Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

Nothing new on display

Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject is justified. It is nearly 20 years now since Selina Hastings’s subtle and perceptive account of Nancy Mitford appeared; and so even if the heart sank at the thought of revisiting Mitford country – the Hons’ cupboard, the ‘sewers’, the shrieks, ‘do tell’ – it seemed only fair to approach this new book about her in a positive, hopeful spirit. After all, it was possible, if not very likely given the assiduous cultivation in recent years of the Mitford literary estate, that Laura

John McEwen

The next best thing

This handsome book should be given to all those non-Waltonians who say, ‘I don’t fish because I haven’t got the patience’, because it shows that fishing is ultimately about contemplation. Winslow Homer: Artist and Angler is an exhibition catalogue for the show which was recently at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and soon will be at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth (11 April-2 June); but it is presented as a book, and an exceptionally pleasing one, thanks to the fidelity of the illustrations and the generosity of Ann Karlstrom’s design. The text inevitably is very much the bread of the sandwich. It consists of seven essays, two

Jonathan Keates

Living under the volcano

Regrettably history is not among the core subjects now prescribed by the government’s umpteenth overhaul of the national curriculum. The omission is a foolish one, given the nation’s unquenchable enthusiasm for the past in whatever form, serious or ‘lite’. Does the official mind scent potential troublemakers among those inquisitive as to the fate of vanished civilisations or exuberantly misbehaving royal dynasties? Most people, as it happens, enjoy history not so much for its lessons, hints and warnings as for the how-different-from-us factor, the armchair schadenfreude enhanced by our comforting remoteness from the miseries and privations its pages evoke. More precious still are the abundant opportunities given to us to be

Ray Monk

Oppenheimer: fact and fiction

‘Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible,’ Virginia Woolf once wrote. She was deploring the decision of her friend, Lytton Strachey, to combine fact and fiction in his book, Elizabeth and Essex, in which, in order to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Strachey used his imagination to invent details of the relationship between the Virgin Queen and her favourite earl. The result, according to Woolf, was neither an honest piece of biography, nor a satisfying work of fiction, but something that was caught in between the conflicting demands of the two genres. Elizabeth and Essex was published as a work of non-fiction. America’s Children is

Michael Carlson

Down to the last detail

One might assume that the Oxford novel, like some long-delayed train finally pulling into Paddington, has run its course. Bright young things flee back into their stately towers as tourists prowl the streets in search of Sebastian Flyte and his chums. But today’s Oxford student is just as likely to be commuting from London in search of the MBA degree that will allow him to take over the rail network. Moreover, readers of the most successful Oxford fiction of recent years expect a city littered with corpses, with opera echoing among the spires as Inspector Morse sorts out the killers from a very different set of dons. Academic fiction has

Francis King

Challenge and response

The first four pages of this novel arouse the highest expectations. Some walkers in the Snowdon area stare up at the boilerplate slabs of a crag up which, far above them, a figure is climbing. He is neither carrying the special equipment nor wearing the protective gear usual for a project so dangerous, and he is, as one of the observers remarks in shocked amazement, ‘bloody soloing’. Then all at once he plunges to his death. Everyone expects the body that lands on the grass below the crag to be that of some reckless tyro. In fact, it is that of a man eventually identified as one of the most

Douglas Johnson

The most interesting of monarchs

When an honest citizen was shown into King James I’s room in Whitehall, the scene of confusion amid which he found the King was no bad picture of the state and quality of James’s own mind. Walter Scott, in The Fortunes of Nigel, tells the story and he explains how valuable ornaments were arranged in a slovenly manner, covered with dust; the table was loaded with huge folios, amongst which lay light books of jest and ribaldry; the King was dressed in a doublet of green velvet, over which he wore a sad-coloured nightgown, out of the pocket of which peeped his hunting horn. But such inconsistencies in dress and

Saturday

Katie Grant

A soft tread and a sure touch

Short stories are best read one a night just before you go to sleep, and this collection by Angela Huth, which brings together work from the last 30 years, would keep you going for nearly a month.

John De-Falbe

The boy who saw too much and too little

Already a bestseller in the many countries where it has been published, I’m Not Scared was described to me as a modern version of The Go-Between. After struggling through the wooden introduction to a group of children cycling up a hill somewhere in the south of Italy, I was steeling myself for one of those second-rate bits of whimsy like Silk or Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress which unaccountably become international bestsellers. But the secret soon discovered by Michele, the child-narrator, is not just emotionally confusing like the illicit love affair to which the boy is made accessory in L. P. Hartley’s novel, but a very real horror. The

