Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

9 Dec 2006

The subtle art of suggestion

Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it. Three brothers, though long since transplanted to metropolitan settings, are still emotionally connected to the seaside hamlet in which, as fatherless children, an uncle

Ian Sansom

Will Count Olaf prevail?

This, in my experience, has been completely unprecedented, and I doubt will ever happen again: three members of the same family reading the same book at the same time. We had to read the book in shifts: it was like waiting on the docks to hear the plight of Little Nell, or gathering together to read samizdat in the former Soviet Union. Even more extraordinary, having read this book I voluntarily went back and read all of the others in the series. Thirteen books by the same author: I’ve read more Lemony Snickets than I’ve read Iris Murdochs. For the uninitiated, among whom I proudly counted myself until the past

Ian Thomson

Hell and its afterlife

In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ he marvelled. No doubt the inmates were supposed to be edified by Dante’s medieval epic of sin and salvation: ghastly retribution is meted out to sinners in the nine circles of Hell. However, if Dante speaks to our present condition, it is not because we fear damnation, but because he wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation. (A more recent sinner, Jeffery Archer, subtitled the three volumes of his prison

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 9 December 2006

December, as far as children’s books are concerned, is the month of the hardback. For the rest of the year the young are fobbed off with soft covers, but the Christmas present book can be an altogether more substantial and permanent friend. This is true of picture books for the very young. Dimity Dumpty by Bob Graham (Walker Books, £10.99) is the story of Humpty Dumpty’s shy little sister, who saves his life when all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have failed, by taking off her T-shirt and bandaging what is delicately called ‘Humpty’s leakage’. The illustrations of the family’s life in the circus as ‘The Tumbling

The Spectator

A selection of recent paperbacks | 9 December 2006

Fiction:Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Penguin, £7.99)The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog by Doris Lessing (Harper Perennial, £7.99)The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill, Vintage, £6.99Making It Up by Penelope Lively (Penguin, £7.99)The Children of Men by P .D. James (Faber, £6.99)Bordeaux Housewives by Daisy Waugh (Harper, £6.99)Four Stories by Alan Bennett (London Review of Books, £7.99)Songs on Bronze: Greek Myths Retold by Nigel Spivey (Faber, £8.99) Non-fiction:Have I Got Views for You by Boris Johnson (Harper Perennial, £7.99)Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare by Clare Asquith (Public Affairs, £9.99)1599: A Year in the Life

Paul Binding

The importance of being Henrik

The celebrations and theatre- productions for this centenary year of Ibsen’s death certainly attest to the continuing vitality of his work. At August’s Ibsen conference in Oslo I heard delegates from China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, Mexico speak both of the plays’ intrinsic fascinations and of their relevance to specific contemporary societies. Likewise scholars and critics of many orientations showed what satisfying harvests, say, Ghosts or The Wild Duck yield when looked at from this or that perspective. What we have lacked, however, has been a full-scale English-language study of the relationship of this impressive oeuvre to the western culture of which it provably is so firm and illustrious a part.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 9 December 2006

Santa’s Twin (1996) by Dean Koontz Dean Koontz is the author of the schlock-horror novel Demon Seed (later a film) about a woman who is raped by a computer. Further offerings include Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place, Intensity, Fear Nothing, and False Memory. His talents, however, don’t end there. His publishers explain: ‘At the request of his fans, bestselling novelist Dean Koontz has created a contemporary masterpiece that is destined to take its place alongside “The Night before Christmas” and A Christmas Carol as a perennial Yuletide favourite. Santa’s Twin is the hilarious and heartwarming story of two little girls, Charlotte and Emily, who set out to save Santa from

Saturday

2 Dec 2006

Anne Chisholm

A very honourable rebel

In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to answer a list of questions put to her by a journalist. ‘Yes, still consider myself a communist!’ she wrote, adding, ‘So do the undertakers, I’m sure.’ At the time, she was working on a revised edition of her great work, the 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death, which exposed and mocked the grotesque practices of the funeral business; outraged undertakers had indeed tried to discredit her as a card-carrying red. She was still working on the new edition when

Bevis Hillier

Royal gaffes, writers’ mottoes and mating bug

In the 1960s I lived in Hampstead, though all these years I have managed not to write a novel about Hampstead dinner-parties. The area was, and still is, rich in second-hand bookshops. There was one bookseller, long since dead, whose shop I used to visit, not to buy books, but to listen to his talk. Let us call him Turner Paige. He never stopped talking to his customers, in an interminable, E. L. Wisty-like drone, and every sentence was a priceless platitude. I used to stand in front of the shelves, pretending to browse, but inwardly gurgling with laughter as one clunking truism followed another. This was the sort of

Tony Gould

Megalopolis and micro-organism

The story of Dr John Snow’s investigations into the causes of the cholera epidemics in mid-Victorian London has been written up several times, most recently in a book by Sandra Hempel which I reviewed in these pages six months ago. So do we need yet another account of them? Perhaps not, except that Steven Johnson approaches them from an unusually interesting angle: his book is less concerned with medical history than with urban history and, in particular, the rise of mega- cities. ‘We are now, as a species,’ he claims, ‘dependent on dense urban living as a survival strategy.’ If you’re wondering what relevance Snow’s discovery, dismissed and mocked as

