Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Francis King

More nattering please

There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total, that he has produced in more than half a century. It is sad that there has not been far more. The first book is a collection, Out of the War, published in 1974, but originally written during the second world war, when the still teenage author had been invalided out of the army with TB.

Andro Linklater

Perhaps the greatest?

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between the inner and outer essences of man and society. And the great artist himself would live decorously on a large government pension befitting a social treasure. Instead of which, his present biographer, the painfully named Rodge Glass, has been forced to write the life of a self-described ‘fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old, Glasgow pedestrian’, who

Lee Langley

Stepping-stones of his past self

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not quite what he intended: ‘I sought trains. I found passengers.’ The Great Railway Bazaar sold 1.5 million copies in 20 languages. Thirty-three years and 40-odd books later, Theroux — ‘twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains’ — set off again, travelling in his own footsteps to see how much he and

Caroline Moorehead

Of zyzzyva and syzygy

Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated word-lists, strategy and money have come to dominate the game. For Paul McCarthy, whose account of the North American circuit, Letterati, is a celebration of professional Scrabble, the ‘parlour players’ (sometimes known as ‘kitchen-table players’) who spend lazy Sunday afternoons munching snacks and debating the spelling of arcane words are just so many dinosaurs. In

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

When we lost our mojo

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on Suez is a fine instance of his style. It has three characteristic qualities: it is irrelevantly judgmental; it drops in a nice piece of gossip (the pregnant ‘known to’, arguably, making that two pieces of gossip); and it makes you want to read on. This is an enormously enjoyable book, a non-systematic, chatty and wilful

Sarah Burton

A fascinating woman, ill-served

Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, by Kirsten Ellis Unlike her republican-minded father, ‘Citizen Stanhope’, Hester declared ‘I am an aristocrat and I make a boast of it’. After falling out with him (her mother had died when Hester was four) and quarrelling with his heir, her brother, in her early twenties she made her home with her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, but even a privileged position at the centre of London political and social life was not enough for Hester. She embarked on a series of love affairs and adventures which were to earn her notoriety and were to end with her living

John Mitchell

All things to all men

Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an Englishwoman, Gale Benson, daughter of Captain Leonard Plugge, an eccentric Tory MP. This book tells the whole story of Michael’s life and career, concentrating on the late 1960s in London, when he was at the peak of his notoriety. It is fluently written and totally gripping throughout. On one level it is a social comedy,

Philip Ziegler

Adventures of a lost soul

Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person with whom she was concerned. The roll-call of her conquests — Balfour and Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener, Kipling and Siegfried Sassoon — attests to her potent and widespread appeal. Beatrice Webb, a woman who might have been expected to deplore everything that Ettie Desborough stood for, paid tribute to her ‘great organising capacity … iron

Raymond Carr

A city frozen in time

Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city in flight, all normal occupations hastily abandoned. The majority, especially the rich, escaped to the countryside. Those who left it too late were incinerated, unable to make their way through streets filled with pumice. The city in flight became a city of the dead buried under thick layers of volcanic dust. It was not rediscovered

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 10 September 2008

Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing to do with the Tube system, therefore, but is a plea to ‘give government back to the people’, published in the year of the introduction of the Poll Tax and a few months before the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. It paints the UK as ‘the most centralised state in Europe, with a few

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tales of the Booker

The Guardian, bless it, has a super feature asking a judge from each of the Booker Prize’s 40(!) years to recall their experiences as a member of the panel. It’s a terrific read and well worth your time. (One surprise, to me at least, the amount of love shown JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur). Anyway, some highlights to encourage you to read the whole thing: 1969, Frank Kermode:Getting through the 60 was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca [West]. “Miss Murdoch writes good and bad novels in alternate years,” she said. “This is a bad year.” Muriel Spark: “clever but too playful.” And out

