Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Juliet Townsend

Reliable friend, less reliable consul

The twin graves lie side-by-side in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, much visited, much photographed; one decorated with the lyre of the poet, the other with the palette of the painter. Beneath the first lie the remains of one of England’s greatest poets, who died at the age of 25. Beneath the second lies a minor artist and consular official who survived into old age, and whose stone is inscribed: ‘Joseph Severn, devoted friend and death-bed companion of JOHN KEATS.’ Severn’s grave would be forgotten and unvisited if it were not for the pilgrims who come to venerate Keats. In the same way, his life would be forgotten and unvisited

Charlotte Mitchell

A devotee of Devon

The regional novel in England sounds like a dull and worthy research topic; investigating it might be entertaining at times, but I suspect that one would just end by concluding that it existed once, and does so no more. People still write novels about life in various regions, of course; some writers still specialise in a particular area, but the glory days are over. When Cold Comfort Farm came out in 1932 to deal it a death-blow, there were still dozens of writers making an honest living in this way; it is often said to mock Mary Webb’s books, but Sheila Kaye-Smith, Eden Phillpotts, Alice Dudeney and many others were

Philip French

Frantic and fantastic

There is now an established tradition of busy stars not reading the books to which they put their names. It stretches from Hedy Lamarr, who 40 years ago sued the ghostwriters of Ecstasy and Me for misrepresentation some while after publication, to Victoria Beckham who claims never to have read a book, not even her autobiography. According to the distinguished film historian, David Thomson, who licked Fan-Tan into shape for publication, it seems likely that the dyslexic Brando belonged to this elite company and never read this posthumously published novel. Without his name on it, the book would never have appeared under the imprint of a reputable publisher. Fan-Tan is

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Tragical- comical- historical

After the Victorians opens with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: King Edward VII took the throne, Younghusband and his Maxim guns took Lhasa. It closes with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: Elizabeth II took the throne, Hillary took the summit of Everest. By the second time round, the chorus of ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’ has, as A. N. Wilson points out, more of hope in it than expectation. We’d had the unimaginable slaughter of two world wars, the collapse of Britain’s

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Foul play in Hull

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original. Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose. As far as the police are

Dr Thorpe

The battles of a lively young cub

In June 1944 two prospective Labour MPs, Harold Wilson and Kenneth Younger, travelled back to London, unsuccessful in seeking the Peterborough candidacy. On the train, they compared notes on the difficult adoption process. Both were returned to Parliament next year in the Labour landslide, but though Wilson was to become prime minister, Kenneth Younger remains one of the forgotten names of postwar Labour politics. His career has long merited serious treatment and Professor Geoffrey Warner’s impeccably researched book, part memoir, part diary, fills a great gap in postwar biography. In the Midst of Events, which, despite its title, is really an overview of international politics from 1945 to 1959, also

James Fleming

Best of friends | 27 August 2005

Birds are our pals. They awaken us, sing us happy songs and delight us with their plumage colours. In the garden they are undemanding visitors, not inferior to neighbours or family. The migrating species perform feats of navigation that in a human would have that person crowned upon landfall. They can fly at great speed and do amazing acrobatics. The literature on them is huge. Languages are stuffed with references to our friendship. Every house in Britain has a bird picture somewhere. And all this stems from what is, most often, a tiny frame. That little scolder the wren weighs the same as a green table grape. Moreover, they’re big

Ian Garrick-Mason

Why Rome fell

I n the decade before his death in 1982, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was afflicted with a powerful delusion. He became convinced that the Roman empire was still in existence; that despite what was written in all the history books it had in fact never fallen. Nineteen-seventies California was merely a false projection, a fantasy world concocted to mask the ongoing and malevolent reality of Rome, AD 70. Modern scholars of late antiquity do not suffer from this delusion. But many of them nonetheless argue that the Roman empire didn’t fall — rather, that it went through a ‘transformation’ from a Roman-led civilisation into a Germanic-led one. Such

Patrick Skene-Catling

Lessons in French humour

When publishers keep a children’s book in print for a certain number of years it is called a classic, by the publishers themselves, of course, then by teachers and librarians, and sometimes by men and women who knew the book when they were young. Nicholas, by every criterion, from every point of view, has attained classical status, and is a much-needed reminder of the Entente Cordiale. As Le Petit Nicholas, it was published first in France in 1960 by the appropriately named Editions Deno

