Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Stoker Devonshire

Just mad about horses

A Year at the Races, the title of this extraordinary book by Jane Smiley, is the peg on which to hang the author’s remarkable insights into the horse and all his workings. It is indeed about racing and her experiences with her various horses at the Californian tracks, but that is almost a sideline. This is about Jane Smiley and horses. Smiley is already a hugely successful writer, and so her horses’ life must come as her, at best, third preoccupation, after her children and her writing; this she denies, emphasising her obsession with the horse, but surely she cannot be serious? She has clearly thought about horses not only

Hugh Massingberd

Playing the marriage market

Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie’. While it is doubtless fair to say that this is ‘the first ever full biography’ of the American sisters who snared British swells in the late 19th century, the path seems to have been pretty well trodden — and rather more lightly

Francis King

Past, present and future at odds

There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then, within a short period, both were suffering the same denunciations — for formalism, objectivism, cosmopolitanism and so forth. Erdman spent three years in Siberia, Olesha fell precipitously from favour. Daunted, they devoted the rest of their lives largely to working on film scripts. Olesha died in 1960, Erdman some ten years later. At first, even

Douglas Johnson

Worth a mass of detail

No one wants to write a history of Paris from Caesar to Sarkozy. Histories that are largely political, which tell the story of the city’s expanding boundaries, endless wars and growing importance within France as a whole tend to be tedious. Most authors try to show that the history of Paris is special, involving a multiplicity of subjects and demanding sentiment and admiration. Colin Jones is determined that his history should demonstrate the richness and complexity of the city. One gains the impression from his introduction that he will surprise the reader, for he begins with a quotation from the avant-garde writer George Perec who, in 1975, spent three days

David Ekserdjian

A conservative convict

At the moment, a whole room of the Sainsbury wing in the Nation- al Gallery is devoted to Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-95), but even the author of this monumental, learned, and absorbing monograph would not claim that he is a household name. Perhaps he is too much of a one-off to merit that double-edged accolade, for all that his ‘Annunciation’ must be one of the most memorable pictures in Trafalgar Square. Long before Caravaggio was kicking up fusses over how his artichokes were prepared or the outcome of a game of tennis, the bad boy artist was a recognised type. We know virtually nothing of Crivelli’s personal life, but it

Ferdinand Mount

The end of the pied piper

At the age of 13, William Norton, the son of a police sergeant and a Post Office worker, wrote to John Betjeman warning him of the impending destruction of Lewisham’s Victorian Gothic town hall. In no time Betjeman put William on to the recently founded Victorian Society, urged him to organise a petition, wrote him several long letters alerting him to other fine churches in Lewisham and Catford and then turned up at the town hall to be photographed with the boy. Despite all this, Lewisham town hall was demolished. It was still 1961, after all. England still slept. Betjeman at the same time was vainly battling to save the

Edward Smith

Finding and losing a voice

What does it take to turn artistic talent into its full creative expression? Then, once you’ve found your authentic artistic voice, how can you stop critics and followers over-defining it until you feel penned-in to the point of paralysis? And if you finally lose your voice altogether, how do you find it again? Bob Dylan’s brilliant autobiography Chronicles invites us to share that creative voyage, to listen to his emerging artistic voice. Singing is only a small part of the story. It is much, much bigger than that. The story starts as abruptly and arrestingly as one of his own ballads, when the 20-year-old Robert Zimmerman arrives in New York

Noble Frankland

Cooking the books

Churchill conceded that the ultimate verdict on his conduct of the second world war would have to be left to the judgment of history. But, as a precaution he resolved to write that history himself. The result was the six volumes and nearly two million words of The Second World War published between 1948 and 1954. David Reynolds, in the relatively short space of 527 pages of text, now gives us a detailed, Gospel-commentary-style analysis of this mammoth work. His purpose is to judge the extent to which Churchill has succeeded in providing the judgment of history upon his own achievement — how far he has, in fact, commanded history

Ronald Segal

Trenchant but tendentious

R. W. Johnson’s book purports to be a history of South Africa, from the emergence of humankind to the last nation (whatever that may mean). The pace is necessarily brisk and only seldom falls over its feet in the process, as in the movement of numerous ethnic entities provided with little more than their names. This is a trenchant treatment of the subject. It is also, as it advances into recent territory, increasingly tendentious. The part played by economic sanctions in the defeat of apartheid was so important that the record of their adoption and deployment requires an informed, accurate recital. In Johnson’s account, Chase Manhattan called in a loan

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Private pain and public glory

