Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

David-Davray

Remembering Douglas Johnson

Simon Hoggart writes:Douglas Johnson, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the most distinguished — and most entertaining — of the academic writers who have appeared in the columns of The Spectator. In fact, the word ‘academic’ has perhaps the wrong connotations, for in spite of Douglas’s great scholarship, few people working in university education were less remote; as a lifelong student of France, he was fascinated by the real life and real people of that country. For instance, many historians who have written about the Dreyfus affair used it to create ponderous studies of social and political change. Douglas knew that it was fundamentally a

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Tracking a Moroccan ghost

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up. Try moxibustion, epizoic, parallactical, aleatory, anastomosing and vaticinal for starters, all beyond this reviewer and, gratifyingly, the (admittedly limited) range of his laptop dictionary. On the second page he muses on the ‘pleasing orbitality’ of food and its terminology. Thus the praecox, the ‘precocious’ peach of the old Roman, has become by way of a

Andro Linklater

A place in the sun

In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five of them. ‘It is almost impossible to get at them to exterminate the lot,’ he wrote apologetically to his father, ‘though they get some pretty hot lessons occasionally for they are always shot like dogs when seen.’ A couple of years later, he improved his score by slaughtering almost 100 from a community that failed

Francis King

Mombasa and Zanzibar

The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit Muslim community: dominant themes of Abdul-razak Gurnah’s former novels are gathered together in this one. Since, though not abnormally long, his book ranges over such a wealth of material, there are inevitably occasions when its usually grave, deliberate pace quickens to a scurry, making one wish to shout out at him, ‘Whoa! Not so fast! Not so fast!’ At the start of the narrative, a devout Muslim shopkeeper, Hassanali, in an obscure town along the coast from Mombasa, sets off early one morning in 1899 for the

Jonathan Mirsky

A low opinion of human nature

I feel slightly cornered by the blurbs on the jacket of this book. On the front, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, says, ‘This is my favourite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge.’ On the back, Lisa Appignanesi suggests we ‘imagine Svevo taking David Lodge to China and bumping into Confucius who had just finished reading Balzac’. In the foreword, Yale’s Jonathan Spence calls Fortress Besieged ‘a novel of originality and spirit, of wit and integrity, one that has clearly earned its place amongst the masterworks of 20th-century Chinese literature’. I don’t think the novel is highly amusing — I didn’t think

Robert Stewart

Murder made easy

What is one to make of this little book? There is much that is good in it, about new handguns, their use in crime and warfare and their role as fashionable accessories (notably in portraiture) of the rich and proud; about the ‘spinning’ rife in Renaissance pamphlet wars; and about that age’s wantonly cruel methods of torture and execution. But does it make sense? Its central contention, that the assassination in 1584 of William of Orange was a landmark in history because it was carried out with a pistol, is more asserted than argued and it remains highly dubious. In the battle that raged across Reformation Europe in the second

Elfreda Pownall

Food for plutocrats and the people

The New English Kitchenby Rose PrinceFourth Estate, £18.99, pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448 The Dinner Ladyby Jeanette OrreyBantam, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0593054296 If a Martian were to read these three recently published cookery books, his postcard home would conclude that for Earthlings money is the root of all cooking. Alain Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine is huge and enormously heavy, (it weighs 111/2 lb). Ducasse is considered by his peers one of the three greatest chefs of the 20th century (with Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse). He has been awarded three Michelin stars for two restaurants at once (the Louis XV in Monte Carlo and the Plaza Athénée in Paris).

Caroline Moorehead

The questions dated, the answers fresh

Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would give an excuse to write about her novels. It turns out, however, to be hugely enjoyable in its own right. Curious Pursuits reminds one that Atwood is a superbly funny (as well as serious) writer: her wit is winningly relaxed and genial as well as sharp. It is odd how often her humour is dis-

Interconnect

The last refuge of a scoundrel

To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he did and what the forces were that drove him onwards. Some degree of sympathy is essential, and the less appealing the subject, the more difficult the task will be. The difficulty is compounded if the biographer has been previously required to approach the material from a different angle: the facts are the same but the

Saturday

Ian Garrick-Mason

Lord of misrule

According to the business press, the age of the ‘imperial CEO’ is now behind us, swept away by a wave of scandals and collapsing stock prices. But for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Eisner was an emperor’s emperor. Recruited from Paramount in 1984, the Walt Disney Company’s new chairman and chief executive officer immediately set about shaking up the poorly performing company. He boosted cash flow by significantly increasing theme park admission prices. He released Disney’s classic animated features as home videos, realising hundreds of millions of dollars of value from the Disney library. He launched a highly successful chain of stand-alone retail stores. And, along with Walt

