Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Curiouser and curiouser

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity. At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple,

Anita Brookner

General fiction from France . . .

On 30 August 2004 a woman wrote a letter to Le Figaro registering her dismay at the number of novels scheduled for publication in the three months that constitute the rentrée littéraire in France each autumn. She confessed that, although an assiduous reader, she rarely found anything of distinction in what was on offer and deplored the lack of true literary worth, let alone devotion to the task in hand. She perceived that this volume of production is little more than sheer economic activity. This was a worthy and pertinent comment, an alternative reading to the literary pages, in which reviewers are often more complimentary than is entirely justified. It

The Questing-Vole

QUESTING QUIZ OF THE YEAR

Opening Sentences (name the books) 1) Aaron, Richard Ithamar (1901-1987), philo- sopher, was born on 6 November 1901 at Upper Dulais, Blaendulais, Glamorgan, the son of William Aaron (1864–1937), a draper, and his wife, Margaret Griffith (d. 1940). 2) When the woman found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable’s man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley. 3) So just how mega is this then? A book on English. 4) Although 1979 may not have the same histor- ical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too

Paul Johnson

The angry Megalosaurus coming fast up Holborn Hill

When the new year is young I always have the impulse to do something sensationally novel in writing. But what? Is there anything which has not been done before? I answer: yes — coin a new metaphor. We take metaphors for granted and use them without thinking, mix them too, and abuse them constantly — whenever we say ‘literally’ we almost always mean metaphorically (e.g., ‘Chirac and the Chinese President literally fell upon each other’s necks’, the New York Times). In fact it was a genius who invented the metaphor, long before Homer (about 2000 bc in Egypt, which raised problems for those who carved the hieroglyphs, its syntax making

Saturday

Jane Rye

Pleasure without angst

David Hockney is a conjuror who likes to explain his tricks, or, as one commentator put it, conducts ‘his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence’. This chunky picture-book brings the story right up to date with watercolours and portrait drawings made only a few months ago. It contains work from throughout Hockney’s career, but is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, according to the themes and subjects that have occupied him for almost five decades. Of the four sections, Problems of Depiction, Life Stilled, Portaits, and Space and Light, the first is the most complex, with sub-divisions into Looking at Pictures; A Marriage of Styles (demonstrating his deliberate

Michael Beloff

Masters of the majors

The game of golf developed in Scotland in the 15th century. This trio of books chronicles the life, times and competition records (blow by blow and, occasionally, hole by hole) of three golfers who on any reckoning rank among its ten greatest exponents of all time. They cover three distinct periods of the 20th century and open windows on social as well as sporting history. The career of Bobby Jones climaxed in 1929 when he won the then Grand Slam of US and British Open and Amateur Championships in an era when (which would be inconceivable today) an amateur could match strokes with the professionals; and the professionals used the

Justin Marozzi

The joys and pains of solitude

Life in Iraq may not be half as apocalyptic as the media would suggest, but it is still sufficiently turbulent to welcome the reissue of Victor Winstone’s classic biography of Gertrude Bell, Arabist, explorer, archaeologist, snob and co-founder of the Iraqi state. Originally published in 1978, it has been updated to include the most recent conflict in the Middle East. This is a shame and disappointment, because much of Winstone’s revised introduction reads like a teenage diatribe against Israel and America. It is not worthy of his fine study of this remarkable woman’s life. He writes contemptuously of the ‘disgracefully named’ ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, claims that past mistakes were

Digby Anderson

The heresy of explanation

The Pentateuch belongs to all sorts of different people and I cannot speak for them and their needs, so I’ll stick with what I know. Most of my church friends rarely read the first five books of the Bible because they rarely read the Bible. They own Bibles, of course, several, maybe a Vulgate, a King James, a Revised Standard or even one of the more modern ones such as the Jerusalem. But they seldom open them; for a very good reason. They think it wiser to take their Scripture in short chunks edited and organised for them by authority. So they read it as presented in the Breviary or

Christopher Woodward

The ogre of lullabies

For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine o’clock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleon’s courtiers during the six years of the emperor’s captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the Atlantic to an island I have never seen and a white bungalow named Longwood. There are sublime moments. ‘I who was master of the world!’ Napoleon shouts as he walks up and down the narrow corridors of the wind-battered house inside which he was exiled. Then he chuckles to General Gourgaud, ‘Ah, it was a

