Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Robert Salisbury

Survival of the fittest

When I was at Eton, many years before David Cameron, much of the school was run by a self-elected society known as ‘Pop’. When I was at Eton, many years before David Cameron, much of the school was run by a self-elected society known as ‘Pop’. Some members were elected ex officio; but the majority belonged because they stood well with the Society’s membership. Most members of ‘Pop’ in my day put me in mind of David Cameron now. The principal difference is that he is by a distance cleverer than they were. However, the apparent social self- confidence and the toughness of mind and of spirit seem very familiar.

Alan Judd

Serving God and Mammon

People have written books about America long before the United States declared itself, and we may be forgiven for asking if we really need another. Doesn’t America already loom large enough in our world; hasn’t it all been said before? Well, yes and no. There’s a sense in which we’re all Americans now because that country is ourselves writ large or — as America might see it — set free. And although much of what is said here may have been said before, it’s rarely been said as concisely and well. Nor have the paradoxes that divide, and unite, that great country been so carefully and sympathetically delineated. Tristram Riley-Smith

David Willetts

The role of the state

Tony Judt is a vivacious and controversial historian. He is Jewish but has turned against Israel. He is a thinker of the Left who has ended up in the USA. And now he has been struck down with a grievous illness, a virulent form of motor neurone disease which has left him paralysed from the neck down. As a result he has composed his latest book in his head and then dictated it to an aide, using the classic memory device of setting the text in different rooms of an elaborate building. This elegant essay is the result. Judt’s illness has left him determined to restate his belief in what

Andro Linklater

Triumph of the will

Alistair Urquhart describes himself as ‘a lucky man as well as an angry man’. Alistair Urquhart describes himself as ‘a lucky man as well as an angry man’. No one who reads his remarkable autobiography will doubt either the phenomenal extent of his good fortune or the extraordinary justification for his anger. Yet his story will be remembered for qualities that are universal rather than personal. At the age of 20, with a job as a warehouseman in Aberdeen, he was called up in 1939 for service in the Gordon Highlanders, and sent to Singapore. When the city suddenly and shockingly fell to the Japanese in December 1941, he was

Leanda De-Lisle

Progress at a price

I was sitting recently with a former US marine by one of the huge open windows on the top floor of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Our drinks were being served on shiny black tables, and at the bar was a group of rather podgy prostitutes. There is something seedy but fun about the hotel, which reeks of new money: not unlike Saigon — as its inhabitants persist in calling Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon, and indeed Vietnam, has been transformed since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union unravelled and the Hanoi politburo was forced to water down its rigid Marxism. The cycle rickshaws, peddled by thin men who

Saturday

Philip Hensher

For all time

To review some new books about Shakespeare is not to note a revival of interest, but simply to let down a bucket into an undammed river. No one really knows the scale of the secondary bibliography. Published sources on any given topic in Shakespeare studies are innumerable and, as James Shapiro reminds us, so are books devoted to the idea that the works were written by someone else. There are two theories to account for why Shakespeare is still so enormously prevalent in cultural life nearly 400 years after he died. The first is the cynical one, that it suited the British empire, and Anglo-Saxon culture in general, to foist

Ferdinand Mount

Refusing to play the game

What sort of person would you expect to be bringing out a life of J. D. Salinger two months after his death, bearing in mind that Salinger was more obsessive about his privacy than any other writer in human history and fought the publication of the last biography all the way to the US Supreme Court? You might not expect the answer to be Kenneth Slawenski. Who, you may ask, is he? Well, he is a pretty private person too. I pummelled the web and the only meagre intelligence I could extract is that he was born and raised in New Jersey and has worked in computers. This may be

Victoria Glendinning

Pearl of the Orient

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her

Alberto Manguel

Solace in the written word

Not only Webster but most of us are much possessed by death. Even if we don’t see the skull beneath the skin, we enjoy the thought that it’s there and look forward to the day when it will turn to dust so that we can sing its bygone glories. Notoriously, the ancient Anglo-Saxons allowed their Roman buildings to fall into ruin and then wrote elegies to mourn their passing. The rise of Greek cities left the countryside to languish outside its walls and gave birth to bucolic poetry. Trains and planes proclaimed the end of parochialism and allowed for the rebirth of patriotism. Likewise with new technologies. Photography proclaimed the

A.N. Wilson

The greatest puzzle of all

Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. He is a truly great storyteller, and the details of his myth, as well as the rich gallery of characters, live forever in the reader’s memory. It upset many religious readers, especially in America, because of the fact that the central villainy of the Gobblers, child-stealers controlled by the Magisterium, are a Blake-inspired vision of Church Christians. (And rather a prophetic picture of what is now revealed on a daily basis in the papers about the

