Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Joanna Kavenna

Paddling through Canada

There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison. It means that as you stare across at an interlaced network of concrete motorways and slab-like apartment blocks, you can contrast the contemporary carnage with the three wooden huts your predecessor observed, or discern the vestiges of the past among the urban clutter. Yet at times the genre can flag: the footsteps simply aren’t compelling,

Andrew Taylor

Ancient trails and quests

Val McDermid is probably best known for her series of sharply contemporary thrillers featuring a criminal profiler. But some of her standalone novels, in particular the superb A Place of Execution and The Distant Echo, have narrative sections that hark back to a generation earlier; and their plots turn upon the long shadows thrown forward by past crimes. The Grave Tattoo takes this process even further back in time. At the heart of the story is the intriguing historical link between the families of William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian. The two men were schoolfellows, taught by Fletcher’s elder brother. There is a persistent legend that the chief mutineer of the

Ruth Guilding

Stones of contention

The acrimonious debate over the Elgin Marbles, housed in the British Museum since 1816, provides the catalyst for this new book. Ever since Lord Byron libelled Lord Elgin in verse as, ‘the last, the worst, dull spoiler,’ plundering the temple where ‘Pallas lingered,’ homegrown restitutionists have quoted Childe Harold to support the arguments for their return to Greece. John Keats never saw the Parthenon, but his feelings on first encountering its sculptures in London were just as intense. He sat before them in a reverie, staring for hours as they opened the classical world to him. His sonnets written afterwards remind us that these Grecian marbles belong to our national

Graham Stewart

The weasels in the wordpile

The etymologists of the Oxford English Dictionary should be alerted that Steven Poole has coined a new word. First used as the title for his book, published in 2006, ‘unspeak’ is a noun for a ‘mode of speech that persuades by stealth’. How, it might be asked, does this differ from ‘spin’? Poole contends that politicians do not talk in platitudes as a means of obfuscation, as is commonly alleged, but rather sway debate by consciously deploying language in a careful and manipulative way. In recognising that newspapers and television bulletins have scant space, they have worked out that they need to reduce their arguments to soundbite size. This means

Paul Johnson

Not bad going, to do one imperishable thing in life

There are some people who do one distinct thing in their life — only one — but it is enough, just, to confer immortality on them. Such a person was Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), the Victorian poet. This gifted and sensitive man was a product of Dr Arnold’s superb teaching at Rugby and won a fellowship at Oriel, then the greatest prize you could get at Oxford. But in the theological turbulence created by Newman’s influence and the fierce reaction to it, he contrived to lose his faith, at least in Anglicanism. Expected not only to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles but to expound them to pupils, he found he

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Up against it down under

William Thornhill, convict, is spending his first night in a mud hut in the penal colony of New South Wales. He’s in Sydney, but this is 1806, and Sydney is little more than a huddle of such huts. Beside him, his wife Sal and their children sleep. Beyond is darkness, the ‘vast fact of the forest’. Above are the unreadable stars of the southern hemisphere, ‘as meaningless as spilt rice’. And then, standing in the entrance, is a naked black man holding a spear. How should Thornhill react? He’s neither a hero nor a villain. In London, he was a member of the underclass; he stole because he couldn’t earn

Hugh Massingberd

Making the surgeon laugh

One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the creepy senator in The Aviator — a thrilling performance which was nominated for an Oscar last year. Significantly, the sea change occurred in what Alda desribes in this deft and witty memoir as ‘golden time’ following a life-threatening intestinal blockage in Chile in 2003. ‘Now, at last,’ he writes, ‘there was no pressure to succeed.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Coming to terms with the old man

Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The sailor of the enigmatic title was his paternal grandfather, who ran away from Ireland to join the Royal Navy and was killed at sea. His portrait in uniform was kept in the family wardrobe, a symbol of the confinement from which Hugo also yearned to escape. Hugo’s mother was a conciliatory German with Allied military

Francis King

Dirty tricks down Mexico way

Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact that Condoleezza Rice is the first black female president of the United States is about all that differentiates Fuentes’ satiric vision of the political world of the future from the actual one today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge

Anthony Daniels

Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite. The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there

