Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Carey Schofield

You can go home again

Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, by Aatish Taseer The publication of Stranger to History is likely to be turned into a fiery political event in Pakistan. The author is the half-Indian son of Salman Taseer, the glamorous and controversial Governor of the Punjab and one of Pakistan’s most important newspaper proprietors.The work is a heartfelt cry for attention from the old mogul, and with its talk of alcohol and of illicit liaisons it provides plenty of fuel for the Governor’s enemies. But it will be a pity if Aatish’s first book — part family memoir, part an account of his journey through the heart of the

Cressida Connolly

Moving swiftly on

Chaplin’s Girl, by Miranda Seymour Love Child, by Allegra Huston Virginia Cherrill was an exceptionally pretty young woman when she turned up in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, looking for fun and adventure. Here Charlie Chap- lin spotted her, in the front row at a boxing match, and invited her to star in his forthcoming movie, City Lights. Still considered among his greatest films, it gave Cherrill the chance to captivate audiences with her portrayal of the blind flower girl. It wasn’t long before she met the young Cary Grant, who followed her to England, begging her to marry him. ‘Endearing, gorgeous and elegant, the Grants made a magnificent

Jeremy Treglown

Lost and found | 20 May 2009

‘Book for book,’ John Banville is quoted as saying on the cover of this one, ‘[Graham] Swift is surely one of England’s finest novelists.’ This may be Irish for ‘but of course he hasn’t written all that much’, though eight novels and a collection of short stories isn’t bad going and it would be odd if work so ruminative and elegiac came out more quickly. If Swift seems costive by comparison with some of his contemporaries, in fact, it’s not that he has produced fewer novels but that he does very little other writing: hardly any journalism or criticism, no polemics. In this as in other respects he resembles his

Lucy Beresford

Ways of escape

At a time in modern, secular Britain when religion is seen not as the saviour but as the cause of many of society’s problems, we have become skilled not so much at turning the other cheek as turning a blind eye. Thank God (maybe literally) for writers like Michael Arditti, whose invigorating novels dare to shake us out of our complacency. Arditti returns to the ecclesiastical territory he charted in previous works, in particular the award-winning novel Easter. As well as examining Christianity as seen through the lives of several members of the Church of England, Arditti’s nuanced cartography now extends to Islam, Judaism, and, briefly, Buddhism and Paganism —

Lee Langley

Sounding a different note

What is inspiration and how does it work? Music and literature have a long record of mutual nourishment: Beethoven inspired Tolstoy who inspired Janacek, and each Kreutzer Sonata was different; miraculously rich and strange. Jeanette Winterson, inspired by Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, has asked some distinguished fellow-writers each to produce a work inspired by an opera. The result is Midsummer Nights — 19 short stories, plus Posy Simmonds illustrating the Glyndebourne experience with wry affection. Edited by Winterson, who also provides a story of passion and Puccini, the book offers a glimpse of how the inspirational and the creative juices interact. The brief was clear: ‘Choose an opera, and from its

Saturday

Adam Nicolson

Behind the wit

Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley As Alan Bennett says in his introduction, ‘Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say “Joking apart . . .” Jok- ing never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.’ And so, of course, this book is full of jokes: the Chatsworth gamekeeper who used to refer to the Duke of Portland as ‘His Other Grace’; the agent at Bolton Abbey who every year used to put a final item on their bill for the unconscionably expensive August grouse shooting: ‘Mousetraps — 9d’; the ladies

Wednesday

Alan Judd

At sixes and fives

A passage in that most insidiously influential of histories, 1066 And All That, tries to explain who the Scots, Irish and Picts really were: The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. Gordon Thomas’s account of MI5 and MI6 could lead to similar confusion. He correctly says they were founded in 1909 with Vernon Kell heading MI5, responsible for counter-espionage, and Mansfield Cumming MI6, responsible for espionage. Subsequently he says they both ‘emerged’ two years later out of the 1911 Official Secrets

Anne Chisholm

The benefit of the doubt

With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell, the man at the heart of what the historian Geoffrey Elton, who first put him on the map 50 years ago, called the Tudor revolution in government. To activate what she has called her ‘informed imagination’, she has read widely and deeply in the literature of the period and then let all her extraordinary talent as a writer of fiction rip. Her book is as true to the facts as

John De-Falbe

A patriarch and his family

The title story of this exceptional collection is the only one directly concerned with the presiding figure of K. K. Harouni, a wealthy Pakistani patriarch. In each of the others, a drama quietly unfolds among his extended family and dependents. In ‘Nawabdin Electrician’, Harouni’s Mr Fixit is attacked by a robber while driving his new motorcycle home to his wife and 12 daughters. ‘Saleema’ and ‘Provide, Provide’ describe girls giving themselves to employees. Saleema loses the protection of Rafik, the valet, when he is moved to a different house after his master’s death. ‘Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, went on to heroin . . .’