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Great Unfinished Novels

Via Clive Davis, the Washington Post offers a list of five great unfinished novels. As you might expect The Man Without Qualities and The Last Tycoon are among those who make the cut. One that’s missing: the novel that was shaping up to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. What other novels should be on the list? Second question: which unfinished novels were better left that way? That is to say, which, had they been completed, would be the most painful or distressing to read? One that leaps to mind: Raymond Chandler’s Poodle Springs. Chandler had only written four chapters when he died and technically, Robert Parker finished

Tom Holland

Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are. One of them, however, has always inspired a faint measure of perplexity. Describing the impact of the Greek troops’ feet on the earth, Homer compares it to ‘the anger of Zeus who delights in thunder, whenever he lashes the ground around Typhoeus in Arima…’ Zeus, of course, was the king of the gods, and Typhoeus

Anita Brookner

A far cry from Paradise

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference. He has, for no apparent reason, bought a house, Paradise Farm, in an unspecified part of the country, and proposes to live there without company, devoting himself to farming his land and

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 6 September 2008

‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp , all the more so because it was the conclusion of Jonathan Sumption’s review in this magazine of John Guy’s book about Thomas and Margaret More; and Jonathan Sumption is not only a Spectator reviewer, but also one of our finest historians. ‘Affected forays into demotic English’ is a splendid magisterial put-down. Poor Mr Guy! Poor

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 6 September 2008

When I first experienced literary life in London it was 1955 and poor Anthony Eden was prime minister. His delightful wife Clarissa was to be seen at literary parties and, amazingly enough, still is. The great panjandrums were Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer on the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee and Harold Nicolson on the Observer, and V.S. Pritchett and John Raymond on the New Statesman. John was my friend, and he opened all the doors to me, doors which were firmly shut in many eager faces. Every morning, in the Commercial on the King’s Road, or the French Pub in Dean Street, he and Maurice Richardson would pool their knowledge

Wednesday

Sara Wheeler

The iceman cometh

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth and reality intertwined’. Beginning at Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, Francis sets out to ‘follow a route that Europeans had taken towards what they once saw as the very limits of the world’. Heading by ferry to the Faroes, he continues to Iceland, Greenland, the snowy hinterland of Scandinavian Finnmark, and finally Svalbard, the

Caroline Moore

Rekindling life in a dead frame

Why re-write Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein? The rewriting of well-known novels generally depends upon two techniques. The first involves recasting the narrator: telling the tale from a different point of view, usually that of the historical underdog (women, servants, woodworm, etc). The second is to update the novel, reinventing it in modern dress. Peter Ackroyd’s narrator, however, is exactly the same as Mary Shelley’s (give or take the now forgot framing device): Victor Frankenstein’s narration is interspersed, just as in the original, with long interludes from a monster endowed with preternatural Romantic magniloquence, though Ackroyd’s monster learned his English from Robinson Crusoe rather

Anne Chisholm

The châtelaine and the wanderer

Towards the end of this hugely enjoyable volume of letters, selected and edited by the skilful Charlotte Mosley from half a century of correspondence (1954-2007), Deborah Devonshire, by now in her mid-eighties, writes a postcard from Chatsworth to her friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 90, who lives in Greece. ‘Did you know’, she asks ‘That the Vikings called Constantinople Micklegarth? Well, they did. Much love, Debo.’ To which he replies: ‘I did know, and have written fruity paragraphs about it in that book called Mani. It’s really Micklegard’, going on to explain that grath, gard and grad all denote towns and that Harold Hardraada, the Viking hero, had visited the

Richard Bradford

Brave new writing

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how. Alan Sillitoe is 80 this year and his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in October 1958, almost exactly half a century ago. The novel evolved from a set of stories written between 1952 and 1958 when he lived in France, Majorca and mainland Spain, but it draws its energy and raw material from his previous experiences in Nottingham: a childhood that would have appalled Orwell and been improved upon by Dickens, followed by semi-skilled work in local factories. It was like nothing written before