Juliet Townsend

Chilblains in the Cotswold

One day in 1941 an officer on exercise in the Cotswolds looked down from the brow of a hill and saw a cluster of stone buildings in the valley below. On closer inspection these turned out to be a deserted farm, with a beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse and great cathedral-like barns. It was in a derelict state, but the soldier, the Bertie of the title and Xandra Bingley’s father, was undeterred. ‘We will rise above any minor problems… we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not when we’ve found this heavenly place… No siree.’ His, or rather his wife May’s, money bought it, and it was in this idyllic though

Saturday

Montagu Curzon

On a wing and a prayer

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination. Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating,

Jonathan Sumption

Not a bad neighbour, just difficult

The French rarely read books by foreigners about their history. This is a pity, for their own historians have not always done the job well. The ideological fault-lines of French intellectual life have obstructed understanding of France’s 20th century. A francocentric view of the world has added to the problem. So, until recently, has the absence of the tradition of lacerating self-criticism and collective guilt common in the rest of Europe. Dreyfus, the fall of France, Vichy, Indo-China, the Algerian war, these are all difficult and delicate subjects in France. Things are beginning to improve, but much of the best work on the country’s modern history is still being written

Anne Somerset

House-building and husbandry

Bess of Hardwick has usually been viewed as a hard-hearted schemer, an unscrupulous woman who triumphed in male-dominated Tudor England by never allowing emotion to impede her ambition. Allegedly driven by acquisitiveness and a lust for power, she married four times, always moving on to a husband richer than the last. Having gained a sizeable fortune, she sought immortality by founding a dynasty and building great houses, and this, too, has been seen as evidence of her predatory nature and instinct for self-aggrandisement. While no one can deny the beauty of her most famous creation, Hardwick Hall, few have doubted that the woman who erected it was deeply unpleasant. Now,

Charlotte Moore

Tunes played by an enchantress

Frankie Burnaby is 12. She lives on a remote farm in British Columbia, where ‘the clear turbulent Thompson River joins the vaster opaque Fraser’. This novella, first published in 1947, charts the two conflicting emotional currents that, like the rivers of Frankie’s birthplace, struggle for dominance. Any new arrival is exciting in this thinly populated neighbourhood, and when beautiful, mysterious Hetty Dorval moves in, she is the object of intense fascination. Mrs Dorval arrives for no discernible reason and with no immediately discernible husband, just a dour guardian called Mrs Broom, a dog called Sailor, and, it is whispered, an unsavoury past. She is a Jamesian character, tainted by the

David Gilmour

Prickles and thorns

One of the oddest forms of contemporary masochism is our passion for surveys that reveal how ignorant and stupid we have become. Scarcely a week goes by without the publication of some poll telling us how many schoolchildren believe that Churchill was victorious at Waterloo or that Hornblower commanded at Trafalgar. The teaching of traditional history has all but disappeared, surviving in just the one area where it should have been abolished: the perpetuation of nationalist myths. In his wise and stimulating new book, Allan Massie recounts the recent story of a Fife councillor who was banned from his local pub for abusing some English visitors on the grounds that

Saturday

Pj Kavanagh

Mid-life midsummer madness

Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life. Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a puzzle) is no great shakes at the game. His account of his annual batting-average varies, but he never claims even to approach double-figures. At university he and other cricket failures founded a necessarily doomed team called, with student gallows-humour, the Captain Scott Invitation XI. Berkmann wrote a book about this team’s misadventures called Rain Men.

Anthony Sattin

Payment on delivery

Picture this scene: in the delivery room of a Botswana hospital, a woman howls with the pain of childbirth and her midwife becomes increasingly bothered that she is disturbing the other patients. Whatever tension there is in this exchange — a woman suffering labour without drugs, an underpaid, overstretched health worker having a bad day — it is transformed by the fact that the nurse is African, the mother-to-be British. ‘White women,’ the midwife huffs in annoyance and, in the process, identifies the dilemma at the heart of this book. There is a strong tradition of European women writing about their experiences in Africa. What attracts them? The call of

C D C Armstrong

Bogeyman but not bigot

Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism. Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin,

Anne Applebaum

The day of the underdog

To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He doesn’t explain why the Americans won. He doesn’t even delve much into the origins of the Declaration of Independence, which was proclaimed in 1776, or reveal much about the men who signed it. But McCullough nevertheless demonstrates, once again, why he is America’s best-selling historian. For his book does lend colour and interest to events

Saturday

Peter Jm-Wayne

From the inside looking out

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer. ‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic. Although the author stops short