Not eating or cheating
‘She was like a bride, they said, festooned in ribbons and bows, a large crucifix resting on her bosom,’ records Si
Book Reviews
Our reviews of the latest in literature
Saturday
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
When Irish eyes were smiling
THE SHADOWS OF ELISA LYNCHby Si
Homage to A. B. Roger
Woodruff, you have not come to Oxford to take examinations, you have come to learn. The whole purpose of Oxford is learning. Buoyed up by the instant success of the first volume of his autobiography, William Woodruff and his English publishers have understandably decided to cash in on the Nab End brand in this, the second. As many readers will remember, The Road to Nab End – about an unusually run-down, and miserably poor neighbourhood in Blackburn – was immediately recognised as a classic account of working-class family life between the wars in what was then a Lancashire cotton town. The author had been born in 1916. The first volume
Why is a birch-tree like a melon?
This is the time of year for armchair gardening. The cold, dark days give one the chance to ignore the muddy plot outside and to sit by the fire with a heap of catalogues. As one reads the thrilling descriptions, next summer’s garden comes to life in the mind’s eye. There are no rabbits, mice, moles, whitefly or weeds to spoil the picture. Instead, the most difficult plants flourish under a sunny sky. These two mighty tomes add up to the most inspiring catalogue I have ever read even though, unlike commercial lists, the descriptions do not exaggerate. They are strictly truthful, because they are written by Dr Martyn Rix,
She fashioned her future
Judging by her own ideals of beauty and drama, Diana Dalziel’s arrival in the world must have been a bit of a let-down. That her Scottish father’s lineage merely went back to 834, or that her mother was part of the narrow 1890s New York society, was not half as picturesque as she’d have liked. Her blood, she felt, should be throbbing with the violent purple corpuscles of a Montezuma or Genghis Khan, her skin as palely violet as that of Diane de Poitiers or Liane de Pougy. She would live in lacquer pavilions lapped by lily-scented seas, or a snowbound, bitumen-blackened reindeer yurt
Articles of faith
Richard Dawkins loves fighting. More precisely, he loves winning. To be Dawkinsed, as this selection from his essays of the past 25 years makes painfully clear, is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste. Those who incur this treatment have one thing in common: all are enemies of truth, Dawkins-style. Which is to say, all are enemies of science. In the current volume, his targets include postmodernists, bishops, religious leaders of other denominations (or ‘cloth-heads’, as he mollifyingly calls them), faith healers and New Ageists. Arch-rationalists will love these essays: others will find them by turns
Saturday
Liquid and solid satisfaction
Cocoa beans were ‘found’ by Europeans on Columbus’s fourth, final and failed voyage (1502). The beans were sufficiently rare to be used as currency and the beverage made from them was called ‘Food of the Gods’ and only served to Amerindian grandees like Montezuma – in his case, in gold cups. The liquid was laced, not with sugar, then unknown in the New World, but with capsicum and vanilla, both unknown in Europe, but Europeans soon preferred to make the drink with sugar, and, after a century, with Eastern spices, including cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. In the early White’s, then a Whig club, the drink was made with milk and
I was a camera
Julia Margaret Cameron is hip. This would not have astonished her – she had every confidence in her vision as a photographer – but for many decades she has been regarded merely as the female face of the male act, someone who created pretty-pretty photographs of allegorical or religious scenes, with the odd Great Man thrown in as a make-weight. This may be changing. A Cameron exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week which will give an opportunity to reassess the work; with From Life Victoria Olsen gives a look at the life. The life was, in many ways, separate from the art. Cameron worked on photography intensively
The hunter hunted
Abbie Devereaux, the heroine of Land of the Living, finds herself hooded and bound and a prisoner of a man who is just a whispering voice. She has a violent headache and cannot remember anything about how she has come to be lying on concrete in this damp, smelly place, or even anything leading up to her present situation. The man, who feeds her four spoonfuls of bland gluck daily and pulls down her trousers and puts her shuffling, hand-cuffed body onto a bucket once a day for her to relieve herself, smells of onions and dirt. He makes it plain that once she is sufficiently broken he will kill
Stopping short of omniscience
Although Janet Malcolm has written in depth about an extraordinary range of subjects, from psychoanalysis and photography through to literary criticism, the art world, journalism, biography and the law, in thematic terms she has actually been one of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant. I never feel such a keen sense of anticipation – the kind of adrenalised mental anticipation that feels almost luxurious to indulge – as when I start out on a new piece of writing by Malcolm. For some, her thematic doggedness has been a problem: launching into a book about Sylvia Path and Ted Hughes (The