Literary Review (2007-06) - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2025)

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JUNE 2007

TRAVELS WITH KAPUSCINSKI Jason Burke on Fifty Years in the Field

Housman’s Letters ★ Einstein’s Curves Valete Romani!

FROLICS in the Park

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Leslie Mitchell considers Robert Peel Jane Ridley admires William Wilberforce Andrew Roberts gets Napoleonic

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John Gray on the Islamist Donald Rayfield on Putin’s Russia Michael Burleigh on the Atomic Bazaar

The JOYS of Essex

FICTION: Murakami ★ Lethem ★ Eggers ★ Tremain ★ Thorpe ★ Maupin and Many More...

FROM THE PULPIT

J EREMY L EWIS A N OBSESSION WITH image and sub-leased paperback r ights all cor porate logos long predates agreed that Penguin had to move designer labels and the global marwith the times: but, as far as I could ketplace. Back in the 1930s firms discover when researching my bioglike Shell and Guinness were nimraphy of Allen Lane, the authors ble practitioners of ‘branding’, as themselves were not consulted, were go-ahead publishers – so much so that books and though Saul Bellow, John Masters, Anthony Powell and authors sometimes seemed to play second fiddle to the Graham Greene were among those who objected to the promotion of their publishers, with the list in general jackets provided for them by Tony Godwin in the 1960s. being exalted at the expense of its particular components. Ten years later, Greene was on the warpath once again: in Victor Gollancz, the most bombastic and self-promoting Penguin by Designers, a fascinating and beautiful collection publisher of his time, dressed his books in the uniform of Penguin jackets recently published by the Penguin typographical jackets designed by Stanley Morison in Collectors’ Society, the designer Derek Birdsall reveals memorable if lurid hues of magenta, black and yellow: how Greene rang to say that he wanted plain typographiand contributors to his hugely influential Left Book Club cal jackets for his paperbacks, equivalent to the marvellous were expected to subsume their identities into what was, lettering jackets provided for his hardbacks by John Ryder in effect, a corporate image. and Michael Harvey at The Bodley Head. Penguin Much the same applied to those authors published by agreed, but sales slumped and Paul Hogarth’s drawings Allen Lane at Penguin Books, founded in 1935. After a were hurriedly restored to the covers of Greene’s books. secretary had suggested a name for the new firm, I suspect that – like Greene – authors often have more Edward Young was sent off to the penguin house at the austere and conservative tastes than publishers and bookZoo to draw what was to become the most famous of all sellers, let alone the all-important buyers in chains and publishing logos. Back in the office, he laid out the supermarkets, and that they like being published by firms famous horizontal bands (orange for fiction, green for with a strong visual as well as literary identity: still more crime, pale blue for non-fiction Pelicans), and although so if, like Penguin in Lane’s era, or Faber in the days of the great typographer Jan Tschichold slimmed down Berthold Wolpe (his Albertus lettering jackets remain the Young’s bulbous bird and refined his layout, while his most beautiful of all), or Cape in the Sixties and successor, Hans Schmoller, substituted vertical for horiSeventies, they are thought to be synonymous with both zontal bands, one Penguin book continued to look like stylishness and quality. A degree of visual anonymity is another, irrespective of the fame or grandeur of its made up for by a sense of being part of a larger enterprise, author. Penguins were instantly identifiable not just from of being propped up by one’s fellow authors and enjoying their jackets, but in terms of layout, title pages and a reflected glory from the more distinguished names on design, all tailored to the contents of the book yet the list. And, of course, a uniform look, particularly if recognisably the same; and the same applied to those well done, appeals to those who collect books as much publishers – like Wren Howard at Jonathan Cape, or for their looks as their content. Penguins were collected Richard de la Mare at Faber – who shared Lane’s perfecfrom the earliest days, as were the green-covered Viragos tionism and his desire to create a ‘brand image’. and, more recently, Nicola Beauman’s grey-coated Nowadays the prevailing orthodoxy has it that book Persephone Books, the elegance and austerity of which jackets should be individually designed to reflect the conare reminiscent of early Penguins. So too, I suspect, were tents and the market for each particular book, and that Tom Maschler’s marvellous but long-forgotten paperback although it makes sense to provide authors with a distincseries of Cape Editions: the books themselves were, for tive ‘look’, the publishers themselves are of little interest the most part, unreadable, unread and mercifully short – to the book-buying public: even within the Penguin Roland Barthes and Eldridge Cleaver are among the Group, orange spines have long been abandoned, and names I remember – but they looked so good that wouldonly the bird remains as a symbol of corporate identity. be trend-setters found them hard to resist. Lane himself was devoted to his austere lettering jackets, Some publishers – Hodder most obviously comes to but by the 1960s he had had to give way and allow fullmind – have never shown much interest in producing colour picture jackets. Rival paperback publishers – Pan, distinctive or attractively designed books, but have never Fontana and the rest – had long espoused picture jackets, had any problems in attracting best-selling authors to and were outselling Penguin as a result; hardback publishtheir list; and yet for many writers the ‘look’ and ‘image’ ers were setting up paperback lists of their own, and of a prospective publisher matters almost as much as an retaining the rights in authors whom Penguin had long advance or a sympathetic editor when deciding where regarded as part of their birthright; booksellers were to place a book. Balancing the demands of author and happy to display some papaerbacks face-out, but saw no publisher, content and the marketplace is a far more point in doing so with a Penguin typographical jacket. complicated business than it was back in the 1930s, Salesmen, booksellers and the hardback publishers who when branding and corporate images prevailed.

