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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Massie

1968 and all that

Roger Scruton has called Les Orphelins by Louis Pauwels the best French novel since the 1939-45 war. Since it seems unlikely that even Professor Scruton has read all the good French novels of the last 60 years — after all, who among us has read all the good English or American ones? — this really means little more than that he thinks very well of it. He is quite right to do so. It’s a remarkable novel. I’ve just read it a second time and think even better of it than before. It was the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Paris events of May ’68 which prompted me

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Not a decent book

What is the point of this book? This isn’t a rhetorical question — and it isn’t meant to be a sneer. It’s one that needs answering. We have an extremely full biography of Kingsley Amis. We have an accomplished memoir by Martin Amis. Do we need either a joint critical study of these two unalike writers, or another biography? Neil Powell sets out his stall rather winningly. He concedes that it’s not quite a biography and not quite an academic work. He apologises for the sketchier biographical information about Martin, saying: ‘I believe it’s impertinent for the biographer or critic to poke his nose into those aspects of a living

Alan Judd

But what about justice, fairness and honesty?

There is growing unease at the contemporary proliferation and inflation of human rights. Not only do undeserving cases benefit from over-generous or quixotic judicial interpretations of Labour’s Human Rights Act, but there is a booming business in ascribing rights to groups. Peoples, nations, races, ethnic, cultural and religious groups are now perceived to have rights deriving somehow from their mere existence. To individuals, meanwhile, are ascribed — sometimes with the force of law — rights to such things as life, jobs, education, health, emotional well-being, self-fulfilment, holidays with pay and even happiness. Whence do these rights derive, how should we determine what they are and how far should they go?

Ian Garrick-Mason

Through Western eyes

‘Why have we come here? The Directory has deported us,’ grumbled the heat-stricken and exhausted soldiers of Napoleon’s Army of the Orient, having travelled for days across the desert to a spot just west of Cairo. There, at what would later be called the Battle of the Pyramids, they would face the forces of the Ottoman governor Murad Bey. Napoleon lifted his men’s spirits with a vision of history: ‘Go and remember that 40 centuries are looking down upon you,’ he told them. Though opposed by ‘vastly superior Mamluk forces’, the French exploited discipline, firepower and innovative tactics to win the day. Vividly described, this is just one of the

John Mitchell

The robots are coming

If you think that you or anyone else knows anything for certain about the universe, or stack of universes or whatever it is, you are probably wrong. I say probably because it is impossible in this world to be certain about anything. The firm ground of reality that progressive thinkers once expected to discover through science has been abolished by science itself, and we are wrapped in the same cloud of unknowing that has enveloped us since the beginning. Uncertainty is our constant condition, but Heisenberg’s recognition of it as a universal principle dismayed the progressives. They should stop worrying, according to Michio Kaku. The further you look into the

Wednesday

Cressida Connolly

Two were barking

Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers. There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the

Jonathan Keates

Cities of the coast

In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical oddity. Officially it is part of the Atlantic, an awkward remnant of what was formerly a vast marine depression stretching far into central Asia. But who beside its shores has felt depressed for very long? The Atlantic is where we go for granite and fog, grey waves and annihilating icebergs, to be overwhelmed by ‘l’immense

John McEwen

Poles apart

With more Poles in Britain than at any time since the second world war, when the 17,000 remnant of the Polish army arrived after the fall of France, this book could not be more pertinent. Nor could it have been written by anyone better. Douglas Hall (b. 1926) was the first Keeper (indeed the Alfred Barr) of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He made a virtue of a small budget by backing artistic outsiders rather than hot favourites, and these uprooted Polish painters were by definition eccentric. Under his keepership no British public gallery did more for them in the long years of their exile. It is a

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The making of modern myths

Who are the big intellectuals today? There are academics, to be sure, each with their speciality, and journalists, ditto. When something comes up the BBC will call on them to pontificate, to explain, but only on their speciality. Off their own piste they are no more valuable than a saloon-bar or dinner-party bore, eager to tell you ‘what I always say’. I don’t exempt myself. Tony Judt, now a professor at New York University, is the rare real thing, the author of 11 books on Marxism and French intellectuals, European resistance and revolution, language in a multi-state world; he is to consider what has happened in post-war Britain, the US,

Matthew Dennison

Not the marrying type

Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924. The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small. Muriel

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 10 May 2008

Are there too many biographies? Thomas Carlyle thought so 150 years ago. ‘What is the use of it?’ he wrote growlingly. ‘Sticking like a woodlouse to an old bedpost and boring one more hole in it?’ He was then engaged in his 13-year task of writing the life of Frederick the Great, and spoke from a full and bitter heart. Since then over a million more biographies have been written in English alone. The public is to blame, as it is to blame for any other excesses, distortions, omissions and duplications in the book trade. I have been encouraged to write biographies, and have done six. Publishers will tell you

