Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Leanda De-Lisle

The return of the maypole

The return of the king follows a death. As the Lord Protector of the three kingdoms draws his last breath a great storm rises up, blowing down houses, trees and ships at sea. To Charles Fitzroy it is as if the elements themselves were celebrating Oliver Cromwell’s passing. But it was expected that tempests should mark the death of great rulers and in 1658 the violent winds must have appeared less a celebration than a warning of coming bloodshed. There was no more dangerous a time in a nation’s life than the passing of a ruler when the succession was in doubt. Although Cromwell was not a king in name,

Christian House

Fighting naked on the beaches

Few have done more than Noble Frankland to dissipate the myths and propaganda that fog our understanding of modern warfare. After serving as a navigator in Bomber Command during the second world war, Frankland went on to become a historian in the Cabinet Office, Director of the Imperial War Museum and adviser to the Thames Television series The World at War. He has proved to be a consummate pathfinder, leading the public through the murky details of 20th-century hostilities. So it’s surprising to find him suddenly embracing the wild fantasies inherent in fiction. Luckily his keen intellect is still evident in his debut novel The Unseen War, as is an

John Bercow

Women of no importance

The Kite Runner, said to be the first Afghan novel to be written in English, told an epic tale of individuals whose lives were lived across two continents amidst relentless political upheaval. Its author, Khaled Hosseini, stunned the critics with the extraordinary quality of that debut novel which has sold over eight million copies and will shortly be the basis of a film. All too often, the sequel to a fine book can disappoint. A Thousand Splendid Suns does not. The story revolves around two women, Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart, whose lives come to be interwoven. Mariam is the illegitimate child of Nana and Jalil. The latter,

Kate Grimond

A fickle jade

Strix would have been 100 on 31 May. Before he had decided on a screech owl as his nom de plume, he had been Moth, and occasionally Scadavay and Apemantus. He had joined The Spectator in 1931 as a bumptious young man with a first in English from Oxford, where he had also been editor of Isis and president of the OUDS. His name was Peter Fleming and his association with The Spectator lasted for nearly 40 years, though it is as a travel writer that he is now remembered by aficionados. ‘A relaxed and somehow amateurish atmosphere pervaded No. 99 Gower Street in 1931,’ he wrote, ‘and it was

Tuesday

The Spectator

G

When Günter Grass confessed last year that he had been in the Waffen SS it took everyone by surprise. It seemed like a cynically timed admission coming after he had won the Nobel prize for literature and before his autobiography came out. That slightly odd feeling isn’t shaken by this long essay in the New Yorker in which Grass explains how he ended up in the SS and stresses that he never actually fired a shot.

Saturday

The Spectator

Why Gordon will go soft

This review of Gordon Brown’s book on Courage from Blair’s pollster Philip Gould is absolutely fascinating. This is his take on Brown’s chapter on Bobby Kennedy’s career: “its fascination for Brown, is Kennedy’s metamorphosis from “hard” to “soft” courage in the course of his later life, moving from tough-guy enforcer to open, empowering and empathetic politician. Brown sees Kennedy as a prototypical New Labour politician rejecting old left bureaucratic, top-down welfare solutions to poverty in favour of empowerment, the dignity of work and the potential of education. But it is clear Brown also sees Kennedy as a model of how it is possible to be renewed as a person and

Philip Hensher

An unpromising land

The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made out of language, you will enjoy it mostly as a dazzling game with styles and genres. Either way, there’s no denying the high hilarity and wit, in the largest sense, of this exceptional book. Michael Chabon’s conceit is that the state of Israel was briefly founded, but was destroyed almost immediately, chased into the sea

Richard Beeston

The voice of moderation

Abu Suleiman looks back on his time in al-Qaeda as a reformed drug addict in Britain might consider his past life as a junkie. Speaking English, learnt from his American jailers at Guantanamo Bay, the young Saudi is now a respectable member of society and has a wife and a job as a stock market analyst in Riyadh to prove it. Like other Muslim men recruited by militant Islam to the cause of jihad, he knows that he is lucky to be alive, and fortunate to be given a second chance. Most others who made the trek to join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan or his associates in Iraq have

Pd James

Fearless freedom fighter

Sara Paretsky is one of the most respected and influential crime novelists of today, and this poignant and compelling personal testimony explains both the influences which made her a writer and the kind of writer she became. She was born in 1947 in Ames, Iowa, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the only daughter in a Jewish family of five children. It was a world in which white Republican Protestants were the decision-makers, any questioning of their social mores provoking an aggressive reaction. Both parents were well educated and highly intelligent, both actively worked for social justice, but paradoxically kept their only daughter in emotional and educational subjection. From the

Francis King

Deep, dark truths revealed

A few nights ago I was at a dinner party at which all those present knew each other far better than I knew them. For what seemed an interminable time their sole topic of conversation was the tempestuous relationship of a couple of whom I had never even heard. The story, in as far as I could piece it together, was fascinating; but with its oblique references to long-past events and to people merely indicated by their first names, it also exasperated me. I had the same experience during my reading of this novel. When we meet one of the two main characters, Lewis, he is looking down on a

