Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

Interconnect

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,

Interconnect

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

Judi Bevan

Moral superiority in cheap plastic bottles

As the train trundled down to Littlehampton one warm summer afternoon in 1988, I was filled with excitement at the thought of meeting Anita Roddick. I had arranged to interview her for a book called The New Tycoons, which I was writing with my Sunday Times colleague John Jay, now my husband. Roddick was already a household name even though the Body Shop had only been in existence for 12 years. When its shares were floated on the Unlisted Securities Market in 1984 they nearly doubled from 95p to 160p on the first day — and she became Britain’s fourth richest woman. Her shops, painted dark green and selling intriguing

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Namier de nos jours

Last night, The Spectator hosted its first book launch at our new home in Old Queen Street. And how apt that it should be in honour of The Triumph of The Political Class (Simon and Schuster, £18.99), by our very own Contributing Editor, Peter Oborne. You can read some of the arguments advanced in this splendid book in this week’s Spectator – a cover piece which has already ruffled many a ministerial feather. Peter is emerging as the Namier de nos jours: a meticulous and fearless analyst of the social and political structures of our time, as well as a fearless truth-teller. He often teases me about being (supposedly) too

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

From outsider to insider

V. S. Naipaul is one of the more striking figures of the great Indian literary diaspora. Yet he was not born in India and has never lived there. His family were originally impoverished high-caste peasants from the region of Gorakhpur. His grandfather migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant at the end of the 19th century. His father was a small-time journalist and author of unsuccessful fiction and much worldly advice, on whom Naipaul based the eponymous hero of A House for Mr Biswas, his first famous novel and probably still his best. As for Naipaul himself, he came to England in 1950 on a government scholarship to Oxford, and

Anthony Daniels

Taking courage from the Dutch

Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on to the Philippines, Macau and Canton with the same aim in view. Vaccination arrived about the same time in Java by way of Mauritius. No modern consumer product has spread more rapidly. Vaccination, however, was late in reaching Japan. This was not because there was no need for it: on the contrary, it has been

Andro Linklater

For the love (and hate) of Mike

The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The combination of these qualities makes General Sir Mike Jackson’s autobiography utterly compelling. Not since Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery in the 1940s has any head of the army been better known to the public or aroused more passionate love and loathing within the service. From his press briefings on the confused street-fighting in Northern Ireland in

Sara Maitland

Not much good clean fun

In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary twist: all the characters tell stories about themselves. This is a book of fictional gossip, all first- person and poor-little-me. Or rather not ‘poor’ at all. The framing device to account for the stories being told in the first place (Chaucer’s pilgrimage, Boccaccio’s plague) is that ten women, independently of each other, decide to spend

Gilbert Adair

When murderers knew their place

Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’. That title, in fact, could not have got it more hopelessly wrong. Surely Wilson was capable of understanding that, of course, nobody cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. That’s the point, for goodness’ sake! Agatha Christie irrelevant? Of course she is, but that again is precisely the glory of her work (relevance we can get at home) and it’s

Charlotte Moore

By their clothes shall you know them

Ursula’s story begins at dawn on the day her ex-husband is to marry his new love. Ursula lies awake, alone with her bitter thoughts, until a reporter rings seeking her reaction to the wedding. For Bill Osborne is no ordinary ex; he edits a national newspaper and hosts a popular television series, while his new bride is a cabinet minister, no less. If the intrusive journalist wants a co-operative response, why ring at 6 a.m.? And why hasn’t Ursula changed her telephone number? Such questions remain unanswered, and indeed Sandra Howard has surprisingly little to say about living one’s life in the public gaze, other than to point out that