Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Jizz, blood and power

Had this excellent little book been available to American policy makers in 2002, say, it might have provided a usefully sobering corrective to the exuberance of the neocons. They wanted to rebuild the Middle East in their own image. Mark Allen would have judged that mission hubristic, inappropriate and, one suspects, doomed to failure. Ignorance of the Arab world, he laments, remains a striking feature in the West. ‘The number of outsiders who have a working knowledge of Arabic and a personal depth of experience of the region is tiny in comparison with its present significance to our own well-being.’ Five years after the Middle East crashed into our consciousness,

Harriet Waugh

Heroines and horrors

It is possible that my interest in this book was heightened by the fact that, in as much as I am anything, I am an aunt. I have 14 nephews and nieces, a step-nephew and -niece and 20 great-nephews and -nieces — as well as two stepchildren who I feel very aunt-like towards. A few years ago, one of my nieces was paid by the Sunday Telegraph to write about travelling somewhere with an aunt (shades of Graham Greene), and off we went for a day and a night to the Ritz in Madrid with a photographer and had a whale of a time. But I am not sure whether

William Feaver

A tasteless ham from Parma

Girolamo Francesco Mazzola was born in Parma (hence the tag ‘Il Parmigianino’), and died in 1540 aged 37. At some point he dropped the ‘Girolamo’, maybe round about when he painted ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a startling little picture in which the smoothy-chops young artist demonstrates a mastery of optical distortion, his face polished, his non-painting hand thrust towards the viewer like a fish foregrounded on a slab. Parmigianino attracts attention for two or three reasons. There’s the oddity: such furtive or chill characters, each portrait a study in black-eyed wariness or Parmesan complacency. Then there’s the homoerotic aspect: he drew male couplings, presumably for private amusement or circulation,

Anthony Daniels

The case for the defence | 4 November 2006

Hubris is followed by nemesis, and the idea that the English-speaking peoples (that is, those who speak English as their native language) exert an economic, political, moral and cultural hegemony in the world strikes me as distinctly hubristic. Whether it is true, or if true desirable, is another question. Andrew Roberts’ history is rather old-fashioned, and none the worse for that, in that it is mainly a narrative of political and military events: a tale of kings (or presidents and prime ministers) and wars. Social, intellectual, cultural and economic history are included only insofar as they impact upon high politics and the balance of power. It is Roberts’ thesis that

Hugh Massingberd

The master of mistakes

In more than half a century of television viewing nothing has haunted me so much as what was transmitted on the evening of 15 April 1984. ‘Thanks, love,’ said Tommy Cooper, in mid-turn, to the dancer who had fastened his cloak. Then he clutched his chest and, as if in slow motion, collapsed on to the stage; the famous fez remained on his craggy head, a little awry. Cutting through the raucous laughter of the audience, who were under the impression that this was all part of the act, came the terrible sound, magnified by his radio microphone, of the great comedian’s last gasps of breath. The curtain fell and

Anita Brookner

This side of the truth

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own

Ian Thomson

Going back to the books

With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. Sherry set to work in 1976, digging for information like a locker-room snoop. His first, 700-page volume up to 1939 scrutinised Greene’s every depression, love affair and alcoholic spree. ‘Oh why does Sherry waste so much time talking about me?’ Greene grumbled, though secretly, perhaps, he was amused by Sherry’s dedication to the task. He may even have enjoyed the vinous

Allan Massie

What price George Meredith?

Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy (‘little Tommy Hardy’, as Henry James unkindly and not very sensibly called him) has survived rather well. His novels are regularly set for A-level and several have been filmed. His poetry too has lasted. What G. M. Young called its ‘ancient music . . . this gnarled and wintry phrasing’ endures, influencing, for instance, Philip Larkin. And what of his contemporary rival poet-novelist, with whom his name was coupled, and

Saturday

Peter Porter

Learning to weep in a museum

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence

Judith Flanders

The bad old East End

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then: they were exactly the same. Mass murder has not disappeared; nor has the sale of women and children for sex; nor has robbery, nor street crime, nor mindless violence. The East End of London is O’Neill’s real focus, and she writes of it with the passion and understanding of an insider. She was born there,

