Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Method in his madness

The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers). He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated

Juliet Townsend

Fleeing fog and filth

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’. Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was

Oliver Marre

Love and vulgarity

When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. I thought of the decent doctor who marries a woman so beautiful and yet so unfaithful that it ruins his life; the two good-looking children who have eyes only for one another, until they discover that he is in fact the most beautiful man in the

Judith Flanders

Life beyond the canvas

Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Now she has once again turned her attention to the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite group, with a joint portrait of the four women who influenced Ford Madox Brown: his two wives, Elisabeth and Emma, and two women for whom he had spiritual affinities, and (probably platonic) romantic yearnings. Elisabeth was,

Rowena Macdonald

Shady characters

A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A Life

Andro Linklater

The greatest rogue in Europe

On 11 November 1743, the most sensational trial of the 18th century opened in the Four Courts in Dublin. The plaintiff, James Annesley, claimed that his uncle, Richard Annesley, the sixth earl of Anglesey, had robbed him of immense estates in England and Ireland worth £10,000 a year. The scale of the theft and the rank of the alleged thief would by themselves have made the case exceptional. According to Viscount Perceval who was present, it was ‘of greater importance than any tryall ever known in this or any other kingdom.’ But what really attracted attention was James Annesley’s allegation that in 1727, the year he became heir to the

Gilbert Adair

Cast a long shadow

Many years ago I invited a young student of mine to see Psycho, a film of which she had never heard, made by a director (Hitchcock) with whose name she was unfamiliar and shot in a format (black-and-white) whose apparent old-fashionedness so mystifed her she wondered aloud why no one thought to complain to the projectionist. Yet, shrieking on cue at all the spooky moments, she ultimately admitted to having been so bowled over by the film that she asked what other Hitchcocks she ought to see. I recommended North by Northwest — only subsequently to learn, to my stupefaction, that she had found it boring. Boring? The most euphoria-inducing

Aidan Hartley

Entrance exam

Before disembarking at Bulawayo airport I stuffed the book I was reading in the front-seat pocket. It was Peter Godwin’s fine When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I did not want to be carrying anything that might identify me as a subversive — or a foreign correspondent. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF goons threatened two-year jail sentences for Western journalists entering Zimbabwe illegally. Most hacks went in pretending to be ornithologists. My best friend Jonathan Clayton had arrived in Bulawayo with a set of golf clubs. He was rumbled, blindfolded and beaten. They threw him into a succession of overcrowded cells where, despite the chill nights, starving inmates stripped down to their underwear

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Newspapers, Mrs Rochester and a Presumption of Literacy

Sometimes, you know, stuff appears in the newspapers that offers just a smidgen of hope. Consider this tidbit from the Guardian’s account of the oh-so-entertaining revelations in Andrew Rawnsley’s new book. At the time of the botched 2006 attempt to topple Tony Blair: In the middle of the coup, the former welfare minister Frank Field went to No 10 to plead with Blair not to give way to Brown. “You can’t go yet. You can’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic,” he said. Rawnsley writes: “Blair roared with laughter.” The grounds for hope, you see, lie in the fact that the Guardian doesn’t feel it necessary to explain the

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Correction of the Day | 22 February 2010

From a New York Times post on David Remnick’s forthcoming Obama biography An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article. Actually, like many such books this, while likely to be rather good, will still be both a pumped and pimped out version of the original 12,000 word article.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Not ‘a boy-crazed trollop’

For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. Lives Like Loaded Guns — which combines biographical material, critical readings, and an assessment of the history of her reputation — tells a completely hair-raising story. The Dickinsons were one of the first families of respectable Amherst. Emily and her sister Lavinia — ‘Vinnie’ — lived in one house, Homestead, right next door to her brother Austin, the head of the family, and his wife Sue. Susan Dickinson was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, bosom friend to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

On our shoulders

Our politics is such a shallow game that any senior British politician who has read a book is apt to be considered cerebral, and if he has read two, feted as an original thinker. So I had never quite dispelled the suspicion that the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ might have been awarded to David Willetts for no better reason than that he knew his stuff, could talk like an academic, had a lively sense of the complexities of things, and sounded a little vague. I had wondered whether he might be one of those men to whom the learned footnote meant more than the useful conclusion. This book goes a long way

Judith Flanders

Riding for a fall

Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. The 1920s had seen a sharp recovery from

David Davis

The great bailout

Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. The story of his role as US Treasury Secretary throughout the great banking crash of 2008–9 gives an impression of people being swept along by a swirling chaos of unexpected events, often completely out of control. ‘This is the economic equivalent of war,’ Paulson said in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008, scrambling to find a resolution for AIG before the insurance behemoth brought down the entire economy. Warfare is

Malcolm Deas

The ghost of an egoist

Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history

Andrew Taylor

From gloom to dispair

In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted into the bestseller lists almost before we have had time to become aware of their existence. Others, like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason and Norway’s Karin Fossum, advance steadily but less dramatically in terms of sales and critical plaudits. And then there’s Henning Mankell, the Swedish commander-in-chief of the invading forces, who deserves a category to himself. He is a distinguished playwright, publisher and children’s author, who has a long and honourable record of supporting charitable causes, especially in Africa. But he

Andrew Taylor

I smell a rat

The Diary of Miss Idilia presents the reader with an unusual problem. The writing is entirely comprehensible, the tale it tells couldn’t be easier to follow. The tricky bit, though, comes with trying to work out what on earth the book is. In 1851, 17-year-old Idilia Dubb was on holiday in the Rhineland with her middle-class Edinburgh family when one morning she disappeared. A lengthy search found nothing, and her parents returned home. Then, in 1860, workmen restoring Lahneck castle outside Coblenz discovered her remains at the top of a seemingly inaccessible tower. Near the body was Idilia’s diary, which recorded in tones of increasing anguish how she’d climbed up

Saturday

Victoria Lane

An 80-year-old mystery

‘The older I get, the more inclined I am to say those three words: I don’t know,’ says Baroness Rendell of Babergh. She turns 80 this week, and seems milder in person than in her writing. In photographs, too, she looks a bit haughty and forbidding, with incredible Ming the Merciless eyebrows. But the door was opened by a smallish woman with a sandy helmet of hair, a quizzical expression and an illuminating smile that appears from nowhere and sends her features skywards. The mouth, the eyebrows, the hair — everything lifts, as though she has stuck her finger in a socket. She has written, she estimates, about 70 books:

Paul Johnson

A dangerous fellow

Do we need another huge life of Arthur Koestler? He wrote a great deal about himself, including three autobiographical works: Spanish Testament (1937), describing his experience as a death-row prisoner of General Franco, Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954). He also contributed to The God that Failed, the fascinating collection of testimonies by former Communists which Dick Crossman edited in 1949. He and his last wife wrote an unfinished joint memoir, published a year after their deaths as Stranger on the Square (1984). An ex-wife, Mamaine, contributed a volume, Living with Koestler (1985). Then a quarter-century after his death came a large-scale 640-page biography entitled Arthur

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Unhelpful issues

It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. The Other Family is about just that — a man who has, or had, two of them. We only meet Richie in death; at the start of the book Chrissie and their