Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Jan Morris

A prickly but noble nation

To my mind one of the relatively few happy circumstances of our time, as we grope into the 21st century, is the condition of Wales. By no means all Welsh people would agree with me. Those who love the Welsh language above all else must still fight their heroic battle in its defence. Those who think politically are dissatisfied with devolution and the febrile dullness of the National Assembly. The flood of English incomers is a curse on several levels. Many of my countrymen are in sackcloth and ashes over the state of Welsh rugby, and rather fewer, perhaps, are mourning the virtual dissolution of the chapels. But I prefer

Toby Young Toby Young

Strutting their stuff

H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else. Mencken’s thoroughbreds are now so rare that when you come across one it’s like encountering a unicorn. Michael Wolff is one such creature. He’s been throwing custard pies at the rich and powerful since he was appointed New York magazine’s media columnist in 1998. His willingness to skewer the robber barons of the media-industrial complex

Olivia Glazebrook

Lucky to be alive?

Oracle Night describes a nine-day episode in the life of a writer, Sidney Orr. Orr is recovering from a long illness after a sudden collapse resulted in critical head injuries. He has been lucky to escape with his life — or, to put it another way, he should be dead. Eight months after the accident Orr drifts around Brooklyn on daily recuperative walks, a shadow of his former self: he is light-headed, detached from the clamour of city life. One morning he buys a blue notebook and starts writing again, curiously absorbed. And then, as if by magic, his life begins to unravel. Certainties become uncertain, trust becomes mistrust, an

Saturday

James Fleming

Can you forgive him?

The story is a good one. Lady Anne was born in 1837 and died, in Egypt, in 1917. Her mother, Ada, who was connected with Babbage and his prototype computer, was Byron’s only legitimate child. Aged 32 and wealthy, Lady Anne was plucked off the shelf by the poet and philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. After miscarrying several times, in 1873 she gave birth to their only living child, Judith, later Lady Wentworth. The Blunts then set out on their Arabian adventures, she being the first European woman to cross the northern desert. They met real danger and hardship. Winstone is excellent on these journeys, which undoubtedly had a profound cultural

Lee Langley

Cola versus curry

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first volume of short stories. The Namesake is her first novel, graceful, funny and sad, its theme dislocation and the pain of building a new life in a different world. In building that new life, something must also be destroyed. After an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave Calcutta to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When, some years later, they take the family to India for a holiday, the couple sink happily into the old culture, but for their children, born in the US, America is home: they yearn for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza. Bengalis, the author tells us, are

John Michell

The endurance of oracles

State constitutions throughout the ancient world were designed to imitate the order of the universe. Their model was an esoteric code of number, harmony and proportion which was supposed to reflect the perfectly structured mind of the Creator. From this procedure came a form of society, like those of archaic Greece, where the nation was divided into halves and quarters and finally into 12 sections, each dedicated to one of the 12 gods of the zodiac. The number 12, which organises the field of number itself, is a natural symbol of the universal order and the rational mind. Its opposite, representing the irrational world of dreams and inspiration, is the

Interconnect

Too much key, not enough novel

Susanna Moore’s fifth novel opens on board the Jupiter in February 1836, with the ladies — make that a capital ‘L’ — Eleanor and Harriet, together with their brother Henry (the incoming governor-general), en route to India. Storms rattle the halyards, rats scrabble at the sodden travelling library and Eleanor, our raisonneur, is somewhat put out to find her own excrement floating back and forth through the flooded cabin. Subsequently, as the Bay of Bengal looms before them, she professes herself ‘shocked at the violence I discover in myself’. Later, inevitably, she will be shocked by the violence she discovers in other people. A first sighting of Calcutta’s chaotic quayside

M R-D-Foot

The nations’ airy navies

When in 1890 Captain A. T. Mahan, United States Navy, produced his book on The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783, it made a world-wide sensation and had important historical consequences; both Germany and Japan took note, and set out to build great navies. There is now room for a book on the influence of air power on history. It needs to be said early that Mr Budiansky has not written it; he has written instead, as an American journalist should, a collection of gripping anecdotes about the results, largely military, of the Wright brothers’ proof in 1903 that a heavier-than-air machine could fly. He presents a mass of

Doris Lessing

Grenada’s crowning glory

Four years ago this author gave us Night & Horses & the Desert, an anthology of classical Arabic literature, all brave deeds, high thinking and love, wit and wisdom — chivalry, in short — reminding why so many generations of the English have fallen madly in love with this culture that is now dead and gone — and so much the worse for all of us. Never have I owned a more romantic book, but with this one Robert Irwin discourages romance. A first chapter is full of alluring tales about the Alhambra, but then he says, ‘Not one fact . . . is likely to be correct’, blaming the

