Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Minds boggling in Nebraska

No 007, the hero of Richard Powers’ suspenseful new novel is a cognitive neurologist. The young man who urgently needs help is a mechanic in an abattoir in a small town in Nebraska. It is a welcome relief to read fiction so interestingly unpredictable, humane and educative. Instead of the consumerism, sex and violence of commonplace contemporary entertainment, the drama of The Echo Maker resides in the problem of how to integrate parts of a brain that have accidentally ceased to communicate with each other. Powers makes no concessions to lay readers, but manages to make the significance of psychopharmacological name-dropping perfectly clear in its context. Medical technicalities do not

Michael Carlson

Grace under pressure | 30 December 2006

In Alan Furst’s nine novels, it always seems to be twilight. The second world war is being fought off-stage, or, as in The Foreign Correspondent, approaching with grim inevitability. Furst’s world is one of railway stations filled with steam, dark cafés filled with smoke, lonely hotel rooms filled with apprehension. It is populated by exiles and fixers, journalists and spies, police and politicians, honest, corrupt, or a bit of both. Business is transacted in four languages at once, five if lying counts as a separate tongue. The characters might have wandered in from films, Hollywood noirs shot by German expressionists, French gangster flicks starring Jean Gabin, or black and white Hitchcock.  Furst

Patrick Boyle

An extraordinarily ordinary life

Who is the greatest male film star of all time? Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Hum- phrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Al Pacino are all contenders and each in his time has topped at least one poll. But my vote would go to James Stewart (or the more familiar ‘Jimmy’, as his biographer, Marc Eliot insists on calling him). Compared with other actors whose careers lasted over 30 years, Stewart starred in the largest number of films that were actually good, and, by good, I mean memorable. When Robert Mitchum, who was himself a considerable star, died the some month as Stewart, in 1997, it was hard to recall more than

Victor Sebestyen

The clash of the armoured megalosaurs

‘If ‘justice were done’, writes Norman Davies in this fascinating and infuriating work, ‘all books on the second world war in Europe would devote perhaps three quarters of their contents to the Eastern Front.’ In the real world, of course, the victors dispense the justice and write the history afterwards. So it is gratifying that there is a scholar around with the skill and passion of Norman Davies to change perspectives about the war and shift the centre of gravity eastwards. Here, rather more than 75 per cent of the action takes place in East/Central Europe, where on a body count most of the lives were lost and on a misery index the greatest suffering took place. Davies sees it as

Sheridan Morley

The almost lost art of astonishment

First, the necessary declaration of interest. The author and I were, at the age of five, at nursery school in New York together for a couple of terms. But as in the intervening 60 years I have seen him barely half a dozen times, in crowded rooms, I feel free to say that he is in my view the best drama critic and showbiz profile-writer we have. Partly, I have to add, this is the luck of the draw: at the New Yorker where he now works, he is given a couple of pages a week to expand on a single Broadway first night, and even better, given three or

Byron Rogers

A Grand Tour of wet Wales

Pennant should have been a publishing sensation, yet how many of you have heard of a book of which within weeks of its appearance all but 12 copies were sold? Not only that, its de luxe version in inlaid leather (at £2,750 a copy) had been sold before it even came out. There will, of course, be no second edition of either, for we are not in the world of conventional publishing. We are in the world of fine art publishing, of hand-made paper and limited editions, where men never read upon the po but put on white gloves just to open the covers of a book, which, given its

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Lecter falling flat

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero’s habits. In theory, one ought to be curious how it is that someone ends up thinking it quite entertaining to cut slices off a human brain (for instance) and sauté them at table before sharing the dish with his girlfriend and the still living victim. In practice, one doesn’t give a

Bevis Hillier

Adages and articles

Long ago (so I have forgotten the precise details) I read one of those books by a British soldier who escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in the second world war. He had managed to pinch a German uniform and was making his way across the Fatherland disguised as an Oberleutnant or something. Suddenly he was confronted by a company of the victorious, advancing British troops. How could he instantly convey to them that he was English, and so avoid being shot? He had a brainwave. He shouted out the filthiest English swear-words he could think of. The soldiers lowered their rifles: few Germans would know those words, and the

Christopher Howse

That old Bethlehem story

If you tell people there was no ox or ass in the stable where Jesus was born, they sometimes become quite irate, especially if they are convinced Christians. They believe in the marvellous Christmas story, and to deny the ox and ass seems tantamount to denying the Babe of Bethlehem. Of course, the ox and ass are not in fact mentioned in the Gospels. The artists painted them in, not just because Jesus lay in a manger, but on account of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib.’ Geza Vermes mentions these beasts as examples of extra-evangelical elements, along with

