Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Theirs not to reason why

Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially decent ‘subjects’ were persuaded to participate in what they believed to be experiments designed to establish the educational value of punishment. They were sat in a glass cubicle next to a room in which an actor pretended to go through a sequence of simple word tests. In front of the ‘subject’ was an impressive looking

Olivia Glazebrook

Who is laughing at whom?

Doctor Johnson’s excellent recipe for cucumber: ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.’ Some readers will doubtless cry, ‘But what about sandwiches?’ There is, as we are all aware, no accounting for taste. Taste is a moot point for readers of James Hamilton-Paterson’s satire, Cooking with Fernet-Branca. Our feeble hero, Gerald Samper, lives on a Tuscan hilltop from which he looks despisingly down on ‘un-reddened Brits’ who flock to the lower slopes for their hols. Gerald considers himself a cut above the hoi polloi, but the joke is on him; he has fallen into the trap of

Carole Angier

His own worst enemy | 12 June 2004

Jonathan Coe is a novelist — a very good novelist. He is not a biographer; indeed he dislikes biography, as he frequently tells us. Given that, he’s done a damn good job. Poor B. S. Johnson leaps off these pages: pathologically morbid and clinically depressed, wildly superstitious and self-dramatising. requiring perfect love and devotion from everyone — women, publishers, agents, even critics — and becoming suicidal and violently vengeful when they can’t provide them; ‘a large, blond, maudlin man’, as a friend said; ‘unassuageable,’ said another, tormented and absurd. And that, as Coe would point out, is without mentioning the books, in which Johnson equally pursued the impossible, and blamed

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Big is not therefore ugly

As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had tried to make a virtue of all-embracing incoherence. John Kay of Oxford and the LSE, in The Truth about Markets (Penguin/Allen Lane 2003), offered a brilliant analysis of why rampant capitalism does not need to be replaced — as anti-globalisers’ placards proclaimed at Seattle — by ‘something nicer’, but why it only delivers widespread benefits

Anita Brookner

Back to the good old whodunnit

Long before the age of irony the novel meted out just punishment, or at least linked effect to cause. These functions have long since devolved to the murder mystery, which combines gruesome reality with superior logic, leaving logic the upper hand. The rules may have changed, but the stereotypes — the small town with its confected name, the aristocratic sleuth, the unloved victim — are all present in Susan Hill’s strikingly old-fashioned debut novel as a writer of detective stories. A respected and prize-winning author, she has reinvented herself as a purveyor of middle-class, middlebrow mysteries, complete with all the stereotypes listed above. Why she has decided to do this

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Fran and Jay show

When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street. The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d

Anthony Daniels

What happens when things go wrong

Only someone with the strongest self-control can resist looking, however furtively, at people with deformities. This is not very creditable to the human race, perhaps, but it is best to admit that it is so. A book about human deformities is almost bound to appeal to the voyeur in us, therefore, even if we feel that it ought not; but I am glad to report that Dr Leroi’s book is genuinely instructive and enlightening, a brilliant admixture of curious historical anecdote and up-to-date science, written in excellent and often elegant prose. No one need feel guilty about buying it. Francis Bacon was the first to appreciate that we might discover

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Seduced by the scent of a mystery

Visits from the Drowned Girl starts out with a gripping idea as old as crime fiction: the bystander. Benny Poteat climbs communications masts for a living. One day, from the top of such a mast out in the back- country, he looks down and sees a girl set up a video-camera on a tripod by the side of a river. The girl, as he watches, powerless to intervene, takes off all her clothes in front of the camera, walks unhesitatingly into the rushing floodwater, and dis- appears from sight. When Benny climbs down the mast and reaches the site of her suicide, he finds alongside her clothes a rucksack full

Jonathan Cecil

One rung below greatness

Actors’ biographies, once a comparative rarity and usually ghosted and bowdlerised, spring forth every season. They are often pruriently, dubiously, sensational: we are told that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye, that Peggy Ashcroft was a near-nymphomaniac and Alec Guinness a covert gay cruiser, all with scant evidence and with little relation to their art. What a relief to read a sober biography of a distinguished player, Michael Redgrave, largely concentrating on his acting although not shirking the fact that he was a promiscuous, often guilt-ridden bisexual with a one-time flirtation with Stalinism. Alan Strachan’s book — all the better for being written by an experienced man of the

Anthony Howard

An ersatz Boston Brahmin

The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this autumn’s presidential election, it offers a cool (and at times almost chilling) assessment of the various episodes that have gone into the making of the career of the present junior senator from Massachusetts. The perspective from which it is written is, it has to be said, predominantly a local one. All three authors are on

Inigo Thomas

When the Eighties had to stop

The Eighties, you might say, didn’t end on time. The speculative financial boom in the United States and elsewhere, which became synonymous with the price of reputation and the importance of money, which began with the Ronald Reagan tax cut and the gloss of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, which rode out a crash in 1987 and rolled on through the soaring Nineties, the decade of Clinton, the Internet and the first billion-dollar movie, began to unravel only after the millennium, when share prices fell, when the US Department of Justice took two leading art auction houses to court, and when it was discovered that executives of a Texan company few

