Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Humph swings

Last Chorus: An Autobiographical Medley, by Humphrey Lyttleton ‘Old Etonian ex-Guards Officer jazz trumpeter’. That was the way tabloid gossip columnists used to describe Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008) in the early years of his fame. Not long after he was released from the Grenadiers at the end of the second world war, he hyphenated his identity to become Old Etonian ex-Guards Officer jazz trumpeter-bandleader-broadcaster-cartoonist-calligrapher-birdwatcher-gastronome-paterfamilias. In this amiable hotch-potch of a book, he reviews every aspect of his multifaceted life with bonhomous éclat. Now, as ever, Humph swings. His father, C. W. Lyttelton, was a beloved Eton housemaster and teacher of English literature, perhaps generally best known for his published correspondence with

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2008

‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is full of delights. A submarine has stalled on the ocean floor, and Willy and his teddy bear, Randolph, set out on the back of the Rightwayup Bird to save it from Konrad the Killer Kipper. On the way they are helped by Sybil the Seagull, an aspiring author and correspondent for the Bird Times who

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 29 November 2008

Because of the economic crisis, I was waiting at the bus station: £2.80 for a bus instead of £28 for a taxi home. I had 50 minutes to wait and was reading a book by Richard Yates. I was wondering why the literature of so optimistic a country as America was so deeply pessimistic (awareness of death is the answer, of the bust after the boom of life from which there is no upturn), when a lady in her eighties sat down beside me. She was tired. Her cheeks puffed and her lips pouted as one with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. ‘I prefer to take taxis,’ she said to me,

Allan Massie

How to write a wrong

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ ‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ This is the conclusion of Kipling’s harrowing story of child abuse, ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’, and it reminds us that the Victorians knew all that one can know, or need to know, about the misery that may be inflicted on children. They also knew where best to deploy that knowledge: in a fictional narrative. No

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Stars bright and dim

Much great American writing is regional in a way that British or French writing never has been. Most of the best writing coming from the States inhabits a place which apparently feels no pressure from the great metropolitan centres — Annie Proulx on the Texas panhandle, Cormac McCarthy on the Mexican border territories, Jane Smiley on the Midwest. Even when a great city is in the vicinity, as in Anne Tyler’s or David Simon’s very different considerations of Baltimore, we feel a specific regional flavour emerging; John Cheever’s fictions of elegant suburban life have a distinctly north-eastern flavour which evidently still weighs heavily with writers of that particular region. It

David Crane

The spice of danger

From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written movingly of the miseries of partings and of the ‘noise, violence indignity and death’ of the battlefield, but give any of them the choice between a cushy command at Catterick and the Normandy beaches and it is no contest. ‘Peace,’ writes the wonderful Reggie Tompson, back in England recovering from a bad wound on 24

Roger Lewis

Gruff Justice

James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson ‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees a patient complaining about shrapnel up the — ‘rectum?’ offers Spratt. ‘Well,’ comes the plaintive reply, ‘it didn’t do ’em any good.’ Gruff and domineering, Spratt and the actor who indelibly played him were interchangeable — except that James Robertson Justice wasn’t really an actor. He didn’t have any showbiz friends or interests, and drew

Raymond Carr

Chalk and cheese

The British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution, by Peter Thorold Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who had seen their friends’ and relations’ heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets of Paris sped to Britain. When the Terror passed, they returned to France and showed little propensity to settle in or revisit a cold climate. Most Britons came to stay. Why did they come? Some were successful economic migrants. Charles

Bevis Hillier

Highs and lows on the laughometer

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw advertised in Los Angeles when I lived there in the 1980s: a silver dustbin studded with precious stones — ‘for the man who has everything and wants to throw some of it away’. What the book does have is the things given by X to Y on every day of the year. An odd assortment

Edward Harrison

Not just Hitler

The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, by Richard L. Evans Any historian attempting a survey of Nazi Germany during the second world war confronts formidable challenges. First, the available literature is so huge that it almost defies synthesis in a single volume, however substantial. Second, the author needs to avoid writing yet another Hitler biography. Third, the most appalling and dispiriting material must be studied. As Richard J. Evans writes in his preface, the subject is ‘sometimes shocking and depressing almost beyond belief’. Nevertheless, in this book, the third of his trilogy on Nazism, Evans achieves a remarkable degree of success in meeting the demands of this most intractable subject.

