Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 December 2007

Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously early in his career. Amazons is a woman’s first-person confessional account written covertly by a man. Not content to stop there, DeLillo makes this a book almost entirely about sex (there is very little hockey in it). Every ten pages is a new sexual encounter in which the characters go at it rather in the

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

O tempora, o mores! | 8 December 2007

More Paddington Bear blogging: Paddington, the bear from Peru, will be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status in a book marking his 50th birthday.Paddington Here and Now, due to be published in June 2008, is set around the bear’s home at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London. It will mark the 50th anniversary of his debut in A Bear Called Paddington. In other Paddington news, he’s not forsaking marmalade at all. Whew!

Paul Johnson

From Renaissance Florence to Hollywood in only one contrapposto step

The other day I came across a clever book on the movie actor John Wayne. I forget the name of the author but it may have been Simon Louvish, who writes better than anyone else on the film-star world. This suggested that the secret of Wayne’s immense physical appeal was his instinctive contrapposto. When filmed standing he never held himself stiffly to attention, as Laurence Olivier and Clark Gable tended to do, but shifted his weight casually on to one leg. This is the posture adopted by both Donatello and Michelangelo in their splendid, and splendidly different, renderings of ‘David’. The concept of contrapposto is subtle as well as important,

Philip Ziegler

All passion spent

Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked the middle-class touch, he lacked even the upper-middle-class touch. He would have viewed the Forsytes with mild disdain; the rich industrialists of the Midlands and North, who every year played a more significant role in Conservative affairs, were an alien breed. He was happy to sit in Cabinet with Joseph Chamberlain; he would, if necessary,

Elfreda Pownall

A choice of cookery books

Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook. The book is divided into two-month chunks and

Christopher Howse

Recent books of photographs

In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s. McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book. It shows The Guvnors, a gang of young men with whom he had grown up, posing in the sun in their sharp Fifties Sunday suits and thin ties on the beams of a half demolished house. One of them was hanged after a policeman was knifed; McCullin sold his picture to

Kevin Brownlow

Too funny for words

In 1989, when David Gill and I celebrated the Chaplin centenary with a week-long run of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre, several critics declared than no one under 40 found Chaplin funny. That ruined our advance box office and not even the presence of Princess Diana on the opening night revived it. Yet those that came were thrilled. We had a live orchestra conducted by Carl Davis, and there were times when you couldn’t hear the music above the laughter. We recorded all those people under 40 not finding Chaplin funny and sent the tapes to the critics. That was as satisfying as the ‘House Full’ notices that went

Allan Mallinson

Fear and loathing in old Europe

What marks out the Napoleonic wars from what had gone before, the great dynastic clashes of the two earlier centuries? It is by no means the only, or even the predominant, question that Charles Esdaile poses in this sweeping study, but in many ways it is the most challenging. Professor Esdaile’s The Peninsular War demonstrated a mastery of the interplay of the many forces and factors in war, of which the economic, social and cultural are sometimes all too easily relegated to footnotes, together with the force of personality of the prime mover himself, and that factor which makes even the simplest thing in war difficult: what Clausewitz calls friction.

Christian House

Don’t judge a book by its cover

With its quartos, rectos and folio, the language of book-binding lends itself to the novelist’s palette. It’s a terminology rich in tactile pleasures and potential metaphor for a writer. So it’s a joy to find Belinda Starling doing it justice in The Journal of Dora Damage, not least by situating this idiosyncratic profession in the equally emotive world of Victorian London. In a clammy corner of Lambeth in 1859, within earshot of the clattering rails of the Necropolis Railway, Dora Damage struggles to keep her family out of the workhouse. Her husband Peter, proprietor of Damage’s Bookbinders, has succumbed to crippling arthritis, leaving Dora and their epileptic five-year-old daughter at

Daniel Swift

A love story

The pilots called it ‘the Spit’, ‘my personal swallow’, ‘a real lady’, or, simply, ‘the fabulous Spitfire’. It was not a perfect machine. Due to its long nose, forward visibility during take-off was poor; it was freezing cold in the cockpit, and so small that the pilot did not have room to wear a bulky flight suit. He had to make do with chamois leather gloves and wool socks. Yet all who flew it marvelled at its grace and power, and it was equally adored by those on the ground. As Leo McKinstry notes, in his thorough and engaging new account of the invention and development of this most glamorous