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A palely loitering revenant

‘Reviewers,’ laments the Dr Cake of Andrew Motion’s title, ‘they are devils. Devils. I have seen good men, good authors, broken by their deprecations. The worst of it is their presumption in supposing that those they chastise do not know their own faults, and admonish themselves with a ferocity others can only imagine.’ From a Laureate whose (admittedly rotten) recent poems have been kicked gleefully to death in the public prints, this has the ring of something profoundly felt. There’s a later, rueful allusion to the superiority of the young Wordsworth over the old Wordsworth – ‘the Laureate who now preaches at us’. There is another reason to be wary

Jane Ridley

The Stuart we fail to remember

In 1066 and All That there is a spoof exam question: ‘How can you be so numb and vague about Arbella Stuart?’ All the same, her name means little today. If she is known at all, it is as one of those fiendishly muddling and worryingly inbred claimants to the Tudor succession who all seem to be called Seymour or Stuart. Sarah Gristwood has rescued Arbella from the tangles of royal genealogy and reinvented her as a figure for our times. Her story is extraordinary. Anyone who doesn’t know their Stuarts from their Seymours should read this book. Arbella, who was born in 1575, was the first cousin of King

Michael Glover

Bum ego trip

‘Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity,’ remarks Augusten (pronounced You-gusten, by the way) Burroughs as he creeps towards the end of what must be one of the strangest and most engrossingly repellent memoirs of dysfunctional American family life ever to be published. Who is Augusten Burroughs anyway? Exactly. He is a nobody who is interested in nothing but writing about himself. And this book is that obsession made manifest. Everything is grotesque about it, from first almost to last. I say almost because the last few pages turn a touch poker-faced, if not moralistic – which

Marcus Berkmann

One man’s prime numbers

When you are a bestselling novelist you get to do things your way. So this isn’t 32 Songs, which would at least be a power of two, or even 30 Songs, but the defiantly prime 31 Songs, because that, says Nick Hornby, is how long the book needs to be. But then the millions of us who read High Fidelity know that Hornby feels rather strongly about pop music. Call it a novel if you wish, but the sorry and thwarted emotional life of that book’s protagonist clearly reflected its author’s profound dedication to all things rock and, moreover, roll. You do not write so keenly and accurately about the

M R-D-Foot

The Russian language front

During the war against Hitler, secret services recruited on the old boy net: there was no other way of being sure that recruits were not duds, and even on the old boy net bad mistakes could be made – Philby and Maclean were only the most notable examples. All that was supposed to vanish with Ernest Bevin’s arrival at the Foreign Office and the Attlee government’s clearing away of old boy values for ever. Not a bit of it. Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their

Philip Hensher

Radiance in suburbia

Shena Mackay has had a difficult and unconventional career, and it has taken a long time for most readers to register what a powerful and original novelist she is. Several things have counted, unfairly, against her; her subjects are not just domestic, but often suburban, which she presents with a disconcerting rapture. She does not write long books, nor polemical ones; it is hard to say what any given novel by her is ‘about’, although various fiercely held convictions may, from time to time, be discerned. They are primarily about human beings living their lives, rendered with increasing mastery and a hard-won truth; and there is nothing harder in the

Saturday

Felipe Fernandezarmesto

Only slightly under the influence

‘The Age of Russia,’ according to the doom-fraught speculations Oswald Spengler published in 1918, would succeed ‘the Decline of the West’. For a while, it looked as if he was right. Russia’s non-western credentials became part of the rhetoric of Soviet foreign policy. Hailed as ‘the future which works’, Russia was earnestly copied by escapers from colonialism, who wanted their newly independent countries to break with the West and bask in the ‘white heat’ of red technology. It was all illusory. Russia never offered an antidote to western-style modernity, just a variant of it. Now Russians sheepishly avow that they never really left the western fold. Among most individuals and

Kevin Jackson

A palpable hit

If you happen to be one of those maddeningly quick-witted or sideways-thinking readers who can spot at a glance that ‘potty train (4)’ means LOCO, that ‘Where reluctant Scotsman lives (7)’ is LOTHIAN, or even – a lovely one, this – that ‘Amundson’s forwarding address (4)’ is MUSH, the pages of Sandy Balfour’s memoir will hold few surprises. (Nor, probably, will you need to be told what its title means. Answer, for the rest of us, in the final paragraph below.) For those who find themselves wrestling with the likes of ‘canine animal’ – three letters, beginning with D – the book will be at the very least a source

Andrew Gimson

Looking – and looking away

Sebald is perturbed by the almost complete failure of German writers to describe the devastation of their country by British and American bombers during the second world war. Here, one might have thought, was an inescapable subject, a reality which confronted anyone who was in Germany during or after the war. About 600,000 civilians were killed in the raids and, as Sebald points out, ‘even after 1950 wooden crosses still stood on the piles of rubble in towns like Pforzheim, which lost almost one third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single raid on the night of 22 February 1945’. Among the ruins dreadful smells emanated from the corpses and