Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Peter Porter

Truly heroic couplets

Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be unrepresentative of his time calls into question received literary history. Powell demonstrates that Crabbe’s best poetry, couched almost invariably in heroic couplets, is as tinged with Romanticism as Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s. Where, to my mind, it is superior is in its avoidance of the limp diction and wayward syntax of almost all Romantics, apart from

Jonathan Bate

The cloak-and-dagger poet

It is almost impossible to write a good biography of Shakespeare. His plays contain at once too much and too little for the biographer; his extraordinary impersonality means that he hardly ever reveals his hand. Every voice has its counter-voice; no single character speaks on behalf of the author. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a biographer’s dream. Whereas Shakespeare vanished into each of his characters, Marlowe stamped his trademark onto his singular anti-heroes: Tamburlaine the Great rising from Scythian shepherd to conqueror of the world, Dr Faustus making his contract with Mephistopheles, King Edward II putting his desires above his crown (with Piers Gaveston in the role of Mrs Simpson).

Sebastian Smee

The Man of Feeling

Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing it. William Trevor, in all other ways a marvellous writer, rains sympathy down on his characters until they are drenched in the stuff. More than half the stories in this new collection are excellent. But, cumulatively, they suffer from an excess of sentiment which leaves you yearning for a burst of nastiness or an inexplicable

Bevis Hillier

Green fairy liquid

A gushy woman told Whistler that she thought he was the greatest artist since Velazquez. ‘Why drag in Velazquez?’ Whistler drawled. One of the bonuses of any book on absinthe is that it drags in — corrals — more or less all the great French artists and writers from the 1860s to the early 1900s, and a few English ones too, such as Beardsley and Wilde. But it also brings in less celebrated figures, like Charles Cros, who died from his 20-glasses-a-day absinthe habit in 1888. The son of a French doctor of law and philosophy, Cros was a poet. Adams devotes an appendix to Cros’ poem ‘Lendemain’, about the

Michael Carlson

A second, darker diagnosis

In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, newly arrived in Britain, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. His sharp eye captured both a society in turmoil and one imbued with immense postwar promise. He combined critical distance with an innate, almost American optimism. Nearly three decades later this sequel, as its title implies, is far less optimistic. Hodgson would certainly agree with Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and Attorney-General, John Mitchell, who said, on his way to

Colin Wilson

The persistence of magic

W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone concluded that the Golden Dawn was a fraud. When I was doing a night class on Yeats in Leicester in 1948, I remember our professor, Philip Collins, explaining that we simply had to accept that the great poet was also a credulous idiot, the only extenuating circumstance being that he wanted to believe such rubbish

Philip Hensher

Christopher and his kind

It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense research a marvellous, immense narrative. Its ultimately stupendous effect is down to the fact that Isherwood, whatever his failings and limitations, was simply there when it counted; old enough to understand the Great War, there at the Opernplatz when the Nazis burnt Heinrich Heine’s work, and there in San Francisco for the summer of love

Saturday

Richard West

James Joyce and the genesis of Ulysses

James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s abstruse version of the Homeric legend, told in a stream of consciousness babble of ancient and modern languages — which, as he rightly foresaw, would ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’. The modern celebration of ‘Bloomsday’ started in the late 1940s with convivial Dublin literary men who wanted to honour a book still virtually prohibited

Henry Hobhouse

A beauty of many names and places

Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer of rhododendron-inspired fabrics, doing her bit to mitigate the rigours of postwar Crippsean austerity in 1947. Rhododendrons (now including azaleas) are calcifuge plants, happy in lime-free soil; hence keen cultivation in the Surrey Alps, in sour patches elsewhere and in peat and sand in the Celtic fringe. In nature, rhododendrons range from huge trees or

John De-Falbe

Rather cold Turkey

In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey’s north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to the Turks. Twenty years ago I happened to visit this dilapidated town myself; the colonial buildings still endowed it with pathetic grandeur. The Russians and Armenians who once lived here hover like shadows behind the modern Turks of Snow, and the prejudices and politics that bedevil the characters of this remarkable novel echo the forces

