Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Mallinson

The Admiral’s men

It is tempting to conclude that a subject is fished out when strange titles appear, presumably with the intention of suggesting something novel. This is Dot Wordsworth’s territory, but can there really be such a thing as ‘the biography of a battle’? Last year, Macmillan published David Cordingly’s excellent history of HMS Bellerophon — Billy Ruffian: The Biography of a Ship of the Line. This is more easily understood, perhaps, since anyone with a soul would acknowledge that a ship is a living thing. But the biography of a battle? ‘As well write the history of a ball,’ huffed the Duke of Wellington when someone proposed writing an account of

Interconnect

An ornamental period piece

By the Grand Canal takes place, not wholly unexpectedly, in the Venice of the immediately post-Great War era. To this idyllic if decaying refuge comes dapper Sir Hugh Thurne, a fortysomething career diplomat, bruised by the turmoil of the past four years (in particular the death of his fast friend Philip Mancroft) but keen to resume the even tenor of his Venetian existence from the vantage point of Ca’ Zante, an agreeable rented house beyond the Accademia. Sir Hugh — worldly-wise and faintly world-weary — turns out to have two chief interests. The first, a taste for wryly reflective conversation, is immediately satisfied by a chat with his old friend

M R-D-Foot

Far beyond the call of duty

On the 150th anniversary of the first deed for which a Victoria Cross was awarded, this admirable book recounts some of the tales of those who have won it. The earliest, a young naval officer called Charles Lucas, ran forward instead of taking cover when a bomb landed, sizzling, on the deck of HMS Hecla in the Baltic, and tossed it overboard before it burst. Even in that heroic band, now 1,354 strong, some were still more heroic than others. Sir Peter de la Billière has picked out a few of the very bravest, from all three armed services and from several continents. Queen Victoria laid down, when she instituted

Saturday

Sara Maitland

Two halves don’t make a whole

What on earth is a ‘high concept novel’? For the expression to have any meaning you’d have to have a low concept novel, a medium concept novel and even a no concept novel. How high? Compared to? It doesn’t make sense. Nonetheless this is one. (In fairness to Fay Weldon she does not say so; the blurb writer does.) From the evidence I can only deduce that ‘high concept’ means ‘bit of a mish-mash’. Mantrapped is half of a novel and half of an autobiography plus author’s commentary on writing the (half) novel. The idea is that in our celebrity culture there can no longer be a ‘hidden’ author. Publicity,

Michael Carlson

Reheating the Cold War

In the days when the Cold War provided depth and context to all spy fiction, Charles McCarry was the strongest of the contenders for the title of ‘the American John Le Carré’. Although Robert Littell and Paul Hennisart wrote novels of complex moral ambiguity, McCarry’s CIA was closer in tone to Smiley’s Circus, chosen from society’s elite, products of the best prep (the American equivalent of public) schools and Yale’s secret societies (one of which, Skull and Bones, has produced both candidates in this year’s US presidential election), honourable schoolboys pursuing a business whose currency is dishonour. His protagonist, Paul Christopher, made his debut in McCarry’s first novel, The Miernik

Lee Langley

Breaking out of purdah

Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour ‘when the kissing had to stop’. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back

Douglas Hurd

Ketchup and thunder

I have read somewhere that the friends of this author are worried. Apparently he is an MP, a shadow minister, a performer on chat shows, editor of a weekly magazine, the next prime minister but three — and now out pops a novel. How can he manage it all? They need not worry. On the evidence I would guess that he wrote this in three days, flat out day and night, finishing with the arrival on the fourth morning of what with his Homeric education he would call the rosy-fingered dawn. And none the worse for that. The rollicking pace and continuous outpouring of comic invention make the book. There

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Making sheep interesting

He is most like a poet when writing least like one. Skim the titles of P. J. Kavanagh’s new collection and you’ll find the clues. ‘November’, ‘London Bridge’ and ‘Christmas walk’ are admirable instances of a skilled craftsman plying his trade, but they lack the yeasty suddenness of the real thing. Head instead for ‘What I didn’t say to Thomas’, a slice of wry humour about Kavanagh’s evasiveness over his belief in God, or ‘Vox Pop’, which uses a Larkinesque transition to turn a momentary rant into a celebration of civilised values. Kavanagh has all the technical gifts a poet could wish for, but at times his brain has to

Francis Kingfrancis-King

Goggling at the box

This far from flimsy novel has been written and published with remarkable speed. Little more than a year ago, on 5 September 2003, the American illusionist David Blaine entered his Perspex box beside the Thames, eventually to emerge after 44 days of starvation. His feat of heroism, madness or self-punishment (interpret it as you will) is the core of radium that provides Nicola Barker’s work with its furious, dangerous and (one hopes) therapeutic energy. The reception of Blaine’s survival in, literally, an unremitting glare of publicity, eerily paralleled that of Princess Diana’s death. The attitude of the press and the crowds that would now cheer him and wave to him

Tom Hiney

Lost white dogs of Africa

There is a fading misconception in Europe that every white person in South Africa lives the life of Reilly, albeit behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence. The fact is that, apart from all the hardworking white postmen and store clerks, genuine white trash abounds, booted out of one too many doors by bosses and wives and daughters’ boyfriends. They walk the streets, live in small townships and paint houses if they don’t drink the paint first. There are quite a lot of them, presumably more now than ever. Emigrating to Canada or Europe is not really an option for these lost white dogs of Africa. The high commissions wouldn’t let them

