Book Reviews

The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon ‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on the run from her older, widowed husband, Gavin, thrusts a bag bulging with diaries and fictionalised autobiography into Emily’s hand. ‘Please don’t read them’, says Sappho. Of course I meant to read them, Emily silently tells the reader. I am a mother, and have my daughter’s best interests at heart. One wonders in this book

The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard Jacobson’s latest taboo-breaker. As he recounts the story of his seduction-by-proxy of his own wife, he runs through the canon of voyeuristic wife-pimping from Herodotus’s account of Candaules and Gyges through Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’ to Pierre Klosowski by way, repeatedly, of Othello. Quinn’s rather twisted, masochistic point is that jealous love fears loss; better to

Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing up plans to transport forces to Germany, a nation he assumed would be his ally. Nine months later, after protracted secret negotiations with both groups of combatants, Italy switched allegiance and entered the war on the side of France and Britain. Foreign observers concluded that the Italians were, in Asquith’s words, ‘voracious, slippery and perfidious’.

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

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

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