Marcus Berkmann

Who said what and when

‘Those who can, write. Those who can’t, quote.’ Well, I’m sure someone has said it, although I have just looked it up in these two vast, baggy new books of quotations and it’s not there. Truth is, the great English tradition of hurling quotations at other people to show how clever you are seems to have disappeared over the past couple of generations. Instead we have books of quotations; indeed I seem to have rather a lot of them, mainly because I have a tendency to wander into bookshops after a long lunch. Surely no one buys a book of quotations when sober. They are books you want but don’t

Clive James

Status Quo Vadis

As any good poem is always ending,The fence looks best when it first needs mending.Weathered, it hints it will fall to pieces —One day, not yet, but the chance increasesWith each nail rusting and grey plank bending.It’s not a wonder if it never ceases. In beauty’s bloom you can see time burning:A lesson learned while your guts are churning.Her soft, sweet cheek shows the clear blood flowingTowards the day when her looks are goingSolely to prove there is no returningThe way they came. There’s a trade wind blowing. We know all this yet we love forever.Build her a fence and she’ll think you’re clever.Write her a poem that’s just beginningFrom

Alberto Manguel

Swiss master of madness

First, I’d like to put a curse on most editors of ‘Selected Writings’ who, sometimes under the devious word ‘Collected’, serve us cold cuts instead of the whole hog; second, I’d like to congratulate the University of ChicagoPress for allowing us once again to read Friedrich Dürrenmatt in English, thereby restoring to the English-speaking public one of the most important writers of the 20th century. There are certainly authors who deserve or demand a selection, since, like the curate’s egg, they’re excellent only in parts; others, however, should be available in their entirety because each of their writings builds on the rest and no single one affords a full enough

William Waldegrave

The Senior Service to the rescue

There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our successors will see as incomprehensible moral blindness on our part than to be taking easy shots at the morality of two centuries ago. What will look as foul to Britons of 2306 as slavery does to us now? We don’t really want to know, because the answers might well be inconvenient. Abortion? The eating of animals?

Jane Ridley

The straight man and the courtier

Gladstone and Disraeli were the Punch and Judy of Victorian politics, and reams have been published about them, but no one has written a book which centres on their relationship. Richard Aldous has had the clever wheeze of charting their rivalry, retelling the story in what he calls a ‘modern way’ for a generation who know little about the past. Actually, the modern way turns out to be remarkably old-fashioned. This book is a romp. Aldous writes fluent, vivid prose and he excels at scene-setting. It’s all very filmic. The book opens with Gladstone at Hawarden Castle, his country home, receiving the telegram announcing the news of Disraeli’s death. Cut

William Feaver

Lashings of homely detail

Norman Rockwell’s the name. You’ll know it of course. Rockwell the byword. It wasn’t simply the perpetual air of impending Thanks- giving that gave his Saturday Evening Post covers such appeal. Rockwell covers were cover stories really; that was their distinction. Others, John Falter for example or Steve Dohano, delivered similar eyefuls of graphic cheer to the mass readership but never came near him in popularity. They could ape the manner but not the air. Legend has it that, in his heyday, every time the Post ran a Rockwell, they upped the print order by a quarter of a million. Whether this is true hardly matters: print the legend. Every

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed. A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of

Richard Shone

Richard Shone on Leonard Woolf

The large garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex, bounded on one side by the village street, and on the other by gently sloping ground towards the River Ouse, was locally famous for its summer brilliance. In August — the month in which I paid my first visit — when most gardens have a moment of exhaustion, Leonard Woolf had contrived a quilt of dahlias, lilies, purple Jerusalem artichokes, gaillardias and fuchsias in the flowerbeds. A conservatory along the side of the house bristled with cacti. Woolf appeared from a distant corner, secateurs in hand, twine dangling from a jacket pocket, a dog fiercely kept to heel. I had been

Allan Massie

A world of snobs and swindlers

Orwell thought that Mark Twain’s  picture of life on the Mississippi showed ‘how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack’ and so are free to develop their personalities Something similar might be said of the rural England portrayed by R. S. Surtees, even if in his novels household servants, grooms and huntsmen may be in danger of being ‘turned off without a character’. Nevertheless Orwell’s observation that in Twain’s Mississippi stories ‘the State hardly existed’ while ‘the churches were weak and spoke with many voices’ might be applied to Surtees’s England too. Reading Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour again, one is struck by the complete absence of

Saturday

Malcolm Deas

A cold fish in deep water

There are many studies of Tocqueville’s books and writings. The publication of the surviving Oeuvres, papiers et correspondence began in 1951 and still drags on. Yet there have been few biographies. Hugh Brogan, who has edited for the Oeuvres the correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville with the English economist Nassau W. Senior, has now written the most complete life to date. He opens with a coy and whimsical declaration: In recent years, seeing me so preoccupied with Tocqueville, some of my friends took to asking me if I liked him. I found the question difficult to answer, but my considered reply must be that Tocqueville is himself one of my

Robert Stewart

Heads that wore the crown

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with