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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

Thursday

Max Egremont

A nation given a bad name

Thirteen years ago, I was driving with a German friend through the Russian city of Kaliningrad (until 1945 the east Prussian city of Königsberg) when my friend said, ‘There’s the old German army barracks.’ As we stared glumly at the bleak building, darkness settled on me, brought on by three words, each — on its own — innocuous: German, army, barracks. The old clichés rose again: discipline, efficiency, inhumanity, conquest — images, I realised, not of Germany but of Prussia. There is, however, another view: that the austere but enlightened Prussian ethos — that of an impartial civil service, a liberal penal code, an excellent education system — was, under

Robert Macfarlane

A long hike from China

‘To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost,’ writes Colin Thubron at the start of this magnificent book, ‘it flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.’ This pattern is the ‘shadow’ of his title — the marks left on the present by an ancient trade route whose infrastructure has been all but abolished by centuries of war, weather and modernisation. The Silk Road, which ran 7,000 miles from Antioch in Turkey to Xian in China, was the first information superhighway. Along it moved not only people and goods, but also ideas, rumours,

Theo Richmond

When peace is a hawk not a dove

Researching the history of a destroyed Polish shtetl, I met some of its survivors, among them Julius, an assimilated Jew, a fearless horse-rider, who had served in the army. He went home to Konin in 1945, alone and hungry, his sole possession a torn blanket. A council official told him, ‘The Jews wanted the war and deserved to be punished.’ A former neighbour, more sympathetic, presented Julius with a pistol, advising him to leave town. He heeded the warning, as did other returning survivors. Three Jews in a nearby village had just been murdered. Julius’s story could come from the pages of Jan Gross’s Fear, a chilling, deeply researched study

Wednesday

Caroline Moore

Through a glass, darkly

In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world, ostensibly at least for the sake of his art. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín returns to the theme of the deep need for, and painful cost of, emotional withdrawal, this time concentrating upon the maternal bond. All of the short stories in this collection are about separation, which is felt as both necessary and a

Andro Linklater

Angry young man

With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and eventual marriage of two separate existences. Apart from its beautiful writing, what stamps Seminary Boy as a classic story of growing up is the kaleidoscope of perspectives it offers on the mystery of being. The narrative concerns the first 17 years of John Cornwell’s life during the 1940s and 1950s when he was sent to

Saturday

Taki

Disturbing legacy

It’s that time of year again, the last week of August, and people are already jockeying in order to cash in a year from now,  the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death.  Tina Brown, a lady who would dumb down Big Brother, was first out of the blocks, her book promising to reveal unheard-of-before secrets. Incidentally, Tina Brown never met Diana and does not know many people who did, but is nevertheless considered a Diana expert. As far as I’m concerned, the only person outside Di’s family who is qualified to write about her is Rosa Monckton, Dominic Lawson’s wife, who not only was a good friend to the tragic one, she also knew about

Thursday

Bevis Hillier

Making the case for Victoriana

When people use the word ‘journalese’, they always do so pejoratively. They are not thinking of James Cameron, Bernard Levin or Walter Winchell. They mean a style that traffics in clichés. The poet B. I. Isherville has derided that kind of writing: Where every heresy is rankAnd every rank is serried;Where every crook is hatchet-faced,And every hatchet buried. There are cliché headlines, too, and for some reason articles on food seem specially to attract them. Any novice sub-editor thinks he or she is being wildly or Wildely witty in heading a piece on puddings ‘Just desserts’. And was there ever a curry recipe that was not headed ‘Some like it