Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Noble Frankland

Finding the tools to finish the job

This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood, it must all the same now be enrolled by any serious student of the second world war as belonging to the list of indispensable sources available. Adam Tooze’s formidable intellect and impressive industry certainly entitle it to that. History may be regarded as a rope consisting of many strands of different strengths and sizes but

Christopher Woodward

A question of all hanging together

The Royal Academy has had the brilliant and brave idea of asking James Fenton to write its history. Fenton is not only a great poet, but also one of Britain’s most interesting writers on art. In his first collection Terminal Moraine (1972) he published a beautiful poem on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and I find that I have carried with me from one museum job to another cuttings of his articles from the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. He begins with Zoffany’s group portrait of the 36 artists who founded the Academy in 1768 in order to exhibit contemporary art and to teach young artists

William Brett

The diary maid

With her poetry collection The World’s Wife (1999), Carol Ann Duffy provided a voice for the women that have been silenced in the course of history. Jane Harris has done something similar with The Observations, a bawdy tale narrated by Bessy Buckley, a (too) young Irish prostitute turned serving maid. Set somewhere dank and dour in Scotland in the middle of the 19th century, this rambunctious story revolves around Bessy’s relationship with her mistress, Arabella Weir, who is writing a treatise on the domestic class. The Observations bears all the hallmarks of a Gothic novel — locked boxes, sordid pasts, mistaken identities, ruined reputations. But it is made unique by

Wednesday

A.N. Wilson

Values and fluctuations

Every now and then there are surveys in which groups or individuals are asked to name books which have changed their lives. In my life, the publication of John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson when I was a bookish teenager, undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take. There are two particular quotations in it which stayed forever in my mind. One was from Andrew Lang, when he said: Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did not seem to be one’s vocation. But the story of Pen [that is, Thackeray’s Pendennis]

Robert Salisbury

The art and craft of government

Any book about the exercise of power that carries a ringing endorsement by Peter Hen- nessy on its dust-cover promises well. Perhaps, therefore, it is the fault of this reviewer that he felt that Professor Mulgan had generated rather less excitement than Professor Hennessy had promised. Hennessy’s own books reflect his own personality: they fizz, they crackle with excitement and find it difficult to suppress whoops of laughter. Yet they illuminate and inform. In this book, Geoff Mulgan’s remarkable command of the literature of power ranges not just over the European tradition, from Solon to Bobbitt, but, in a world where Western supremacy is being challenged by China, India and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nul points for conduct

Great writers are never that great close up. Ralph Pite’s revealing biography of Thomas Hardy focuses on the emotional character of the poet and novelist. He comes across as difficult, snobbish, tight-fisted, self-centred, hypocritical, and, worst of all, ungrateful to those who helped him in the early stages of his career. The great champion of the rural poor was a mean and petty-minded employer. He never tipped his servants. He interfered constantly with minor building alterations. And if the grate was stacked too high he would remove surplus coals and lay them on the fender as a rebuke to the maid. Though his works suggest an abiding interest in women’s

Adam Zamoyski

A long losing run

This is indeed a story of war, passion and loss. But those looking for a bittersweet tale of romantic Polish aristocrats stoically facing their doom at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets will get a great deal more than they bargained for. This is Gone with the Wind scripted for the Addams family. The sorry tale opens in 1914 with the author’s grandfather running out of the bedroom on his wedding night and shooting himself with a revolver. He survived, and whatever his problem may have been, it was eventually resolved: he produced a brace of children, to which his wife added an extramarital supernumerary. It might have been

Lucy Beresford

Summer reads

Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? But what to do, when a long summer stretches ahead and there are still hours in the day to kill after you’ve finished watching the footie, or the live feed of Big Brother 7? (I know! compulsive viewing, isn’t it? But that’s for another article.) So, whether you intend to laze on your yacht, trek for gorillas, brave the Bognor rain, or find yourself stranded at Gatwick, everyone needs an undemanding book somewhere in their Louis Vuitton. You don’t have to be so well-heeled

Simon Baker

Coming out of the cold

At the beginning of Andreï Makine’s new novel we meet a young narrator in possession of some fairly bleak certainties. On the subject of love, he tells us that, once affection has been won, the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other one’s mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise … At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs. Whether or not one sympathises with such epic negativity, it is hard not to admire that casually brutal ‘or otherwise’. And yet the narrator himself is unhappy with his views. He is, he knows, the

William Brett

Nailing the zeitgeist

When Microserfs was published in 1995, it sealed Douglas Coupland’s reputation as a nonpareil, the foremost recorder of American popular culture and the digital revolution. Tracing the lives of a group of computer coders who abandon Bill Gates’ campus-like corporation to start up their own company, the novel became famous as the definitive account of the explosive success of Microsoft, and as a prediction of the eventual disillusionment of its most talented employees. By then, Coupland was already known as the curator of the 1990s zeitgeist after his debut novel, Generation X (1991), was hailed as the defining mouthpiece for his post-Baby Boomer contemporaries. But this status came at a

