Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The bicentenary of the Literary Society

Next month, the Literary Society will celebrate its 200th birthday. The monthly dinner at the Garrick Club will be bigger than usual, but otherwise there will be nothing unusual. The membership has often been distinguished but, as is perhaps typical of English letters, the club has never done anything other than dine. It is not clear that its founding members, who included Wordsworth, ever intended anything in particular by starting it. Most Spectator readers have probably never heard of it. Past members include Walter Scott, George Crabbe, Matthew Arnold, J. M. Barrie, John Betjeman, Hilaire Belloc, Siegfried Sassoon, John Galsworthy, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Anthony Powell, A. A. Milne

Allan Massie

Is Hilaire Belloc out of date?

A. N. Wilson, in his admirable  biography, concluded that Belloc  was more remarkable as a man than in his writings. No doubt he was, and his case is not unusual. The same has been said often of Dr Johnson and of Byron, while I know people who return frequently to Walter Scott’s Journal, fascinated by the man who presents himself there, but who never open any of the Waverley novels. Likewise Hemingway and Fitzgerald have now been the subjects of more biographies and memoirs than the sum total of the books they themselves wrote, evidence at least of the magnetic influence of their personalities. Of course there are those of

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Not a barrel of laughs

What a peculiar life it was: born in Poland, exiled to Russia, orphan- ed at 11, and sent to sea at 16. A decade and a half of salt water and solitude in the merchant marine. Then the rest of it spent as an English gent, writing literary novels in his third language (English) under the strong influence of the writers of his second (French). And yet, there he is, slap-bang in the Great Tradition. This biography, first published here in 1983 and now updated and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth, has quite some heft to it. Coming to it as an enthusiast, rather than a

The Spectator

The cunning of evil

In her book on the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt famously, and controversially, wrote of the ‘banality of evil’. The contemporary variant is the awesome banality of much of the analysis and soul-searching that evil provokes. Since the horrific murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, there has been a spree of such commentary. The rest of the world treats America like a dominant but dysfunctional family. So great is the cultural reach and ‘soft power’ of the United States that an atrocity of this kind quickly assumes almost global significance and is treated, quite inappropriately, as a metaphor for all manner of modern pathologies. What dark impulses coursed

Clive James

Tramps and Bowlers

In the park in front of my place, every nightA bunch of tramps sleep on the wooden porchOf the bowling green club-house. They shed no light.No policeman ever wakes them with a torch, Because no one reports their nightly stay.People like me who take an early walkJust after dawn will see them start the dayBy packing up. They barely even talk, Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place:This lot make sure that, when the bowlers come, There’s not a beer-can to pollute the scene.And so, by day, neat paragons of thriftAnd duty bow

Simon Sebag Montefiore

How Stephen the Small came to save Montenegro and afterwards

In 1766, a diminutive adventurer appeared in Cetinje, the capital of the mountainous principality of Monte- negro, and managed to supplant the rightful claimant to the position of Vladika, the ruling Prince-Bishop. The adventurer was remarkable in many respects. Firstly, he was known as ‘Scepan Mali’, ‘Stephen the Small’, in a country where physical stature and strength were highly prized. Even more bizarrely, he claimed to be Tsar Peter III of Russia, who had been deposed by his wife Catherine the Great in 1762 in St Petersburg and strangled shortly afterwards by the brothers of her lover, Grigory Orlov. In fact he was neither a warrior nor a Russian but

Anita Brookner

What Henry knew

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly. He was 32 years old, and therefore not so very young, but his impressionability and a certain innocence that was to mark him for life caused him

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

No longer a friend of the famous

Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The Insider, Morgan’s chronicle of his first 20 years as a tabloid journalist, the new memoir covers barely 20 months. There’s enough padding here to insulate a barn. Morgan reprints in its entirety a Mother’s Day article listing ten important things Mrs Morgan taught little Piers when he was in shorts. The chaste details of his

Alberto Manguel

The survival of literature

Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in London or Los Angeles, dysfunctional families in Brooklyn or Glasgow, offer readers the impression of bewildering déjà vu. If literature has one Author, it’s time for Her (or Him) to change subjects. The figure in the carpet is wearing thin. Enter Enrique Vila-Matas. For the past 30 years, aware of the futility of

William Boyd

All at sea

On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Medusa, en route for Senegal, ran aground on the dreaded Arguin sandbank off the west coast of Africa. Incompetent seamanship had landed the vessel there and attempts to refloat the Medusa over the next couple of days proved to be in vain. The decision was therefore taken to press on for St Louis in Senegal, a couple of hundred miles to the south, in various of the ship’s boats and barges but, as they couldn’t carry all the passengers and crew, a large raft was constructed, from spars and timber lashed together, which would be towed behind four of the larger boats. The

Eric Christiansen

One of the last Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life

This book is about the Cowley Road, which runs for about a mile and a half south east out of Oxford towards a place where they assemble motor cars. Most of it was built up between 1830 and 1940, in many varieties of cheap and sometimes cheerful brickwork for the housing and lodging of ungenteel and downright working-class newcomers needed by but not welcome inside the well-fenced seat of learning across the river Cherwell. The far end crossed a marsh and was colonised and re-routed by Morris car workers between the wars; the dividing line was marked by the grandiose Regal cinema, which dwindled into a bingo hall in the

