Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Douglas Johnson

Helping to set Europe ablaze

The Museum of the French Resistance in Brittany lies just outside Saint-Marcel in the Morbihan department, near to Malestroit. It is extensive and consists of a number of buildings situated in a large wooded park. But what makes it special is that it covers the site of the battle of 18 June 1944 which was fought between the Germans and various French and British Resistance forces, including those organised by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) that had been created in July 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’. This was one of the great Resistance battles in which 560 German soldiers were killed, in contrast to 42 Resistance fighters. André Hue, who

James Fleming

Sweet water and bitter

‘Naturalist-in-charge’ was Shel-ton’s title as fisheries expert on board the Tellina, a research vessel. It holds good throughout this excellent memoir, which contains much pertinent information and few idle sentences. By page 30 I’d learned that apple wood makes the best catapult, about the guanine crystals in fish scales, about lampreys, the names of his grandmother’s two Rhode Island Reds, what the lower quadrant signal means to the railways, conjugated valve gear ditto, how to load a muzzle-loader (‘the flinty grains shining as they trickled from the measure at the head of the tooled copper flask’), and the weight of a Duchess class locomotive — 160 tons or about 140

Sandra Howard

Here be dragons aplenty

Walter Moers has cleverly built a fantastical tale around 21 drawings from the work of the famous 19th-century illustrator, Gustave Doré. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels and dragons and the faces of the moon; Moers has plenty to go on. He spellbinds and spooks it all up into a well-knitted super-scary flight of fancy that should appeal to sophisticated and naive children alike. Moers’ young hero is Doré himself as a 12-year-old child. We meet him when he is rather incredibly captaining a ship which is at threat from perilous twin storms, the spiralling Siamese Twins Tornado. He survives and finds himself

David Prycejones

Scholar and Cold War warrior

When not thinking and writing, Richard Pipes tells us in these memoirs, he is at a loose end. At different times he had ambitions to be an art historian or perhaps a musicologist, he also says, but settled to be a historian. The writing of history depends in the first place on scholarship. Vixi is the work of a man of immense learning, whose apposite quotations range through several classical and modern literatures from Praxilla of Sicyon in the fifth century BC and Seneca all the way to Trollope, Guizot and Sainte-Beuve. But selection of facts rests ultimately on the historian’s humanity and aesthetic sense. Most unusually, Vixi is also

Caroline Moorehead

Fear of fleeing

Tucked into the pages of The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally has slipped a short letter. Giving his reasons for writing the book and stating that he believes it to be the best he has yet produced, the letter is presumably intended for reviewers and booksellers, and it provides information in many ways crucial for readers, so crucial that it is hard to see why it was not included in a preface. The Tyrant’s Novel, Keneally explains, grew out of visits he made to the Villawood detention centre for asylum seekers outside Sydney, a ‘double-walled gulag’ behind razor wire and prison walls, where he felt outraged by the visible signs of

George Osborne

A clear case of ‘misunderestimation’

American Dynastyby Kevin PhillipsPenguin/Allen Lane, £18.99, pp. 397, ISBN 071399746X The prosperous Floridan seaside resort of Sarasota should be natural Bush country. Home to golf courses, marinas and retirement condos, the town’s Republican Congress- woman Katherine Harris shot to fame in the 2000 presidential election as the official appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to make sure the Florida recount gave the right result. Last month, a friend of mine who is an astute observer of American politics was having lunch in a Sarasota shopping mall and saw something significant. A young man was selling ‘Help Beat Bush’ badges to passing shoppers — not just one or two but dozens of

Harriet Waugh

Closely related deaths

Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent novel by that mistress of introspective sensitivity, Jean Rhys. Reginald Hill hijacks the title for his far less morbid new detective novel starring that trinity of beings, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. Good Morning, Midnight is, however, definitely Pascoe’s case. Dalziel plays an entirely subsidiary role displaying bellicose discomfiture as Peter attempts to wrongfoot him and prove that a clear case of suicide is murder. We know that it is suicide because we witness antique dealer Pal Maciver killing himself. The novel is set a few weeks after the denouement of Reginald Hill’s previous novel, Death’s Jest-Book. It

Caroline Moore

Flattening the literary landscape

Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to mean only ‘the last volume, for the present, in this particular series of the Oxford English Literary History’, bringing us up from 1960 to the millennium. Still, it nevertheless managed to monger a certain mild gloom in me. My chief complaint is that it does not make the period exciting enough. On internal evidence, I

Saturday

Robert Stewart

Butcher in the Rye

In 1743 John Breads, a butcher, stabbed to death Allen Grebell in the declining Cinque port town of Rye on the east Sussex coast. Grebell was the brother-in-law of James Lamb, the mayor who lived in the town’s big house, Lamb House, that was later to be home to Henry James and E. F. Benson. Paul Monod has chosen that murder as a peg on which to hang his history of the town from the Civil War to the mid-18th century. The Grebell-Lamb interest was the cornerstone of the Whig oligarchy that had come to rule Rye. Can Breads’ story tell us something about the progress of Rye from the

Digby Durrant

‘My libido’s last hurrah!’

