Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

8 Oct 2005

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

1 Oct 2005

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

Penelope Lively

As entertaining as ever

Fifty-two-year-old Alan Mackenzie has been in severe and unrelenting pain for 16 months, having slipped a disc during a game of volleyball. No one has been able to alleviate his condition, not ‘four physical therapists, three ortho-paedic surgeons, two neurologists and an acupuncturist in a pear tree’. He no longer expects to get better, and lives amid a welter of medication and cumbersome aids; his wife Jane has become effectively his attendant, suppressing her guilty resentment. At this point, sufferers from acute back pain may wish to stop reading. Actually, they would do well to continue, with relish, for we are in an Alison Lurie novel, where deft irony will

Susan Hill

The pleasure of guessing wrong

The closed-circle Agatha Christieian detective story has rather fallen out of fashion in favour of the ‘crime novel’, the essential difference being that while every detective story is a crime novel the reverse is not necessarily the case. As the doyenne of the detective story P. D. James rarely strays far from home and The Lighthouse represents the form at its purest. First, we need the right, closed setting. It used to be a remote country house which a snowfall has cut off from the outside world, isolating the dozen people suspected of murdering the colonel. P. D. James has gone one better and invented her own island, Combe, off

Jonathan Keates

The style is the man

‘Is your autobiography really necessary?’ Something along the lines of that war poster which asked a similar question about railway journeys should be tacked up above the desk of every self-respecting author. Edmund White is one such, and we are already entitled to feel that we know an awful lot about him. He has skilfully fictionalised episodes from his youth and mature adulthood in A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man, he has made hay with characters based on his friends in Caracole and mapped out his socio-sexual milieu as a gay American during the 1970s in States of Desire. What more can he possibly have to disclose? My

Interconnect

An infinite capacity for enjoyment

Nearly 30 years ago I asked Rupert Hart-Davis, nephew and literary executor of Duff Cooper, whether I could see these diaries for a biography I was writing of Duff’s wife, Diana. ‘Not the slightest point, dear boy,’ he replied. ‘They are no more than a chronicle of unbridled extravagance, drunkenness and lechery.’ Eventually he relented and I discovered how wrong he was. There is, indeed, an inordinate amount of wine and women in these diaries, little song (Duff was tone-deaf) but much baccarat or bridge and backgammon for high stakes at White’s. Rupert’s error lay in the ‘no more’. There is plenty in this well- balanced, honest and admirably edited

M R-D-Foot

The Marlborough touch

Geoffrey Best has written a formidably good book about Churchill’s military core. He begins with the hussar sub- altern, as well as the great Duke of Marlborough his ancestor, before he goes near politics. He reconstructs the standards of conduct that were common form among the aristocracy and the officer class with whom the young Winston Churchill grew up, and explains how they continued to guide him all through his military and political life. There were things one did not do; no gentleman would do them. There were accepted laws and customs of war, universally respected by civilised states, even if they were not yet enshrined in print. Churchill went

Ferdinand Mount

A carefully constructed person

The Americans come off the boat. They may come singly, or in couples or even in a threesome, but there is no safety in numbers, for their fate is sealed the moment they step down the gangplank. The Americans are innocent of course, but they are not very nice. As a rule in the world of Paul Bowles, they tend to be mean-spirited and tight-fisted, and there is also a kind of eerie blankness about them. They think of themselves — Porter Moresby in The Sheltering Sky for example — as travellers, not tourists, belonging no more to one place than another and moving slowly from one part of the

William Waldegrave

Before the mast was rigged

There are three possible reasons for republishing forgotten books by writers who have achieved subsequent fame. The first and best is that they may have been unjustly forgotten. The second is that they are of interest to fans looking for hints of the future. The third is that early novels in particular often contain autobiography, more or less disguised; and in the case of a life as strange as Patrick O’Brian’s they may therefore be of interest to literary detectives. Only one of these novels really passes the first test; both pass the second and third. The Catalans is a well-crafted story of love and betrayal in the French Catalonia

