Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Brian Masters

Climbing among the skyscrapers

According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the privileged few you needed poise, an aptitude for polite conversation, a polished and deferential manner, an infinite capacity of good humour, and the ability to entertain and be entertained. And also, by the by, pots of money. Given that one was expected to change one’s entire outfit nine times a day and take 20 gowns just for summer hols, the cost of belonging could have floated a small country, let alone a young lady. Yet the need to be part of an icily exclusive set with a profound sense of

Simon Courtauld

The Orwell of Notting Hill

Roy Kerridge is conservative in attitude, he loves the works of Kipling and he enjoys the company of those whom he describes as of the African diaspora but would rather not call blacks. His affection for that race may have originated with his West African stepfather; he has certainly spent much of his time in the coloured districts of London. And I remember a previous book of his recounting his travels in parts of the southern United States, which appealed to him mainly because of their history of black enslavement. It is also relevant to point out that Kerridge is physically quite small: he has a round, studious, bespectacled face

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Driving on a dark night

Ken Nott is the most annoying man in England. It’s his job (he’s a shock jock, a prime-time talk-radio DJ), and also his hobby (he’s unfaithful to his girlfriend, has bedded his best mate’s wife, and, worst of all, likes to take his controversial opinions into the pub with him). And then, just when you thought he couldn’t be any more irritating, he attends a flash drinks party where he meets – on a roof, and, yes, in a thunderstorm – Celia, a mysterious and beautiful woman who apparently wants nothing more than to have passionate, no-strings-attached sex with him in a series of eight-star hotels. The only downside is

Sebastian Smee

Putting it all in

Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious literary divide between women’s fiction and men’s fiction: hermaphrodite fiction. A marketing dream. The narrator of Eugenides’ second novel, Middlesex, is a hermaphrodite, and, at least through the second half of the novel, which relates the narrator’s own life, you are sure to find aspects of Eugenides’ hero/heroine with which to identify, no matter what

Interconnect

A poet under strict controls

This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts – who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa – which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the risk of missing something revealing, amusing, germane. Perhaps these bits should have been printed in different type. Not a mountain, perhaps, a quarry for future Yeats scholars. However, these – a last complaint – will not be helped by the index: under ‘astrology’, for example, there are no less than 150 page references but no

Allan Mallinson

Mastery of time and space

Even Churchill might have been discouraged had he, instead of Lord Portland, been prime minister and surveying the scene in 1807. Bonaparte had crushed the Prussians, knocked out the Austrians, and forced Russia to sue for peace. He had organised an almost total blockade of the continent against British trade, was redrawing the map of central and eastern Europe to consolidate his position, and had placed his family on thrones from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Britain’s only allies were Sweden and Naples, and even Naples was in French hands except for Sicily, whence the king had fled. But while Sweden and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were strategically

Digby Anderson

The organisation man

In 1743, 393 livings within the gift of the Archbishop of York were occupied by clergymen who did not live within that diocese and another 335 incumbents held plural livings. One bishop of Winchester distributed 30 incumbencies among his family. The Church of England was corrupt and slumbered. The facts of John Wesley’s life and of his ‘Great Awakening’ which disturbed the slumbers are clear. Born in 1703, he was ordained and died a priest in the Church of England. Influenced both by High Church and non-juror, by Taylor, A Kempis and Law and by Puritan traditions, by the classics of spirituality and the Counter-Reformation, and by the disciplined spirituality

Charlotte Moore

Tales of the expected unexpected

‘Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant,’ promises the jacket. The heroines of Fay Weldon’s short stories ‘offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation’. It’s not the done thing to start a review by quoting the blurb, but this one unwittingly helps to establish why these stories ought to be good, and why, on the whole, they are not. Most stick to the ‘twist in the tail’ formula bequeathed to short-story writers by Saki and too rarely discarded since. A faked Early Christian cross works healing miracles, a dowdy book illustrator turns the tables on a smooth-talking con-man, a china-smashing poltergeist shows a

Philip Hensher

Third time unlucky

£14.99 for individual volumes The single problem facing any translator of Proust is that there is, really, no equivalent of his style in English. He is at once classical and idiosyncratic; the rhythms and proportions of classical French style are followed faithfully in every sentence, and over the whole book. The end result looks so alarmingly new, however, because the proportions and rhythms are employed on an unprecedented scale. The novel really is one novel, and not, like Anthony Powell, a sequence of novels; his sentences are always immense, balanced epigrams. The novel has an essential orthodox classicism which emerges, on such a scale, as revolutionary audacity. When the narrator

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Our man in the thick of it

There he is on the cover, our handsome 57-year-old Boys’ Own adventurer, probably doing a piece to camera, cheered on by the locals who have come along to revel in the BBC’s long-awaited liberation of Kabul last November. Why couldn’t he have arrived a few years earlier, they’re probably wondering. It could all have been so much easier. No beastly Taliban. No need even for America’s B52s and the Northern Alliance. There was always a far better and infinitely more elegant solution to the interminable Afghan conundrum. Send for Simpson. Of the BBC’s big guns, they don’t come any bigger than Simpson. Revolution in Serbia? Put Simpson on a plane.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Too much and too late

By the criteria of the day before yesterday, the late William Whitelaw, a much loved Tory politician who served as Mrs Thatcher’s deputy leader, must have seemed a good circulation bet for a successful biography. Most people, after all, would have heard of him, if only because of Mrs Thatcher’s memorable remark that ‘every prime minister needs a Willie’. In addition, however, to acting his most valuable role as a restraining influence on Prime Minister Thatcher, he was also a controversial Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, a well-thought-of Home Secretary, Chief Whip and leader of the House of Lords, not to mention a second world war hero and a