Alexander Chancellor

Master of most

Andrew Marr is a great adornment to his — our — trade. He is terribly clever and well-read, and I am sure he could have done something serious and useful with his life. But he decided early on that journalism was the thing for him. Despite his first-class degree in English at Cambridge, it quickly dawned on him that he wasn’t really qualified for any profession. ‘I was a scientifically illiterate innocent with the entrepreneurial instincts of a 13th-century peasant and the iron determination of a butterfly,’ he writes. ‘Journalism seemed the only option.’ But surely his instinct must also have told him that journalism was a field in which

Stephen Glover

The work of P.G. Wodehouse is immortal, but he was guilty of a moral lapse

The debate about P.G. Wodehouse’s wartime radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany has been raging for more than 60 years. It is re-ignited by Robert McCrum’s admirable new biography of the great writer. Most reviewers have taken the line that ‘Plum’s’ talks were inconsequential. Though sympathetic to his subject, Mr McCrum is a little sterner. ‘His behaviour,’ he writes of Wodehouse, ‘was incredibly stupid, but it was not treacherous.’ What business is it of a media column to re-enter these difficult waters? My excuse is that Wodehouse was almost destroyed by a journalist, and he has over the years been defended and largely rehabilitated by writers who were also journalists. His

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Busy doing nothing

Tom Hodgkinson is a 21st-century Luddite. He wishes we could smash the principles of capitalist consumerism that enslave most of the population so they can service their debts. In this beguiling book, he persuasively advocates idleness as the way to gain access to the creativity of the subconscious mind, or at least to enjoy a few beers. Hodgkinson is a dedicated connoisseur of idleness. He is the founder and editor of Idler magazine, which enables him to support himself and his family in Devon. Endorsed by quotations from an interestingly variegated team of believers in the benefits of inactivity, including Dr Johnson, William Blake, Bertrand Russell, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde,

Robert Edric

That not impossible she

Matt Thorne’s new novel might have been more usefully subtitled ‘A Suspension of Disbelief’. A novel called Cherry about sexual desire and manipulation, about a real (or possibly imaginary and perhaps, at best, invented) woman called Cherry, and with a cherry on the jacket. A cherry surrounded by splashes of …what? Blood, ink, barbecue sauce? Because whatever it is, it probably isn’t cherry juice. A strange and intriguing hybrid of a book: on the one hand firmly rooted in very contemporary obsessions and psychoses — the predictable ‘darker side of love’, according to the blurb — and on the other hand teetering on the crumbling and endlessly reforming brink of

Diana Hendry

A refusal to mourn

‘Every true writer becomes a writer because of a profound trauma experienced in youth or childhood,’ wrote Amos Oz in The Silence of Heaven, his study of the work of the Israeli Nobel-prize winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon. With reservations, he added, ‘We might venture to say that the flight of the narrator’s imagination is as high as the depth of his wound….’ All this might apply to Oz himself, his own profound trauma being the suicide of his mother, Fania, when he was 12. Perhaps, too, it is possible to say that the depth of that wound has made Oz one of the greatest novelists of our times. At last

Caroline Moorehead

The return of Cosa Nostra

When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More important, no other country had its prime minister on trial, accused of bribing judges, ruling over a coalition busy enacting special laws to protect himself and his friends. Drawing attention to these facts in the Economist not long afterwards, David Lane provoked fury in the Italian political and financial establishment, and talk among Italy’s EU

Jonathan Mirsky

A great-grandmother glimpsed

I have a faded photograph of Frances Osborne. I imagine the moment the picture was taken: perhaps she had just been told that this, her first book, would be published. She must have been happy and would have shared her happiness with her children, Luke and Liberty, who, I suppose, must have been happy, too. I can also picture Ms Osborne before she became an author, when she was a barrister, banker and a journalist. In each of these activities, she probably worked very hard, had been disappointed at times and happy at others. I like to think of her at her second home in Cheshire when this picture was

Saturday

Olivia Glazebrook

The return of the rotters

Finishing The Rotters’ Club and finding ‘there will be a sequel’ posted at the back was a bit of good news. As was finding that sequel on my doormat. And here’s more good news: The Closed Circle is terrific. Last seen on election night in 1979, the characters from The Rotters’ Club are now pushing 40 and bracing themselves for the new century. Coe manages to fill us in on the intervening 20 years with the minimum of fuss, and soon Benjamin Trotter, his brother Paul, Claire Newman (sister of the vanished Miriam), Doug Anderton and Philip Chase are up and running again. The key events of the first novel

Interconnect

Service with a smile

Alexis Soyer was Britain’s first celebrity chef, and the catalogue of his achievements dwarfs that of Delia or Jamie. He made his name providing banquets for the richest Victorians, including Prince Albert and half the Cabinet, yet he also designed a soup kitchen for victims of the Irish famine, which fed 8,750 people daily in Dublin (the ingredients of the soups supplied included turnip peelings and leek leaves). He wrote a ballet, and also invented relishes for Mr Crosse and Mr Blackwell. He was satirised, as M. Mirabolant, by Thackeray in Pendennis, but was a friend of Florence Nightingale, whose hospital kitchens at Scutari he re-designed and ran. He opened

Jane Gardam

A fusillade from the last ditch

Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the Church and the periodicals she writes for. The Universe sacked her. There is an affectionate introduction by Richard Ingrams, who says that he loves misfits and drop-outs and likes to provide them with soapboxes (e.g. in The Oldie, he describes her as a woman who has suffered in her time but keeps at the heart