Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Lee Langley

The gringo’s progress

In his History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott described the bafflement of the Spanish arriving in a country where savagery and sweetness, blood sacrifice and delicate manners co-existed unsettlingly. In Mexico nothing was straightforward. Anita Desai is known, and acclaimed, for her novels about India. The sub- continent is her birthplace and literary territory. Setting her latest novel in Mexico, she writes with a visitor’s eye about a visitor, Eric, a nice, unmotivated post-graduate student at a loose end, who stumbles into a quest for his roots. For the quiet Bostonian, the shock of Mexico is visceral, overwhelming. Long-buried family links emerge: a Cornish grandfather who sought his fortune

Anne Chisholm

Shock tactics in love and life

In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at the centre of the book, signify in their own right rather than as wives, lovers and muses to a series of more talented men. They were indeed, as she writes, ‘strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild’; but that was about it. As Connolly is too honest to conceal, they were also frequently a pain in the

Antonia Fraser

A most superior street

Nancy Mitford did not enjoy readers’ letters, according to Harold Acton’s sprightly memoir (how unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss). But she did enjoy this one from a certain Mavis Mitford-Potts, following the enormous success of her first historical biography, Madame de Pompadour. It was along these lines: ‘I live alone in a bungalow and shall soon no doubt be murdered by one of the many people who think all Mitfords better dead’ and had the PS: ‘Please don’t think I admire your idiotic books.’ Nancy Mitford described this missive as ‘a breath of fresh air’ compared to the stack of fan-letters she was receiving: ‘It’s so odd why

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Coming in from the open air

Selected Poemsby R. S. ThomasPenguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908 Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just a poem you were asked to discuss. And it got worse, much worse. The poem was a carol. Poems I thought I knew about: they were puzzles. Poems allowed me to write at length, using words whose meaning I was not entirely sure about, like ambiguity and irony. Yet here was something so simple, so

John Michell

Fasten your seat-belts . . .

The end of the world is nigh. Well, of course it is. Everything falls apart, sooner or later, including ourselves and the Earth we live on. We are particularly vulnerable today, with so many mortal threats to civilised existence competing for attention — war, pestilence, pollution, economic breakdown and moral collapse. Ian Rankin adds another threat, the most terrible of all. The world is going to shift off its axis, causing widespread cataclysms and the destruction of everything we know and cherish. It has often happened before and it is bound to happen again — probably quite soon, says Rankin. This is a radical theory and it has powerful opponents.

Kate Chisholm

Music as the food of love

Susanna Burney was the younger sister of the more famous Fanny (one of the best-loved of English diarists and author of Evelina). Born in 1755, three years after Fanny, Susanna began writing a journal long before Fanny had conceived the idea of confiding her thoughts ‘To Nobody’. Susanna’s diaries (still unpublished) tell us less about the personalities in the Burney circle — and they were an extra- ordinary bunch, including not just Garrick, Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also Burke, Sheridan and James Bruce, the explorer of Abyssinia — but they are recognised by those who have read them in the British Library, pasted into hefty leather-bound tomes, as a

Philip Mansel

Power behind the scenes

Parliament has so dominated the writing of English political history that the royal household has been sidelined. Moreover, the absence of a tradition of court literature as strong as the French, and prudent bonfires of such compromising documents as the letters to George III from Lord Bute, subject of this remarkable study — and to John Brown from Queen Victoria — have erected walls of silence around this elusive institution. In reality, well into the 19th century the court was the centre of power and pleasure in London. Someone as independent as Swift spent years haunting St James’s palace in search of a job. It contained a Secretary of State’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

With a little help from our friends

Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victoryby James FalknerPen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it was the event which opened for Britain ‘the gateways of the modern world’. So how come all most of us remember about it today is that it was won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and that it had a palace in Woodstock named after it? One reason may be that since it involved neither

Harry Mount

The great and the grumpy

Denis Healey will never be the same, once you discover, as you do in this fizzing collection of mini-biographies, that his favour- ite question is, ‘Do you have sexual fantasies when you smoke cigars?’ Peregrine Wors- thorne is now forever fixed in my mind exchanging shirts with the first Mrs Nigel Lawson in a crowded Wheeler’s restaurant during a Brighton party conference. And the dynamics of Private Eye fall into place when you know that, in the 1950 scholarship list for Shrewsbury, Richard Ingrams came first, Christopher Booker third and the late Paul Foot fifth. Alan Watkins, the eminent political columnist, now for the Independent on Sunday and for many

Kevin Jackson

The gentle art of saying no

Cynics have long noted that there are certain, relatively coarse, artistic vocations in which premature death can be a shrewd career move: consider the presently thriving and/or grossly inflated reputations of, say, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. For those who practise the more elite arts, an equally potent and far less drastic option is readily available. Why bother with the agony and mess of drug overdoses or car crashes when you can attain a comparable, pseudo-posthumous mystique just by renouncing your gift? One of the most frequently recounted fables of modernism is the story of the Grand Refusal: Rimbaud chucking in poetry at 19 in favour