Anita Brookner

Missing link

In times of anxiety or confusion the most effective palliative is a good detective story. The requirement is that a sense of justice be restored, and, paradoxically, given the fictional events portrayed, a much desired sense of order. The effect is transitory but reliable. It is also necessary that the protagonist be a man of principle. Such a one is the unassailably virtuous Simon Serrailler, Susan Hill’s detective hero, now making his fifth appearance in this agreeable series. He is, of course, no stranger to melancholy, largely in connection with his equally high-minded girlfriend from whom he is momentarily estranged. And he lives in Lafferton, a small fictional town which

Bevis Hillier

Fine artist, but a dirty old man

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke. I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke. Those passages seem to claim too much for heredity, and to bear out A. J. P. Taylor’s dictum that snobbery is the occupational disease of historians. But there

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Existential Wodehouse

Jenny Haddon has a nice piece on Wodehouse and Hot Water as her contribution to Norm’s Writers’ Choice series. She argues: In fact, I disagree with the regular characterization of Wodehouse’s dramatis personae as amiable eccentrics. (Bertie Wooster is a kind man but his slightest gesture towards eccentricity is squashed by Jeeves – one remembers, with regret, the skirmish over the white mess jacket. Lord Emsworth is only intermittently amiable. With the exception of the occasional chorus girl, all PGW’s women are tough cookies who could give today’s feminists a correspondence course in man management.) The amiability is the author’s and it is the amiability of the measured Augustan, who

Saturday

David Sexton

The whirlwind and the saint

Dave Eggers is the very model of the engaged writer. Since publishing his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has branched out into all kinds of philanthropic literary activity. His organisation, McSweeney’s, has become a major imprint, championing emerging writers. In San Francisco, he has set up a community writing project, called 826 Valencia, which now has branches in six other cities. In 2004, he created Voice of Witness, ‘a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world’. In one project, people talked about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina and that was where he first read the story

James Mather

Annals of war

‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I felt there was a real danger that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.’ How, half a decade later, was that prescience brushed aside by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the rush for regime change? The Chilcot Inquiry, whose committee of the great

Mark Seddon

Land of eternal euphemism

If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? There really is no place quite like it, a surreal time capsule largely devoid of mobile phones, cars and electric light; a land presided over by the world’s first hereditary Communist, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, whose deceased father remains Eternal President of the place I like to call the ‘Land of Eternal Happiness’. Less charitable types have described North Korea as like ‘Upper Volta

Raymond Carr

Faith under fire

Giles St Aubyn, in this long, scholarly book, sets out to chronicle the shifts in the Christian churches from the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and the Enlightenment of the 18th, to the apparent triumph of secularism in the 20th. H. H. Asquith, as leader of the Liberal party, was not an enthusiastic Christian. Nor did the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee waste much time on religious concerns, which bored him. What mattered was the NHS and the welfare state, which saved men’s bodies rather than their souls. The Reformation had shattered the universal Catholic church of the Middle Ages, leaving in its wake what the Catholic apologist Blaise

Michela Wrong

In the shadow of Mau Mau

When the Kenyan human rights campaigner, Maina Kiai, recently addressed the House of Commons, his list of policy recommendations probably surprised many MPs. Be tough on Kenya’s fractious government, he urged. Crack down on British companies which bribe African politicians. And it was well past time, he added, that Britain made a formal apology for Mau Mau. A chasm yawns between the soft-focus memories of a former colonial master and the less happy recollections of the colonised. Never more so than with Mau Mau, the 1950s uprising against white rule which traumatised the Kikuyu community, the country’s biggest tribe, eventually paving the way for independence. Anyone puzzled by the chorus

Lewis Jones

Pretty boy blue

In his memoir Somebody Down Here Likes Me, Too, the boxer Rocky Graziano, on whom Paul Newman based his performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), describes the actor in perfect Runyonese: I could see right off there ain’t one thing phony about this guy. Maybe there was. He was too good-looking. In fact, the guy is pretty… He’s got bright blue eyes, but when you look in ’em you see a hard look dancing around inside. Only one other guy I see these same eyes on an’ that was another friend of mine, Frank Sinatra. When their blue eyes spot a wise guy, the eyes say, ‘Don’t fuck

Rowena Macdonald

A choice of first novels | 27 March 2010

Catharine is a middle-class, married woman in her late thirties living in a genteel village an hour from London with her husband, a successful lawyer, who nicknames her ‘Catch’. Catharine is a middle-class, married woman in her late thirties living in a genteel village an hour from London with her husband, a successful lawyer, who nicknames her ‘Catch’. Though educated and bright, she has no career. She is ‘famous’ for her ‘lack of sense of humour’ and is ‘the most feminine woman’ her husband has ever known. Simon Robson’s novel spans one rainy winter day in Catch’s life, in which she spends the morning drinking tea and worrying about her