Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Rupert Christiansen

Departing wisely from the text

This enthralling and important book offers vital reading for anyone with a serious interest in opera. Its author Philip Gossett describes himself as ‘a fan, a musician and a scholar’; more specifically, he works from a base at the University of Chicago as one of the foremost authorities on the period broadly circumscribed by Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (1859), supervising the ongoing complete editions of those two composers and counselling singers and conductors on productions and recordings. This volume is the summation of his life’s work. Written with unfailing clarity and waspish wit, it charts the musical problems, both theoretical and practical, presented by the

Diarmaid Macculloch

Church and Chapel

I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided by the great contraries of Church and Chapel. I was the parson’s son: on Sundays I sat in the Rectory pew in the chancel of our parish church, staring at the monument to one of my father’s predecessors, the Regency baronet who had turned a Tudor farmhouse into an elegant parsonage (rather faded in splendour

Philip Ziegler

Not so duplicitous as painted

Narendra Singh Sarila has a theory. Because he is a man of high intelligence and has researched diligently into the sources, his theory must be treated with respect. As one of India’s most senior ambassadors he is well qualified to assess the limitations of state papers and to distinguish between what politicians say and what they really mean. He is moderate in his judgments and, for the most part, fair in his treatment of individuals. The only pity is that he is almost entirely wrong. His thesis, as is made clear by the title of his book, is that the British attitude towards the independence of the Indian subcontinent was

Peter Porter

Leafing through the Latin Dictionary

fuga, fugas — music now, not backat school where Harry Roberts flashed his gown,a toga to berate a class as slackas Rome became; we’d been meant to be English Augustans, but were soon brought downto being worthy only of a fewemotive Saxon nouns and verbs: the sea had brought our Fathers to a sanded shore,packed tight with iron sermons on The Poor —but still the dictionary had work to do:peregrinus, wanderers in needof some Virgilian outcome — might this bookhave shown how Europe’s words could safely bleedon strands Aeneas left to Captain Cook? oppidanus — not from Rome, but notfrom Eton either: if from anywherewe hailed from pissed-on concrete and

Simon Baker

Brooklands goes ballistic

An oddity about J.G. Ballard is that his unquestionable truths about English society are often encased within deliberately, and stupendously, implausible plots; his trick is to conjure reality from the deeply unrealistic. Kingdom Come, his latest novel, demonstrates that he is still, in his eighth decade, as outré as ever, and still as keen to understand the national psyche. It begins, conventionally enough, with its narrator, Richard Pearson, describing outer London suburbia, a place where every resident… was constantly trading the contents of house and home, replacing the same cars and cameras, the same ceramic hobs and fitted bathrooms. Nothing was being swapped for nothing. Behind this frantic turnover, a

William Brett

The peacock and the belly-dancer

Although Barry Unsworth’s latest novel might in some sense be about the relationship between Islam and Christianity, other less trendy themes are much more effectively addressed. Besides, The Ruby in Her Navel is told by a fictional character so convincing in his strengths and weaknesses that all considerations of politics, religion, history and morality are subordinate to his enormous and realistic charm. So the reader would do well not to graft modern political notions on to this beautifully constructed historical romance, and instead enjoy it for the simple elegance of its story. The narrator, Thurstan Beauchamp, is a young Norman working at the court of the tolerant 12th-century King of

Allan Massie

The original Dylan

The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter read, in his own words, ‘indiscriminatingly and all the time, with my eyes hanging out on stalks’. Doesn’t sound like a dyslexic child to me, though doubtless the experts know better. Also in the news recently was the announcement of a Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £50,000 to the winner. Considering that having failed to file

John Casey

A hunt for origins

No modern country wishes to understand itself through its remote past more ardently than does Korea. Nineteenth- century Korean nationalists were anxious to trace their state back to a mythical semi-divine hero, Tan’gun, who founded Korea in the third millennium BC. (Koreans will probably be irritated if it is suggested that this resembles Japanese eagerness to trace their imperial family back to an Emperor Jimmu, about 2,500 years ago.) The communists enthusiastically join this hunt for origins. When the ‘Great Leader’, the late Kim Il Sung, dictator of North Korea, wanted to propose a federation of the North with the South, he suggested that the name for the united country

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Beauty, chastity and unruly times

It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic. This book takes them, jointly and severally,

Byron Rogers

Haunted by hunting

This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling. Of his father, a third-generation brewer and a colonel in the TA (a rank he used in private life), he says: ‘every time my dad said “Surrey” he made a tsk noise, because he’d once met someone from Esher who wore a Gannex coat like Mr Wilson’. In other words, Motion Senior was a hair-raising snob. The county of

Allan Mallinson

Lost at sea

Roy Adkins, an archaeologist, wrote a book for the Trafalgar bicentenary called Trafalgar: The Biography of a Battle. Despite the curiously pretentious title and a jumbled content, this reviewer described it in these pages as ‘eclectic but engaging’: Trafalgar was, after all, a straightforward battle, and the author had quoted a large number of apt first-hand accounts. In this follow-up, the authors (Adkins’s wife is co-writer) have considerably spread their canvas. They have done so most perilously. It is difficult to make oneself struggle through 500 pages which begin with ‘In 1789 the monarchs and aristocracies of Europe were shocked by the Revolution in France’, and then a few lines

