Book Reviews Archives

Saturday

13 Dec 2003

A ruthless ally

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last American presidential election was contested between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; while the most famous American president of what one of his vice- presidents called the century of the common man was a rich patrician who grew up as far as could be imagined from the proverbial

Saturday

29 Nov 2003

Anne Chisholm

Granny takes several trips

Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound desire to be noticed as a writer seems a more likely answer than a need for erotic adventure; this is a book which takes the literature of exhibitionism to new heights. Ostensibly, it was an Eric Rohmer film in which a woman of fortysomething advertises for a lover on behalf of a friend that gave

Justin Marozzi

Beholding sundry places

Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where to begin? How about Herodotus, Father of History, affable Greek aristocrat and probably the world’s first travel writer to boot? Here we find him musing on the unfathomable geography of Europe, ending his erudite aside with the splendidly modern conclusion, ‘But that is quite enough on this subject.’ In a very entertaining introductory section, ‘Notes

Harry Mount

Sexing up American history

This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack — ‘dear Jack’ — and Gore fell into conversation, although it was less of a conversation than a question-and-answer session. Need you ask who was doing the questioning and who was giving the answers? The President of the United States was the pupil, Vidal his master. What the pupil wanted to know is why he

Stephen Abell

Making it a just so story

This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double negative of the last sentence): She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple … She began, not inexpertly, to caress

Caroline Moorehead

Above and below blood temperature

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial for a story about the ‘shoe bomber’ and the fundamentalist Islamic underground groups in Pakistan. She was six months pregnant. Pearl, by all accounts, was an energetic, loving, humorous man, full of intelligence and curiosity. He never returned. Eight days later, his kidnappers murdered him. A Mighty Heart, written slowly in the months after his

Andrew Barrow

The Dutch manipulator of the Pelvis

Behind many great stars of stage and screen lurks a mysterious, sometimes sinister manager figure, minder or mastermind, whose precise role in their protégé’s life, especially in terms of creative input, may be hard to define. Richard Burton’s career was kick-started by the Welsh schoolmaster whose surname he took. Tommy Cooper’s affairs were handled for years by a character called Miff Ferrie who lived in Eaton Square. My fragile friend Michael Barrymore was frogmarched to precarious stardom by his amazing wife Cheryl. And even poor little Tom Thumb had the great P. T. Barnum to give him stature. The man who managed or mismanaged Elvis Presley’s career was a particularly

Interconnect

Hunting the killer rhyme

Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find a remaindered copy of Charles Charming’s Challenges winking at one from the bargain bin. Then again, an air of metropolitan cliquishness rose off its shiny surface like sweat. It appeared to consist mostly of tinkling tributes to well-placed chums (‘Among the foremost ranks of your adherents/I’m vocal to the point of incoherence,’ our man addressed

Anita Brookner

A season in hell

When Philippe Labro, novelist, journalist, cineast, television producer and man about Paris, woke up one morning in 1999 at his usual hour of three o’clock it was with a profound and intimate conviction: ‘Quelque chose a changé.’ This was not occasioned by a physical malaise, although his bedclothes, even his pillows, were drenched with sweat, a phenomenon that was to recur in the days and weeks that followed, but something more seismic, what Scott Fitzgerald had called ‘the crack-up’, a nervous breakdown, unheralded and prolonged, from which he emerged two years later. Unavailing attempts at the sort of cure conscientiously recommended by doctors, who prefer to describe the process as

Marcus Berkmann

Letting it all hang out

For all of us who are paid to make jokes about pop music, Sting is a bit of a godsend. Earnest to the point of pomposity, visibly self-satisfied and even more serious about his music than George Michael, the former teacher and long-term sex symbol has come to represent a certain sort of middle-aged rock star: one that needs taking down a peg or two. And so we try, but it never makes any difference. Despite his prickly public persona, Sting has sold millions of records around the world and continues to sell them, unlike most of his contemporaries. More astoundingly yet, he has maintained this level of success while

Saturday

22 Nov 2003

Jeremy Clarke

How good was the Boyo?

When Dylan Thomas first lived at the Boathouse, Laugharne (tel. Laugharne 68) there was no electricity, no running water and the rats took liberties. Today it is a spick and span little gimcrack museum. I went there recently hoping perhaps for a faint psychic whiff of Wales’ most famous son. But the place has been tarted up to such an extent that gawping at the memorabilia behind the glass all I felt was a terrifying sense of alienation from the recent past. The other visitors were mostly Welsh. They wandered grimly from room to room, passing critical comments about the meagre furniture and complaining about the entry fee. In the

