Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Jonathan Gathornehardy

Trouble at the sex factory

I should perhaps declare, not an interest quite, or at least not only an interest, but an expertise. Ten years ago I spent seven months in Bloomington, Indiana researching a biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneer entomologist and sex researcher. The book appeared in 1998. T. C. Boyle has had the bright idea of writing a novel based on ‘Prok’, as Kinsey was called, and his ‘inner circle’: ‘Mac’ his wife, and his three assistants and their wives. A bright idea fortuitously, since his novel is able to coincide with the film Kinsey starring Liam Neeson and just out. But bright also because it is in fact a dramatic

Olivia Glazebrook

Going astray abroad

These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context? In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values. A middle-class English family, trying to be adventurous,

Charlotte Hobson

A tale of January and May

So you’d like your child to be a successful writer (as the classified ads might say)? Well, the least you can do, in that case, is to ensure that he or she grows up as a first- or second-generation immigrant. That way, you will provide them with an incomparably rich (literarily speaking) background straddled between two cultures, with all the sense of irony, alienation and identity crisis this entails. They will absorb two different languages and, even better, the mish-mash of both which inevitably ends up being spoken at home and which has enlivened Anglophone literature in a hundred different ways over the past half century. And, as you will

Robert Oakeshott

Mau Mau and all that

Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya: Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail. And yet writing 30-odd years later in his monumental volume Inside Africa in 1954, John Gunther summarised the division

James Stourton

Living it up in Paris

The French no longer keep diaries or go in much for social memoirs. They take their secrets with them to the grave, which is why so many of the best accounts of postwar Paris social life are Anglo-Saxon. It is therefore all the more extraordinary to read this memoir dictated from the pinnacle of Parisian social life by the Baron Alexis de Redé before he died in July 2004. Living closeted in the most beautiful of all h

Euan Cameron

From mourning into morning

Grief hangs like a pall over the opening section of Christopher Rush’s account of how he came to make a journey in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. A 49-year-old Edinburgh schoolmaster and writer, his life disintegrated in 1993 when his beloved wife Patricia died suddenly from breast cancer after 25 years of marriage, and this book is at once a memorial to her and a story of his own catharsis and re-emergence into the life of the living. In the first 80 pages Rush describes the onset of ‘the obscenity of cancer’ and its effects on his poor wife’s ailing body in such painfully forthright detail that anyone of

Saturday

Robert Stewart

How much of a saint?

Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe’s book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler’s life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe’s indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and

Joanna Kavenna

The frozen, unruly north

John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose, whose first travel book appeared under the title At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. For his second, he has followed an ancestral trail, padding along in the footprints of his great-grandfather, Eliot Curwen. Curwen, a doctor, set off for Newfoundland and Labrador in 1893, ‘lands generally supposed to have been gnawed away by poverty and cold’. Gimlette finds a ‘theatre of fish’, where the locals speak a curious dialect, riddled with surviving elements from ‘Old English, Middle English, bad English, both classical and bog Irish, Portuguese, Micmac, Basque, Breton and babble’. Newfound- land, according to Gimlette, is a land neither

Jane Ridley

The cutting edge of medicine

In 1767, John Hunter, a 39-year-old surgeon, performed an experiment on venereal disease. In order to prove the hypothesis that gonorrhoea was the same disease as syphilis, he dipped a lancet into a festering venereal sore, and then injected it into a penis. He took careful notes, observing the classic symptoms of gonorrhoea, which then developed into the secondary stage of syphilis. Buboes, ulcers and copper-coloured blotches appeared, which he anointed with mercury. This seemingly proved that syphilis and gonorrhoea were one and the same. But his experiment was fatally flawed. Unwittingly, he had injected from a patient with syphilis, not gonorrhoea. His botched experiment set back the treatment of

Caroline Moorehead

The grass below, above, the vaulted sky

It was soon after he finished work on Flora Britannica, his hugely successful book about the wild plants he had spent his life exploring, that Richard Mabey fell ill. It began as a nagging feeling of ‘ill- fittedness’, being out of kilter with his surroundings, and with the loss of all taste and hunger for work. An author and naturalist with a string of memorable and excellent books behind him, he simply ran out of words. By the time he was diagnosed as suffering from severe depression he had fallen out with his much loved sister, sold the family home, and was spending most of his time, when not in

Pn Furbank

Stories about story-telling

The story that John Barth has to tell is that he had planned a book, to be entitled Ten Nights and a Night, in which he would reprint ten already published stories, interweaving them with a new story about his relations with his Muse. The purpose would have been to put these tales into a narrative frame, ‘connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts’, on the model of The Thousand and One Nights and the Decameron. But before the book was completed there came the events of 9/11, which seemed to make story-telling hopelessly irrelevant. Still,