Zenga Longmore

How to succeed as a failure

‘Why do your tales of degradation and humiliation make you so popular?’ a fellow drinker at Moe’s Bar asks Homer Simpson. Homer replies, ‘I dunno, they just do.’ The toper would have been wiser to have addressed the question to Toby Young. No writer in Christendom has made a greater success out of failure. Young’s massive bestseller, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, charted his thunderous flop as a journalist in New York. How we applauded his defeat. While reading The Sound of No Hands Clapping we cheer ever more heartily as we follow Toby’s path through Hollywood, a path strewn with nettles from the Devil’s own Satanic garden.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A hoot and a treasure

This is a wonderful book — lucid, funny, sharp, truthful, cheeky, generous, erudite, surprise-crammed, and emanating a delicious tang of sophisticated amusement. I would love to continue in this vein but I’m afraid I mustn’t. It’s just not right. You see, the book is a collection of literary columns written by Nick Hornby for an American magazine. Each month he reflects on whatever he happens to have been reading, and the editor has given him absolute freedom to clodhop where he will across the sods of literature provided he utters no word against any author. The editor means it. When Hornby badmouths some writer by accident he gets sin-binned for

Cressida Connolly

A visit to sit-com country

Mark Haddon’s previous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was a bestseller and that golden egg of publishing, a ‘crossover’ book: one which, like Harry Potter, was read by both children and adults. It told the story of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism), employing the flat, affectless language that such a child might use. The plot, such as it was, involved the boy in nothing more dramatic than catching a train from Swindon to London; nevertheless, it was as gripping as any picaresque novel. It was an audacious and utterly original book. After the giddy joy of opening his bank statements,

Judith Flanders

The Boogie and Ginnie double act

Relationships between mothers and daughters are sometimes harmonious, often troubled, and always contradictory. Daughters want to break away, be independent, yet have the approval and advice of their mothers; their mothers, in turn, want to protect and defend their daughters, while willing them to stand on their own feet. This push-me-pull-you dynamic frequently remains unresolved. Virginia Reynolds (nicknamed Boogie) was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1883, the daughter of former slave-holders and transplanted New Englanders (she was, proudly, a second cousin once-removed of Emily Dickinson). Her daughter, also Virginia (Ginnie), was born in 1908, and was given a cosmopolitan education that included a period in Biarritz and tuition in New

Andrew Lambirth

A remarkably broad canvas

First published in 1991, and reissued now in paperback by popular demand, this enchanting book chronicles the life and work of one of our finest realist painters. John Ward (born 1917) looks back on his life in a short but poignant memoir, describing his early years in Hereford where his father kept an antiques shop, and specialised in cleaning and restoring pictures. The family of seven lived above the shop, never particularly well off, but taking great delight in life, especially in such treats as boating on the River Wye. The young Ward was encouraged in his predilection for drawing and studied first at Hereford School of Arts and Crafts,

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 16 September 2006

The Horror Horn (1974) by E.F. Benson‘Are you ready for the ultimate in sheer horror?’ asks the back cover of this 1970s paperback. ‘Here are stories from the darker reaches of the mind, stories which will cling like mould in your memory because there is something horribly real and convincing about them.’ Well, of course there is. They were written by the author of the Mapp and Lucia books, who always aimed to be horribly real and convincing. E.F. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a prolific author who, in between writing his classic high-camp stories of life in Tilling, knocked out a few ghost tales which

William Brett

Spies in Oxford

Spy fiction, or ‘spy-fi’, has its specialist practitioners, but big literary names have also turned to the genre for their own varied purposes. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American springs to mind, as does Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, a fictionalised study of the CIA. But where these two literary spy thrillers struggle to shed the suspicion of political motivation, William Boyd’s Restless instead does what all his novels do. It informs us a little about what humans are like. In the sweltering English summer of 1976, Sally Gilmartin gives her daughter a manuscript describing her secret past life as Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée and British spy during the first few

Andrew Taylor

Father Christmas is dead

The Silence of the Grave, Indridason’s previous novel, won the three international crime-writing awards, including Britain’s Gold Dagger. It featured his Icelandic series detective, the lugubrious policeman Erlendur, who returns in Voices to investigate the murder of a doorman at one of Reykjavik’s smartest hotels. It’s just before Christmas, and the hotel management is less than co-operative for fear of scandal. The doorman, who was about to appear at a children’s party, was found stabbed in his Santa Claus outfit with his trousers around his ankles and a condom drooping from his penis. At first sight, then, the murder looks as if it might be the consequence of a sexual

Pj Kavanagh

Ode to the A202

A personal note, but relevant: I first picked up this large book at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and began to dip into it, a preliminary reconnaissance. I had an appointment at six with an impatient man, the sort who leaves if you are ten minutes late. When I next looked at my watch, the time was five past six. That is hardly a review, but surely an involuntary recommendation. The first attraction is small poems that begin intriguingly: If we are still together, it is becauseOf the need to weed the garden. You wonder what he means and he tells you, in a further nine lines (‘Eleven-thirty’). Brownjohn