Allan Massie

The enduring mystery of Mrs Bathurst

A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension  ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result: precisely the same.’ Wodehouse is not alone in finding the story baffling. At once rambling and compressed, told entirely in reminiscent and speculative conversation, it is powerful but murky. You may feel it is a masterpiece yet be unable to determine just what happens. Summarising it is difficult, but, for the benefit of anyone who

Saturday

Samuel Brittan

Mill! thou shouldst be living at this hour

Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances dominated the more intelligent public debates of the mid-19th century — predictably he was keenly studied by Gladstone and mocked by Disraeli. In the last year of his life he was persuaded to be godfather to the infant Bertrand Russell, who was the nearest runner-up in the UK public intellectual stake. Mill’s own influence was on the wane for much of the 20th century when Marx became the centre of attention. But it has been rekindled in the past few decades as faith in collectivist nostrums has

Bevis Hillier

Christmas funny books

Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but only by unstoppering a phial and waggling it under a person’s nose can you convey what the scent is like. It’s a similar case with poetry. You can prattle away about felicitous rhymes (assuming there are any), striking imagery, passion, depth and concentration of meaning (John Betjeman called poetry ‘the shorthand of the heart’); but

Graham Stewart

A criminal waste

With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has been allowed to watch its citizens so comprehensively in this way rests with the claim that CCTV is a protection rather than an intrusion. Only the guilty should fear the all-seeing eye. Those with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. It is tempting to imagine this is what Calvin’s Geneva might have been like if only the technology had been the equal of the theology. Except, of course, the inner cities of 21st- century Britain are patently not where the Godly Elect hang out

Alan Brownjohn

Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism

Alan Brownjohn Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism Shows in the delicate way he rests his head — Despite every fear that she will remove it — On the shoulder of Miss Chiang to watch Duck Soup, The video, from his reproduction sofa. The alarm clock rings beside the bed of the man Made President with the aid of American money In the person of Margaret Dumont, and the lovely Miss Chiang Is completely puzzled by Mr Groucho Marx. ‘This gentleman — he is really President?’ she asks. Ludbrooke needs to lift his romantic head To look at her, and answer. As he tries to explain That this is not quite like life,

Charlotte Mitchell

His own short story

This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44 at the hands of a German sniper at Beaumont Hamel in 1916. Its ten chapters include four which focus mainly on the fiction, but the other chapters, which are mainly biographical and arranged more or less chronologically, also include copious references to his writings. Like most of Saki’s fans, Professor Byrne is curious about his

Frank Field

A false dawn

Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth consecutive election victory. As Lee’s outstanding book makes plain, the Prime Minister’s immediate political task is to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of the Blair legacy without falling into the hole Al Gore dug for himself. Brown’s task is much more difficult, however. No one thought Gore had much influence on US politics. No one could believe the same here, with Brown’s unparalleled imperial power over home policy. The Prime Minister has also to deal with the Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath Question. This strategy coalesces around attempts to

Charlotte Moore

The parent trap

Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read music magazines, sports reports, pornography and cereal packets, but they are notoriously averse to reading — or rather, finishing — books. Can Hornby break the habit, or lack of habit? Slam’s main subjects are sex and skateboarding, both calculated to have instant appeal for the target audience, but Hornby’s treatment of them is thoughtful, careful and wholly untitillating. Instead of pandering to youthful fantasies of conquest and glory, he sets out, in the nicest possible way, to expose the gap between

Oliver Gilmour

The call of the wild

Jean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky (‘with his stillborn affectations’) or the artificial contrivances of Arnold Schönberg. Sibelius was his own man, and a deeply human one, moved and moulded by the harsh Finnish landscape. This gave his music a rugged and austere quality, prompting the composer to reflect, ‘My orchestration is better than Beethoven’s and I have better themes than his. But he was born in a wine country — I in a land where surmjölk [curdled milk] is in charge.’ Sibelius was not an arrogant man. As Andrew Barnett reveals in this fine

Richard Shone

Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider

As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for Stevenson too can be stylish and sharp. Anyone who knows the engrossing volume of Burra’s letters Well, Dearie!, edited by his lifelong friend William Chappell, will surely pounce on this new book to reacquaint themselves with those letters already published and laugh aloud at extracts that will be new to them. A Burra letter is