Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Interconnect

Boots, boots, boots, boots

KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers. As such it recapitulates, and to a limited degree extends, a saga that sports journalists have been amusing themselves with for nearly 40 years, certainly long before the celebrated joint appearance in the 1966 World Cup final. On the surface – a surface diligently polished by the sports writers and professional colleagues – the story

Jonathan Mirsky

Out of the bottom drawer?

Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin’s earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning it by listening to the World Service, came to the US in 1985 when he was 29. Waiting won the National Book Award. One of the reasons I liked that book was Ha’s creation of a world in which people acted naturally, like real Chinese, as their gripping story unfolded. The problem with The Crazed

Andrew Barrow

The way to the tomb

This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Its hero is an intensely innocent young railway apprentice, who dreams of becoming an engine driver ‘of the better sort’, and its villains – or so it seems – are a bunch of hard-bitten, foul-mouthed colleagues who are apparently up to something dark and dirty. Set during the closing months of 1903, this book is, as its publishers rightly claim, ‘fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail’, but this backdrop material is so skilfully woven into the story that it comes across as playfully invented rather

Robert Edric

A world of drivers and passengers

VJ night, the war in the Pacific is finally over, and in William Kennedy’s Albany the war of senatorial election is about to begin. The candidates stand up to be counted and the consequences of their election are considered. Small crooks fresh out of crook school and the army rise into the lower reaches of these considerations. Bigger crooks and politicians start to circle each other and to watch their backs. And the biggest and most battle-scarred crooks of all (politicians to a man) – chief among whom resides Roscoe Conway – sit with their open wallets on their desks, old hunting trophies high on the walls of their offices,

Susan Greenfield

Nature versus Nurture: the state of play

The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that in the eternal Nature-Nurture debate the scales tip heavily in favour of the environment: when it comes to the human mind, nothing is left to the caprice of genes. Steven Pinker, well known for The Language Instinct and to a lesser extent How the Mind Works, devotes some 500 pages to refuting this stance. Effectively, then, this book is all about human nature – its validation, characterisation, and neurological basis, along with all its wider moral, political and social baggage. Given the ambitious theme, and indeed the admirably detailed though

Saturday

Fatema Ahmed

A bleak kind of optimism

After several acclaimed novels, including last year’s Pulitzer prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has now produced a volume of short stories. However, the qualities which endear the novels to their readers – a wry sense of humour, vivid characterisation and the sense of lives being lived over time – are less apparent here; the shorter form has created a sterner and more uncomfortable writer. In the title story, ‘the whore’s child’ is an elderly Belgian nun who joins the narrator’s creative-writing class. Sister Ursula writes several accounts of her own life, the unchanging details of which are that she is the daughter of a prostitute, and that she was sent

Philip Ziegler

No room at the top

In the years following the second world war, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey either became Labour Members of Parliament or worked closely with the Labour party. Few parties in so short a time can have gathered three recruits so obviously of prime-ministerial calibre. No other party could have so contrived things that none of them attained that office. The parallels between the three are almost unnerving. Crosland’s family was socially a cut above the other two, but none of them was grand and none penurious. All were at Oxford immediately before the war, were involved in politics and were on the Left (unsurprisingly, since out of an undergraduate

Nicholas Harman

Deceiving only those who want to believe

Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills and violate the sanctity of property, until photolithography, then typing, devalued the uniqueness of the handwritten text. But a modern forger can still make a decent profit by turning out the fake-historical or fake-literary stuff that collectors strangely hanker for, and news- papers sometimes eagerly swallow. This book about Mark Hofmann, a leading forger and a real-life weirdo worthy of the great Elmore Leonard’s inventions, uncovers an especially American world in which literature, religion, lying, cheating, greed, gullibility and, eventually, murder are combined. The murders are shocking. To be shocked

Christopher Woodward

How the master of landscape was transformed

In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading ‘Mr Gainsborough, Painter’. The artist’s showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister’s millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled with the oil paint drying on masterpieces such as ‘Countess Howe’ and ‘The Byam Family’. In London, prints publicised an artist; in the crowded winter resort a showroom invited visitors with time and money on their hands to judge the likeness of a celebrity who might have been glimpsed in the Pump Room a few

Magnus Linklater

Raw skin over bone

At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist – it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in peasants. Indeed, he believes that it is only by studying the character of the peasant class, those who are conditioned by the land on which they live and work, that we can reach an understanding of the character of a nation – in this case, Scotland. And so he begins what he calls his biography

Interconnect

As sharp as cut tin

In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt’s latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts pile and then, a few moments later, in a spirit of mild bewilderment, putting it back. Read cold by someone unfamiliar with the dazzling encomia that litter Nicola Barker’s book jackets, Behindlings, you fear, would produce a similar result. Two years back Miss Barker’s Wide Open won the IMPAC award, ‘the English-speaking world’s largest prize