COVER STORY

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CONTENTS

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by Jeremy Lewis. His most recent book, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane, is now available in paperback from Penguin. He is currently working on a book about the Greene family for Jonathan Cape.

PULPIT

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J EREMY L EWIS

BIOGRAPHY

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L ESLIE M ITCHELL Robert Peel: A Biography Douglas Hurd J A N E R I D L E Y William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner William Hague A N D R E W R O B E R T S Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769–1799 Philip Dwyer J O N A T H A N M I R S K Y John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics Richard Parker BRENDA MADDOX Einstein: His Life and Universe Walter Isaacson SARAH WISE The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath Charles van Onselen

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JOHN GRAY’s next book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, is published by Penguin in July. LESLIE MITCHELL is Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford. His most recent publications include a life of Bulwer-Lytton and a study of the Whig Party entitled The Whig World.

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FOREIGN PARTS

A NDREW R OBERTS ’s most recent book, A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. BRENDA MADDOX’s Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones will be published by John Murray in September. JANE RIDLEY is writing a biography of King Edward VII, to be published by Chatto & Windus.

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PETER PARSONS’s City of the SharpNosed Fish, concerning the papyrus fragments of Oxyrhynchus, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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JOHN GRAY The Islamist Ed Husain PAUL JOHNSON The Letters of A E Housman (Ed) Archie Burnett DAVID KYNASTON Clever Girl: A Sentimental Education Brian Thompson LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir A M Homes

FICTION I

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JOHN DUGDALE You Don’t Love Me Yet Jonathan Lethem HUGH CECIL The Children of Húrin J R R Tolkien CHRISTOPHER ROSS After Dark Haruki Murakami JOHN DE FALBE Between Each Breath Adam Thorpe FRANCIS KING Michael Tolliver Lives Armistead Maupin AMANDA CRAIG The Road Home Rose Tremain P HILIP W OMACK Barnaby Grimes Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

HISTORY

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C H R I S T O P H E R C O K E R Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 Ian Kershaw A LLAN M ASSIE Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 Hanna Diamond PIERS BRENDON Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1916–1968 Ronald Hyam PETER PARSONS Farewell Britannia: A Family Saga of Roman Britain Simon Young J OHN J OLLIFFE Return of the King: The Restoration of Charles II Charles Fitzroy

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D ONALD R AYFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Stalin and his Hangmen (Penguin, 2005).

JASON BURKE Travels with Herodotus Ryszard Kapuscinski DONALD RAYFIELD A Russian Diary Anna Politkovskaya Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1 Timothy Phillips Russia’s Islamic Threat Gordon M Hahn TOM STACEY Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart Tim Butcher

MEMOIRS & LETTERS

CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of several books on international security. D AVID K YNASTON ’s Austerity Britain:1945–51 is published by Bloomsbury.