Johnny Grimond

Uncle Sam on the couch

According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes America tick. This book is his attempt to enlighten them. ‘How can America’s intellectual and technological sophistication be reconciled with primitive attitudes on gun law and capital punishment?’ asks Walden. ‘How can its creed of self-seeking be combined with its religiosity? And how can its culture be at once infantile and highly mature?’ Why, in

Rupert Christiansen

A good man among ambiguities

The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his expert knowledge of the Far East to subtle use. George Orwell became a colleague and friend — both of them liberal leftists, albeit of profoundly different literary bents. At the BBC, Empson encountered the Amazonian figure of Hetta Crouse, a splendidly forthright and fearless South African sculptor, whom Haffenden aptly describes as a ‘seminal hippie’.

Digby Durrant

Going under and coming up

It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good man unjustly struck down by fate after cracking the rib of a Very Guilty Suspect during a routine inquiry, he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage leaving him barely able to walk or speak. Even when a white man throws himself out of a hotel window and lands in front of his wheelchair he’s silent and only feels

Michael Carlson

How many deaths?

‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook.  Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among the very best suspense novels of the past two decades.  The Murmur of Stones is typical of Cook at his best. Its small-town setting is gently New England, a timeless stage that is the present but could just as easily be 50 years ago. It’s more the New England of John Cheever than Stephen King or

Olivia Glazebrook

Going round the bend in a bunch

If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway — after all, that would be a bit vindictive, wouldn’t it? I mean, what’s more likely to give an actress a nervous breakdown than the success of a close personal friend? Well, Cissie O’Brien is a comedienne (ghastly, unfunny word), so perhaps she does it as a joke: she whisks her depressed actress friend, Maggie Salt,

Interconnect

A stay of execution

Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the interaction of organisms in the world. Trees are as much the actors as any woodsman, forester or conservationist. And where the idea of the environment is essentially simple — how does man either destroy or preserve what surrounds him — the idea of ecology is essentially complicated and even incomprehensible. Every detail counts, every relationship,

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 28 October 2006

Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989) by Jimmy Stewart The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be Auden. But Jimmy Stewart and His Poems by Jimmy Stewart is perfect, managing to suggest that Jimmy Stewart realises that writing poetry is a highly eccentric activity, but that he knows he’s a bit of an oddball in a loveable, self-effacing, gangling sort of a way, and so he thought he’d have a stab at

Ian Garrick-Mason

Making it up as we go

For the scales at which we live — the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles we drive, the sports we play — classical physics is a useful, highly accurate and reassuringly comprehensible system. But at scales we never personally encounter, at immense velocities, infinitesimal sizes or cosmic distances, things are not so simple. In these worlds, time passes more slowly or quickly depending on one’s own speed, light beams travel on bendy paths through a universe of dented spacetime and electrons are not distinct particles but rather probabilistic clouds which collapse into specific measurements only when we observe them. The novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is fascinated by such worlds. Copenhagen,

Matthew Dancona

A chill Cabinet

In a taped diary entry for April 2003, David Blunkett describes a terrible dream: ‘a dream that had all the undertones of being on the outside, of being alienated, of being given the cold shoulder, of being friendless and leaning on a stick, having fallen out with Tony Blair and then having challenged him in the middle of a speech in the Commons and humiliating him by raising something that left him floundering.’ Well, you don’t have to be Freud to analyse that particular nightmare. This is an important book, though not for the reasons many anticipated. On the subject of his private life, and the personal background to his

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Getting to know the General

It is a tribute to Pervez Musharraf’s powers of persuasion that after reading this book you’re not entirely sure which country he rules. Is it Pakistan or Fantasististan? The rational choice is Pakistan, but the country he describes belongs to another world altogether. Women are empowered, the madrassahs are being curbed, democracy is waxing, terrorism is waning, investment is up, poverty down, the economy is booming, it’s all marvellous. How on earth did Pakistan get by before the general came along? A quick corrective to this self-congratulatory tome is not difficult to find. Human Rights Watch, for example, says that in Azad Kashmir ‘the Pakistani government represses democratic freedoms, muzzles