of the infamous Bodyline tactic used to nullify Don Bradman’s Australians in 1932-33. The Larwood book cracks along at a hurtling pace; A Last English Summer, set to the

Saturday

Margaret Macmillan

The threat of holy war

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story. He starts in the late 19th century

Peter Hoskin

Same old perversions

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’ So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious

Cressida Connolly

Mother issues

The Norwegian, Per Petterson, was not well known until his 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, became a surprise international bestseller. It deserved the many prizes it garnered: it is a wonderful book, unsettling and minutely observed. Readers may recall that the closing scene of that novel has the young narrator walking with his mother: ‘We went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple . . . it was like dancing.’ An earlier book, To Siberia, is an imagined account of Petterson’s mother’s young life as a girl in wartime, moving from Danish Jutland to Norway. By contrast, I Curse the River of Time is about the end

Ian Birrell

Caught in the crossfire

Maqbool Sheikh dreaded hearing a knock at the door of his home. For he was the most intimate witness to one of the world’s most enduring and forgotten conflicts, the struggle over Kashmir. As the only autopsy expert at the police hospital in Srinagar, it was his job to conduct post mortems on those shot, stabbed or blown to pieces — and the bodies arrived at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Each time, as he drove back to the mortuary, he wondered whether he would be confronted with the corpse of a child, a woman or another young man. The law required him to determine how each one

Marcus Berkmann

The perfect book

Like Nelson Eddy, Devon Malcolm and the composer Havergal Brian, the critic Greil Marcus has one of those names that is all the more memorable for being obviously the wrong way round. He is, of course, the doyen, high priest and panjandrum of American music writers, whose best-known book, Mystery Train (1975), dared to treat American rock with a seriousness and a dignity it had previously been denied. In the years since, Marcus has taught rock, and indeed roll, at several prestigious US universities, and settled into the role of revered cultural historian. Staring out of the flyleaf of this latest volume, he looks slightly concerned but distracted in a

Andro Linklater

Tried and tested

In June 1964, when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage against the apartheid government of South Africa, he was, as photographs reveal, a burly, blackhaired man, with a handsome, pugnacious grin. By the time he was released in 1990, his hair was grey and his features gaunt. But his first speech as a free man described the same ideal of a democratic, multiracial South Africa that he had presented in his final address before being sentenced — ‘an ideal I hope to live for, but if needs be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die’. That imprisonment should neither have broken nor embittered

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Crisp and brave

Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half. Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half. Ben’s language skills are precocious, but he is passing through a stage, as some infants do, of preferring to speak in the third rather than the first person. Thus ‘Ben wants an ice cream’; or ‘Ben was a bit disappointed’. Once, even, he declared: ‘Ben’s quite tired’ (thoughtful pause), ‘he said.’ If the unexamined life is indeed not worth living, this child has taken the lesson to heart. Peter Mandelson, who has called his

Gilbert Adair

No body in the library

The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus: The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus: September 25, 1919. John Lane was very pleased with himself as he leaned into the mirror over the sink in his bathroom and examined his beard. Using a small pair of manicure scissors, which he was barely able to handle with his too-chubby fingers, he snipped at a few stray hairs. And, four lines later in the same faux- finicky vein, the paragraph ends:

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The body in the snow

A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice. A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice. It shines out of his story of the murder of the 17-year-old Tibetan nun, Kelsang Namtso. It happened on 30 September 2006, at the base camp on Cho Oyu in Tibet, the sixth highest peak in the world. Forty teams of Westerners, who had paid up to $20,000 each for the trip, waited there for their turns to climb. To make the wait more comfortable, hundreds of yaks and porters had carried quantities of wine, sushi, TV films, pregnancy-testing kits, condoms and M&Ms to

Harriet Sergeant

Reverting to type

While I was living in Tokyo, a Japanese girl friend of mine fell in love with a British investment banker. After promising marriage, he abandoned her for an English wife from the counties. But my girl friend was no Madame Butterfly. She did not attempt suicide. She felt she had had a lucky escape. A visit to Wiltshire to meet his family had convinced her the English upper classes were mad. Emerging from her room on Sunday evening, she discovered her lover’s father polishing the family shoes. She rang me in shock. Did he suffer from some kind of foot fetish? she asked. I explained that men of that generation