Clemency Burtonhill

Three welcome new voices

Liars and Saintsby Maile MeloyJohn Murray, £14.99, pp. 260, ISBN 0719566444 Darien Dogsby Henry ShukmanJonathan Cape, £12.99, pp. 279, ISBN 022407282 ‘Short’ as Peter Dimock’s potent novel about the Vietnam war may be, it packs a not insignificant punch. The curious title is to be taken literally: this really is a ‘rhetoric’, in the classical sense, and the point on which it wishes to persuade is indeed ‘leaving the family’. For, on the eve of the first Gulf war, Jarleth Lanham writes a letter to his two adoptive ‘sons’, intended to be read when they come of age in 11 years’ time (which takes us unwittingly to September 2001, just

Philip Hensher

Not an egg, bean or crumpet

Among the great works of art written in the prison camps of the second world war are Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Viktor Ullman’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos and P. G. Wodehouse’s Joy in the Morning. Spot the odd one out. Robert McCrum, with some ingenuity, has managed to isolate some lines in Joy in the Morning, that incomparably sunny comedy, which may be inflected by Wodehouse’s difficult war. The Gestapo translates into a little sourness about village policemen, and that is about it. McCrum yields to temptation, and describes Wodehouse’s war history as the defining episode of his career, but that is

Saturday

Interconnect

What is this life?

W. H. Davies was a phenomenon of whom, it seems, few nowadays have heard. His lines, ‘What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare?’ were quoted with approval in the local pub the other day, but nobody knew who wrote them. In 1996 that poem, ‘Leisure’, was voted 14th most popular in the English language, ahead of Marvell and Blake. Davies was indeed a phenomenon because, for at least ten years of his life, he was a non-writing, non-reading tramp. Not a ‘hobo’, who looks around for casual labour, not a slumming would-be author in search of copy, but a genuine, non-diary-keeping,

Francis King

Madness and death in Korea

This diptych of a novel starts with a surprise. Margaret Drabble’s fame rests largely on fiction dealing with social issues in contemporary Britain. But here she has taken real-life intrigue, madness and murder in 18th- century Korea as the subject for the first half of her book. Her inspiration, Drabble tells us, came from a reading of the memoirs of the Lady Hyegy

Judith Flanders

The play’s the thing | 21 August 2004

‘His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner … On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and [his prospective wife] is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it.’ Thus Nabokov on the mystery of Shakespeare. The mystery is not that we don’t know much about the man

Tony Gould

The lighter side of gender politics

The sixth in the ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ series of novels is as delightful as any of its predecessors. Mma Ramotswe and her able assistant, Mma Makutsi (‘the most distinguished graduate of her year from the Botswana Secretarial College’ with a 97 per cent pass mark), continue to dispense true justice in a corrupt world while experiencing to the full the moral and emotional stresses of life. Cheerful ladies though they may be — and their virtues and foibles certainly cheer the reader — their triumphs over adversity do not come without a cost. Their vulnerability, as well as their humanity, is what makes them so attractive. In this

Sebastian Smee

Method acting with a vengeance

Two of a good thing is usually better than one — unless, of course, the good thing in question is you. Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s new novel, The Double, is built around just such a premise. His main character, a mildly depressed history teacher called Tertuliano M

John De-Falbe

Stifled at birth

This is a reissue in paperback of a novel that utterly vanished on its first publication in 1998. Since it is exceptionally good, it is worth explaining its disappearance. Review copies were sent out by Bellew, its original publisher, and copies were sent to the Society of Authors for submission to their Sagittarius Prize (best first novel by an author aged 60 and over), but ten days later Bellew went bust. The receivers sold all the stock to a remainders firm who took the view that The Danube Testament was unsaleable and pulped the whole edition. No copies went to bookshops. This does not quite explain why it was never

Andro Linklater

The acceptable face of crime

It was no fun being captured by pirates. Hanging from the yardarm or walking the plank was the least of your worries. According to Alexander Exque- melin’s eye-witness account in Buccaneers of America: Amongst other tortures then used, one was to stretch [the victims’] limbs with cords and at the same time beat them with sticks and other instruments. Others had burning matches placed between their fingers, others had slender cords twisted about their heads, till their eyes burst out of their skull. Worse still could be expected from a French pirate known as Montbars de Languedoc, aka ‘the Exterminator’, who allegedly would slit open a prisoner’s belly, nail his

Jane Ridley

Health, money, recipes and gossip

In 1799 Susan O’Brien underwent an operation for breast cancer. She was 56 and, her sister having died of the disease, she nerved herself for the knife. The doctors insisted on blindfolding her during the operation, but she took nothing to ease the pain and remained fully conscious throughout. She was convinced that the operation would kill her, so she saw it rather like a public execution, and determined to die with dignity. She didn’t scream or weep once. The operation was a complete success, and she lived on for another 28 years. This and many other plums are tightly packed into Joanna Martin’s book. Her bran tub is a