How a timid, subdued, frustrated man from Buenos Aires, with failing eyesight and blind for the last part of his creative years, turned out to be one of the major, if not the major writer of the 20th century, is the central mystery this book preserves, untouched, at its centre. Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges is what its title claims to be — ‘a life’. Whether it is the ‘definitive biography’ (as Mario Vargas Llosa in a publicity blurb claims it to be) is something only time, unearthed documents and loosened tongues may prove. But ‘a life’ is two things — Borges’ own and Williamson’s version of it. In this

Interconnect

Copses and corpses

What a welcome change from the energetic staccato style of many modern thrillers is this, Rennie Airth’s second book. No short thudding sentences for him, no relentless brutality and spattered swear-words, more a leisurely, gentlemanly unfurling of a story which yet is as bloody and grim as any. The rape and murder of a Surrey schoolgirl, her face hammered beyond recognition, tax the police from the local constabulary. Her body is found lying beside a stream in a wood frequented by tramps. Gradually a few other cases of young girls with smashed faces come to light in other counties and Scotland Yard is brought in. The investigation widens and enquiries

Judith Flanders

New technology, component costs and product placement

The fashion for novelty is scarcely, well, novel. In the 18th century Dr Johnson warned that the frenzy for the new had reached such a pitch that men would even look to ‘be hanged in a new way’. New fashions, new fabrics, new furniture, new decorations and ornaments, all cascaded out of workshops and factories. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, his 1776 summation of the new theory of supply and demand, talked about the ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. And leading the way in supplying the voraciously consuming masses for the previous two decades was Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Potter to Her Majesty’

Saturday

Colette Clark

Dancing and death

I thought at first that this was going to be a truly marvellous book, and in many ways it is, but I soon found that, in common with most modern biographies, it is too long, too detailed and there is too much talk about sex. It is hard to believe that non-professionals want quite so much description of ballets and ballet personalities long departed. Richard Buckle once shouted at Margot Fonteyn at the end of a long party, ‘Are you trying to tell me that ballet is a totally ephemeral art?’ ‘Yes, I am,’ replied Margot firmly. That said, this is a gripping story, and there is not much that

John Mortimer

Orphan of the Raj

Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career, he followed the one-time lawyer’s rule, ‘Failed in London, Try Hong Kong’. Unlike the many barristers who have made fortunes in Hong Kong, he became a judge and then retired to Dorset with his wife Betty, where much of this beautifully written and strangely moving novel takes place. The truth about Filth, whose real name

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A charming chap after all

Sad to report, but this book is a gem. Why sad? Because Michael Winner, a sensitive, witty and extremely gifted artist, has made such a cock-up of his personal PR that to praise him in public is like applauding the Holocaust. There are nasty silences. Faces go white. Plates drop. The man is not well liked. But he deserves to be. This is one of the books of the year. It’s easy to forget that in the late Sixties Winner was the most enterprising young director in Britain, popular with audiences, loved by stars and saluted by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is the story of

Mick Brown

The great enemy of dogma

Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on his own journey from India, to Europe, to America, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Descartes, Schopenhauer and Hume jostle for attention, along with pensées on the rise of the nation state, the end of history and Islamic fundamentalism. It sounds an almighty mess. The extraordinary thing is that it works, and triumphantly. The

Byron Rogers

When the laughing had to stop

It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous, then to loose him on the real world and his own diary. But she, being angrier, always ran more risks than the Grossmith brothers. Unlike them she touched on politics and living people, yet managed deftly to move in and out of her two worlds, the one of reality, the other of fantasy, until now.

David Hughes

When the going was bad

Billed on the cover as ‘The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave’, this blockbuster movie of a volume shoots through the months between 1934 and 1936 when a star was born: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, vain and dapper. At first he presides over a ‘group of gentlemen’, unarmed because they were only investigators. So strict was the code that Hoover’s agent in Denver was fired for offering a drink to a visitor. But in 600 days — during which the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were bumblingly gunned into legend — Hoover turned from moralist to killer, from

Eric Hobsbawm

From Harlesden to Zaire

The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous gift in this misleadingly modest booklet. Like the Alexandrian poet Kavafy (in E.M. Forster’s famous phrase), he ‘stands at a slight angle to the universe’, being both outside and part of the scene on which he comments. Though the title From Blues to Rap suggests that this scene is transatlantic, and Kerridge has made the

Rupert Christiansen

Stooping, but not to conquer

Here is yet another attempt to interest a wider public in classical music, in the form of a book ‘as told to’ Tim Lihoreau by Stephen Fry, based on a show the latter hosted on Classic FM. Falling concert attendances and CD sales, as well as the general downward slide of the culture, means that somebody needs to do mission work in this area, especially among the ear-numbed young. But I’m afraid that this isn’t going to do the trick. I should say at once that I have no doubt that Fry’s passion for the great composers is sincere and that, perfectly honourably, he aims low. Boldly, he traverses the