Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Victoria Glendinning

Small elephant at Dove Cottage

This is a lively contribution to that mound of books — now approximately the height of Skiddaw — about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their ladies in the Lake District. Frances Wilson has found a niche, basing her book on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, written during the two and a half years at the opening of the 19th century when Dorothy and her brother lived at Dove Cottage. Dorothy was just 28 when they arrived, and Wordsworth a rather middle-aged 32, his impassioned revolutionary days left behind. Also left behind was Annette Vallon, the mistress he had abandoned in France pregnant by him. The marriage of William to Mary Hutchinson was

Robert Stewart

Power to the people | 27 February 2008

In July, 1642, as the English House of Commons debated whether to raise an army against the king, a dismayed MP, Bulstrode Whitelocke, wondered how parliament had ‘insensibly slipped into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another [so that] we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers and replies we are now come to the question of raising forces.’ Historians have come up with a variety of explanations. The beauty of Michael Braddick’s book is that he does not feel compelled to deliver one. At the war’s end England had neither a king nor a House of Lords.

Richard Beeston

An appeal from beyond the grave

In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ul-Huq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most countries the violent death of a leader, who had dominated politics for more than a decade, would trigger soul-searching, or at the very least a determination to find out who had killed him and why. But within days of the assassination it was clear that there was little appetite to probe the latest chapter in Pakistan’s violent history. Zia was given a state funeral and quickly forgotten by his countrymen. Twenty years after his murder, the circumstances of his death

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 23 February 2008

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of them, it’s not hard to see why. The central character, Blomkvist, works for a hard-hitting magazine named Millennium. An attack on a corrupt Swedish billionaire has backfired, leaving him on the brink of financial and professional ruin. He accepts a lifeline in the form of a commission to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl

Gerard Noel

Brave enough to say no

The first world war seemed like a good idea at the time. Cheering crowds thronged deliriously through the capitals of Europe as war was declared. In England the prospect of being paid to kill foreigners started a stampede to join up. Within five weeks almost 480,000 men had volunteered, many lying about their age. An exception was Bert Brocklesby, a charismatic young Methodist in South Yorkshire who wrote on the first day of the war: ‘However many might volunteer yet I would not … God had not put me on earth to go destroying his own children.’ Brocklesby was one of the 35 ‘absolutists’ who were prepared to die rather

Anthony Sattin

Earning an easy chair

If you were left a legacy by a friend would you tuck it away, blow it on art, or buy something for your home or the person you share it with? Notting Hill-based writer Duncan Fallowell decided to do what it says on the cover and go as far as he could. Why? ‘So that I need never travel again. Because I’ll have cracked the planet, finally solved the terrible mystery of distance, and can relax.’ It is a tall order, but one that he tries valiantly, humourously, persistently to fulfil. New Zealand doesn’t appear to have been a country Fallowell knew any more about than the rest of us.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Creating a climate of fear

At the outset of this rich, dense and polemical primer on the modern history of political violence Michael Burleigh has the good sense to define his terms. He describes terrorism as ‘a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess’. A phrase that recurs is ‘propaganda by the deed’, and he adds: ‘that modern states … have been responsible for the most lethal instances of terrorism … is taken as a given’. Burleigh doesn’t seek to be comprehensive — South America

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Where the Wild Things Roam

Another splendid obituary from The Daily Telegraph that offers a splendid view of a rather different, if also gruesome, world than with which most of us are familiar. Funny too, of course, in the way in which the sadnesses of ghastly people often can be. (I also liked the understatement here: “Like his father, however, Alec Wildenstein could become somewhat disagreeable when things did not go his way.”) Anyway, read it all, but here’s a choice excerpt:

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 20 February 2008

I gave up writing novels in my mid-twenties, when I was halfway through my third, convinced I had not enough talent for fiction. Sometimes I wish I had persisted. There is one particular reason. The point is made neatly by W. Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale: These remarks need qualification. I’m not sure that the essay can be used for such a purpose. Hazlitt, a great essayist, wrote an extended essay — short book length — to exorcise the torturing spirit of his landlady’s awful (but to him divine) daughter, Sarah, and it did not work: merely got him into fresh, public trouble. It is true that Lamb, an