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

More than politics

Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff. Then there’s the extra-curricular life — the gliding accident, the false start as a trapeze artist at 17, chairmanship of the Benevolent Fund for Abandoned Zoo Animals, the notorious fling with the Foreign Secretary’s wife, the deep love of Shelley, the book on Indian Railways and the passion for rare cyclamen. Crikey, you think, let’s

Byron Rogers

Instead of the poem

On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer, and from the beginning, you are made aware of what form this adaptation will take. This is how Chaucer introduces his Prioress in the General Prologue, and it is a moment of quiet, if sly, humour as he sketches the prissy little ladylike ways of this Merle Oberon in a wimple: And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe. And you don’t need to

Eric Christiansen

Raymond Carr at 90

Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Sillery, Samgrass, Cottard, Lucky Jim’s professor, the History Man, all Snow’s Masters: these spring to mind at once. Why are they so disgusting? Perhaps some are false fathers to young people expecting more attention, like the pompous young Gibbon at Magdalen. Perhaps because they are obvious targets to would-be writers at a time of life when the urge to debag and deflate is strong: they seem self-satisfied in ways which cry louder for satire than the ways of more, or less insignificant subjects. The clever students don’t need dons. The dons don’t

Saturday

Allan Massie

Life & Letters | 9 May 2009

Amanda Craig recently rebuked her fellow novelists for evading the contemporary scene and setting their novels in the past. We should be more like the Victorians, she said, and have the courage to write about our own times. If the novel is to be relevant to readers, it should address today’s issues. Why, she asked, is Hilary Mantel publishing a novel about Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, rather than . . . Well, I don’t recall if she actually suggested an alternative subject, but her point is clear. Writing historical novels is an evasion of the novelist’s duty. Of course Hilary Mantel has written novels set in the here and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Exit the hero

It was in The Spectator, in 1954, that the Movement was christened, and its members’ stereotyped image was soon set: white, male (except for Elizabeth Jennings), non-posh poets who rhymed and scanned, hated Abroad, thought T. S. Eliot was arse, Didn’t Come From London, and disconcerted the students at the redbrick universities where they taught by wearing flat caps and scarves in lectures. Kingsley Amis cast them as a jazz ensemble: Jack Wain and the Provincial All-Stars Wain (tpt, voc) directing Phil Larkin (clt), ‘King’ Amis (tmb), Don Davie (alto), Al Alvarez (pno), Tommy Gunn (gtr), George (‘Pops’) Fraser (bs), Wally Robson (ds) It was at the time a highly

Simon Baker

One out of five

Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with characters living in obscurity; the stories are populated by people, often musicians, who have been forced to downgrade their ambitions dramatically. While the title also suggests classical music, however, jazz and its related forms feature more prominently. The standout success among the five is ‘Malvern Hills’, which features a university drop-out who is trying (like countless others) to write songs, while helping out at his sister’s café in Worcestershire. Ishiguro insightfully portrays both the man’s self-regarding pomposity

Martin Jacomb

Nor all that glisters

Fool’s Gold, by Gillian Tett Millions of words and scores of official reports on the credit crisis have poured out. There has been no shortage of criticism, especially from political leaders eager to deflect responsibility from themselves. The catastrophe is a man-made disaster, and in years to come historians will ask how it could possibly have been allowed to happen. Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold is the book they will turn to. The story she tells reveals in painful detail how credit derivatives came to be invented and then misused on an unimaginable scale. It is a thriller. The idea emerged from a wild weekend party of J. P. Morgan ‘rocket

Christopher Booker

Poisoned spring

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe, by Richard Vaughan On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited a bridge on the Dorset Stour to watch sand martins nesting in the riverbank. Since 1984 they have vanished. In 2002 I wrote a letter to the Times, headed ‘The last cuckoo’, to note that for the first time in decades I had not heard the cuckoo arriving on the button (17 April in Dorset,

D J-Taylor

Trouble at the Imperial

It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door. The first sign that all might not be well

Sebastian Smee

Home is where the heart is

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed. The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called Eilis can’t find good work in her home town of Enniscorthy, so she goes along with a well-intended family conspiracy to send her to a decent job in Brooklyn. It is the early 1950s. Her father is dead. In Brooklyn, she finds her feet and falls in love. But when her older sister dies, she

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Krapp’s Last Sale

From John Banville’s TNR review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40: In London, Beckett considered a number of possible day jobs, toying with the notion of becoming an airline pilot or–wait for it–an advertising copy writer. (There is food for a dinner-party game, devising the jingles that Beckett might have thought up for washing powder or diapers.) Quite so! Readers are therefore invited to suggest advertising copy that could have been written by Mr Beckett…