Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

The longest day

As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your child goes missing? It sounds a simple formula, and it is. But getting it right is extraordinarily difficult. Saturday 18 December is Nina Landry’s 40th birthday. She and her children — 15- year-old Charlotte and 12-year-old Jackson — are off to Florida for Christmas with Nina’s boyfriend. The Landrys live on Sandling Island off the

Grey Gowrie

Bells to St Wystan

This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch: So obsessive a ritualista pleasant surprisemakes him cross.Without a watchhe would never know whento feel hungry or horny. Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with

Saturday

Charlotte Hobson

A genius for living

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the

Robert Stewart

When tobacco worked wonders

The British empire in North America was not founded in a fit of absence of mind, though it might be said, in its beginnings at least, to have represented the triumph of hope over experience. From the outset, King James I and his chief minister, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, were sceptical. A royal charter was granted to the London Virginia Company in 1606 and a Royal Council appointed to oversee the trans-Atlantic adventure, but the king was interested only in grabbing the lion’s share of the profits that might accrue. Otherwise, as Cecil put it, the colonists were to be left on their own ‘unto the peril which

Eric Weinberger

Funny peculiar and ha-ha

Rumours and published reviews to one side, the new novel by Norman Mailer, called The Castle in the Forest, is not the ‘biography’ of Adolf Hitler or even the story of his youth so much as it is the life of his father Alois Schicklgruber, or Hiedler, finally Hitler. He turns out to be an unusually interesting man, or perhaps a merely ordinary man who, because he is rendered by Mailer’s hand, becomes far more: dangerous, daunting, dutiful (an ever ascendant and honest customs official), sexually rampant and obsessed with bees and bee-keeping. Possibly a product of incest, he continues the family tradition. As the story of a petit-bourgeois, sometime

Cressida Connolly

Sins of the father

Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers — from J. R. Ackerley’s (and the brilliant companion piece by his secret half-sister, Diana Petre) to Lorna Sage’s to Blake Morrison’s — exert a special fascination. A small subdivision of the form are those accounts featuring not only a father who is mad, bad or dangerous to know, but a big house. Of these, the Mitfords’ father is probably the most exasperating and lovable. Last year’s Title Deeds by Lisa Campbell, whose father was Thane of Cawdor, was a notable addition. Miranda Seymour’s is the latest gem. George FitzRoy Seymour was a pedant, a bully and a snob. He wrote unsolicited letters to

William Waldegrave

The tricky world of faction

There is something odd about a roman à clef which has the key attached. Justin Cartwright’s latest novel tells the story of ‘legendary Oxford professor’ Elya Mendel of All Souls and his relationship with German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg, who is hanged in Plotzensee on 26 August 1944 after the failure of the July Plot. In case we miss the clues (Isaiah Berlin’s father was called Mendel; Adam von Trott was hanged on that day and in that prison) there is an afterword saying that the book is based ‘in part’ on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin, and on ‘the ‘repudiation’ of that friendship by Berlin. Others

John Mole

Children at a Daffodil Planting

They dibble the turf with fork and trowel eagerly, eagerly going to it, each whiskery bulb unclutched and buried as we their assistants kneel beside them. Ours is the knowledge, the choice of season, the nurturing landfill, the bedding down, but theirs the trust in a world new-minted, like prospectors for the future’s gold.

Ben Wilson

Policies of masterly inactivity

In December 1743 George Bickham produced a caricature, The Late P-m-r M-n-r showing the face of the recently departed premier contorted into a great monstrous yawn — a yawn seemingly stretched to the limits of human endurance. The caption begins with an adaptation of lines from The Dunciad, which come just after the Empress of Dullness has conferred powers on a prime minister to extend the realm of boredom: ‘More she had said, but yawn’d — All Nature nods:/ What Mortal can resist the Yawns of Gods?’ Waiting for a long-serving prime minister to go is rarely a merry business, and Robert Walpole’s enemies had to suffer 21 years. In