Tom Holland

Business as usual | 21 April 2007

Protests against international business are nothing new. Probably the wittiest, and certainly the most brutal, took place long before the first trashing of a Starbucks, way back in the early 1st century BC. This was a period when the Roman Republic, lacking a bureaucracy of its own, had opted to privatise the provincial tax-system — and huge conglomerates, complete with share options, board directors and AGMs, duly reaped spectacular profits. A spectacular whirlwind too, for in 89 BC, the entire province of Asia rose in revolt, and a year later, when the Roman commissioner was taken prisoner, he suffered a memorably hideous fate. ‘The Romans,’ pronounced his judge, ‘have only

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Too much information

In managing too carefully the revelation of truth, parents often betray it. Graham Swift’s new novel is narrated by a mother and addressed to ‘you’, her teenage twins, boy and girl. It involves us, as voyeurs, in the revelation of a truth that will come as a bolt from the blue to the children. But it tries to manage this revelation so carefully, with so many detours, so much cushioning and qualification, that we may easily wonder whether the truth has been served or betrayed. The novel takes the form of a letter written by Paula, the mother, late one night while her children and her husband, Mike, sleep. The

Justin Cartwright

Historical- thrillery-factual fiction

Recently, Adam Mars Jones accused me in the Observer of being in some ways worse than Hitler, because at least Hitler had an excuse for idolising the German upper classes, namely race science, which I didn’t. I was outraged, and seriously considered suing him. I have since calmed down a little and see now that novels set in the recent past are particularly prone to judgments which are more about the history than the fiction, and sometimes even confuse the author with the fictional voice.  This was the point Allan Massie made so eloquently in these pages a few weeks ago.       Dancing with Eva raises some of these questions. It is

Ben Wilson

Making a virtue out of necessity

John Evelyn would find our agonies about food all too familiar. He was impressed with the modern ‘miracles of art’ whereby plants were forced in hot beds and meats and fish were preserved for months or years; but nothing tasted better or was more wholesome than fresh ingredients. He was preoccupied by healthy diets, noting that ‘husbandmen and laborious people [were] more robust and longer lived than others of an uncertain, extravagant diet’. Others, from the 16th century through to the 18th, who were lucky or rich enough to be able to eat wild produce, rated their taste far above cultivated or reared foods. They hated that the seasons were

Simon Baker

Voodoo, rape and an apple tree

A summary of the events that take place in this novel might run as follows: a lost boy (who may be the soul of a comatose adult) walks around a hospital with an apple tree growing inconveniently in his stomach. He explores most of the floors, some of which are in a different dimension, and meets, among others, the kinky ‘Rubber Nurse’. Elsewhere, Nurse Swallow loves Mr Steele, a handsome surgeon. Nikki Froth, a prostitute, is hiding from her drug-addled pimps, Spanner and Case. PC Dixon loves Nikki. Sir Reginald Saint-Hellier, the head surgeon, leads a Satanist cult which murders babies and rapes virgins on the building’s 13th floor. Haitian

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Our women at the front

In the horror that is the Iraq war reporters usually broadcast from the safety of the vast Green Zone where Coalition civilians eat, sleep, make policy and issue statements. What we see on television are pictures taken by non-white photographers; the face-to-camera commentary usually comes from within the Zone. We can only surmise what life is like for Iraqis and along with the guessing there creeps in an I-don’t-want-to see-anymore fatigue. Now comes Lynne O’Donnell who, as Joseph Conrad insisted about good writing, above all makes us see. A foreign correspondent with considerable experience in China, she now works for Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong. In 2003 O’Donnell found herself

Montagu Curzon

From hero to villain

Patrick Bishop’s much praised Fighter Boys brought new life to the story of the Battle of Britain; by analysing the backgrounds of the pilots he added a dimension of who-they-were to the well-known what-they-did. Rescued from the status of national myth, they became people again. Trying the same with Bomber Boys is harder. Flying bombers had not the same dash: Guy Gibson likened it to driving a bus. And they were many, not a Few: 125,000 passed through Bomber Command. Hardest is the highly contested reputation of the bombing offensive. Once the scale of its devastation and carnage passed the point of comparability with that suffered in England, and then

Juliet Townsend

Starting out on the wrong foot

E. Nesbit once pointed out that, in order to write good books for the young, it is not necessary to enjoy a close relationship with children in adult life. The essential thing is to retain a true and vivid memory of one’s own childhood; not only of events and people, but of feelings and emotions, sounds and smells and all the minutiae of day-to-day life. Jacqueline Wilson, the enormously popular writer and most borrowed author from British libraries, is certainly a case in point. Her childhood covered much the same period as mine, and this account, written for her younger readers, brings back a host of memories. Many of the

Olivia Glazebrook

Wonders never cease

Janet seems to have her life neatly organised. She’s hardworking, she has a nice boyfriend, she lives in a comfortable house and she drives a dark-green Golf. Recently, however, she has been receiving messages from her mind. Seizures (which also occurred in her childhood) will strike without warning and leave her humming with nervous tension — a struck tuning fork. Janet disregards this important signal of an imminent decline; in any case, her attention is diverted by a call from a solicitor. She is told that she has inherited, from her mother, a house beside the sea. Janet is puzzled by this news. She had always believed — had been