William Boyd

Tough is the night

‘Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,’ Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. ‘We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.’ There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not. Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a

Philip Hensher

Brief and to the point

Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don Paterson is exactly that writer, the best poet of his generation, as well as an original and lucid thinker, and his boldness in bringing out The Book of Shadows is amply rewarded by the excellence of the final result. One of the impressive things about his last collection of poetry, Landing Light, was its suggestive

David Ekserdjian

Recent arts books

This year’s crop of art books for Christmas is the usual mixed bunch, and if they have anything in common, it is their general lack of festive associations. The one exception is M. A. Michael’s Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Scala, £25), a beautifully illustrated picture book with an exemplary and truly instructive text, which includes the Magi not having a notably cold coming of it among its panoply of more and less familiar religious scenes. Naturally, the lion’s share of the images is of mediaeval glass, and they are accompanied by handy diagrams detailing exactly which pieces are replaced or repainted, but more recent additions, such as Sir Ninian

Saturday

Sophie Lewis

A choice of recent first novels

All writing has some literary precedent; where better then for a first novelist to find inspiration than the Bible, the first book? David Maine takes the few, terse chapters of Genesis that comprise Noah’s story for his striking reconstruction of this crucial episode in Christian history. The Flood introduces us to ‘Noe’, ‘still a vital old corker’ at the age of 600, ‘the wife’, and their family of three sons and three daughters-in-law. Maine’s skill lies in the combination of faithfulness to the familiar authorised version — the relevant biblical verse prefaces each chapter, so the old story unfolds in parallel to the novel — and imaginative exploration of the

Charles Allen

Wolves in sheep’s clothing

The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of men like Osama bin Laden. It goes without saying that the Western world needs to know all there is to know about Wahhabis, so when a book comes along that claims to be the first serious study of the man who gave his name to this particular brand of bigotry we should take it seriously.

Kate Grimond

The daily round, the common task

Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the citizens of Bolton as they went about their daily business. Charles Madge, a radical poet, and Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker, at about the same time and unknown to Harrisson were planning a scientific survey of ordinary people’s lives. This was to be conducted by means of sending out detailed questionnaires to a host of volunteers

D J-Taylor

Down but not out on one’s uppers

One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an earl’s grandson whose father was a Harley Street physician in the inter-war era, spends a large part of this highly entertaining memoir explaining that he is actually deeply middle-class. The general effect is rather like an Edwardian stage play in which the dinner-jacketed exquisite turns out to be a cockney burglar in disguise. However outrageous

Interconnect

Happy days in Wyoming

In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection. For the purposes of this quintessentially Great American Dream Fable, the reader finds himself transplanted straight back into the centre of that extensive splodge of gun-toting Republican red which dominated the TV pundits’ psephological maps, a remarkably beautiful backdrop for a novel centred around Yellowstone National Park, crowned by the ‘black and jagged’ Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, where, we are reliably

Tom Sutcliffe

Awkward member of the squad

Peter Hall and Richard Eyre both published diaries about their time running the National Theatre, edited in Hall’s case by his head of PR, John Goodwin. Alan Bennett’s diaries are a bestseller. So are Joe Orton’s, with their devotion over a mere eight months to extra-curricular, often subterranean activity. The ‘celebrity diary’ as a literary phenomenon benefits from the current profitable obsession with biography. But Lindsay Anderson’s diaries are another thing. He kept them intermittently for about 50 years, if he could be bothered — which he couldn’t during the depression of his last two years. When he died suddenly ten years ago, with his accountant Monty White as his

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas

The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of men like Osama bin Laden. It goes without saying that the Western world needs to know all there is to know about Wahhabis, so when a book comes along that claims to be the first serious study of the man who gave his name to this particular brand of bigotry we should take it seriously.

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters

Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was contacted for help by an in-house DNB scribe who had been commissioned to write the entry for his stepfather, the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian. Tolstoy — who was working on his own full-length biography, and knew that O’Brian had taken several liberties with the facts of his own life over the years — asked his