Raymond Carr

The slog of high command

Almost every day throughout the Great War of 1914 to 1918 Douglas Haig kept a diary which its editors describe as ‘an understated account of the day-to-day slog of high command’. It consists of often brief notes of operations and their outcome. Magnificently edited as it is, without maps with arrows showing the directions of attacks and the ground lost or gained in the great battles, the reader is lost in a welter of obscure place names. Haig was not, Bourne and Sheffield remark, ‘a man for reflecting on his own motives and performance’, but he does often supply observations of the motives and performance of others. They add a

Interconnect

Psychic jaunts and jollities

It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes Beyond Black, a long, dense and complicated work which combines almost forensic accounts of the modern medium in action with some rapt reportage from in and around the M25 corridor, while leaving the reader in no doubt that these two kinds of banality are somehow connected. The focus for this relentless and at the same

Anne Somerset

Tricky regime change

At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in April 1603, the predominant emotion among the spectators was relief. For the past 45 years her subjects had lived in continual terror of being engulfed in civil war when the childless queen died, leaving behind her a disputed succession. There were as many as 12 possible claimants to the throne and since Elizabeth had never made clear her own preference, it was far from obvious which one would triumph. Elizabeth had forbidden discussion of the matter on pain of death, but while this silenced speculation, it could not stop her subjects worrying about what would happen after she was gone. Upon her death, however, there

Digby Durrant

Love lies bleeding

A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they join Gauguin and others at Pont-Aven. And then one misty morning by a river down in deepest Devon Bron, too, sees a girl on a bridge and he knows exactly what Marotte felt. Flora is no unworldly Kate. Everyone’s enjoyed her, including Mick Jagger and David Bailey, and she has husband problems. Now she’s through

Patrick Skene-Catling

Fine and mellow

Having obsessively admired Billie Holiday’s singing for 50 years or so, having seen her perform whenever possible, having listened to her recordings again and again, and having read hundreds of thousands of words about her, I received Julia Blackburn’s With Billie in a mood of blasé scepticism. It is a pleasure to report that this is a really marvellous book, the most uninhibitedly intimate portrayal ever of the short, hard life and overall musical triumph of Lady Day. Though not as orderly as Stuart Nicholson’s 1995 biography, for example, With Billie more vividly reflects the chaos that Billie Holiday was born into and only rarely escaped from. Blackburn had the

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

The boy done good

The saga of Naim Attallah and his writing career continues. For readers who have just joined, Attallah’s short morality tale about his simple and happy childhood with his good and loving grandmother and great-aunt, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, appeared last year. It came swiftly on the heels of Jennie Erdal’s entertainting memoir, Ghosting. In this, she revealed that Attallah’s immense and impressive literary output — articles, collections of interviews, book reviews, erotic novels — had in fact been written not by him, but by her. For over 20 years, she had been his full-time ghost. Now, in another extremely short space of time, Attallah has produced the second volume

Patricia Daunt

Intrepid sisters of the Service

Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as a masterpiece. It’s not; but it’s fun and I suspect it of being quite a spoof too. The gifted wife of the current EU ambassador to Kazakhstan, a professional journalist, has whiled away time in Almaty, capital of the land of the Soviet gulags, in lacing a highly coloured account of her 30-year marriage to

John Mortimer

The shaky scales of justice

Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular. More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By introducing imprisonment without trial and attacking the golden threads of British justice such as the presumption of innocence which means that the burden of proof should always be on the prosecution, the present Labour government, through its disastrous home secretaries, has demeaned our judicial system. It is hoped that they will pay the penalty for

Olivia Glazebrook

Learning how to swim

The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible. Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal, selfish and irresponsible alcoholic. His wife Mary Rose is a painter who detests domestic chores and has an attitude towards her children as robust as her husband’s. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she says, and expects them to find their own food, and fight their own battles. Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maur-

William Reesmogg

Practising to deceive

There are two views about the morality of political lying. The first is the classical British view that politicians should always tell the truth, as people should in private life. This view is usually qualified, as William Waldegrave qualified it before the Treasury and Civil Services Committee of the House of Commons: ‘In exceptional circumstances it is necessary to say something that is untrue to the House of Commons. The House of Commons understands that and accepts that.’ Such lies are only justified to protect a major public interest, where a refusal to answer would be taken as a confirmation of the fact, as in devaluation of the currency. The