Frank Johnson

A puzzle still unsolved

Sara Moore would explain a rise to power as astonishing as any in history. A down-and-out house-painter and plebeian agitator becomes master at 43 of a country whose most influential classes expected its rulers to be of some social standing, and not to look absurd. The Marx, Lenin and Stalin, all in one, of his revolution; writing the manifesto, building the party; overthrowing the state after a lost war; then murdering his party rivals; becoming the subject of a ‘leadership cult,’ and then war leader; there differing only from Stalin in that he lost. Take away any one part of the whole —defeat in 1918, inflation, the army and bourgeoisie owing

Allan Massie

Keeping the balance

In a volume of his posthumously published notebooks (Garder Tout en Composant Tout), Henry de Montherlant remarks: ‘Je ne sais pourquoi nous faisons des descriptions, puisque le lecteur ne les lit jamais.’ Well said, but not quite true; there are readers who dote on long descriptive passages. Alain de Botton for instance wrote recently that the best bits of Proust are the descriptions and passages of analysis. Yet for me these are just the parts of A la Recherche which seem stale, while the characters and conversation remain entrancing. So I find myself on Montherlant’s side. Devoted though I am to the Waverley novels, my eyes tend to glaze on

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

The view ahead through the windscreen

Listing page content here Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes riding the Underground. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in texture, all about the privations of 1948. Brave New World is about the rise of cheap popular mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Will Self’s impressive new book presents, in a way, a pure portrait of the imagined future. Even though his future society is mostly extrapolated

Anne Applebaum

The slow poison of praise

Listing page content here More than 60 years after its release, Citizen Kane still regularly appears on pretty much every critics’ list of the ‘Greatest Films of All Time’. If it is also regularly mentioned as one of the most overrated films of all time, that too is a testament to the power of its reputation. Not only do critics admire Citizen Kane, they also feel that they are somehow obliged to admire it, as if failure to do so were an indicator of bad taste. But if the critics overdo their praise now, the problem was far worse when the film first appeared. In 1941, there weren’t reams of

Anita Brookner

A meeting of true minds

Listing page content here These letters record a friendship that proceeded, unmarred, for 40 years. It began as a simple transaction; in 1938 Sylvia Townsend Warner, as a dare, submitted a short story to the New Yorker. Her editor was William Maxwell. They proved sympathetic to each other, so sympathetic, in fact, that 150 stories followed, and, more important, 1,300 letters, in which it is possible to distinguish real love, albeit of a rare and disembodied variety. Their circumstances could not have been more different. Sylvia Townsend Warner, an immensely popular writer, now diminished by the fate that awaits all once popular writers, lived in Dorset with her female companion

Christopher Howse

Diamonds and other best friends

Listing page content here Recent troubles in the Labour party were likened by more than one unsuccessful letter-writer to the Daily Telegraph to those of the army described by Petronius Arbiter nearly 2,000 years ago: We trained hard; but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. That is not by Petronius, of course. It is a sort of urban thumbnail myth circulating with the help

Anne Chisholm

The dangerous edge of things

Listing page content here If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten successful novels at the age of 70, and knowing a surprising amount, for a ladylike senior citizen, about sex. Even her greatest fans, though, might wonder if she rates a serious, full-length biography, and why a well-regarded writer and journalist like Patrick Marnham, who has previously produced books on Simenon, Diego Rivera and Jean Moulin, should choose her as a subject. All such carping questions can be put aside immediately. This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of

Ian Sansom

Rhythm and blues

Nothing much to report here, no news and no surprises: dog bites man; Philip Roth writes another masterpiece. What would be truly shocking at this stage in the late, great unfolding of Roth’s genius would be if he were to write a bad book, something as bad as The Breast, his last bad book, and that was published in 1972. We expect — and rightly — intermittency of genius: Roth, in an effort which already seems like the stuff of myth and legend, defies our expectations. Since, say, 1995, from Sabbath’s Theater onwards, through American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist, (1998), The Human Stain (2000) and The Plot Against

Wednesday

Interconnect

Sermon

Out of the darkness and the bouillabaisseof nebulae and swirling gas we come,out of the toxic argon wilderness,seeking a sanctuary and a home. Be kind. Love one another. The frogs are dying. The old copper beechfesters in acid rain. The sky corrodes,contaminated birds are robbed of speechand, wrapped in fumes, Antarctica implodes.Be kind. Love one another. Towering tsunamis break upon the shore.The rich pursue a dream of lost content.Drought and starvation threaten more and more.An epidemic claims a continent.Be kind. Love one another. Antipathies accumulate of race.Jew, Muslim, Gentile — which can hate the best?A cashiered commissar, now fallen from grace,downs vodka, nursing gall within his breast.Be kind. Love one

Raymond Carr

A tapestry’s rich life

Listing page content here The Bayeux tapestry records pictorially in a series of 56 panels, stretching for 70 metres, the last successful invasion of England. It reveals that the invasion of 1066 was a combined operation involving the building of 800 ships to transport an army of some 12,000 men and 2,000 horses across the Channel. For its time it was as complex a piece of planning as the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Since its creation, probably in the 1070s, the tapestry had rested for centuries in comparative obscurity in the care of Bayeux cathedral. In the 18th century, squabbling British antiquarians, for whom the artefacts of the