Allan Massie

The double nature of romance

The word ‘romance’ has come down in the world, and the romantic novel is one in which the love-interest predominates. A romance used to be more spirited, a tale of adventure in which the events are striking and come perilously close to being improbable. That scene in my favourite Dumas novel, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, in which d’Artagnan kidnaps General Monck, puts him in a box and transports him across the sea to meet the exiled Charles II and be persuaded to restore him to the throne, is highly improbable but a splendid invention. Dumas is the master of this sort of thing. In Twenty Years After, there is another

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Intensity, not force

Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of us will ever have heard of was a crumpled, driven, disorganised figure, sometimes kindly and sometimes cantankerous — just as one wants one’s batty scientists to be. He conducted long, cheerful conversations with himself. He was prone to turn up to work wearing two ties at once. During the lunch-break at a meeting of the

Ian Thomson

A cure for optimism

Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt in detective fiction today from Scandinavia. The fjords and iron-bound rocks of Norway are part of one’s enjoyment of Karin Fossum, for example, the queen of Norwegian crime, whose thrillers conjure an Ibsenesque atmosphere of shadowy menace. Oddly, for a country which gave us trolls, few mythic cave-dwelling creatures appear in Ibsen’s theatre. (Roald Dahl,

William Skidelsky

Shooting the breeze for free

The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or plays. In addition, the group came up with an ingenious format — the Q&A — whereby authors would have the chance to discuss the process of writing with a knowledgeable and broadly sympathetic interviewer. Undoubtedly, the format’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the Paris Review was cash-strapped. Displaying a financial canniness that is

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels

Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work, her attention is on a complex insurance case involving the Arrow, an elegant addition to the City’s skyline which is developing some unexpected cracks. The opposing team includes a heavily pregnant friend, Cecilia. Then Cecilia is brutally attacked in the studio of her sculptor husband Sam. Her baby is born prematurely as she dies. Sam,

Jeremy Treglown

The dangerous edge of things | 10 February 2007

If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and his editorship of a Penguin series of modern European poetry in translation, made him at least as important to poetry-readers as Kenneth Tynan was to theatre-goers. Latterly, most of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books (where he was one of the founding contributors), but in the

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Virtually a kangaroo court

When Slobodan Milosevic died, more than four years into his trial for war crimes, newspapers around the world said that he had cheated justice. It would have been more accurate to say that he had cheated injustice. Had he lived, the judges would have been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: either to find him not guilty, thus casting a lurid light upon the past activities of their employers, the powers that had brought the tribunal into being in the first place, or to find him guilty and to sentence him to a long prison term on evidence that would not have justified a fine for illegal parking. As John Laughland

Judith Flanders

Beautiful Victorian behemoth

It would take a heart of stone to contemplate St Pancras station and its appended Midland Grand Hotel without laughing, such is the brio, the swagger, the sheer in-your-faceness of its high Victorian Gothic. Yet it has not always been so appreciated. In the 1950s the distinguished architectural historian Sir John Summerson confided to Sir John Betjeman that he found the design both ‘nauseating’ and unworthy of governmental heritage protection (it was listed anyway, in 1967). The building was in its pomp for a relatively short time; its life as a shabby office or a shuttered, gloomy no-go area lasted much longer. From 2007, however, Eurostar will be making its

Jonathan Sumption

For reasons of state

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations, this one requires a fair amount of tendentious selection to support it. Pryce-Jones draws his examples from a wide field. The Dreyfus affair, the exclusion of Jews from the higher reaches of the pre-war diplomatic service, the racial policies of Vichy France, the granting of asylum to the Mufti of Jerusalem and later to Khomeini

D J-Taylor

Things falling apart

Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around

Allan Massie

When the judges got it right

In 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature was for the first time awarded to an English-language writer: Kipling. It wasn’t even then a choice that went down well with those whose opinions counted. ‘The denizens of literary London,’ David Gilmour remarked in The Last Recessional, ‘were aghast that the prize should have gone to Kipling while Swinburne, Meredith and Hardy were still alive. It was a case, said one of them, of neglecting the goldsmiths and exalting the literary blacksmith.’ This was a curious judgment, for, whatever else may be said about Kipling, he was, in the short stories especially, the most careful and cunning craftsman. But by 1907 the