Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

16 Oct 2004

Never short of an answer

People, that’s to say some critics, just don’t get it about R. B. Kitaj. They dislike the way he paints, running things past us in dead heats, so to speak, drawing things together with a Huck Finn-like disregard for propriety. He’s bookish, it seems, and full of himself, which annoys them, and he can be bitterly cantakerous. They particularly hate the way he answers back. These days Kitaj lives in Los Angeles, where the critical climate is comparatively mellow. There he has family and seclusion and room in which to revisit his themes, the most urgent of which is a coming to terms in pictures with the death of Sandra

Carole Angier

The awkward squad | 16 October 2004

The introduction to Alone! Alone! is very good. It’s modest and candid, and everything Rosemary Din- nage says about book-reviewing is spot on (e.g. ‘If it’s about misery, send it to Dinnage’ — funny, I thought that was me.) Especially this: ‘It’s sometimes like writing a diary, or a running commentary of evolving ideas.’ That’s exactly how it feels, if you review a lot — and not even very rapidly evolving ideas, in my case; my current obsessions probably repeat themselves in every review. Hence Dinnage’s idea for this book: to collect those of her reviews that hung together as a ‘running commentary’ on one of her favourite miseries, ‘outsider

William Deedes

The price of the last push

This lucid account by a practised hand of what went on in Europe during that final year of the second world war addresses a question that has puzzled many people. Why, after putting the German army to rout in August 1944, did it take Anglo-American forces until May 1945 to secure victory? Field-Marshal Montgomery, with whom I became closely acquainted after the war, had his own didactic version of what went wrong. After our setback at Arnhem in September 1944, General Eisenhower virtually called a halt. ‘Failure to win by Christmas,’ Monty told me, ‘all our troubles hinged on that … Patton [Commander, America’s Third Army] or me — didn’t

Saturday

9 Oct 2004

Jane Ridley

The hero with a hundred faults

The Duke of Wellington once bumped into Nelson in a minister’s anteroom. Nelson had no idea who Wellington was (it was before he was famous), and at first Nelson talked entirely about himself, and in a style so vain and silly that Wellington was disgusted. Then Nelson briefly left the room, checked out Wellington’s identity, and returned to talk as one officer to another in a way that Wellington found altogether fascinating. There were two sides to Nelson. The most brilliant naval commander of all time was also a shameless self-publicist and the spoiled celebrity lover of Emma Hamilton. Perhaps these contradictions are what make him endlessly fascinating to biographers.

Digby Anderson

The god that has failed to fail

Atheists were rare before the mid-18th century. The 200 years from then to the mid 20th century were their moment, especially among intellectuals. Much opinion imagines their success will continue. Professor McGrath thinks it has already turned into decline. ‘Religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the 21st century.’ He here gives us a potted history of atheism over those two centuries. He helpfully dissects its various strands. Some atheists reject religion on ‘logical’ grounds. Some indict it as old-fashioned and out of date. Others reject it for justifying war and oppression and class domination. Yet others see it as a man-made invention to solve psychological

Aidan Hartley

Kenya’s hopes and horrors

Atheists were rare before the mid-18th century. The 200 years from then to the mid 20th century were their moment, especially among intellectuals. Much opinion imagines their success will continue. Professor McGrath thinks it has already turned into decline. ‘Religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the 21st century.’ He here gives us a potted history of atheism over those two centuries. He helpfully dissects its various strands. Some atheists reject religion on ‘logical’ grounds. Some indict it as old-fashioned and out of date. Others reject it for justifying war and oppression and class domination. Yet others see it as a man-made invention to solve psychological

Eric Christiansen

Big Daddy of Europe?

It was one of his own poets who described Charlemagne as ‘father of Europe’, over 1,200 years ago. Pres- umably that is why the publishers call him father of a continent, although in this case the continent was more notional than geographical. About a third of the land-mass bowed down to the big man by the time he died in 814, but even after 46 years of generally successful self-assertion there were still four other European empires going strong (the Byzantine, Bulgar, Chazar and Cordovan), not to mention the kingdoms of the British Isles and Nordic world. Another of those poets called him ‘lighthouse of Europe’, which will seem more

Toby Young

Both the first and the last word

Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but more seasoned observers will spot the resemblance to the subtitle of another book, Seeing Is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties by Peter Biskind. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a deliberate bit of provocation on Shone’s part. Six years ago Biskind wrote a

Olivia Glazebrook

Working with ideas, not stories

This collection was originally published by Faber in 1993, and was followed in 1996 by Martel’s first novel, Self. Then Canongate bagged the prizewinning Life of Pi in 2002, and now, in the wake of its colossal success, they have republished these four stories, ‘slightly revised’. ‘I’m happy to offer these four stories again to the reading public …’ chuckles Martel fondly in his Author’s Note, ‘… the youthful urge to overstate reined in, the occasional clumsiness in the prose I hope ironed out.’ The title story is an account of the decline and death of Paul, a young man who has contracted the HIV virus as a result of

