Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Raymond Carr

The teddy bares his teeth

Ever since he could read and write John Betjeman felt himself destined to become a poet. Later he wrote, ‘I have always preferred it [poetry], knowing that its composition was my vocation and that anything else I wrote has been primarily a means of earning money in order to write poetry.’ In so doing he wrote a great deal of prose. Stephen Games gives a superb selection of his journalism, his correspondence, the texts of his broadcast talks and the scripts of his television appearances. By the1960s his radio talks and TV appearances had made him a familiar figure. To his fans he was a national treasure rightly created Poet

Allan Massie

The magnum opus of Compton Mackenzie

On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will

Friday

Mark Amory

Isn’t saying The Brothers Karamazov rather idiotic?

On holiday I read (not reread I am afraid in my case, as people tend to claim about great classics) The Karamazov Brothers, in a new translation from Penguin. The moment I saw the title I wondered how we had all been persuaded to call it The Brothers Karamazov all these years. Talking about the Brothers Smith sounds very affected. Though the Arts Editor here now informs me that it is acceptable to say The Brothers Grimm.

Saturday

Interconnect

A life in pictures

Jonathan Coe’s gloomy new novel will surprise fans of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve-Up!, but it need not disappoint them. In taking on the voice of Rosamond, an elderly, suicidal lesbian, Coe shows an admirable refusal to be pigeonholed. Like many contemporary novelists (Penelope Lively, Thomas Keneally, Alan Judd), Coe is concerned with the emotional dislocation caused by the second world war and its impact on succeeding generations. In common with these novelists, he chiefly concerns himself with the lives of women, with the domestic aftermath of the experience of upheaval and loss. Aged eight, Rosamond is evacuated from Birmingham, torn away from her best friend and first-love

Interconnect

Rich man, poor man, communist, facist

At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and Nancy wrote some very good books. The Mitford sisters’ fame originated, mostly, in newspaper scandals of the 1930s, to the horror of their parents, who believed that a gentlewoman’s name should appear in newspapers only twice, on her marriage and on her death. (According to Decca, Lady Redesdale grew to dread the sight of the

Raymond Carr

The enemy within

On the 9 August 378 AD near Adrianople in Thrace the Roman army of the East was massacred and the Emperor Valens left dead on the battlefield by an army of barbarian Goths. It was, as Alessandro Barbero’s title claims, ‘The Day of the Barbarians’. He gives a highly readable account of the campaign and its consequences for an empire that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the fortresses on the Rhine, the Danube and the Tigris. It included what is now Turkey and the Middle East, Egypt and a strip of territory along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Beyond the frontier lay the restive German barbarian tribes and the

Interconnect

How did the Colosseum?

Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it a useful vademecum while the Caesars were on the throne. Today’s 50-euro-a-day tourist will find it hardly less enlightening. Philip Matyszak both knows his stuff and manages to serve it in deliciae-sized portions. His guide honours all the usual categories of sights and pleasures and alerts travellers to the perennial dangers, not forgetting mislaid or

Interconnect

Small Room in a Hotel

Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died at stool, Bent in that vain rictus of hope That gives to their flushed features The terrifying squint of a Samurai? Between philosophical reflections And the final rebellion of blood Is the same fine line as between shadows And the ignorant earth which casts them. Why are we so eager for shadows? Is reality so

Interconnect

Patterns from the past

Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling belfry, or ‘like a villanelle … the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development’. It is like a ‘triptych’, offering parallel panels. ‘We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell,’ says one character (it hardly matters which). Narrative in Divisadero splinters, and shards of glass

Interconnect

Return to form

Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant brand recognition that means the next time you’re in a bookshop or a library you’re going to head for their spot on the shelf to see what they’ve been up to lately. With his novel Empire Falls (2001) it looked as though Russo was about to emerge from obscurity into the sunny uplands of bookshop

Vernon Scannell

War Words

War Words I heard the other day of soldiers back from serving in the fighting in Iraq, not wounded bodily but suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ — ‘bomb- happy’s’ what they called it in the war on Hitler; ‘shell-shock’ in the one before. And then I thought, Ah yes, I can recall D-Day, June the sixth in forty-four, wading through chest-high waves to reach the shore (the stretch I later learned was called Sword Beach, a place I didn’t really wish to reach). What I that day with many others shared was ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’, or, as specialists might say, we were ‘shit-scared’. Vernon Scannell

Interconnect

Good account of bad times

Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should have not had their war against the coalowners in 1926, precipitating the abortive General Strike, because it was the wrong time. Hattersley could have told them that, had it not happened six years before he was born. But by heavens, he tells them now. ‘It was a bad moment for the miners to choose,’ he

Interconnect

The final curtain?

This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran, E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a novel of Jewish life and then all but forgotten when he puzzlingly fails to produce the expected successor. Lonoff enjoys a ménage à trois with a long-suffering wife and a mysterious foreign woman, Amy, his student and muse, to whom Zuckerman is instantly attracted and whom he half believes to be Anna Frank, living incognito

Interconnect

A painter goes blind

I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is called Hélène, then on pages 5, 6, and 7 she is called Helena, then reverts to Hélène for the rest of the book. Why? In the first few pages Peter is in the garden with his daughter while it gets dark. Some time later Peter is painting in his studio when he notices that it

Interconnect

Black men in England

Caryl Phillips has found his niche, as a master of historical ‘re-imaginings’. To blend real sources and fictional interpretations into a continuous narrative requires expert control, and he has it. Foreigners tells the heartbreaking stories of three black men struggling, and ultimately failing, to find their footing in England. It follows Dancing in the Dark (2005), which employed a similar hotchpotch of fictional and factual voices to tell the story of the black US entertainer Bert Williams. In the interim, Phillips has refined this distinctive technique to devastating effect. First up is Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s beloved servant, who was a former slave and ended his life ruined in an

Interconnect

Where there’s a Will . . .

Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from Shakespeare scholars such as Stanley Wells, Frank Kermode and Stephen Greenblatt, and from knowledgeable non-specialists such as Peter Ackroyd. In consequence, however, many aspects of his life — the provincial childhood, the lost years, the first reference to him in print (as an ‘upstart crow’, by Robert Greene), the fact that he bequeathed only his

Alexander Masters

The language of mathematics

‘I find that the earth is not as round as it is described, but it is shaped like a pear,’ Christopher Columbus wrote after his return from America, ‘with a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and nearest heaven.’ Determining the shape of the surface on which we live is, as Donal O’Shea observes in this historically minded little book, a delicate matter. Columbus’s idea was not (at least, not only) the lascivious fantasy of a hoary sea dog. He believed that he had reached India, not America. But he also knew that he had completed the journey much more quickly than the accepted size

Interconnect

Was Anna Karenina always beautiful?

It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything is vile and all must be reworked and rewritten, everything that has been printed needs to be crossed out, dropped and disavowed. Such were the agonies of Leo Tolstoy about one of his two great novels, with whose central character, writes Viktor Shklovsky, the great man fell in love — as have many readers. Later

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Recent crime novels | 22 September 2007

David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on from the Japanese surrender. The first of a projected trilogy, the novel deals with the murder of two young geishas strangled with their own shawls. Detective Minami of the beleaguered Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned the investigation, a task he accepts with what proves to be well-founded reluctance. The Department itself is in crisis,

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Alternative reading | 22 September 2007

The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a spacefarer returning from his wanderings finds that he is no longer suited for any earthly employment, and kills himself. The title story, ‘Escape to Hell’ (great title for Hollywood), is told in the voice of a Bedouin who finds that hell is more to his taste than modern urban life: I will now tell you