Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Rupert Christiansen

A master of ambiguities

School reports can be remarkably prescient. William Empson’s headmaster noted, ‘He has a good deal of originality and enterprise: I hope he is learning also to discipline his vagaries.’ It’s a judgment which could serve as an epigraph for this massive first volume of John Haffenden’s long-awaited, long-meditated biography, in which the great literary critic and poet indeed shows ‘a good deal of originality and enterprise’, but rather heroically fails ‘to discipline his vagaries’. I remember Empson only as an old man, when he came to Cambridge to deliver the Clark Lectures in 1974. They were not considered a success, though at the opening he made everyone laugh by slyly

Sandy Balfour

A long and winding road

Having read The Prester Quest almost at a single sitting, I think I can say without fear of contradiction or a libel suit that Nicholas Jubber is full of it. But his is a most passionate, exuberant and charming kind of ‘it’, and his account of travels in Italy, the Levant, Sudan and Ethiopia in search of — well, in search of something — is a delight. Nominally he is trying to nail down the myths that surround Prester John, the ‘Priest-King of the Indies’ and master of an earthly paradise located somewhere between Turkey and China. We do not know precisely where, but Ethiopia seems like a good bet.

Saturday

Jonathan Keates

Coming to a bad end

Something very important in the history of England happened on 24 January 1536, when King Henry VIII, celebrating the vigil of the feast of St Paul’s conversion, staged a splendid tournament in the tiltyard of his palace at Greenwich. The monarch, ‘mounted on a great horse to run at the lists’, was unseated by an opponent’s lance. As Henry staggered to his feet the heavily armoured charger fell on top of him, causing severe concussion and the opening of a varicose ulcer for which he had been treated ten years earlier. Almost at once the bluff King Hal of Holbein’s swaggering portraits, the poet, scholar and musician, disappeared from view,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Masters of the chain gangs

Recent research tells us that the average British shopper is destined to spend two years of his or her life inside a supermarket. Ever since ‘Mr Alan’ Sainsbury, third-generation head of the grocery dynasty, converted his Croydon branch to self-service in 1950 — and despite the fact that one of the first customers threw her wire basket at him in disgust — these cathedrals to consumer choice and convenience have loomed larger and larger in the national landscape. They have hollowed out our town centres and surrounded them with graceless hangars in giant car parks. They have become an irresistible force in the economics of farming. They have broadened our

Nicholas Harman

Memoirs of a workaholic Scot

They are a puzzle, those Victorian ancestors, gazing through their beards stock-still to keep the image sharp. How did they move when the photographer had left, how uncomfortable were their bulky coats? The Airds found out. Charles (1831-1910) wrote a memoir in his retirement, and his grandson and great-granddaughter have piously transcribed and published it. The family memorials include the first Aswan Dam, the West Highland Railway, the sewers of Copenhagen and Berlin, and the gasworks at Kingston-upon-Thames. Here are the private thoughts and doings of one of those Scotsmen who literally built the Empire. Less partial editors would have cut the boring bits, thought of a better title and

Interconnect

Scanning the far horizon

Following his previous three novels — the work upon which much of Winton’s international acclaim rests — the 17 interconnected stories of The Turning come as something of a revelation. Those previous works, to this reviewer’s mind, have tended towards being overwritten and over-embellished (give-away epithets such as ‘lyrical’, ‘exuberant’, ‘inventive’ and ‘gutsy’ commonly recur). In The Turning, however, Winton has spectacularly reinvented himself and reined in his writing to create a world of pared-down, stunning and entirely believable completeness and complexity; a world at once exotically alien and instantly knowable. There is a precision here, and an openness, a honed inventiveness in which the telling detail and prescient moment

Anna Reid

A herdsman’s lot is not a happy one

Piers Vitebsky is Head of Anthropology and Russian North- ern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, an appealing Cambridge institution whose lecture halls are hung with polar bear skins and whose staff and students are summoned to tea and biscuits every morning by the ship’s bell of the Terra Nova. Part memoir, part social study, his book is a warm and lucid tribute to the Eveny, a 17,000-strong reindeer-herding people from the far north-east of Siberia. Vitebsky has been visiting them since 1988, and thus witnessed the tail-end of the old Soviet system for dealing with the Siberian minorities and its replacement, amidst the chaos of the Nineties, with

Saturday

Zenga Longmore

The ghosts that haunt Brick Lane

What an extraordinary book. It reminds me of a magnificently woven carpet whose eclectic style combines oriental, East- ern European and Hebraic adornments. Threads are abruptly snipped and left dangling. Curry and blood-stains are spattered upon it, causing confusion and alarm. Gavron’s work defies categorisation. It is not a collection of short stories. It is not fact and it is not quite fiction. The single theme that binds this cleverly researched book together is East London’s Brick Lane. The author includes sagas of silk weavers, manuscripts from the Civil War, Elizabethan poems, short stories, cartoon strips and newspaper quotations concerning the grisly ‘plasticater’ Gunther von Hagens. Even Boswell manages to