At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As a youth Gideon occasionally has very mild spasms of lust for boys but is content enough to lie beside a girl, his clumsy fingers inching past the cups of her brassiere to toy with her nipples. Suddenly her record player sings out, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream/ Make him the cutest I’ve ever seen

Jonathan Keates

Early Essex man

Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out between the robber and his victim before the offence took place. However much we proclaim our hatred of the sinner, his sinfulness nourishes our less respectable dreams and fantasies. Thus the agents of havoc are easily metamorphosed into folk heroes, loved, envied and applauded even at the foot of the gallows. Highwaymen were archetypal avatars

Stephen Abell

A serious case of rising damp

In this, her ninth novel, Maggie Gee has determinedly sought — like God in the beginning — to make the watery world she has created ‘teem with countless living creatures’. She did not, however, see to it that it was good. For The Flood teems not only with living things (birds ‘quivering, flashing on the flowering quinces’ or ‘narrow-faced, amber-eyed, rufous, fearless’ foxes, for example), but with torrents of gushingly overwritten prose that only serve to leave the reader bemused, overwhelmed and somewhat flushed. Set in a dystopian ‘city of dreams’ confusingly semi-detached from reality, The Flood tells the story of a legion of inter-related characters — some of whom

Charles Mitchell

Sins of the fathers

Dan Fesperman’s first book, Lie in the Dark, was a fine debut: set in Sarajevo during the civil war, it had homicide detective Vlado Petric struggling to investigate a murder case while sniper bullets snapped about his heels. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (Bantam Press, £12.99) is the follow-up and it is written to the same high standard. Petric is building a new life with his wife and daughter in Berlin when an American working for the International War Crimes Tribunal approaches him with a job offer: go back to Bosnia and help us to flush out a war criminal. The twist is that the men from the Hague

Interconnect

The war and a sprained ankle

The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling. From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family (he married when he was 21) by articles and reviews, a staggering number of these, and by prose books of various kinds, more than 40 of them; the thought of the work rate gives one a headache and certainly maddened him. Some were editions of poets, with long introductions, some historical, most were about the

Peter Clark

A breeze with a hint of rain

Diplomat, soldier, diplomat again, humanitarian, environmentalist: you cannot plan a career like that today. But that has been the CV of John Henniker, otherwise Major Henniker-Major MC, now the eighth Lord Henniker, who, in his late eighties, has written a modest and readable account of his life and work. Born in 1916, and following a conventional education, he had an exciting war. He is the last survivor of that sparky band of officers — Evelyn Waugh, Bill Deakin, Randolph Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean — who were parachuted into Yugoslavia to establish contact with Tito. Resuming a Foreign Office career, he opened a post-war embassy in Belgrade before transfer to London,

John De-Falbe

A thoughtful trip to the seaside

Set in Anatolia in 1922, The Maze describes the retreat of a Greek brigade to the sea. Under the questionable guidance of a brigadier addicted to morphine and a hypocritical priest without the slightest understanding of their parlous situation, the detachment is lost in the arid landscape. Thanks to the trail of droppings left by a runaway horse, they reach a town where we are introduced to a venal mayor, a schoolmaster, an Armenian grocer, a French whore and various others. A mysterious spate of thefts is explained, and the man responsible for spreading seditious pamphlets is identified. Accompanied by civilians of the professional classes, the brigade then makes its

Philip Hensher

Roller-coaster of a ride

David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published as recently as 1999, and Cloud Atlas is only his third. Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, number9dream, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His novels have a gleefully kleptomaniac air, moving from the most tawdry thrills to thunderous, visionary spectacle; they are unlike anything else, and you emerge from them dazed, amazed, unsure of the exact nature of the overwhelming experience. Cloud Atlas is a tremendous novel, but I’m not entirely sure why. Ghostwritten had a very original structure,

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Fated and enchanted love

Wagner’s masterpiece, Tristan, has now a considerable literature of its own, with books devoted to its harmonic structure, its baleful influence on artists of various kinds, its philosophical significance, its sources in the mediaeval literature of courtly love, its phonographic history, and plenty of other things. Roger Scruton’s impressive new book is concerned with its dramatic content, and its relevance to a time when those aspects of humanity which should separate us from the rest of the animal world — the capacity for sacrifice, self-abnegating love, sexual activity seen as the urgent expression of a spiritual need rather than as merely biological or hedonistic — are either denied or ‘deconstructed’:

Interconnect

A heist too far

When I first met Terry Smith ten years ago, in the library of Long Lartin top security prison in Worcestershire, he was part of a cockney criminal elite as exclusive and self-perpetuating as the Whig junta that once controlled England. Along the austere corridors in that microcosm of misanthropy and discontent, Smith and his ilk cut quite a dash in their Day-glo designer sportswear, dispensing favours here, meting out summary justice there, employing the less prosperous prisoners amongst us to fetch and carry after regular Lucullan repasts and hooch-fuelled revelries. ‘We were the living embodiment of extroversion,’ Smith suggests in retrospect. ‘A collection of colourful crooks [who] loved to brag