Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Harriet Waugh

Seven of the best

Call the Dying is the seventh novel in Andrew Taylor’s Lydmouth series. He started it in 1994 and by setting it in the 1950s he recreates the English detective novel in what is perhaps its heyday but with subtle additions. In the first couple of novels the reader is aware of 1950s dress, behaviour and drab, postwar atmosphere far more than in contemporary novels of that time. There is the added realism of frustrated lives and hidden sexuality played out against the background of the moral mores of the era. Now, though, some of the picturesque aspects of the novels have diminished. In Taylor’s last and best Lydmouth novel, Death’s

Jane Gardam

A romantic socialist

There is no introduction to this collection of essays, reviews and ‘think-pieces’ by Doris Lessing, but they are presumably chosen by herself from the quantity of her literary criticism (the hardest work, or so they say) over a long political and literary lifetime. The pieces must have been difficult to assemble, for the acknowledgments in the back of the book include some very obscure sources alongside the blue-ribbon publications where you would expect to find ‘one of the most influential writers of the 20th century’. Some are from the Guardian, the New York Observer, the L. A. Times; more from The Spectator, the Literary Review and the late lamented Books

John McEwen

The hum of special contentment

How welcome it is to find a book published by a small private concern in this age of conglomerates; the more pleasing when one knows that the Perpetua Press is the creation of the poet Anne Ridler’s husband Vivian, former Printer of the Oxford University Press, and that it is still run from their Oxford home, where they raised three children and lived from 1948 until Anne Ridler’s death, aged 89, in 2001. These gentle reminiscences, the final few pages put together by the Ridlers’ son Ben, are of happy industry based on the Affirmative Way, ‘which pursues perfection through delight in/adoration of the created world’. This was the philosophy

John Parfitt

Britannia’s finest years

In 1903, the final volume of Laird Clowes’s seven-part History of the Royal Navy thudded on to Britain’s bookshelves: 4,385 pages of broadside-by-broadside chronology from 55 BC to 1900 AD that were in print for almost a century. Nobody has attempted to follow it on that scale, until Professor Rodger that is. His 1997 volume, Safeguard of the Sea, took us to 1649; this second volume takes us on to 1815. It has been worth the wait. Rodger says he wants to ‘put naval affairs back into the history of Britain’. High time, when too many think that history began in 1914, geography stops somewhere near the Russian border, and

Francis Wyndham

Fear in a handful of dust

Richard Wollheim died last year, aged 80, after a distinguished academic career as a philosopher fascinated by aesthetics and psychoanalysis. He had recently completed this memoir of his childhood. Posthumous publication reveals it to be a masterpiece — an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated. Although it carries self-scrutiny to an extreme of scrupulous candour which I believe to be unique, the term ‘confessional’ — with its suggestion of apology and therapeutic exhibitionism — does not apply. There is little sense here of personal secrets being exposed to public view, but rather of the

Andrew Lambirth

Well worth the weight

There is no comfortable way to read or appreciate this vast book without the benefit of a lectern. How many households now possess such a thing? I certainly don’t, and the frustration that this immediately caused — it’s hard enough to pick the book up in one hand, let alone hold it balanced to peruse — almost turned me against what is in fact a well-written and sumptuously illustrated account of one of the best 20th-century British artists. For those of less forbearing a kidney, it might be better to saw the thing in half down the spine and enjoy two (relatively) manageable volumes for the price of one. The

Jonathan Sumption

Mixed mediaeval motives

The crusades have had a bad press lately, for reasons which are not far to seek. They were characterised by the three things that the modern age has found most abhorrent about its own recent past: religious enthusiasm, racism and colonial settlement. More generally, they were inspired by a belief that there is a divine plan for the world, and that some people have been specially charged with executing it. This belief is not widely accepted today, outside the United States and parts of the Islamic Middle East. The 18th-century sceptic David Hume thought that the crusades were ‘the most signal and the most durable monument of human folly that

Peregrine Worsthorne

All human life is here except politics

Unfortunately for this volume commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Daily Telegraph, most people today are keener to read about the paper’s somewhat scandalous recent experiences and mysteriously uncertain future — about which it has nothing to say — than about its long and worthy past. So the timing of this chatty and jolly tome could not be worse. It is rather as if the Cunard company had brought out a comparably lightweight volume shortly after the sinking of the Titanic. That said, the book has much to commend it, in the form of eye-catching extracts from the paper, starting with the Hyde Park riots of 1855 and ending, as

Charlotte Moore

Posh and common

This is one of those lovely Persephone reprints with a pearly grey cover and endpapers like the maids’ bedroom curtains in a Victorian country house. The title, too, suggests that one is in for a soothing read. Marghanita Laski provides a complete dramatis personae, to add to the reader’s comfort. If one were to confuse Miss Porteous with Miss Moodie, or Green the ironmonger with Brotherton the stationer, one could just flip back to the beginning and check. Sure enough, this is a traditionally organised novel of English village life. In Priory Dean, everybody knows everyone else’s business, feathers are ruffled over where the annual fete is to be held,

Zenga Longmore

An uninspired foreign correspondent

What are the essential elements that make a good book of letters? The first is mild spite. Had John Gielgud spared us his catty asides (such as his amusement at Larry’s latest attempt at Iago) his letters would have been horribly dreary. The second is a lively correspondent. Fanny Kemble’s vivid letters describing the horrors of the Deep South will remain an everlasting antidote to the ghastly Gone With the Wind view of the ‘golden age of slavery’. Thirdly, one needs to be interested in the letter-writer. Anyone who would happily wade through Tolstoy’s novels would brave a similar struggle with the great man’s letters. So why would anyone want

Teresa Waugh

A bad Samaritan

An avalanche in a French ski resort is thought by some to have been caused by American warplanes flying low in order to refuel on their way to bomb some hapless Balkan country. This is the first clue to one of the main themes in Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire: the dislike, mistrust and misunderstanding of all nations for one another, the unlikelihood of living in harmony with foreigners, the ingrained prejudices of even supposedly intelligent people and the impossibility that ever the twain should meet. Unfortunately Johnson makes no allowances for the quick-wittedness of her reader, so she lays it on not so much with a trowel as with a sledgehammer.

Bevis Hillier

An accretion of accumulators

The word ‘camp’ is often used as shorthand for ‘homosexual’. Its wider cultural sense has been best defined by Susan Sontag: the sublime treated as ridiculous or the ridiculous treated as sublime. In Sontag’s first category might be Marcel Duchamp’s daubing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And in the second? Well, suppose somebody wrote a huge, respectful, footnoted book on the St John’s Wood Clique — the group of Victorian artists which included W. F. Yeames, painter of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ (I wrote an article on them in Apollo magazine 40 years ago. That’s as far as it went, but my father commented, ‘It

Saturday

Sibylla Jane-Flower

The power of total contempt

As plans gather pace to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war, there are certain to be renewed calls to record the reminiscences of ex-servicemen in this conflict ‘before it is too late’. Most of these efforts, however well intentioned, are useless from a historical point of view. The Imperial War Museum ran an admirable programme of recording second world war experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, thereafter acknowledging the decreasing value of oral history as memories fade. The experience of those who survived captivity at the hands of the Japanese is a case in point. Evidence of a ‘collective memory’ becomes increasingly apparent in

William Feaver

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

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