Teresa Waugh

A new lease of life

The heroine of Margaret Drabble’s new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening part of The Seven Sisters is in the form of Candida Wilton’s diary, written from the time she moves to a modest flat in London after the break-up of her marriage. Despite her incongruously glamorous name, she is the middle-aged, discarded wife of a headmaster from Suffolk. Her children, whom she doesn’t like, are grown up and have, surprisingly, sided with their father in the divorce. She has very little money and, apart from being a headmaster’s wife and bringing up her three daughters, her only work has been filling

Frederic Raphael

Unblinking, even for a second

Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be ‘about’ paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert’s passion as a metaphor for the Master’s onomastic infatuation with America (does anyone accuse Yeats of having validated copulation with swans because he made Leda the subject of a poem?). Platform has been admired, as was the same author’s Atomised, by worthy sponsors. Clearly they detect merits that go beyond the blow-by-blow sexual activity calculated – others might say – to

Juliet Townsend

He is cheap, he is pure, he is capable – and he isn’t doomed

In any discussion about the English judicial system with foreigners, they are always amazed to learn that more than 90 per cent of the criminal cases in this country are tried by unpaid lay magistrates. In a society where an applicant for the most unskilled job is required to be able to produce some paper qualification, the magistracy sails on with a magnificent disregard for such irrelevancies. Its requirements are simple but demanding: good character, common sense, fairness and good judgment, and it expects and largely succeeds in finding these qualities in people from widely varying backgrounds. Magistrates have never had a good press. People identify more readily with juries,

Interconnect

When inner and outer reality collide

Coleridge’s Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied selection, 1794 to 1820, from his 22nd year to his 48th. By that time he had become the loquacious Sage of Highgate, ‘an archangel, a little damaged’. To the end he was a self-observer, still making, as it were, entries in his Notebooks, although it was now up to others to write them down. On his deathbed (1834), reports Richard Holmes his biographer, he told a visitor that his mind was quite unclouded and, closing his eyes, added, with growing interest, ‘I could even be witty

Andrew Robinson

The heart of the master

THE HUMOUR AND THE PITY: ESSAYS ON V. S. NAIPAULedited by Amitava KumarBuffalo Books, in association with the British Council, New Delhi, Rs 175, pp. 174, ISBN 8187890029 In ‘London’, a short essay written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1958, the up-and-coming V. S. Naipaul accurately analysed why his fictions about the Caribbean would never be bestsellers in England. First, I cannot write Sex. I haven’t the skill, or the wide experience which is necessary if one’s work is to have variety. And then I would be embarrassed even at the moment of writing. My friends would laugh. My mother would be shocked, and with reason. Secondly, he was

Saturday

David Caute

Plucking at the sighing harp of time

William Trevor is the voice of a civilised Anglo-Ireland capable of apologising for ancient privileges and extensive estates while discreetly lamenting their departure. Laying out and constantly refolding a finely observed landscape (County Cork) of water, rock and sand, of religious divide and class deference, Trevor conveys the baffled rage of Fenian fire-bombers and the sighing flight of their victims to relatives in Wiltshire. Deft touches of irony abound; the upright Gault clan, we are told, have gambled away much of their land to the neighbouring O’Reillys at the card table. The Gaults are yet one more Protestant ‘big house family’ about to leave their rural home because of an

Sam Phipps

Grimly comic menace

Porno is billed as ‘the sequel to Trainspotting’, which immediately is a worrying sign, like the blow-up doll that stares out from the front cover. Why is Irvine Welsh returning to the territory of his phenomenal debut after all these years? Does it mean he has run out of ideas? And does anyone really want or need another fix of Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie, the drug-addled radges who put a largely hidden Edinburgh on the map nearly a decade ago? These kind of doubts all swirl around as you pitch into Porno. The quotation from Nietzsche that prefaces the book – ‘without cruelty there is no festival’ –

A.N. Wilson

A phoenix rising from European ashes

It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill’s writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had to put it in a phrase, it would be: what we all lost when we lost our religion, and, at the same time, became deaf to the voices of our ancestors, their literature, their lives and thought-processes. But one can’t put it in a phrase, and that is the point. Here comes our poet-sage ‘to

Digby Anderson

Sniggling with a darning needle

I have always counted myself a loyal, even an enthusiastic eel fan. I seek them out and buy them whenever I can find them live: they deteriorate quickly and should be killed just before cooking. The French like to buy them skinned. This is a culinary error and usually, though not necessarily, means they are bought dead. I keep them in the bath with the cold tap just dripping. I like cutting them up holding the body with the women’s pages of the Daily Telegraph and watching the advice about alternative health disintegrating in a mess of blood and slime while the severed head watches, approvingly winking and squirming in