Eric Christiansen

A dreadful victory

The trouble with great historical narratives is the volume of detail they demand: tidal waves of personal and place names, of dates and sums of money, of CVs, menus, fashion notes, light brown hair and glacial moraines, which after 25 pages remind the untrained reader of the showing and telling of holiday snaps. Yet history without detail is worse than hot air, just a deflated party balloon caught on a hawthorn tree. Details have not merely to be included, but used as crampons up the rock-face of past time. Ways and means to ration and present them exist, and the most convenient is the footnote; it is a pity that

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 1 October 2005

The Big Green Book (1962) by Robert Graves The Big Green Book (1962) by Robert Graves The Big Green Book, a children’s story illustrated by Maurice Sendak (before he won fame with Where the Wild Things Are), contains some familiar Gravesian themes. Jack, an orphan, finds a big green book of magic in the attic and uses it to transform himself into a druidic-looking little old man with a knee-length beard. He then begins to torment his elders. To his uncle, he says, ‘You see these three peas? Put them in a row in the middle of your hand, and see if you can blow away the middle one without

Saturday

24 Sep 2005

Raymond Carr

Once upon a time there was . . .

E. H. Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909. As a boy he had seen the Emperor Franz Joseph walking in his garden. As a young man, himself a Jew, he had watched Jewish students being beaten up in the streets by Nazi thugs. In January 1936, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna in triumph, he arrived as an exile in London, to work as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute of which he became director in 1959. When he died, loaded with honours in 2001, the huge sales of his book The Story of Art, published in 1950, had made him the best known and most

Ian Mcintyre

The case of the lurking paradigm

The gung-ho photo on the dust jacket — battle fatigues, the red beret of the Paras, eyes narrowed to determined slits — suggests a touch of the Paddy Ashdowns. But that is at odds with the picture of the author that emerges from this his first book: ‘For my part, I do not think I have been in action in the broadest sense for more than about six of my 37 years of commissioned service.’ Yet as military careers go in an age of peace-keeping and humanitarian intervention, General Sir Rupert Smith’s has not been exactly uneventful. As a young company commander in the 1970s he was blown up by

Sandy Balfour

Tips for technique and tactics

In 1994 the membership of the American Contract Bridge League voted S. J. Simon’s 1946 classic, Why You Lose at Bridge, the best bridge book ever. To that extent, all bridge books live in its considerable shadow. According to Simon you lose at bridge for two reasons: lack of skill and losing tactics. He doesn’t plan to do much about the first. ‘You’ve been making the same mistakes for years and you have every intention of going on making them.’ But he thinks he can, perhaps, help with the second. You lose, he says, not because you can’t play difficult hands (of which there are in any case relatively few)

Nicholas Harman

Anyone for dunnocks?

As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelf-space. The fattest fledgling in this new

Charlotte Hobson

A cross-cultural crisis

If you were a Martian, whiling away the time on an intergalactic beach holiday by reading an account of the Cuban missile crisis, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as wildly implausible fiction. All the blockbuster ingredients are there: the clash of superpowers, one led by the clean-cut American hero, the other by the fat Ukrainian with bad teeth, the military hardware amassing in the Caribbean (nice location), the split-second timing, not to mention the prospect of the end of the world. As a setting for a novel it’s worthy of a Robert Harris-style humdinger, called, no doubt, Cuba, or Missile, or even just Crisis. Instead, rather surprisingly, here

Jane Ridley

Servants who were masters

It is a remarkable but little known fact that in 1901 the entire Indian subcontinent with a population totalling 300 million was administered by a British ruling elite which consisted of no more than 1,000 men. Still more extraordinary, their rule rested neither on military force nor on terror or corruption. On the contrary, the rulers of the British Raj were renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. Yet this astonishing British success story has been largely ignored. Historians have got their knickers in such a twist over the whole embarrassing business of imperialism that they have been blind to its strengths. Slaves to political correctness, they are fixated