Claire Tomalin

Too clever for her own good

‘I am sorry to say that the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity,’ wrote Elizabeth Montagu in 1750, after looking over the memoirs of her contemporary, the witty Mrs Pilkington. Mrs Montagu, learned, respectable and rich, curled her lip at poor Laetitia Pilkington, who started writing for pure pleasure but was then forced to use her pen to keep afloat in a harsh world. She died soon after Mrs Montagu’s comment, and her reputation remained dubious. In the old DNB she was described as an adventuress. But in the 1920s Virginia Woolf devoted a brilliant essay to her, and her memoirs were edited by

Alberto Manguel

Sins of omission

Readers are defined by what they don’t read as much as by what they do. George Moore shunned works of reference. ‘An encyclopedia in this house!’ he spluttered indignantly at the enquiry of a friend. Mark Twain was not an enthusiast of Emma and Pride and Prejudice. ‘The best way to start a library,’ he advised, ‘is to leave out the works of Jane Austen.’ Sins of omission in writers are harder to judge, largely because, in the authorial realm, confessions of this kind are rare. Stephan Mallarmé, in a letter to Paul Verlaine, admitted that his unwritten opus was ‘simply a book, in several volumes, a book that is

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

The slave in the next room

‘Being Roman,’ declares Catullus, the poet protagonist of Counting the Stars, ‘is a state of mind’. As in earlier novels — The Siege, House of Orphans — Helen Dunmore allows the reader to enter the ‘state of mind’ of a specific moment in history. Here, Julius Caesar’s Rome, in all its squalor and grandeur, brutality and sophistication, is made available to us in a way that is almost wholly convincing. Dunmore constructs her narrative from Catullus’ poetry. In less skilful hands this would seem laboured, but Dunmore is a poet herself and the joins don’t show. Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the ‘Lesbia’ of his poems. Clodia is ten years

Olivia Cole

All at sea in Shanghai

The conquering white male, guiltily plundering, seduced by exoticism and abundance but never quite sure that he’s not just the clueless foreigner being taken for a ride: so we have Tony Parson’s pugnacious hero Bill, clad in his designer suit. He is the ambitious corporate lawyer, billing for every hour he breathes, hoping to ‘make partner’ faster in Shanghai than in London but of course accidentally finding ‘partner’ instead in the form of the alarmingly beautiful but endearingly goofy Li Jin Jin, despite the existence of Becca and Holly, his picture-in-wallet perfect blonde family. The half-enchanted Western writer, of course, treads a well-travelled road, but My Favourite Wife is a

Ian Thomson

Not under the volcano

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions  Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age of 48, from an overdose of barbiturates, having written his epitaph: Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukulele. His reputation rests on one novel only: Under the Volcano (1947). Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead,

Caroline Moore

Dial M for mother

Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms. With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the refusal to allow the reader the common courtesy of speech-marks, which might make it altogether too easy to know what is going on — yet, time after brilliant time, he carries it off (sometimes better than others; but this is one of his best). His tricks move beyond mere trickiness. This is not just because

Allan Massie

The son of Mann

Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests. The volume covering the years 1931-36 (the only one I have yet read) gives by reason of its casual and generally

Wednesday

A.N. Wilson

The strange experience of England

The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on Arthurian Britain, Porius (1951) which some consider to be the master work, it should be clear that here we have a truly major figure. Every now and again there is an attempt at a revival. A brave publisher will reissue one of the novels and print on the jacket the plaudits which Powys has received:

Blair Worden

Winner by a nose

When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave Rostand his model, and who has been overshadowed by his theatrical counterpart for more than a century, would have lain beyond Bertie’s range of reference. Rostand’s drama belongs to a 19th-century French tradition which romanticised the nation’s involvement in the brutal conflict of the Thirty Years War. In 1834 Théophile Gautier, attempting to revive interest

Dr Thorpe

A slice off the top

‘I’m not going to pay good money’, Groucho Marx famously quipped, ‘to join a club that lets in people like me.’ In the case of the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, whose 175th anniversary last year was marked by this handsome history, requirements were quite explicit. Membership depended on opposition to the 1832 Reform Bill. Four years later, the Reform Club demanded the exact opposite. Thus, in their political heyday between the first two Reform Acts, these rival clubs became the effective headquarters of their respective parties, a role altered but not entirely diminished in the Carlton’s case by the foundation of Conservative Central Office in the early 1870s.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A crash course in survival

No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is as thin a body of lived experience as the average Labour Cabinet minister possesses. Reading J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, you sometimes need to pause to remind yourself just how young he was at the time of many of the atrocious events described. At the point where most English autobiographies are just beginning, as the subject