Saturday

Saul Kelly

Only a moderately intriguing adventurer

John Bierman, the co-author of a recent book on Alamein, had doubts about writing this biography of Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian-born explorer of the Libyan desert, whose exploits were ‘immortalised’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, and the subsequent Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. Bierman did not want to be seen to be taking ‘a ride on the coat-tails’ of the novel and the film (in which case a change of subtitle might have been advisable). He was also, rather puzzlingly, concerned that he might find ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ with regard to Almasy’s alleged Nazi past. Lastly, and more tellingly, he was unsure whether Almasy

Stephen Abell

Taking matters seriously

For a critic as seriously intelligent as James Wood, a discussion about the nature of comedy is, inevitably, no laughing matter. And this is appropriate enough: modern comedy, in his opinion, appears to contain few actual laughs. The historical shift from an essentially religious, theatrical ‘comedy of correction’ to a secular, novelistic ‘comedy of forgiveness’ — the move from piety to pity — has instead brought with it a much fuller range of emotional intricacies. As a result, all comic novels are problem comedies, of ‘hilarious pathos’ or ‘mingled amusement and pity’; Wood is talking un-laughter and the novel. Wood’s view of comedy is closely related to his view of

Simon Courtauld

The crown that fitted perfectly

Professor Preston has done his subject proud. This is a better biography than his 1,000-page indictment of Franco, not only because he is in sympathy with the Spanish king but because, in some respects, he now appears less implacably hostile towards the Generalisimo. It was thanks to Franco, after all, that the monarchy was restored, and in the person of a man who, by his sacrifice and dedication, was far better qualified than the other candidates for the succession to transform his country from dictatorship following civil war to a democratic system acceptable to his people. The old Caudillo might have turned in his grave a few times, but he

Nicholas Harman

What feats we did that day

Stalin’s admirers wanted it sooner, to help our Soviet allies. Others wanted it sooner, to give us a chance of beating the Russkies to Berlin (as we didn’t). But time and tide set the date, and the invasion of occupied France had to be in spring, at low ebb, after many months of planning, training, accumulating resources, spying, and the brilliant spinning of lies to divert the enemy from the real target. Since the main ally was the United States with all its men, guns and oil, and the Germans had used up their fuel and pilots on the eastern front, success was likely. Yet the Nazis’ army, in an

Saturday

Michael Howard

Both lion and donkey

Richard Holmes wrote this book 20 years ago when he was a humble lecturer at Sandhurst, long before his splendid television performances had made him a national figure. He has not had to do much to update it. In a useful foreword he describes the progress made since he wrote it in the historiography of the war — the Lions v. Donkeys debate, the research into both the operational doctrine and the social background of the British army, developments on the home front — but the focus of this biography is too limited for him to have felt it necessary to modify his original text. He might have reconsidered what

Ian Garrick-Mason

The five stages of a downhill descent

After defeating two fascist powers in a world war, the citizens of the democratic West have gradually come to throw the label ‘fascist’ around with abandon. Police officers are fascists to the protesters they confront. University administrators are fascists to the students they discipline. Think back: many of you probably had parents who were fascists — at least with regard to your curfew. Alas, the term has come to be used rather freely even in political discourse: to the Left, postwar non-communist dictatorships under generals Franco and Pinochet were fascist, and to today’s pro-war Right, Muslim fundamentalists are Islamo- fascists’, in Christopher Hitchens’ colourful phrase. Since we seem so fond

Sandy Balfour

One man’s Mexican dream

The author of a weighty tome on a 16th-century attempt to create a Utopia in Mexico might well expect to be exempt from Elmore Leonard’s advice to ‘leave out the parts readers tend to skip’. A book that runs to 60 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index might even be required to have such parts. But Toby Green’s tale of Vasco de Quiroga bills itself as ‘genre-defying’ and so we shall judge it accordingly. The bits the reader is tempted to skip are — of course — the same bits that ‘defy’ easy categorisation by genre. What Green does is to tell a good and captivating story of great interest

Francis King

A charming but alarming city

In the summer of 2001 Sofka Zinovieff accompanied her husband, Vassilis — first met when he was press officer to the Greek embassy in Moscow — on a posting back to Athens. This book is both an account of her enthusiastic, if often balked, attempts to transform herself into a Greek, and a vivid evocation of a city in a chaotic ferment of change. That change is at once demonstrated when the couple find a flat, undistinguished except for a tremendous view, in Vouliagmeni, 18 kilometres from the centre of the city. Some 60 years ago, when I used to visit Vouliagmeni before a direct road had been constructed to

Peregrine Worsthorne

The race of the thoroughbreds

I read every page, every line of this very long book with sustained interest and pleasure. It is a collective biography of four Grenadier Guards officers — Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank — who, after becoming friends at Eton, and serving together gallantly and bloodily in the trenches of the first world war, went on to play prominent roles on the stage of British politics for the rest of the century, usually as allies in the Conservative party cause but sometimes as rivals or even, towards the end, as enemies. But as well as being a collective biography it is also a comparative biography, since the