Tony Gould

A blot on the imperial escutcheon

The massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians and the wounding of over 1,000 others in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (a barren enclosure walled in by houses) on the unlucky 13 April 1919 has a far greater historical resonance than the incident would seem to merit. This is not to make light of what the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, called ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in sinister isolation’, accusing the perpetrator of the deed, Brigadier-General Dyer, of ‘frightfulness’ (a word then redolent of German atrocities in the first world war). It was a heinous crime, but on a

Interconnect

Darkness in the background

The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’ Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up a parallel world to the novels that Jane Austen was very much aware of, lurking around the margins of ‘the two inches of ivory and fine brush’ she used for the tiny events of Georgian family life. Fullerton early became interested in the connections of the Austen family to Australia, as others have done: there

Olivia Glazebrook

From Tipperary to hell and back

There are plenty of books about the first world war, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for another. In any case, this, I think, is the first novel to take as its hero a young Irish volunteer, stepping up to fight for the Allies in 1915. Too short to be a policeman like his father, 18-year-old Willie Dunne sees his chance to be a soldier and a hero when he reads of Kitchener’s appeal. And indeed, John Redmond the Irish leader has ‘echoed the call’, having received from the British ‘the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule’ when the war is over. So Private Willie Dunne is

Peter Porter

Master surveyor of many territories

This volume of several pounds weight and over 600 pages duration is an undeniably serious estimation of the last 250 years of European and American literature. The word panoptic might have been coined for Bayley: if not the monarch, he is at least the master of all he surveys. His readers had better be almost as universal, since his critical method is to assume that with so much known his duty is to adorn the facts with a few paradoxical interpretations. This works well at review length as the need for concentration keeps him on the high wire. He is the reviewer’s reviewer, and for a minor figure in the

Interconnect

Rumours of life greatly exaggerated

Certain concepts send even the least reputable historian scuttling for cover. The Holy Grail heads the list. The Knights Templar inspire grave suspicion; so do Atlantis and the Round Table. The Ark of the Covenant is up there with the best — or worst — of them. The Ark was the repository for the two tablets of stone which Moses brought down from the mountain and on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. To house it Solomon built a temple of stone and cedarwood, olive wood and gold. Today it rests, or so some 25 million Ethiopian Christians believe, in the rather drear church of Maryam Selon — ‘a small,

Saturday

Susan Hill Susan Hill

With a nod to the Master

Literature feeds off other literature and why ever not? Think of Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, bred from, respectively, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway. Think of Shakespeare for that matter, who told a good story provided someone else had told it to him first. To get the most out of this chilling little tale you really do need to have read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. If you have not, shame on you, but Penguin Popular Classics have it for all of £1.50 and you have the treat in store of the greatest ghost story ever written. Come back here when you’ve

Victoria Glendinning

The music of the earth and the dance of the atoms

Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal Society gets quizzed on BBC 4’s PM programme, and Cheltenham and Edinburgh run festivals of science in addition to their celebrations of literature and music. These happenings no longer represent straws in the wind but great bales of the stuff, and this marvellous Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is an ornament to the straw-stack. The

Nicholas Haslam

Brilliance and bathos

That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or any of Norma Shearer’s, both huge stars and Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood contemporaries. In fact Tallulah made nearly 60 appearances in films and theatre, some of them laughable, some memorable, all of them idiosyncratic because of her unique style. She was also one of the most famous figures of the 20th century. Hemingway once said about

Simon Heffer

Still in the dark

From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win the coming contest, and Michael Howard will not be prime minister. So best to get this unauthorised biography out on the shelves now, when at least its subject is doing something interesting. Even though the Tories seem placed to do better than in the last two debacles, there is unlikely to be such consistent publicity

Jonathan Sumption

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not as odd as it seems now, after the passage of a decade and a half. Few of those present would have predicted that German unification would mark the beginning of a long period of relative economic decline, in which sclerotic institutions devised to achieve social cohesion and labour security after the second world war would

Charles Saumarez-Smith

God’s house with many mansions

Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the late Roy Porter, David Canna- dine and Simon Schama amongst others, all of them alumni of the Jack Plumb school of history, which was based in Christ’s during Plumb’s long postwar reign there as history tutor and which became the forcing house for an engaged, literate, civic style of historical writing which can make even

Anita Brookner

A nest of ungentle Essex folk

Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences, which proceed without flagging from the outset of a complex narrative to its eventual resolution. Her astonishing productivity is another matter altogether. This is not so much devotion to the task as obedience to an impulse with which she is on enviably relaxed terms. She is in many ways qualified to be our foremost woman