Sebastian Smee

Both deep and dazzling

Rivalled only by the Rabbit novels, John Updike’s early stories — the 100 or so pieces of short fiction he wrote for magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Playboy between 1954 and 1975 — now seem very close to being the best things he has written, surely placing them among the finest 20th-century writing by anyone. This 800-page book is a collection rather than a selection (Updike suggests the winnowing is better left to others after he is gone), but the stories are, to a surprising and satisfying degree, all of a piece. For the most part, they are organised chronologically according to the

Saturday

Anne Sebba

Appointment in Sarajevo

In July 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Janine di Giovanni went to Sarajevo to see how it felt for those who had suffered so brutally from his rule. But she found no one celebrating. Some of the ‘big fish’ were getting caught, but the ones who really did it — ‘the executioners’ as people call them — are still living peacefully, walking the streets. They are the men who raped and killed and burned and now sit in cafés in Foca and Srebrenica, confident that The Hague will never find them. In fact, there isn’t a lot of

Anthony Hobson

The pleasure dome in Wiltshire

William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey is thought of as a supreme example of romantic hubris and defiance of nature. The tower, 276 feet high, originally intended to exceed the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, crumbled and fell within 20 years. Robert J. Gemmett, Professor of English in New York State University, gives a very readable account of its history, well illustrated and written in a pleasant style, agreeably free of academic jargon. An appendix reprinting contemporary accounts occupies more than half the book. In his teens Beckford was already writing of his hopes of erecting ‘a Tower dedicated to meditation’ and his imagination was fired by Swiss scenery, the remoteness of the

Jonathan Sumption

When Greek met Greek

This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point in human civilisation. Nearly half a century before, the Greeks had united against the great continental power of Persia. Led by Athens and Sparta, the two principal Greek powers, they had driven the fleets and armies of Xerxes from Europe and recovered control of their colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Now the Greeks

Montagu Curzon

A child of the ashram

Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between. So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a necklace of mala beads with the Master’s picture in the locket, and was given a Sanskrit name of spiritually encouraging meaning. Deliberately provocative, rebellious, eloquent, erudite and funny, proclaiming inexhaustible sexual freedom as the route to enlightenment, the better to shock those on the outside and to make himself universally known, Bhagwan Rajneesh was not

Rob White

Images with built-in obsolescence

Film posters are not made to last. They appear on billboards, then they are torn down or pasted over. Sometimes they do not have even that brief visibility. The original 1927 poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s state-sponsored retelling of the 1917 Russian Revolution was dominated by the face of Trotsky. However, just as Eisenstein was getting ready to release October, Trotsky was disgraced. The film had to be cut by a quarter to match a new view of Soviet history; the poster was useless, but it was preserved and is reproduced in Emily King’s book. The odds against the survival of these commercial artworks are reflected in the private market for

Ian Garrick-Mason

The posthumous patriot

In the spring of 1943, Allied armies in North Africa prepared to attack the Axis powers on the continent of Europe. Dominating the central Mediterranean, Sicily was the obvious first target, and it was clear the German High Command would heavily reinforce the island. To counter this, British naval intelligence concocted a bold disinformation operation aimed at fooling the Germans into thinking the Allies’ real targets were Greece and Sardinia. Taking advantage of the well-known links between Franco’s government in Spain and Nazi Germany, the Navy dressed a cadaver in the uniform of a Royal Marine officer and set it afloat near Huelva, its hands clutching a briefcase containing General

Philip Hensher

By no means roses, roses all the way

Robert Browning, in life, was always immensely popular in a worldly way; he knew everyone not just in London but in Europe, and was almost universally loved over the dinner table. More than that, his shining, decent, boldly original mind leaps out from any biography, and it is easy to see how enchanting and charming he must have been in person. His poetry, on the other hand, is another matter; it has never been exactly popular. Even at the height of his success in 1870, just after the publication and immense acclamation of The Ring and the Book, he earned only £100 from his poetry, and his busy social life

Saturday

Emma Tennant

Friends in high places

David Lang first heard about the Himalayas when he was a little boy. As his father read aloud from the works of the great botanical explorers — Reginald Farrer, Frank Kingdon-Ward, and ‘Chinese’ Wilson — he imagined the high mountains and the flower-filled valleys. Above all, he longed to see the yaks: ‘there was something about yaks which appealed to a small child’. When he grew up, David Lang became a vet with a busy practice in Sussex. He is also an accomplished field naturalist, equally knowledgeable about plants and birds, and author of several books about British wild flowers. Not until 1983 did he realise his dream of visiting