Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

Heavy losses on the cultural front

The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first great German Jewish man of letters, who, we are told, was passionate about social justice ‘for a man of his time and place’. None of those benighted men of the Enlightenment could be expected, of course, to attain the degree of passion about social justice that moves us now. We begin to fear we are

Zenga Longmore

Intruder in the dust

The Emma of the title was an intrepid young woman who journeyed to the Sudan in search of exotic adventure. Owing to an ill-chosen marriage she found herself at the centre of a bloody civil war. A few years later she met with an early death. One’s loins need to be well girded before embarking on this book. Emma’s Sudan, portrayed by Deborah Scroggins, is a nightmarish, Goyaesque picture. During the 1980s, Emma McCune left her dreary Yorkshire village to work as an aid worker in the Sudan in search of thrills, romance and Sudanese men. She found an abundance of all three, although her job with the British Voluntary

Jonathan Sumption

A square peg

In life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and the Director of the FBI. Although an MI5 officer of only middling rank, he entertained the prime minister to dinner in wartime in a private room at the Savoy Hotel. At a humbler level than this, he made it his business to know an astonishing range of civil servants and politicians, artists and writers, journalists,

Saturday

Interconnect

Own goals galore

FOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPSby David Conn, Chris Green, Richard McIlroy and Kevin MousleyBBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581 By chance I picked up Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings’ biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description applied by Lady Redesdale, Nancy’s mother, to the collection of preening Oxford aesthetes that her daughter invited to the house for weekends: ‘What a set!’ Invited to meet the 20 chairmen of the Premiership, bidden to dine with the Football Association or inspect the assorted riff-raff operating as ‘agents’, Lady Redesdale, you fear, would have

Robert Macfarlane

Eureka proclaimed too loudly

James Watson has all the makings of a great biographical subject. He is notoriously volatile, splenetic, and aggressive. During his career he has not fought shy of public controversy. And of course he is globally famous for a single achievement: having been one of the two men who, in 1953, ‘discovered’ the double-helix structure of DNA. The discovery was, as one peer put it, ‘a scientist’s dream: simple, elegant, and universal for all organisms’. It brought the pathologically ambitious Watson a Nobel Prize at the age of 34, and ‘triggered and sustained a revolution in science that affects us all’. The story of how that discovery occurred, like that of

Charlotte Mitchell

Hacking a path through the jungle

Jonathan Bate, the general editor of this series, which replaces the Oxford History of English Literature, announces in a preface how exceptionally difficult it is to write literary history at all in modern times. As the slightly awkward new title of the series suggests, there is all that American, Scots, Welsh and Irish stuff now. They need more than the odd chapter, so away with them. Hundreds of dead women writers are now actually in print who were formerly unheard of. Distinctions between high and low culture have collapsed. Competing theoretical approaches raise terrible anxieties. Evaluation itself is under threat. So the task of writing the history of Eng. Lit.,

Jonathan Cecil

He who would be king

Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hZlas!’ I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar are hard to credit. Wrongfully estranged from his father Gloucester through a blatant trick played by his bastard brother – something a moment’s explanation could have put right – he hastily flees and takes on the disguise of a garrulous, mud-caked lunatic. Gloucester’s later on-stage blinding often cited by defenders of video nasties – ‘Shakespeare

Tom Pocock

Hervey remounts his horse

Those who prefer their history straight may look askance at the historical novel, particularly if it is military. Accuracy is all. Surely it was the 31st Foot rather than the 38th and was the rifle yet in service and when did the Iron Duke say that it had been a really, really close-run thing? But Alan Mallinson’s reputation rests on authenticity, for he is a serving soldier who has commanded a cavalry regiment. It is cavalry of the four-legged, rather than the tracked, sort that he has made his own in fiction and soon one has settled into regimental life, albeit in the early 19th century and, in this case,

Alan Wall

Spreading the good word

This is a remarkable novel. Written in a beautifully crafted prose, its theme is the resistance of China to Christianity. Missionaries, one of them of mixed blood, make their way into the mind and heartland of China, seeking to bring the good news of the crucified and resurrected Lord to those who are still devoted to other, older, powers. For the river people worship a river god; he after all is responsible for providing their livelihood. The fish are his soldiers. The villagers know they must propitiate him. When they catch a particularly large specimen they lay it on his altar all night, in sorrow at the possibility of his

Sebastian Shakespeare

Why did she do it?

We have had to wait seven years for Graham Swift’s latest novel. Was it worth it? The hero of The Light of Day might think so. George Webb shares the patience of Job. He is prepared to wait eight or nine years until the woman he loves is let out of prison and re-emerges into the light of day. It is hard to understand the nature of his obsession. Firstly, he has only met Sarah a couple of times before she is jailed for murdering her husband. Secondly, his fixation seems to revolve around her knees. Am I alone in thinking knees are the most unerogenous part of the body?

Gabriele Annan

Drifting out of court

Judge Savage is a dashing mixture of thriller, social comedy and dysfunctional family saga. The dust-cover is misleading. It shows a very black black in a judge’s wig, looking thoughtful and gleaming with sweat. Judge Savage is not like that at all. He is ‘almond-coloured’ (Parks doesn’t say whether with or without the shell), of mixed race, and was adopted by an English colonel and his wife who already had a son. They send both boys to Rugby and Oxford. Taxi-drivers recognise Daniel as a toff. He is as humane and good as he is clever and sceptical. His two strongest impulses are for ‘helping and leching’. The second is

Philip Hensher

A nasty old person from Persia

I have to register a strong complaint about the misleading and opportunistic title of this book; it is not about ‘the Great Game’ as the phrase is usually understood. Various interesting and valuable attempts, such as the studies by Peter Hopkirk, have made the case that the British/Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia not only continued into the Soviet era, but is plausibly still going on. But no one will expect a book with this title to be about 20th-century Iran. Nor is it as general as the title implies; I would love to read a dashing book which deserves this title. There are excellent English books on Persia

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.