Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Geoffrey Owen

An early lead lost

In 1926 Simon Marks, head of a little-known chain of penny bazaars called Marks & Spencer, placed an order for men’s socks with Corahs, a Leicester knitwear manufacturer. The order was kept secret – the Corah brothers did not want to offend the wholesalers, who forbade their suppliers from selling direct to retailers – but it proved to be the start of a beautiful friendship. The cost to Marks & Spencer was 8s 6d for a dozen pairs of socks, a shilling less than a wholesaler would have charged. But Simon Marks was not just interested in lower prices. He wanted to distinguish M&S from Woolworths by upgrading quality and

John Jolliffe

The third man

In the 1840s and 50s, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens and Thackeray were the three best known literary men in England, and it was said at the time that it was ‘hardly possible to discuss the merits of any of them without referring to the other two. What happened to Jerrold? He was born into a family of strolling players, and at the age of 11 served for a few months on a ship commanded by Jane Austen’s brother. When he started writing plays, his great success began with a nautical melodrama called Black-Eyed Susan, the central figure being an innocent ordinary seaman who escaped the gallows in the nick of time.

Saturday

Robert Edric

The disappearing guru

In 1909, in a late letter to his brother, Henry James bemoaned the fact that the ‘novel of ideas’ – the novel ‘built on the momentum and inspiration found in a solid, sustainable and infinitely expandable idea’ – was finally dead, and that it had died from ‘lack of want or appetite in the reading public’. He complained that the modern novel was too often concerned only with the ‘circumstance of character and enforced narrative’, that ‘novelty and fantasy and the banality of everyday ordinariness’ now held sway. Nicholas Mosley has written a novel of which James would have wholeheartedly approved. Inventing God is an unfashionable, unpredictable novel in which

Jonathan Mirsky

Remembering to forget

In this exploration of her pain, terror, and ten years of barely surviving the trauma of rape and near-murder, Susan Brison’s most piercing words are, ‘For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time),

Nicholas Fearn

When conscience is a doubtful guide

In the summer, I met a man who made his living by selling computer hardware he found discarded around London’s business districts. A Scorpion tank driver during the Gulf war, he told me how he had been wounded in a firefight and now found himself unequipped for ordinary employment. Soldiers who have seen action are not supposed to enjoy talking about their experiences, so I took him for a fantasist, until he pulled down the neck of his t-shirt and showed me his bullet wounds. The man may have risked his life for a cheap oil supply and the restoration of a despotic government, but he had come out of

Caroline Moore

High prairie, low life

Annie Proulx’s latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx’s customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction. The Shipping News cohered memorably around the figure of Quoyle (‘head shaped like a crenshaw

Saturday

Matthew Leeming

The making of the Taleban

I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and poetry sleepwalk back into the Middle Ages? In future the tourists will be carrying this book. As an account of how the country got into its present state, and of the making of the grotesque regime of the Taleban, it could not possibly be bettered. Lamb saw much of the tragedy at first hand and

Sophia Watson

God’s own country

Photographs by Mark J. Rattenbury Further details are available on the archive website, www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/exmoor This is a puzzlingly titled book. Are we being encouraged to look on the contents as mirrored reflections of a way of life, or reflections on the death of the old Exmoor? Perhaps we, like the Lady of Shalott, are supposed to be glimpsing shadows of the world in the pages of the book, or perhaps we are meant to be pensive about it all. In any event, while many distinguished men and women are featured, there is, alas, no sign of Sir Lancelot tirra-lirra-ing his way across Exmoor. The book is made up of portraits

Anthony Smith

The higher the fewer

What to do if you plan a book whose essence is a single parachute drop? And what to do if, apparently, that particular parachutist was not deeply committed to the book? Similarly, if your two previous books have been Soup and Mushroom, and if your career has involved theology, minicab-driving, obituary writing, and founding a chain of soup bars, how can you detail the physics and technology embodied in such a subject as high-altitude parachuting? This actual drop was no casual tumble from the skies, being the highest ever such descent, starting at 102,000 feet above the earth and landing safely in New Mexico on 16 August 1960. No one

Gerard Noel

A congregation of clergymen

This highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century from 1987 to 2002. Of the 89 entries, 86 are of men, mostly, but not all, Anglican. Highlighted here are facts and events not, in general, mentioned in the actual obituaries, whose dates are given in brackets. The Rev. Dr Alec Vindler (27 July 1987) was the first person to give a nudge towards Christianity

Ruth Guilding

Off the straight and narrow

The picture of a maverick which emerges from this book is ever more strongly drawn. In this sequel to his auto- biographical No Voice from the Hall, published in 1998, John Harris takes us forwards, backwards and sideways around his earlier account. There is less fishing, and the kindly figure of ‘Snozzle’, his Uncle Sid, the upholsterer-cum-antique dealer who ‘took on’ Harris in his teenage years, appears only fleetingly. The anecdotes are more circumstantial, the edited and neatly dovetailed snapshots of the conservative upbringing against which Harris revolted, and subsequent revolts against authority in all its forms. Harris the putative anarchist, destined for grammar school and a red-brick university, takes

Zenga Longmore

Mr Nice and Mr Nasty

Quentin Crisp was, among other delightful things, a human paradox. He loathed the Gay Liberation Movement as bitterly as he despised Oscar Wilde, yet he did more than anyone else to change people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. He was unashamedly flamboyant, yet spinsterish and celibate; the sex act, he explained, was like ‘undergoing a colostomy operation without anaesthetic’. He was flippant yet wise. He hated England, but became an English figure of affection. Born Denis Pratt, he ‘dyed’ his name Quentin in his early twenties. His childhood was spent in ‘middle-class, middling, middle-brow’ suburbia where his unusual appearance prompted his father to expostulate that he looked like a male whore. Andrew

Candia Mcwilliam

Browsing for escape

The fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably compendious, with such indiosyncratic flowerings as Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the backlist of the Press fills a worthy niche for the second-hand bookshop browser. The OUP’s own bookshop on the High in Oxford is, however, rather different. The assistants are young, helpful, conceivably not overlavishly paid. The beautifully printed Oxford University Gazette may

Saturday

Interconnect

Out of the commonplace

The following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy’s head so well that the birds came and pecked them. Sir G. Kneller said that if the boy too had been well painted the birds wouldn’t have dared approach.An accurate daguerrotype portrait of a commonplace face, a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.C. Bront‘ (1848) on Pride and Prejudice

Mark Steyn

Home is where the snow is

Some songs are hits – Number One for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards – they endure decade after decade. And a few very rare songs reach way beyond either category, to embed themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness they become part of the soundtrack of society. They start off the same as all the other numbers, written for a show or a movie, a singer or an event, but they float free of the writer, they outlast the singer, transcend the movie, change the event. In White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, Jody Rosen makes the case that the subject of his book transformed

Grey Gowrie

Grand, ritzy and splendid

A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted on a Martini before bedtime in the Bemelmans Bar. Bobby Short would play a few Bogartish tunes on the piano, Ludwig’s own murals soothed the eye and the America you entered seemed a throwback: older and more elegant than still trendy London, or the rest of busy neurotic New York fighting off its post-Vietnam blues.

Juliet Townsend

A choice of children’s books

This year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern education – the Computer Suite. Of course computers are an essential part of every child’s world, and will presumably be even more so in the future. Yet there is something rather soulless about the rows of mesmerised little figures staring into their screens while skilfully manipulating an army of mice. Somehow that world needs to be balanced by introducing children to the very different pleasures of the book, and there has never been a time when children’s books were so varied, well-produced and such good value as today. Probably the