Harriet Waugh

Howard’s end reconsidered

Minette Walters is an unusually uneven writer. Although we know she is just one person it is as though there are two writers taking it in turns to produce the novels. Her last one, Fox Evil, was a histrionic, scrappy affair, while Disordered Minds is far more intriguing, and has characters that seriously engage your interest since what they are, in the wide spectrum of good and evil, is as much at the heart of the mystery as the gradually accumulating evidence. Two people come together to re-examine the facts that led to the conviction for murder in 1970 of a retarded young man called Howard Stamp. His reclusive aunt,

Charlotte Moore

All you need is love

‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in Surrey, England, where she has no social, financial, legal or emotional status. Her lawful husband, the one she wants dead, is too concerned about his reputation to grant her a divorce. Her ‘real’, common-law husband is Stephen Crane, an American adventurer, acclaimed author of The Red Badge of Courage. He is the love of Cora’s

Judith Flanders

Beta plus and beta minus

Say ‘Rossetti’ to most people, and you will get back ‘Dante Gabriel’, or ‘Christina’, or perhaps a description of paintings of exotically beflowered, heavy-jawed women. It is impossible to imagine that anyone will respond with, ‘Of course, William Michael’, much less ‘Lucy Madox’. Angela Thirlwell, in her passionately argued double biography, wants to bring Dante Gabriel’s little brother and his wife out of the wings and into the spotlight. William Michael Rossetti’s main claim to fame was as aid and support to both his feckless, ultimately chloral-sodden brother and his retiring, home-loving sister. He left school at 15 to work for the Board of the Inland Revenue, initially as a

Hugh Thomas

Question mark over Cuba

In the United States several diplomats have written profound books about countries where they have been posted. For example, the works on the Soviet Union by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen were among the most important studies of that once menacing empire. I remember little recently by British ambassadors apart from Percy Cradock’s admirable Experiences of China. Autobio- graphies there have, of course, been in plenty, amongst which I rank highest Lord Vansittart’s extraordinary The Mist Process- ion, a curious mixture of arrogance and melancholy, each chapter of which had as an epigraph a line from one of the author’s own poems. There was Eastern Approaches of Fitzroy Maclean with

Allan Mallinson

When believing is not all there is to seeing

In his 100-page introduction to the Collins Guide to the Parish Churches of England and Wales (1958), John Betjeman does not deem it necessary to explain any of the symbolism in architecture or decoration. It is interesting to speculate whether this was because he could have assumed that, despite only ‘scattered worshippers in the nave’, the majority of the country was churched, if only through the common rites of baptism, marriage and burial, or the National Service church parade. Just a decade later he could surely not have made that assumption. A century and a half before Betjeman’s masterpiece, Cainy Ball’s ‘pore mother’ in Far from the Madding Crowd, being

Zenga Longmore

A bas la différence!

Kathy Lette’s latest novel begins with a zany one-liner: ‘How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?’ The next sentence is a zany one-liner: ‘God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.’ The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth. Aaagh! Wacky one- liners choke the book, rendering the reader gasping for gravity. They elbow aside both plot and characterisation, which is just as well, because the plot is profoundly absurd and the characters are clichéd cartoon cut-outs. Shelly, a schoolteacher, suddenly finds she is about to marry a total stranger, handsome American Kit, ‘butter-blond

Jane Ridley

Talking to some purpose

Nineteenth-century British politics used to be the historian’s bread and butter, but it has gone sadly out of fashion. Instead of the Great Reform Act, what every schoolgirl knows today is Hitler and Stalin, studied over and over again. The story of reform is too narrowly political for today’s tastes. The historians spoiled it too. Doctoral students were taught to comb the archives for correspondence, the more obscure the better, and the dense and tedious monographs they wrote about ‘high politics’ added very little to the big picture. Edward Pearce’s new book shows what a mistake it is to ignore reform. It is quite simply a splendid story. The fact

Mark Amory

Blood-brother and king-maker

At a garden party in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994 I overheard Tom Stacey, a tall elegant figure, saying with some urgency, ‘The Bakonjo when I first met them 40 years ago in the west of your beautiful country …’ and later noted, ‘Tom is fascinating for quite a long time about Rwenzori, their king Charles Wesley, who must be made to come back from America, 14 of his people killed yesterday, how he loves the people; but then he goes on for longer than that.’ And finally in an impromptu after-dinner speech he moved from ‘the worst prime minister of the century with the best intentions [Blair] who was dismembering

Robert Stewart

Their knavish tricks frustrated

The Enterprise of England, the name given by His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain, to the attempted overthrow of Queen Elizabeth I and the conquest of England, was part of a great plan. In 1588, when the Spanish Armada set sail for the English Channel, Philip already controlled the greater part of the accessible globe. But Europe was divided into Protestant and Roman Catholic camps and the Calvinist Spanish Netherlands were in revolt against rule from Madrid. If Philip could bring England back to Rome and, by taking possession of the powerful Tudor navy, gain the means to subdue the Dutch rebels, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Crown