The country of Sir Walter
Although the Scottish Borders contain some of the most picturesque and unspoilt scenery in the British Isles, with the country houses along the Tweed putting up a fair show to rival the ch
Book Reviews
Our reviews of the latest in literature
Saturday
Watching the human comedy unfold
I remember once swimming in the Batha river in central Chad. Despite recent rains the river was sluggish, warm and muddy, so much so that it was not immediately clear what was the point. I was uncertain of which way to go. I could not see my feet. I was covered in mud. And yet I emerged strangely relaxed. Easing your way into Cees Nooteboom’s remarkable new collection of travel pieces, you may have the same experience. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that you cannot see your feet and that you are not sure why it is interesting to read an account of a journey to Mali in 1971.
Much possessed by death
On the 25 November, 1970 after a failed coup d’état, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima stuck a knife into his belly, then had his head cut off with his own sword. Twenty years later I enjoyed a brief flirtation with a member of Mishima’s private militia, the Tate no Kai or Shield Society. Matsumura, like Mishima, proved a series of contradictions. A right-wing nationalist who owned a coffee shop in the centre of Tokyo, he had spent the 1960s cracking left-wing students over the head with a drain- pipe. His best friend, Morita, Mishima’s second-in-command, had beheaded the writer before killing himself. But Matsumura also spoke fluent English, enjoyed arguing
Putting bezazz into Bazaar
Carmel Snow, routinely called ‘the legendary Mrs Snow’ by news- papers in her lifetime, edited the most perfect fashion magazine in the history of glossies, American Harper’s Bazaar, for 25 years from 1933 to 1957. It’s probably a fashion statement in itself (‘Sooooo yesterday’) that her legend has almost entirely faded from public memory. Having spent long years toiling as a professional mag-hag myself, I knew the mythopoeic bits already. It was Snow, at Christian Dior’s first Paris show in 1947, who told son cher Tian that ‘your dresses have such a new look’, thereby ensuring a) his name and thunderous fortune, and b) the triumphant return of postwar Paris
Doing nothing in particular very well
‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton — who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday — was one of the great farters-around of all time. That we know of him now is largely down to his long and tortured love affair with the ill-starred Danish coffee-farmer Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen described their relationship in Out of Africa. The image most of us have of him, then, is of a
Saturday
Peter and friends
It is some years since I saw, in a Paris bookshop, a translated copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but I still enjoy recalling the French names given for the four members of the rabbit family: Flopson, Mopson, Queue-de-coton et Pierre. Cottontail is the species of rabbit which is found all over the United States; an amphibious swamp rabbit inhabits the bayous of Louisiana, and a rare marsh cottontail, which lives in Florida, has been given the name sylvilagus palustris hefneris, apparently in honour of the founder of Playboy magazine and its ‘bunnies’. Rabbits are also commonly found in central America, as I learnt while in Mexico
The discreet shape of tears
Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives. Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually owes less to life than to the author’s shaping imagination. Indeed, the best are often largely fantasy (Trollope’s captivating autobiography is a case in point). Rarely does a completely authentic recollection make compelling reading. Too often, as Henry James’s great short story on this theme reminds us, compared to art the ‘real thing’ disappoints and
A glorious road to ruin
We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison, Edward III is an icon. He lived his life in the manner that medieval men expected of a king. He looked the part. He won his battles. He made the right sort of people rich. In the chronicles of his time, his character is completely concealed behind a mask of conventional praise. Picking up a
A far from plodding pedestrian
How much more do we need to know about Sir Wilfred Thesiger? Alexander Maitland, his literary executor and friend for the last 40 years of his life, collaborated with Thesiger on six books of his travels, and we have Thesiger’s first two classics, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, not to mention two other mainly photographic books. Then there is his autobiography and an excellent biography by Michael Asher published in 1994. One of the merits of Asher’s book was that he retraced, by camel and donkey, several of Thesiger’s journeys. It was also informed by anecdotes, some of which Maitland has overlooked or chosen to omit. Maitland makes only
Ups and downs of Bankside
Walk over Lord Foster’s wobbly bridge from St Paul’s and you will see, squashed between Tate Modern and the reconstructed Globe Theatre, a three-storey house that, according to an inscription, is where Sir Christopher Wren stayed while building the cathedral. Alas, the legend, acceptable in the 1940s when the words were put up, no longer holds water. The house was not built until 1710, long after Wren had a use for it. But the story that Gillian Tindall weaves in this book is no less fascinating for an absence of grand characters — in many ways it is the better for it. The house becomes a window through which the
Reports from discomfort zones
South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars. Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts
Finnish but not yet free
Finland, 1902. The Russian empire controls the country — has done for nearly 100 years — but a resistance to Tsarist rule is gaining strength and volume. In Helsinki, revolutionary discussion is turning into action; in the country, Swedish Finns are comfortable as the ruling class. The House of Orphans is the name given to an orphanage which lies in a town surrounded by forest, to the north-west of Helsinki. It is here that 14-year-old Eeva was taken from Helsinki after the death of her father. Two years later she is sent to work for the local doctor as his housekeeper. To Dr Eklund’s surprise and fascination Eeva is much
Saturday
Brothers and sisters in revolt
After a family quarrel in 1717, George I ordered his son and heir’s imprisonment in the Tower. His ministers had to explain that in England not even a king could dispense with habeas corpus. The King considered bundling the future George II on to a man-of-war bound for the West Indian plantations, but reluctantly conceded to English niceties. Obedience to the law and public opinion did not suit a man who had dedicated his first 54 years to the interests of Hanover before inheriting the British throne in 1714. In his small and happy German kingdom, George had personal power and was treated with honour by his deferential subjects; the
Marcel the Magnificent
Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in different-coloured inks to indicate successive references to food, carriages, clothing etc. A lady in America is busy compiling a Proustian peerage, scanning the small print of silver-fork gazetteers and almanacs for stray duchesses, barons and counts, with the idea of giving us the whole coroneted galaxy in a sumptuous album, complete with escutcheons and portraits.
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,
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
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
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
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
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