Interconnect

Reasonable, readable rambles

The subtitle, ‘On Settling’, is apt; the book is about the author’s settling in (you could nearly say ‘into’) what he calls ‘the claylands’, near Malmesbury in Gloucester-shire, and about the ‘settled’ nature of that place, the threats it has survived, the way it has adapted and, by extension, the manner in which England and ‘Englishness’ have evolved. Concerning ‘Englishness’: today happens to be St George’s Day in brilliant sunshine. Earlier this morning there was a radio phone-in and people complaining that St George wasn’t even English, his flag has been hijacked by football hooligans, and so on. (Phone-ins are un-settling.) ‘English’ is a difficult word for someone with my

Kate Hoey

The sunset glory of the amateurs

3:59:4: The Quest to Break the Four-Minute Mileby John BryantHutchinson, £14.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0091800331 Fifty years ago, on 6 May 1954, it was a blustery evening in Oxford. On the Iffley Road cinder track an event took place which has since become synonymous with everything that was good about sport. To run a mile in under four minutes had been seen by many as a feat beyond the limits of human endeavour. But Roger Bannister did so that night in front of a crowd of 1,200. His photograph appeared on the front page of newspapers all over the world and he became a British hero for the rest of

Elisa Segrave

Scared of Christmas presents

In this fascinating book about her two autistic sons Charlotte Moore describes what would be a nightmare life for most of us. I’d like to be able to have a bath without anybody else joining me in it … to open my handbag without finding a bitten-off lipstick or a capless, leaking pen … to leave a pot boiling on the stove while I answer the door, without finding that an ingredient I hadn’t bargained for has been added in my absence … to be able to watch television; usually I can’t, because the boys go to bed late. I’d love to be . . . secure in the knowledge

Ray Monk

Somewhere between hero and demon

‘I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller… I think he is an enemy of humanity.’ With this uncompromising assessment of his fellow physicist, the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi expressed a view that has found many an echo throughout the last five decades. There are several reasons to regard Edward Teller as, in Rabi’s words, ‘a danger to all that is important’. First and foremost, he was ‘the father of the H-bomb’, the man who obsessively and single-mindedly overcame all the form- idable barriers — intellectual, technical, political and moral — in the way of creating the most terrifying weapon the world has ever known,

Raymond Carr

Justified surgery or pointless blood-letting?

In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise in the Gulf War of 1991 and the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq in order to present ‘an objective record of a cross-section of the intellectual community’, which embraces both Jilly Cooper and Lord Skidelsky, by canvassing its opinions. The word ‘community’ is revealing. Writers are, like theatre ‘luvvies’, most comfortable with their

Diana Hendry

A voice worth listening to

I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who spent most of his life in Cornwall among the artists of St Ives, but I hear his voice in my head saying, ‘Tell them about the poems’. So I will. Graham’s are the most talkative poems of the 20th century. They talk to the reader, to friends (dead and alive), to his wife, to himself (or selves), to the muse, to silence, to the alphabet and, perhaps most importantly, to language itself. Here he is in ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ talking to his dead artist friend: This is only a note To say how sorry

Miranda France

The mind at the end of its tether

When I interviewed him about his novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath described himself as a ‘psychological novelist’, adding that he would be ‘very happy to spend the next 30 years working through different species of madness’. That was eight years ago, and he seems to be keeping to schedule. Asylum and then Dr Haggard’s Disease were richly praised for their portrayals of dangerous obsession and the loss of sanity. This new novel examines the maddening effect of life in the tropics on two volatile artists and their godforsaken daughters. With a view to developing their work away from cultural distractions, Jack Rathbone and his lover Vera Savage seek isolation in Port

Philip Hensher

Other voices, the same rooms

I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am told that he or she has what I would have thought a slightly alarming habit of sitting down heavily at the end of the bed: just a previous inhabitant, whose name is now long forgotten, observing these curiously un-Italian occupants sleeping in his house with emotions impossible to retrieve. But all houses, in a sense,

Saturday

Jane Gardam

Dirty hands with green fingers

The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies’ Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs. British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children’s Mughal Garden in Bradford and the

Digby Anderson

The crushing burden of proof

Anthony Kenny does not believe in the existence of God, but his disbelief is qualified and complex. He does not believe that the existence of God can be proved through something like the five Thomist ‘proofs’: they depend too much on ‘outdated Aristotelian cosmology’. Further, he thinks that the traditional attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence are incompatible. He implies that there is also a traditional attribution to God of (total?) ineffability and this, too, damages proof of existence. I don’t quite understand his emphasis on the un-utterability of God. It’s true there is a strand of ineffability-thinking in the Church, but there are even stronger strands