Jonathan Keates

A slave of solitude

Loneliness is a pearl of great price among novelists. Fiction, drawing so much of its inspiration from groups, communities and societies, nevertheless cherishes the idea of solitude, of the hero or heroine outcast and apart, thrown upon their own resources for spiritual endurance. Think Robinson Crusoe among his goats, Jane Eyre roaming the corridors and attics of Thornfield, Fanny Price learning the value of non-inclusiveness from her selfish Bertram cousins or the peopled wilderness created by Dickens in Bleak House. Douglas Coupland’s latest novel invokes one of the 20th century’s best known loners in its title. According to the Lennon and McCartney song, Eleanor Rigby ‘picks up the rice in

Clayre Percy

Without a blush or a yawn

Joan Wyndham has written two war diaries, and one postwar autobiography; now she completes the picture with a description, part diary, part straight narrative, of her life as a child, a schoolgirl and a student at Rada. Her first three books were the story of an uninhibited bohemian. This one starts gently. Joan Wyndham began her life at Clouds. To see that most famous of Arts and Crafts houses not through the eyes of an architectural historian but through the eyes of a small child who actually lived there is a good way to begin. Unfortun- ately she did not stay there for long. Her parents’ marriage foundered and the

Patrick Skene-Catling

Beyond the camera’s reach

The 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were terrific disaster television. No special effects! How about those great shots of real people jumping off to avoid incineration? And here comes the novel, which can be read as the preview of a dramatic treatment for the script of the movie. A novel is only second best to reality TV, of course, but there are certain advantages. Frédéric Beigbeder, a 39-year-old Parisian publisher, literary critic and broadcaster, has been able imaginatively to penetrate places where there were no cameras on that day. He has then described what it may have been like on the 107th floor, in the Windows on the World

Ian Garrick-Mason

A poor pre-emptive strike

‘You will be in charge, although, of course, nothing will happen, and I shall be back again this evening early,’ Major Henry Spalding told Lieutenant John Chard before riding away from the British supply depot in search of reinforcements that had failed to show up on time. Chard was thus the officer in command when barely two hours later the depot, defended by only 139 soldiers and engineers, was attacked by a column of 4,000-6,000 Zulus. The subsequent battle of Rorke’s Drift would become one of the most famous in British military history. Saul David’s history of the six-month Zulu war of 1879 arrives on the 125th anniversary of the

Tom Pocock

When there was nowhere to go but down

It goes without saying that the second world war was decided as much on the western ocean as in the sky over England. Indeed the Battle of the Atlantic could be seen as the Battle of Britain in slow motion, its critical period lasting for the first three and a half years of the war. There was little dash about the battle, however, which has only occasionally been illuminated by a book or film, like The Cruel Sea, which gives this book its rather unworthily derivative title. First glancing through the 700 pages, it seems taxingly repetitive. All those ships (merchantmen tended to have inconsequential names like racehorses), their captains

Sam Leith

Olden but not golden

‘Roy Hattersley,’ said Becky, tilting her head on one side to read the spine of the thick red book I had brought away with me to the house party. ‘The Edwardians. Are there four more depressing words in the language?’ Now, that’s not fair. He may be a bit of a windbag, but he’s our windbag, and he has obviously done a good deal of work on a book about a lively period in our history. His tour d’horizon of the Edwardian age takes in 360 degrees of horizon. It is largely a work of summary, coloured by its author’s partisanship, and given original flavour by quotes from the unpublished

Saturday

2 Oct 2004

Vicki Woods

Going behind the Bushes

Kitty Kelley is the Heat maga- zine of celebrity biographers. Spectator readers who may not be familiar with this unpleasant (but very popular) weekly should know that public taste has moved on from Hello!. Heat doesn’t do airbrushed celebrities looking gorgeous in their celebrity homes. Heat gives you the celeb ‘as she [or he] really is’ i. e. preferably sweaty, hag-ridden and running to fat, or displaying signs of a) extensive rehab, b) a coup de vieux or c) recent arrest. Heat is a ‘post-celebrity’ celeb mag, which aims to show that despite all their fame and money celebs are sad losers just like the rest of us. Before The

David Willetts

The world we have lost

The Whig interpretation of history, a relentlessly progressive account of the emergence of our parliamentary system, has long been out of fashion when it comes to politics. But histories of social policy are all too often complacent accounts of ‘the development’ or ‘evolution’ of state provision. This excellent book breaks with that tradition by reminding us of what was lost as the conventional welfare state expanded. A vigorous network of working-class institutions ranging from friendly societies to dissenting chapels was bulldozed out of the way as the state moved in. E. G. West powerfully showed how much schooling there was before Foster’s Education Act of 1870. David Green showed the

Interconnect

Patriot and appeaser

Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders. Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh of the conference of Vienna, was one of the grandest and richest men in Britain. He owned several country houses, London-derry House in Park Lane and 50,000 acres in Ireland and England, including large parts of the Durham coalfields. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and commissioned into the Blues, which he commanded during

Byron Rogers

Saved by comic relief

There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’. I knew things were pretty bizarre in Berlin towards the end, with the Nazis legalising nudism and stores holding spring sales as the Russian tanks rolled in, but for Cyril Connolly to have had a cultural correspondent in the enemy capital at the end of a world war would have been the supernova of aestheticism. And a very catastrophic

Francis King

Morality and mortality

At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due. His raffish old comrade in asthma Joe Follows, a financier with a ‘colourful’ past — already met in the second volume, Of Love and Asthma — then persuades him to join in the flotation of a business called Heads You Win. This, at first dedicated merely to headhunting, soon extends to the hectic takeover of