Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Honor Clerk

A picture that tells a story

Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy – or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama. The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene. As he and Bill become friends, their histories are

Philip Hensher

A question of upbringing

Superficially, Hitler and Churchill resembled each other, in the way that two very powerful leaders will. In particular, as Andrew Roberts points out, both their careers rested on a particular sort of confidence trick, an ability to misrepresent the facts of the case and thereby inspire their followers into action. In Hitler’s case it was the malign lie that Germany’s difficulties after the Great War, and indeed the fact that they lost that war, were down to the machinations of international Jewry. In Churchill’s case, it was the benign and necessary claim that victory could be achieved by the British will alone; a claim which, throughout the country’s ‘finest hour’

Saturday

Harriet Waugh

Recent crime novels | 1 February 2003

For the last few years Ruth Rendell has used her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels to explore social issues that have been much in the papers. This has unfortunately made for unoriginal story lines with obvious villains in an all too familiar terrain. It is a pleasure therefore to be able to report that The Babes in the Wood (Hutchinson, £16.99) returns to more traditional territory. The novel is set during the perpetual rain that we suffered last year. Kingsmarkham, the Sussex town where Wexford bestrides the police force, is in danger of flooding. The river having broken through its banks is threatening the environs of the town, which includes

Kevin Jackson

The charm of the commonplace

Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make a bar of soap revolve in your hand by strategic squeezing, why it is perfectly permissible, indeed thoughtful, for gentlemen to relieve their bladders in the seated position traditionally favoured by ladies, the demonstrable superiority of the English spelling ‘grey’ to the standard American ‘gray’. For readers who discovered the uniquely beguiling qualities of Baker’s

Andrew Gimson

Every fair from fair sometime declines

Polly Toynbee describes herself as ‘profoundly anti-religious’, but she had the energy and curiosity to accept an ingenious challenge from a group of Christians. Church Action on Poverty wanted her to spend Lent trying to live on the minimum wage of £4.10 an hour. She duly moved out of her comfortable house and into a cheerless flat on a nearby council estate, where she tried to support herself in such badly paid jobs as hospital porter, care assistant, packer of cakes in a bakery, school dinner lady, office cleaner and telesales rep. Her book sheds light on the kind of conditions endured by what she calls ‘the bottom 30 per

Harry Mount

Our longest peace

Has anybody ever struggled for Europe? They might have struggled for British Ulster or Free France or the village green in Moreton-in-Marsh. But Europe? There are supposed to be some people around who, when they’re asked where they’re from, trumpet, ‘I’m European!’; if they really exist, they’re doing a good job of keeping themselves to themselves. Europe is such a bulky ragbag of countries with such wildly different histories, languages and customs, that to say you’re European is about as precise as saying you’re a world citizen or a sentient being or a member of the mammal family. And to try to write a history of Europe as an organic

Frank Johnson

The day I had to pour soup over a fire in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s kitchen

Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I. He agreed to talk to me because – I speculate – I knew him, but not too well. Also, I was not an academic and would therefore not know too much about the donnish politics that consumed him almost as much as any other kind of politics. Furthermore, I made it obvious that I idolised him. This idolising began long before I ever met him, with The Last Days of Hitler

Saturday

Raymond Carr

The triumph of outrage

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso’s largest canvas, measuring 11′ 6” high and 25′ 8” long, came to be called ‘Guernica’, after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter’s best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts. In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become ‘more Spanish than less so’. From

Miranda France

The Paraguayan way

John Gimlette and I both won this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (awarded for unconventional travel writing) and we both got book deals as a result. Winning the prize changed my life and perhaps it changed Gimlette’s, too. We should toast The Spectator regularly for our good luck. I wrote about the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and found them to be sophisticated, intellectual, vain and angry, spluttering with rage in shop queues. Gimlette has written about Paraguayans, who, he says, are surprisingly lacking in anger. They aren’t vain, sophisticated or intellectual, nor do they seem to have any unifying national characteristics. This is partly because the population is sparsely distributed

David Nokes

Classics in the classroom

There comes a time when all professors of literature think of writing a book like this. Elaine Showalter has been professing it for 40 years, and after such a long and varied career what could be more apposite or timely than to share the wisdom of such experience with her younger colleagues? The answer, I fear, is much. She should have been gently dissuaded from writing a book which ranges from the tendentious (‘methods can be overrated’) to the banal (‘the main difference between lectures and seminars was that in seminars the tutor sat down.’). One says ‘writing’, but the word is misapplied; ‘compiling’ would be a better term to

