Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Richard Beeston

Great reporter, lousy prophet

Eavesdrop on any gathering of Middle East correspondents huddled by the poolside of the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad or enjoying a late supper at Cairo’s Greek Club and the name Robert Fisk will inevitably enter the conversation. For three decades the reporter and author has energetically criss-crossed the Arab world and beyond, generating respect and loathing in equal measure from his colleagues and readers. For some Fisk is the apologist for every dictator and fanatic from Belgrade to Bagram, a prophet of doom with a giant ego who blames all the region’s ills on American arrogance, Israeli conspiracies and Western meddling. To his supporters Fisk is the award-winning journalist who

Alan Judd

The making of a poet

I once considered attempting a biography of Siegfried Sassoon. Having now read Max Egremont’s comprehensive and perceptive book, based partly on access to private papers unavailable to previous biographers, I’m relieved I didn’t. Egremont has produced a thorough, sympathetic, balanced, engrossing account. There are two aspects to the 1886-1967 life of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC (he liked to use his rank and was proud of his medal) that make him a worthy biographical subject. The first is his literary achievement, essentially his war poems and his prose memoirs. Although he felt he was a poet from the age of five, was published before the first world war and continued producing

Saturday

Interconnect

Fissures within the urban landscape

Published recently in the Times, William Rees-Mogg’s contention (in a well-meaning if speciously argued piece on the Vatican’s continuing opposition to the ordination of self-confessed homosexuals) that the sexual proclivities of priests attracted to pre-pubertal children was ‘comparable to Oscar Wilde’s relations with London rent boys’ is typical of a fashionable misapprehension which confuses paedophila (as it is currently understood) with the neo-Socratean, hopelessly idealistic conception of paederastia into which Wilde and his associates threw themselves so energetically at the end of the 19th century. As Morris Kaplan so eloquently defines it in his slim but no less esoteric Sodom on the Thames, theirs was a love that combined ‘the

Andrew Taylor

Cracking the code of celebrity

Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself. Or is it? The narrator of the novel is ‘Bret Easton Ellis’. ‘There’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands’, he assures the reader. ‘All of it really happened, every word is true.’ The early chapters of this book invite the reader to play the chic, post-modern game of Spot the Join. ‘Bret’ has published

Ben Wilson

A sad arbiter of elegance

‘Do you call that thing a coat?’ Brummell sneered when the Duke of Bedford asked for an opinion on a new purchase. The dominance that Brummell held over the fashionable was absolute; his small house in Chesterfield Street was thronged with gentlemen, often including the Prince of Wales, eager to witness the dressing ritual of the Beau. His mastery of putting on his clothes, his sharp tongue and his coterie of aristocratic toadies meant that ‘he could decide the fate of a young man just launched into the world with a single word’. George Bryan Brummell became a symbol of urbane style, masculinity and cosmopolitan poise, revered by Balzac, Pushkin,

David Crane

When the hunt was in full cry

Howard and Southwell, Fortes- cue, Paine, Percy, Mayne, Milner, Owen, Houghton, Cam- pion — even the names of our prep school dormitories were a declaration of dissent. Of this list perhaps only Edmund Campion is now at all widely known, but after three years of interminable prayers for the reconversion of England and the canonisation of the 40 martyrs that quixotic collection of saints, poets, fanatics, scholars, Jesuits, Carthus- ians, plotters, aristocrats and carpenters can still conjure up an alternative sense of Englishness and English history that is difficult to shake off. It is more than a decade now since Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars brought recusant history

Digby Durrant

Oh, my Papa!