Noble Frankland

Last but not least

Of six million Russian soldiers captured by the Germans, only one million are still alive in 1945, two million German women raped by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, countless millions of Jews and others done to death in German concentration camps, 12 million displaced persons wandering about in Germany at the end of the war not knowing where to go. Such are a few of the statistics of Hitler’s legacy inherited by Europe in May 1945. These figures perhaps have become familiar, but how often do those to whom they have become familiar pause to consider what they really mean? Huge figures such as these have

Matthew Dennison

Uncomfortable home truths

In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and their four ill-assorted children: an emotional, intellectual, motherly leviathan. Her standards are exactingly high — ‘For Claudia, good enough has never been good enough’ — but the veneer of family perfection Rabbi Rubin takes pride in sharing with the outside world is built on shaky foundations. The obligations and responsibilities of love have ousted simple

Lee Langley

A romantic looks back

The unending journey of this book takes Mark Tully from slums to skyscrapers as he explores the past, present and future not only of the subcontinent but of society, both eastern and western; how democracy is facing up to fundamentalism — Hindu, Muslim and an atheism he scathingly labels ‘aggressive secularism’. The Dawkins camp would not be welcome in his compound. There was a time when Tully was the most famous Englishman in India — ‘What does Tully Sahib say?’ the man on the village charpoy would ask when political or economic upheaval loomed. Tully’s mellifluous voice filled the airwaves for the 22 years he ran the BBC’s New Delhi

Joanna Pitman

A paradise for bookworms

Imagine coming across a book that has lain untouched for 100 years, and making an unexpected historical discovery. Ed Maggs, an antiquarian bookseller, had just such a thrill recently. ‘I was reading the epistolary diaries of a rather eccentric Victorian called Cuthbert Bede. I became strangely fixated by the story of this man who was obsessed by an unnamed woman. He fell into a state of schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum called Munster House in Fulham. But as I was reading, I was wondering who this woman could have been — and wouldn’t it be fascinating if it turned out to be Alice Liddell? In the end it

Allan Massie

Ordering the steps of the Dance . . .

Writing a novel is a voyage into unknown territory. (Reading one is also, of course.) The author explores possibilities. To some extent even those novels which seem far removed from autobiography represent the author’s imaginary, or alternative, life, characters owing more in the last resort to him than to any identifiable models. He is a puppet-master, ordering the steps of the dance. Nevertheless he is likely, in the writing, often to be taken by surprise. ‘How do I know what I mean till I see what I’ve said?’  What to the reader seems right, even inevitable, might have taken a different course. The truth of this is well illustrated by  the

Friday

The Spectator

Reading Wagner

I’ve been having a Wagnerian time of it lately, organizing a festival of events to coincide with the Royal Opera’s performances of the Ring cycle in October. On Wednesday I was deep in the Nibelheim-like bowels of the Royal Opera House, recording extracts from Wagner’s letters with Simon Callow. He read with the most spine-tingling concentration and a vivid fluency that made me unnervingly feel as if I was sitting next to the composer himself. Wagner was undeniably a monster but the energy and passion of the man was astounding. One minute he’s writing exaltedly to Franz Liszt – ‘I now consider my powers to be immeasurable: everything seethes within

Saturday

Philip French

An affair to remember

New movie festivals spring up every year and pictures can achieve fame and reach large, if not especially lucrative, audiences by playing on the worldwide festival circuit without ever getting into normal commercial cinemas. But pace John Huston, who over half a century ago described Edinburgh as ‘the only film festival worth a damn’ (a tribute the organisers repeat annually), there are still only three that truly matter, and all began with political motivations. Mussolini launched the world’s first film festival in Venice in 1932 to advertise his Fascist regime. Six years later, when Nazi Germany joined in to make Venice an Axis occasion, France, Britain and the United States

Jane Ridley

When friends fall out

Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before. The detail is too much, and the potted narrative of forgotten political manoeuvring tends to overwhelm the life. One way out of this dilemma is to write about relationships. Friendship in politics is the hidden key to the top — can you think of an anorak who made it as prime minister? Even the nerdish ones had friends — the younger Pitt had Wilberforce, Bonar Law had Beaverbrook; but once our hero climbs to the top of the greasy

Michael Glover

Haunted by the past

This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but, ultimately, they remain yawningly apart from, and on occasions almost entirely invisible to, each other. What is more, these looming elements of the fantastical never become sufficiently realised, or even sufficiently comprehensible, for the reader to be able to weigh — or even properly to register — their emotional impact upon each other. Here is

Pj Kavanagh

Richness in diversity

I seem to have missed the name David Crystal. He is clearly a phonetician, expert in linguistics, but the blurb tells us little about him except that he appears on television. He comes across as a genial cove. In one of his many digressions on the subject of words — this book is composed of them — he tells us of the arrival of that very word ‘blurb’. ‘Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.’ In 1907, in New York, an author didn’t like his book-jacket, he wanted it more appealingly lurid. So he ‘sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets and labelled her “Miss