Byron Rogers

Partners on thin ice

My one contact with Conrad Black was an exchange of letters following his review in the Daily Telegraph of a book about the 1798 Irish rising. In this he had described the French landing as their most successful military intervention in Britain since Hastings. Helpfully I wrote to remind him of their landing in 1216, when King John’s England was within a whisker of becoming a French province. For the man had, after all, described himself as ‘historian’ on his first marriage certificate. His reply was brief and dismissive. The French army, he wrote, had just sort of wandered about. Well, in a sense they had, but only in the

Peter Porter

Because We Can

This sensationWe say is the nationActing its destiny.How like is itTo the smaller act which here we see,The incomplete Devil paying a visit? We know it is our Fate to lack power —Is this our excuseThat we are very smallAmong demagogues whose job is to chooseThe Few’s good or the Good of All? Perhaps at homeThought might roamIn rhyme’s paradigmFrom native spiteIn bed or drawing room to Real TimeDownloaded to us day and night. Should then we askTo whom the task?There have been, we know,Unflinching soulsWho’ve travelled far as thought can go:Why is the world dying between the Poles? Nobody today,At least down our way,Slaves in minesOr starves or freezes,Yet each Old Baron in his Saturnines,In

Mary Keen

A choice of gardening books

Aspiration. Aspiration. Aspir- ation is still the watchword for publishers of gardening books. How many heavy, glossy productions filled with Get-the- Look pictures does the average gardener need? Especially when what is always peddled and praised tends to emphasise the haute couture of horticulture. There is a fashionable tendency to over-intellectualise about design. This is not what gardening is about. If you want more of this argument log onto www.thehadspenparabola.com, a website for the competition to redesign the walled garden at Hadspen, where there is some good online reading to be had. Victoria Glendinning is down-to-earth: ‘This is all gardens-in-the-head, not about real gardens and still less about making a

Matthew Dennison

Liking to be beside the seaside

This is the second time The Fortnight in September has been reviewed in The Spectator. On its first appearance, my predecessor applauded ‘more simple human goodness and understanding … than in anything I have read for years’. The year was 1931. Three-quarters of a century has passed, and what to that earlier reviewer was a study in contemporary ordinariness has become a period piece. But the passage of time and the disappearance of the novel’s mise-en-scène — the interwar world of seaside boarding houses — have not altered its impact. My own verdict and that published in these pages 75 years ago overlap entirely. Mr and Mrs Stevens have three

Nicolas Barker

A mixed bag of memories

In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and in the process transformed the way old books were bought and sold (a fact unnoticed here). It became the custom for some celebrity (or what passed for one) formally to open the fair. One year it fell to my turn. I had noticed that all previous openers had always said, sententiously, how much they owed

David Ekserdjian

Christmas art books | 2 December 2006

The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is a spectacular case in point, which not only contains numerous gorgeous photographs of the paintings and carvings within them, but also some remarkable six-page fold-outs. Hawass is above all concerned with the subject-matter and meaning of these decorations, which were based upon such texts as the Book of the Dead, and proves to

Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France

The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he served on the wrong, i.e. German side. Notable for his sane and reasonable tone of voice the narrator divulges, without much compunction, that he is a former Nazi, an SS officer who was present in all the main theatres of war, initially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, and latterly in a devastated Berlin. He is

Allan Massie

Roth marches on

Writing here (18 November), Anita Brookner described Joseph Roth’s reports from France 1925-39, The White Cities, as ‘her best read of the year’. I’ve had a copy for several months now, and I keep dipping into it and always finding something new, surprising and delightful. The rediscovery of Roth has been one of the happiest things in recent years; it owes much to the devotion and excellence of his translator, Michael Hofmann, and of course to the support given by his publisher, Granta. Roth is probably best known for The Radetzky March, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century fiction. None of his other books may match that; why should they?

Saturday

25 Nov 2006

The Spectator

Christmas Books 2

Anthony Daniels J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £17.99) is a dyspeptic vision of a dystopian Britain that has already half-arrived. He is a close observer of our national malaise: indiscriminate consumerism combined with a sense of entitlement, and therefore of resentment. His profound understanding of the place of the teddy bear in our national life made me laugh. Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (Granta, £20) is a brilliant, subtle and very moving exploration of the ironies of modernisation and nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Greek Moslems were deemed Turks, and Turkish Orthodox deemed Greek, and expelled from their ancestral homes accordingly.

Bevis Hillier

He told it like it was

Cardinal Newman and James Lees-Milne had these things in common: both were Roman Catholic converts; both were predominantly homosexual; each wrote about himself with brilliance; and both wrote lousy novels. Osbert Sitwell shared three of these attributes, but was not a Catholic convert and teased his boyfriend David Horner for becoming one. Some will think it heretical, but I am tempted to add to the list of great self- portraitists who wrote indifferent novels, Compton Mackenzie, Anthony Powell and John Fowles. I recently reread Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913-14), wondering whether it could be adapted as a Merchant-Ivory type of film. It has fine passages of prose; but the whole thing