Miles Kington, humourist-at-large from the moment he was born, which he remembers because a shadowy figure had snapped at him that he’s pressed for time, what does he want to be, girl or boy? He arrives to find himself surrounded by an unusually colourful family. Father, a very short man who is made all the shorter by the thinness of his wartime socks, had recently failed to get into midget submarines. Hasn’t he noticed there hasn’t been a pantomime production of Snow White since 1937? The navy has recruited all the dwarfs they needed. Instead he’d got a job pretending to be a spy to test the alertness of the

Robert Stewart

The painful, birth of the nation-state

‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe,’ the austere, implacable revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just wrote in 1791, as events in France were moving swiftly towards the establishment of a republic and the onset of Terror. The French Revolution was (if we prefer not to go back so far as the Renaissance) the cradle of modernity. It carried the aspirations of those reformers who as the 18th century progressed turned their backs on religion and the promise of an eternal afterlife as the hope of sinful man and looked for ways to improve the lot of humanity in the here and now. French philosophes and English Utilitarians made war on superstition

Jonathan Keates

Paddling in murky waters

Published in 1995, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was one of those books whose success could be measured by the fact that dozens of people pretended they had read it when they hadn’t. Was this a novel, we wondered, or just snappy reportage with a few names changed and a spot of discreet decorative interference with actuality? Not that it mattered, so enjoyable was the pungent cocktail of murder, voodoo and gender reassignment amid the premier gratin, white or black, of Savannah, Georgia. Some ten years on, Berendt has attempted a repeat performance in The City of Falling Angels, turning his attention from criminal Dixie

Judith Flanders

Dogged does it

William Boyd has written a dozen novels and short stories in the past quarter-century. That makes him a fairly prolific author. Factor in a dozen screenplays realised (and another couple of dozen that were never made, for the usual inscrutable film-world reasons), and he seems properly Stakhanovite. But take a deep breath, because Boyd estimates that in his moments of leisure he has also written three-quarters of a million words or so of journalism. Given this, it is rather startling to find, in the first 20 pages of this selection of essays and reviews, three references to his ‘laziness’ at school. Less surprising is to find that what it is

Caroline Moorehead

The art of sucking eggs

A grandmother, wrote Queen Victoria in a letter to her daughter, the Princess Royal, in June 1859, ‘must ever be loved and venerated, particularly one’s mother’s mother I always think’. Few are the modern grandmothers fortunate enough to attact much veneration, but, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall makes clear in her guide for the best grannies, it’s certainly possible to give and receive love of a kind never envisaged or anticipated. No one, after all, decides to become a grandmother: it simply happens to you. And as such there is no more profound pleasure. Literature is rich in grannies, from Proust’s devoted companion to Dosto-evsky’s enthusiastic gambler, but most belong to the

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Meaning well but doing ill

Dwelling Place is the story of a planter family in 19th-century Georgia, and of the slave community which served it. As an insight into the moral dilemmas of a slave-owning society and the local patriotism which sustained the Confederate side in the American civil war, it is one of the more remarkable recent books on the ante-bellum South. It is also refreshingly free from romantic delusions at one extreme or politically correct cant at the other. The central figure is Charles Colcock Jones, landowner, patriarch and Presbyt- erian minister, who inherited as a young man three cotton plantations and more than 100 slaves in Liberty County, on the Atlantic coast

Alistair Irwin

Tops of the top brass

The subtitle of this latest study of British generalship, ‘Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World’, sets the bar exclusively high. Perhaps this is why in the introduction we are given three other criteria for the selection of subjects. The author seeks to illustrate military success or failure in the context of the political control of the generals, to describe men who have left a legacy applicable today, and to describe how the factors affecting the conduct of commanders have developed over the last three centuries. Onto this complex and broadly defined parade ground Mark Urban marches ten British generals, each of whom is exposed to us through entertainingly written

Andrew Taylor

A rich and palatable mixture

At the heart of this novel is the notion that a sexual predator can find natural cover for his activities in a war zone. Its title is taken from a Turkish phrase meaning a woman who unwittingly arouses a man’s sexual interest. The narrator, Connie Burns, is a foreign correspondent, born in Zimbabwe, educated at Oxford and at home in the troubled places of the world. In Sierra Leone, she reports on the rape and murder of several local women, and her suspicions are aroused by the presence in Freetown of John Harwood, a former British soldier and mercenary, whom she knew under another name in Kinshasa. Two years later,

