Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Diana Hendry

A concern with appearances

I was bemused by this novel — a first from Katherine Bucknell, better known as an editor of Isherwood’s diaries and of Auden studies. In its concentration on houses (in London and Virginia) and their furnishings, I kept thinking of Henry James and such novels as Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton and this had me holding my breath, hoping for more psychological complexity and characters changed by experience. In opposition to this, I sometimes had the exasperated feeling that I was reading Interiors magazine with a rather thin story attached. What is of interest in Canarino is that it is not so much a portrait of

Norman Stone

A man, a plan, a canal . . .

Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was the theory: porn magazines were probably the reality). Killing off Shias, clearing the Kurds out of the oil towns in northern Iraq, and launching himself as hero of the down-trodden Arabs, Saddam clearly had Stalin in mind. Aburish’s book was a good one, but it was also inspired by animosity — ‘from vigilance of grief

Alan Watkins

Placeman without a place

One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group; Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they return- ed to prosper under

Anthony Daniels

Fantasies under the river gums

Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance. Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clichés that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand.

Saturday

Katherine Duncanjones

Infinite riches in a little room

Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar, ‘as if the important thing was to make everyone sound very Roman, like senators preparing to sit for statues of themselves’; and an analysis of the phrase ‘simple shells’ in Pericles which he sees as ‘an early warning to those who find the last plays simple; not even the word “simple” is simple’. Such acute

Interconnect

Much more than a game

It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through. This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his early career, the astonishing web of intrigue, bribery and political pressure in which he later found himself, and his eventual triumph. Because of his straightforward cricketing skills, his mere presence in England, and in the England team, could be said to have changed the world. This book is also a history of the stupidity and

Mark Archer

Making the most of the obvious

James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each other on a crowded pavement. He calls it ‘the beauty of a well- co-ordinated crowd’. When he goes into a supermarket in search of orange juice, there’s the juice carton ready and waiting for him! How did the grocer know he was coming? And how does he know he’ll want some more juice tomorrow? He

Raymond Carr

Rare conjunctions of the stars

Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their lives become intertwined as a result of ‘a chance meeting’. James Baldwin reluctantly goes to a Paris party of the Marxist writer Jean Malaquais where Norman Mailer, glass in hand, is doing his loud-voiced party piece. It is the point de départ of a friendship based on mutual admiration. Is this first chance meeting significant?

Matthew Leeming

The Quaker Prince of Ghor

The saga of the First Afghan War, one of the greatest disasters ever met by the British army, has been told many times before, and I had vowed to throw any book that told it again away in the bin. But Ben Macintyre has found a wholly original angle on it by turning the spotlight on a mysterious American, Josiah Harlan, whose story briefly crosses other accounts of this period. In doing so, he has produced a riveting book and a valuable contribution to Great Game literature. It is the story of the American adventurer who has passed into the folklore of the North-West Frontier and was almost certainly Kipling’s

Henry Patterson

Playing poker in the Last Chance Saloon

A biography of over 1,000 pages whose subject is the leader of a provincial political party which has five MPs at Westminster and could, if the more alarmist projections from the recent European elections are fulfilled, lose them all to Paisleyites at the next might seem excessive. Yet the story which forms the heart of the book is a fascinating and important one. Godson demonstrates that without Trimble the historic Belfast Agreement and the peace process itself could have long since foundered for lack of Unionist support. Although the book’s subject is David Trimble and the broader ‘Unionist family’ it provides much new information and many insights into the British,

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Hit-and-miss history man

Since it was a prime social manifestation of the industrial revolution, the Victorian city more than merits serious attention by historians. It became the symbol of the de-ruralisation of the British (or more specifically, English) poor, and was the vehicle for the rise of the middle classes. These themes and others are discussed in detail by Tristram Hunt in this book. Its three sections deal broadly with the establishment of the new cities, their development, and their decline. Together with familiar tales from familiar sources about the condition of the urban poor, Dr Hunt has found some unfamiliar tales and sources as well. He is clearly knowledgeable about architecture (though

Brian Masters

A week with a human monster!