Andrew Taylor

Cries and whispers

C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential decency intact. He had a particularly harrowing time in the previous book in the series, Sovereign, when he narrowly averted a rebellion, survived torture in the Tower and was publicly humiliated by the bloated and paranoid tyrant on the throne of England. Now, 18 months later, things are about to get even worse. It’s 1543,

Sara Wheeler

Lust in a hot climate

This sprightly book recounts the life of Idina Sackville, the author’s great-grandmother. A glamorous aristocrat with a penchant for scandal, she married and divorced five times and was a protagonist of the Happy Valley set, the coterie of dim and adulterous cocktail-swiggers who achieved notoriety in inter-war Kenya (pronounced Keenya). Idina was not beautiful — according to Frances Osborne she possessed ‘a shotaway chin’ — but she had what it took. Painted by Orpen and photographed by Beaton, she epitomised the androgynous, indifferent chic of the age. Her father, the eighth Earl de la Warr, abandoned the marital home when Idina was four for an actress he met at the

Sarah Burton

Dramatic thrills and chills

To be a member of a good audience is exhilarating. The sounds that it makes around you are as much a part of the show as the sounds from the stage: the sound of alert anticipation before the curtain rises — the sound of silence — the sound of implications being understood — the sound of generosity in laughter and response. This description occurs early in the first half of the collection, where Frayn describes the processes involved in the writing, rehearsal, re-writing and performance of his original plays. Many of these reflections and ruminations relate to what is often called — though he never, I think, uses the word

Pj Kavanagh

Llamas but no locals

Richard Askwith is Associate Editor of the Independent and lives in a small Northamptonshire village; presumably he commutes. After a year’s absence abroad he returns to his village and finds that two loved neighbours have moved, eight houses (out of 94) have been sold, and five more have ‘For Sale’ notices outside them. The pub had closed; the sub-Post Office was closing. (The school and the shop had closed years ago.) … One nearby farm — which hadn’t even had electricity when I first visited it a decade or more ago — had become a state-of-the-art equestrian centre. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ demands his wife, who is a sensible

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Et in Purgatorio ego?

Thanks to Ross Douthat for alerting me to this trailer for the forthcoming movie of Brideshead Revisited: As Ross says, this may not bear much resemblance to the novel you read. But come on, isn’t this just delightfully over-the-top and wonderfully trashy? I doubt it matters that the adaptation – Emma Thomson as Lady Marchmain notwithstanding – seems certain to be utter tripe. I remember that when Andrew Davies announced that his adaptation would take the view that the book’s really about how catholicism ruins everyone’s life, there was much umbrage and outrage at this desecration of Waugh’s intent. But there’s little necessity for an adaptation to be faithful to

Wednesday

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 7 May 2008

The writer Trigorin, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, always carried a notebook with him in which he jotted down ideas or snatches of conversation that interested him and that might have proved useful to him in the future. I have tried to develop the Trigorin habit myself, but unfortunately I have often forgotten to take my notebook with me precisely when it would have been most useful. The other problem with such notebooks as I do succeed in filling is that, within hours, I cannot decipher the meaning or context of what I have written. And even when I can decipher my notes, I am unsure what use I shall ever

Philip Mansel

Through Levantine eyes

The corniche at Izmir had a magic atmosphere. Lined with cafés and orchestras playing every kind of music — Western, Greek, Turkish, Armenian — it had the reputation for making the gloomiest laugh. Though ‘terribly chee-chee’ (i.e., they spoke with a sing-song accent), the women were famous for their allure. The trade in figs, raisins and opium made the city the richest in the Levant; it had the first cars, first cinemas and first girls’ schools. Nowhere else, it was said, did East and West mingle in so spectacular a manner. In 1919, as Giles Milton describes in this indictment of nationalism, Izmir Greeks welcomed a Greek army with flowers

Byron Rogers

At her most disarming

I must declare an interest at the outset. Thirty or so years ago I went out, or walked out (or whatever the phrase is), with the author, until, that is, the night when, for reasons I have never been able to establish, she hit me over the head with a stainless-steel electric kettle. You may not have read a book review starting quite like that. At the time all she said was, ‘You were being even more irritating than usual’, so, reading her memoir, I turned nervously to the chapter entitled ‘Men, Love and Sex’ but found no reference to me or the kettle. As a friend said of his

Stanley Johnson

Grace under fire

To reach Sir Christopher Ondaatje’s Glenthorne estate you have to drive down a three-mile track which drops 1,000 feet to the only piece of flat land between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here, in 1831, the Reverend Walter S. Halliday built a substantial house, hemmed in behind by the towering Devon cliffs but enjoying an uninterrupted view over the Bristol Channel to the Welsh mountains. Halliday plays an important role in The Glenthorne Cat. Working in his library one wintry evening, Ondaatje looked up to find the reverend gentleman sitting in a nearby chair wrapped in scarf and nightgown. The ensuing conversation, as reported by Ondaatje, provides as plausible an explanation for