Interconnect

A rogue gene at work

No commemorative blue plaque adorns the wall of 112 Eaton Square, ‘that curious house’, in Barbara Pym’s words, ‘with its oil paintings and smell of incense’. Yet, as David Faber reveals in this important history of the Amery family, for over 70 years the house was one of the foremost London political salons. The paterfamilias was Leo Amery, known as the ‘pocket Hercules’ for his gymnastic prowess at Harrow, where he once hurled Winston Churchill into the swimming pool. Balliol double first and All Souls prize fellow, author of the seven- volume history of the Boer war and one of Lord Milner’s ‘kindergarten’ in South Africa, his belief in Imperial

Frederic Raphael

When the Greeks stood together

‘Everyone with a bellyful of the classics,’ Henry Miller said, ‘is an enemy of mankind.’ Was the Brooklyn bronco serious in claiming that indoctrination with ancient literature generated monsters? As readers of The Colossus of Maroussi well know, Miller himself fell under the Greek spell. So, earlier, had the Romantics (with unromantic Periclean Athens), Victorian schoolmasters (with the flog-meister, sodomitic Spartans) and Harold Macmillan, who wanted to be Jack Kennedy’s paidagogos. It all depends which Greece you are looking at, with which preconceptions and through how many veils of a posteriori varnish. The smug division of the world into Civilised and Barbarian certainly supplied moral sanction for aggressive imperialism. Aristotle’s

Jane Rye

Going to the country

One and a half million children were evacuated from London and housed in the country in two days. The evacuee child with its gas mask round its neck and the luggage label so particularly distressing to modern sensibilities, is a familiar image, but perhaps more credit is due to the organisation of Operation Pied Piper which went into action on 1 September 1939. In the light of recent events in New Orleans it begins to seem a miracle of planning and execution. According to Jessica Mann’s preface to this reissue of Barbara Noble’s 1946 novel about the emotional consequences of evacuation, an Evacuation Sub-Committee was established as early as 1931,

Jonathan Mirsky

Coming to the aid of the party

In 1967 I met a Polish diplomat in Cambodia whose communist family had immigrated to Palestine when he was a child. Like many Jewish (and other) communists the family was plunged into an emotional ideological quandary by the Soviet pact with the Nazis in 1939. The diplomat told me that one morning he awoke to music. When he looked out of his window he saw his parents and their communist neighbours dancing and singing. It was 22 June 1941 and the German army had just crossed the border into the Soviet Union. All the tortured explanations for Stalin’s ‘wise decision’ for the alliance now vanished. Jonathan Frankel, a professor at

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 8 October 2005

Oriri (1940) Marie Stopes Marie Stopes, the birth control campaigner and author of Married Love, was notoriously plain-speaking (‘Never put in your vagina anything that you would not put in your mouth,’ she told the bemused, mainly male readers of The Lancet in 1938). Her sexual frankness was central to her campaigning success — but it had its origins in a notably idealised view of sex as the supreme spiritual experience, imbued with ‘holiness and divine beauty’. Nowhere is this idealism more apparent than in her unsuccessful career as a great poet. Oriri, one of her several volumes of ecstatically undistinguished verse, is a single long poem dealing with the

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

The case for the defence

A few years back, Harper’s & Queen magazine asked me to write an article in a series entitled ‘Something I have never done before’. (No, it was not: Write a short book review.) The piece that appeared in the month before mine was Norman Lamont on falconry — a hard pterodact to follow. I decided I would stand on a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner in London (well, actually it was a plastic milk-crate pinched from my milkman) and hold forth. I thought religion and royalty were two subjects that would get the crowd going, and launched into religion first. People began to cluster round me. I had not been speaking