Thirty years ago Sandy Fawkes was a Daily Express reporter following a story in the southern states of the USA. She met a good-looking young man in a bar, and spent the next six days in his company, driving around with him, eating out, and sharing a bed. He was enigmatic and monosyllabic, but sufficiently intriguing to keep her interest alive. Just as well, for had he been bored he might well have murdered her. She later discovered that he had been responsible for the hideous deaths of at least 18 people, the last four within the two days immediately before he picked her up. She had been intimate with

Graham Stewart

Two-way traffic: arrivals and departures

Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600by Eric RichardsHambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413 In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making was becoming a nuisance. Charles Babbage complained that their racket was disrupting his concentration while he was trying to build his calculating machine. The Times got equally huffy. With a change to the law making life more difficult for the grinders, the money, such as it was, fell out of the barrel-organ market. The boys

William Oddie

A good man in a naughty world

All Archbishops of Canterbury fail. Dr Carey quotes Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang’s famous dictum: ‘The post is impossible for one man to do, but only one man can do it.’ It is not simply that there is too much for one man to do. The real problem is that the internal contradictions of Anglicanism have become impossible to resolve. What do Anglicans believe? Archbishop Lang could have referred an enquirer to the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer. But that shiny little black volume is no longer to be found in most churches today, and the possibilities for schism and chaos have multiplied. Poor Dr Carey. He cannot be

Jonathan Keates

A bully with a heart of gold

Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff of Bounderby and Pecksniff with an innocent delight in showmanship, exercising his benevolence as a kind of pantomime ‘Grand Transformation Scene’, ending in paeans of praise from a grateful proletariat. William Hesketh Lever never wanted to be seen as philanthropic, and was always at pains to emphasise the self-interest of any step he might take

Harry Mount

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre

The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the gods out.” ’ More likely, the gods would say, ‘Ouch, what a rubbish film.’ But they couldn’t attack Mr Benioff for playing around with the plot. That’s been going on ever since the Iliad was written in around 700 BC. Even a century later, Solon, the tyrant ruler of Athens, one of the few poets

Lee Langley

Gurus, artists and exiles

The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited. Wide-eyed, she moves through a world peopled by egotistical monsters, flighty, flirty mothers, gruff fathers who can

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The heart of lightness

Alexander McCall Smith counts Donald Rumsfeld and The Red Hot Chili Peppers among his fans, and has a very cool cat. Mary Wakefield talks to him about Africa and ‘reality’ Alexander McCall Smith wants to show me his cat. ‘I think he’s asleep in the spare bedroom,’ says Edna, his cleaning lady, putting down a mug of coffee. ‘I’ll go and get him.’ ‘No, no, no!’ McCall Smith leaps into the hallway ahead of her. For a big man, he is surprisingly light on his feet. ‘He’ll come, he will! He’ll come if I call him.’ His teenage daughter appears in the study doorway. Edna looks out from the kitchen.

Saturday

Robert Stewart

Much more than a sporting event

The Ancient Olympicsby Nigel SpiveyOUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Gamesby Michael Llewellyn SmithProfile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about the sporting events themselves, abundantly demonstrate that the athletic contexts represented far more than sporting prowess. Stephen Miller’s richly detailed study, beautifully illustrated, is an examination of the whole of Greek culture and the role that athletics, games and festivals played in the moulding of Greek literature, vase painting, democracy and politics. Athletics, performed in

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lost and found in lonely places

Patricia Tyrrell has self-published two novels, both of which were shortlisted for major prizes. The Promised Land was runner-up for the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by someone over the age of 60, and The Reckoning was a contender for the Encore Award. I am happy to declare an interest here as, along with Mark Amory, the literary editor of these pages, I was one of the Encore judges. The book didn’t win, but Tyrrell has gone on gaining admirers, including a major publishing house who have now brought her into mainstream print. This remarkable novel lifts off from a story of archetypal depth: a stolen child, a murder,