Ian Thomson

Learning the hard way

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The plot has many devilish twists, lurching along like a gothic raree-show. We are in upstate New York in the early 1960s; a 19-year-old girl, Anellia, is studying philosophy at Syracuse University. Tiny and timorous, she is vulnerable to ridicule, and indeed her sexual and social awakening is to be troubled by bullies. A swot, Anellia

William Feaver

The usual Soho suspects

When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent’s Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be ‘rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle’, he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes the young Bill Coldstream, who would stand beside his ‘blabbering urine-moistened form, urging restraint’. Initiated into parental artistic circles which extended, prewar, from St John’s Wood to the New Forest, Bloomsbury and the Euston Road, Moynihan was reared in a ferment of rows and realignments. His father, Rodrigo Moynihan, had an ‘Objective Abstraction’ phase –

G S-Rousseau

In America we trust

Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist and author of The Sun Also Sets which accurately predicted the decline of Japan, believes there are two fundamental questions to ask at the beginning of the 21st century. Can capitalism continue to be the dominant force? And, in his words, ‘Will America continue to lead the world and keep the peace?’ Both draw an unsurprising, resounding yes, with many qualifications and much invested in the fine detail where the book’s heartland lodges. Emmott’s discussion depends on two beliefs central to the framing of these questions. First is that we can only predict the future by looking at the past. Thus committed to

John Casey

The lure of the jungle

This is a curious story. In 1886, a year after the final British conquest of Upper Burma, a piano-tuner, Edgar Drake, is requested by the War Office to travel to the Shan States – still largely untouched by British power – to tune a rare 1840s Erard piano. The piano was originally shipped to one Surgeon-Major Antony Carroll, an ambiguous, slightly Kurtz-like figure, who rules a remote area in the Shan States, and who is either making peace or fomenting war or even (as we finally hear alleged) spying for the Russians among the Shan. It remains unclear throughout the novel just why Carroll required a piano – and especially

Julius Purcell

Tunes of vanishing glory

Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece. For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes were the very symbol of Austria-Hungary. They underpinned a whole way of life, uniting that multi-ethnic empire that stretched precariously across central Europe. Born in 1894, Roth arrived too late to be a part of the astonishing creativity of Vienna in the dying days of Habsburg power. Most of his output focused on the sense

Philip Hensher

Lost, stolen or strayed

This is a strange, tantalising book of unintentional poetry; it is rather like a book plucked from the shelves of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ impossible libraries. The first book of the celebrated philanthropist, collector and Daimler heir, Gert-Rudolf ‘Muck’ Flick, it is a highly scholarly and lucid biography of a dozen or so great paintings; a biography so far as it is known, since this is the story of the provenance and history of paintings now thought to be lost. None of them is definitely destroyed; another book could be written about such works, like ‘The Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn’, which many of Hogarth’s contemporaries thought his

Saturday

David Ekserdjian

Keeping one’s head above water in Venice

I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed – as I thought – to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty- gritty of how many lectures I would be giving, what titles I had in mind, and so on. I must have been all of 25, and had never given a proper lecture – by which I mean one without a written text – in my life. In retrospect, it strikes me that John must have

Lucy Beresford

Recent first novels

I selected Overnight to Innsbruck by Denyse Woods by chance from the reviewing shelf and discovered a real treat of a read. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in having a strong, page-turning plot, and credible characters who panic and fret in recognisably authentic ways, yet bristling with smart, contemporary dialogue and psychological insight. If only chance had been similarly benevolent to the novel’s protagonists

Michael Glover

Education via the gymnasium

Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) – especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached the precarious age of 53, he met a rather threatening, gleamingly muscle-bound skinhead in a gym who changed his life. No, he didn’t fall in love with the man. He fell in love with the idea – and the ideals – of body-building. The skinhead was himself a body-builder – every last, well defined pectoral

Patrick Boyle

A young explorer of horror

How many people have heard of Michael Reeves? Most biographies are written about famous people or people who hobnob with famous people or lesser-known people who have led particularly interesting lives. Michael Reeves is none of these. He was an English ex-public school boy, obsessed by cinema, who made three low-budget horror films and died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 25. With such a short and relatively uneventful life, why should anyone bother to write a 360- page biography of him? The reason is that one of his films achieved ‘cult’ status. There seem to be two definitions of a cult movie. One is a film made