Ferdinand Mount

Ornery and extraordinary

Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two fathoms, or 12 feet). The Clemenses had come west from Virginia by way of Kentucky with half a dozen slaves and irrepressible dreams of remaking their fortune. In this sloppy, imaginative, wandering hulk of a biography Ron Powers never bothers to chart the family’s history, so that you are surprised when every now and then

Saturday

Frederic Raphael

The Timon of Lyme Regis

Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list for a full year. Fowles’s advances reached $250,000. Even The Ebony Tower, a soft-porn novella, and a clutch of short stories made him a small fortune. Hollywood films were made of FLW (as he refers to it) and of his earlier novels The Collector and The Magus, though none was worth seeing. The movies are

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Pressuring the press

I feel I ought to start this review by letting the authors know that I will not enter into correspondence with them. However much they might loathe what I am about to say and wish to bombard me with emails ridiculing my reasoning, I regret to tell them that I will be far too busy to respond. That might look like a weird intro to a review, until you realise that the authors being reviewed — David Edwards and David Cromwell — run a pressure group called Medialens which is in the business of berating journalists (and encouraging others to do likewise) for their perceived prejudices. Medialens is like a

Jonathan Mirsky

The return of the native

Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on my wall; Li Bai, the great Tang dynasty poet (8th century), probably drunk and standing on tip-toe, is gazing up at the moon. There is no moon in the picture, only the empty, not blank, space. I know the moon is there because in one of his poems Li Bai describes looking up at it.

Amanda Herries

Not to the manor born

Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she said, ‘the generational refit.’ It is the same exercise which lies at the heart of Belinda Rathbone’s well-observed description of ten years of similar effort near Arbroath in the Scottish Highlands, at her new husband’s ancestral home, a Georgian mansion called the Guynd. ‘Mansion’ is a word not much used in the description of country

Jane Ridley

The man who saw the Jabberwock

John Tenniel’s name means little today, but everyone knows his work. Tenniel was the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, creating those unforgettable images of the little girl in the Alice band who shrinks and grows so alarmingly. The cartoons which Tenniel drew each week for Punch have survived as well. Thanks to Tenniel, we still think of a grim, hatchet-faced Gladstone chopping trees, or a jaunty but distinctly Semitic Disraeli in coronet and toga. Political cartoonists like Tenniel wielded massive influence in the days before press photography. Tenniel trained as a history painter, but aged 30 he gave up the roller- coaster of high art and got

Piers Paul-Read

Post-war feuds and dilemmas

Albert Camus was an exceptional man who lived in interest- ing times. His parents were pieds-noirs — French settlers in Algeria. His father died at the battle of the Marne and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate cleaning lady. Encouraged by inspired teachers, he won scholarships to a lycée and then university in Algiers. He published his first book at the age of 24, and worked as a journalist, first in Algiers and later in Paris. At the outbreak of the second world war, ill-health exempted him from military service. He worked as a reader for Gallimard, and wrote a classic novel of existentialism, L’Etranger, and a philosophical

John Grimond

Blaming the wicked West

An unkind thought keeps coming to mind as you read this book: perhaps Henry Ford was right, after all. It is unkind because so much of Guy Arnold’s great opus is admirable. As an account of the main political events that have taken place in Africa since 1960, it is awe-inspiring, some might even say awesome. Arnold’s ability to assemble facts, everywhere from the Cape to Cairo, from Dakar to Djibouti, is as commendable as his clear, jargon-free style. Yet, if his history is not bunk, it is certainly deeply unsatisfying. It contains hardly an original observation and provides no clear answers to the difficult questions about Africa, in particular,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Luther of medicine?

The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and remains — even in the works of J. K. Rowling — shorthand for a whiff of brimstone. He’s a myth. But, like most myths, he’s also an idea, and an interesting one. Paracelsus himself was a stocky, odd little bloke. Contemporaries attest that he was often drunk and seldom changed his clothes. He seemed, much

Saturday

M R-D-Foot

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Most of this powerful book was written nearly 60 years ago. It was then rejected by two London publishers as too anti-Soviet in tone, and a few years later by two more as too anti-German. It consists of the war recollections of a Polish countess of notable ancestry and equally notable courage, who describes exactly what it felt like to live under Soviet and then under German military occupation. Ostensibly, she co-operated with the occupiers, in the task of feeding prisoners, denying (under oath, to the Germans) that she was working against them; in fact she was also an invaluable source of intelligence for the Polish Home Army, till she