Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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

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