Jonathan Sumption

The way of the world

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not at all. Return to equilibrium is possible only through starvation or disease, provoked either by natural catastrophe or by wars over the scarce remaining resources. The resources of the earth have proved to be more elastic than Malthus foresaw. The mechanisms by which they may be exhausted are infinitely more complicated than he realised. And,

Philip Hensher

School for scandal

The time is the late 1990s; the setting a boarding school called Hailsham. This being a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy H., who attended the school, is looking back after some years and trying to make sense of her story. The school, it is quickly made clear, is not quite like other schools, the pupils not quite like people we know, and the 1990s slightly different from the decade we might remember. There is talk of ‘carers’, of the ‘fourth donation’, of ‘completing’, of someone called Madame. There don’t seem to be any holidays, and, anyway, the kids don’t have parents; nor are they orphans. In the outside

Saturday

Johann Hari

The decline of the West?

David Thomson is one of a handful of highbrow film critics writing today, along with Ron Rosen- baum and David Lane, whose work will still be read decades from now. He is best known for his amazingly ambitious Dictionary of Film, an ocean of mini-essays about every major figure in international film in the past century, and the best toilet-side reading on earth. Somehow Thomson has come up with an even more daring agenda for his follow-up performance. In Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, he writes that Hollywood ‘can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to

Douglas Johnson

There shone one woman

In January 1798 Talleyrand gave a magnificent ball designed to honour Josephine, who had married Bona- parte two years earlier. Everyone who mattered in Paris was there, whether old nobility or former terrorists. Bonaparte was well pleased with the evening, when he was suddenly cornered by Madame de Sta

Daniel Neill

You can’t go home again

Bombay, the biggest city on the planet, is built on a combination of palm fronds, fish entrails and the dreams of 14 million people. Originally comprising seven islands off the west coast of India, large areas of the city were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea during the 19th and 20th centuries. Nowadays, 500 people arrive in Bombay every day, filling every available square foot of land and adding to the agglomeration of dreams that sustains it. Maximum City relates some of these dreams: from Bollywood moguls to Hindu nationalists, from gang members to bar dancers. The central theme of the book is one of nostalgia. It is a theme that

Kate Grimond

Pigtails among the haystacks

During the bitter winter that seized Britain in earnest at the end of January 1947, the children of the village of Farnborough on the Berkshire Downs went to the pictures in Wantage to see Courage of Lassie but were unable to return home on the bus because of a heavy fall of snow. Accompanied by ‘big Mrs Willoughby (20-odd stone), who never took off her pinafore and had arms like skittles’, they trudged the five miles back on foot through the fresh snow in the dark. ‘There was a strange ethereal light on everything and a deep silence. It was as though we were the only people left on earth.’

Anne Chisholm

The limits of post-mortem knowledge

Not many collections of old reviews and lectures make worthwhile books, no matter how skilfully topped and tailed; but everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the state of the biographer’s art in recent years is worth re-reading. The title is off-putting, suggestive of the morgue, and there is something irritating about the subtitle as well: ‘life-writing’, apart from being clumsy, suggests that ‘biography’ is somehow old-fashioned, perhaps unlikely to lure students to a seminar. However, Professor Lee justifies the term by pointing out the incontrovertible fact that there are many different ways for writers to tell life stories — memoir, autobiography, journalism, diaries, letters,

Caroline Moore

Baby, it’s cold outside

The very title of Leaving Home announces a quintessential Brook- ner theme. A heroine in her novels will always face a struggle to escape, not only from an airless, restrictive upbringing (almost invariably embodied in a claustrophobically close relationship with her mother), but also from traits embedded in her own character. Her problem is that she has been so moulded by maternal genes and love, so bonded and bounded by her environment, that her character has become inseparable from her upbringing — and can, indeed, only be described as a ‘mindset’. Emma Roberts has been brought up by her widowed mother, cocooned in mutual love ‘so exclusive … that it

Raymond Carr

Micawber with a touch of Skimpole

Biographers, in their desperate search for a suitable subject hitherto undiscovered by their professional colleagues, sometimes light on a figure once well known, but who has fallen into disrepute. Such was the fate of Leigh Hunt, now resurrected in these two books. Anthony Holden is a professional biographer whose subjects have ranged from Olivier and the Prince of Wales to Tchaikovsky. Using the abundant written sources of the epoch, he has produced a long, well-researched life of Hunt from his fame as a schoolboy poet in 1800 to his death in 1859. Professor Roe is a distinguished literary critic and historian of the Romantic movement. His learned and perceptive book