Hugh Massingberd

Gentleman and player

During my brief stint as a showbiz scribe – which unfortunately came to an end when I expressed a preference for profiling Gerald Harper rather than Jean-Claude Van Damme – I had the privilege of interviewing George Baker (celebrated as Chief Inspector Wexford in ITV’s The Ruth Rendell Mysteries), whom I had admired since his days as a clean-cut, young officer in British films of the Fifties. What struck me most about this unusually tall actor was his impeccable courtesy. I arrived disgracefully late for our lunch in Soho, and we were then pestered by one of the neighbourhood topers, but Baker’s beautiful manners were a humbling object lesson in

Jeremy Treglown

Past glories prove elusive

Despite many allusions to Virgil and a diligent summary of various interpretations of Poussin’s ‘Les Bergers d’Arcadie’, Ben Okri’s main sense of Arcadia, with its ‘star-dust magic’, seems to be derived from pop music lite. ‘We are stardust, golden’, sang Eva Cassidy in Woodstock, ‘and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ Anyone who has been tempted to replace this with ‘We’ve got to get back to the weedin’ ‘ will know what’s missing from Okri’s view of nature. Realism apart, In Arcadia has no narrative tension and the characters are ciphers. The long philosophical-cum- cultural-historical rants which it mainly consists of, with their outbreaks of uncontrolled Latinity

Miranda Seymour

Well met by moonlight

One of the best permanent shows in London is the Science Museum’s collection of electrical and magnetic instruments commissioned by George III. Here, gathered in one room, you can see orreries, Leyden jars, air pumps and – my favourite – electrostatic spangles flickering like lightning in the glass pillars of a temple intended to stand as the centrepiece of a dining-table. You could, until 1993, combine the joys of this collection with a visit to the museum’s history of electricity, laid out in darkened tableaux to make theatre of the lacemaker’s pin-pricked candleshade, the shock of the first arc-light. I mourn its passing; these are the places which bring us

Jane Ridley

The Margot and Henry show

The publicity material likens this book to The Forsyte Saga, but in fact it’s far more gripping than fiction: the true story of a larger-than-life political dynasty. The diaries of Margot Asquith form the core of the book. For too long Margot’s voluminous diaries have been unavailable, and Colin Clifford is the first biographer to gain unrestricted access. He has put them to excellent use. Daughter of the fabulously rich Sir Charles Tennant (‘the Bart’), Margot took London by storm with her energy and outrageous wit. Her diaries reveal a less attractive side. She emerges as self-obsessed, with an irritating habit of detailing pert exchanges with the great and the

Robert Edric

No petticoat long unlifted

Few admirers of Faber’s recent spate of tales and novellas – the spacious and admirably unadorned The Courage Consort and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, for instance – will be prepared for the solid and all-inclusive recreation of (an echo here of Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings) The Crimson Petal and the White. Twenty years in the making, Faber’s latest work boldly proclaims itself and its High Victorian intentions from the outset. No post-modern sleight of hand

Patrick Skene-Catling

Big little man

‘What a swankpot!’ Sir Norman Wisdom pseudo-modestly pseudo-rebukes himself after listing some of the trophies in a display cabinet at home on the Isle of Man. ‘But why not?’ he asks, almost disarmingly. ‘I did get ’em, didn’t I?’ This is ventriloquial star-speak by William Hall, an expert writer-with, whose credits include biographies of Michael Caine, James Dean, Frankie Howerd, Larry Adler and Dick Emery. Wisdom’s cabinet contains a British Academy Award, seven trophies for Britain’s Top Comedian, seven engraved silver spoons from John Paddy Carstairs, one for each Norman Wisdom film he directed, emblems of the Golden Flame from Argentina and the Lifetime Achievement Award from his fellow British

Sinclair McKay

PROPERTY SPECIAL:Literary London

Until recently, a lively sub-genre of English literature was that devoted to London’s creepier, darker back streets. Peter Ackroyd took us on a grim tour of early 1980s (and early 1700s) Shoreditch and Limehouse in Hawksmoor; Iain Sinclair angrily traversed the weed-sprouting, rubbish-strewn streets of Hackney and Tilbury and what he called the ‘sumplands’ of Dagenham in Downriver. Angela Carter peeked through the yellowing net curtains of dowdy south London, while Michael Moorcock beckoned us to explore the gentle sadness of peeling suburban avenues. Go further back and you will find Patrick Hamilton’s malign vision of Earls Court, Arthur Conan Doyle’s all-pervading fogs, Dickens’s appalling rookeries. The point is that

Saturday

Graham Stewart

Pedalling into politics

Perhaps it is not a good idea to call Dervla Murphy ‘redoubtable’. She is a strident anti-militarist and might not enjoy being given the sort of name that could so easily belong to an old dreadnought or hunter-killer submarine. But the 71-year-old cycling grandmother can hardly be thought of as anything less. While half the population of her age retreat into a world of sheltered accommodation and televised snooker, she has opted instead to pedal against the steep mountain inclines of the Balkans. Needless to say, the terrain proves to be by no means the most arduous or dangerous part of the odyssey. Like anyone who has witnessed the humanitarian

Interconnect

Not one to be stared down

No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he did: stubborn, scornful of frills and too intelligent to be dull; a man (a boy) who could stick up for himself. At 19, in 1987, while still at Cambridge, he was already playing for Lancashire, causing resentment. Someone daubed FEC on his locker, which did not mean ‘Future England Captain’ (the E stood for ‘educated’). In only his third match for the county he put some wet clothes in the pavilion dryer and Paul Allott, a senior player, took them out and threw in his own. Atherton took out Allott’s