Andrew Taylor

Deadlier than the male

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again

Michael Howard

The power of the evasive word

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe De mortuis nil nisi bonum, or so it used to be said. That was then. Now, since the late Hugh Montgomery- Massingbird became obituaries editor of the Telegraph, James Fergusson of the Independent, and Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe of the Economist, all has changed, changed utterly. Now obituaries are light entertainment. The great and the good can no longer console themselves for mortality with the expectation of unctuous posthumous tributes: the first paragraph of the Economist’s treatment of Edward Heath warns them what to expect: The tributes spoke of his integrity, his long service and the strength of

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Should We Be More Like Bonobos?

I dunno. But perhaps we should try and ignore our warrior-chimp ancestry and learn from the blessed, peaceful bonobos. At least that seems to be the idea behind Sex & War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: another trendy but implausibly sweeping sub-title. Nonetheless, I heartily* recommend this book and suggest it may make an ideal christmas present for more people than you might think. Wired interview with the authors and book extract here. *Have you read the book, Massie? No. So why the recommendation? Because one of the authors, Thomas Hayden, is a friend, silly.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Love between the lines

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’

Robert Cooper

Recent audio books | 22 November 2008

To some of us solitude may be sitting on a park bench amidst a bustling city. To Trond Sander, seclusion is a rickety forest cabin in the far east of Norway. For company his only companion is his dog, Lyra. Isolation is 67-year-old Trond’s chosen existence — ‘all my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this’. Do not think for one moment that Out Stealing Horses is in any aspect claustrophobic or disheartening — quite the contrary. Although Trond has recently lost his wife and sister, this is an entirely gloom-free novel. Law-abiders and lovers of our four-legged friends can also rest easy, as no

Wednesday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 19 November 2008

Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history of art. That has long been completed and published. But the books, most of them huge, remain, and make the white-painted, floor-to-ceiling shelves, all made by a local carpenter, groan in patient submission. Books are such heavy things, especially art books printed on glazed paper. My house is full now, so I have scaled down

The Spectator

Books Of The Year | 19 November 2008

A further selection of the best and worst books of 2008 , chosen by  some of our regular reviewers Ferdinand Mount I’m not sure quite what it is that captivated me about Tim Winton’s novel, Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). It’s a sort of Huck Finn goes surfing in Australia. A scrawny kid bums along the coast in search of the ultimate wave and falls under the spell of Sando, the mysterious wizard of the surfboard. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but it is queerly compelling and I can still taste the spray. Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99) well deserved its Forward Poetry Prize. This irresistible collection

Jonathan Sumption

New light on a dark age

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise be a mere jumble of events. Chronicles traditionally began at the Creation. All history was a divinely ordained cycle concluding with the last trump. Men lived under the perpetual threat of extinction. Apocalyptic writers of the age were remarkably precise about how it would happen. There would be natural calamities, human catastrophes, plague and mass-murder.

Alan Strachan

Not always a saint

On her sole experience of sharing a stage with Sybil Thorndike the redoubtable old dragon, Marie Tempest, found all her scene-stealing tricks foiled by her co-star. Hear- ing of Thorndike’s later damehood she muttered: ‘That’s what comes of playing saints’. Thorndike was, of course, always associated with Saint Joan from her first portrayal of Shaw’s heroine in 1924 through revivals at home and overseas to her final encounter with the role in her eighties on radio, that matchless voice still silver-toned. Other saints included Teresa of Avila along with women carrying a nimbus of sanctity or the mystic — Katharine of Aragon, Edith Cavell and a memorable Mrs Moore in

Harriet Sergeant

Three men and a singer

Ian Buruma’s latest book, The China Lover, is a fictionalised take on themes previously examined in his impressive body of non-fictional work. His views on Japan, its history, films and underworld as well as the role of the outsider, the relationship between East and West and much more are all unpacked here as we follow the life of the teenage singer and actress, Yoshiko Yamaguchi. She takes us on a tour of Manchuria and Shanghai in the 1930s, Japan during the American Occupation and, finally, Lebanon in the 1970s. These are periods and places that Buruma knows intimately and writes about with confidence. Yamaguchi’s story is told from the perspective