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Editor: NANCY SLADEK Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS Assistant Editor: PHILIP WOMACK Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH Cover illustration by Chris Riddell Issue no. 344 2 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

JUNE 2007

SHORT STORY

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C LAIRE K EEGAN Surrender

ARCADIA

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C HARLES E LLIOTT The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden Tim Richardson H UGH M ASSINGBERD The Park: The Story of the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park David Conville

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GENERAL

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48 50 51 52

FICTION II

53 54 55 56 57 58

SILENCED VOICES

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CRIME POETRY AUDIOBOOK LETTERS CLASSIFIEDS CROSSWORD BOOKSHOP

MICHAEL BURLEIGH The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor William Langewiesche GILLIAN TINDALL Full of Soup and Gold: The Life of Henry Jermyn Anthony Adolph West End Chronicles: Three Hundred Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London SIMON HEFFER The Buildings of England: Essex James Bentley and Nikolaus Pevsner J OHN M C E WEN L S Lowry: A Life Shelley Rohde A C G RAYLING At the Same Time Susan Sontag W ILLIAM P ALMER Anacaona: The Amazing Adventures of Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band Alicia Castro, with Ingrid Kummels S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE What is the What Dave Eggers SAM LEITH Darkmans Nicola Barker G ILL H ORNBY When We Were Romans Matthew Kneale S IMON W ILLIS Julius Winsome Gerard Donovan S IMON B AKER ON F IRST N OVELS L EO B ENEDICTUS The Secrets of the Chess Machine Robert Löhr

JASON BURKE is a foreign correspondent for The Observer. His latest book is On the Road to Kandahar: Travels through Conflict in the Muslim World. SARAH W ISE is the author of The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London (Pimlico). Her investigation of late nineteenth-century East London poverty, The Blackest Streets, will be published next year. PIERS BRENDON’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is published by Jonathan Cape. M ICHAEL B URLEIGH is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is currently working on a history of terrorism. G ILLIAN T INDALL ’s The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village was first published in 1977 and is still in print. Her book about the oldest house on Bankside, The House By the Thames, is published by Chatto & Windus. AMANDA CRAIG is the author of five novels, including A Vicious Circle and Love in Idleness. Her new novel, about immigrants in London, will be published next year.

LUCY POPESCU JESSICA MANN SUSAN CROSLAND

CHRISTOPHER ROSS’s latest book, Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, was published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 2006 and in its American edition was selected as a Notable Book of 2007 by the judges of the Kiriyama Prize, the major Pacific Rim literary award.

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CLAIRE KEEGAN is an award-winning short-story writer. ‘Surrender’ is taken from her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, published recently by Faber & Faber. She lives in rural Ireland.

The Literary Review, incorporating Quarto, is published monthly from: 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW Tel: 020 7437 9392 Fax: 020 7734 1844 ISSN 0144 4360 © All subscription enquiries and changes of address to: Literary Review Subscriptions, FREEPOST RRGR-ASHK-BTSL, Unit 14, 1-11 Willow Lane, Mitcham CR4 4NA Tel: 020 8687 3840 Fax: 020 8687 3841. UK Subscription Rate £32, Europe £39, rest of the world air mail only £54 (US$104) USA Airspeed subscription price is £39 (US$75) per annum. Periodical pre-paid at Champlain NY (USPS 004218). All advertising enquiries to: Tom Fleming, Literary Review, 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW Tel: 020 7437 9392 Printed by The Friary Press, Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1JL Tel: 01305 265656 Fax: 01305 263665 Distributed to newsagents worldwide by COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Rd, West Drayton, Middlesex, UB7 7QX Tel: 01895 433 800 Distributed to bookshops by Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 Tel: 020 8986 4854 www.literaryreview.co.uk email: [emailprotected] 3 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

BIOGRAPHY

L ESLIE M ITCHELL

HIGH POLITICS ROBERT P EEL : A B IOGRAPHY ★

By Douglas Hurd (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 416pp £20)

POLITICIANS WHO FIND themselves out of office for a long time or in voluntary retirement are in need of employment. Some go quiet, finding solace in watercolours and golf-clubs. For others, the House of Lords is a consolation. One or two in each generation however, take to writing history. Lord Rosebery dabbled and so did Roy Jenkins. More recently William Hague has had a shot at it, and now Douglas Hurd has entered the game. In this respect, he treads where others have gone before. In one sense, there is no harm in this kind of outdoor relief. The author’s name will guarantee financial success, and, if care is taken, the public at large may learn something to their advantage. But one caveat has to be firmly entered. Such books must not be confused with scholarship. If they are, there is the danger that the world of Whitehall will come to think that historians can reasonably produce a book on a major figure every three or four years. In fact, there is all the difference in the world between a book that is thoroughly researched and one that is based on different assumptions. Of its kind, this biography makes pleasant reading, even though the middle classes are sometimes ‘rising’, no doubt driven by ‘the spirit of the age’. Sir Robert Peel is firmly associated with Douglas Hurd’s own brand of Conservatism. He was a one-nation Tory, endlessly harassed by Ultras of limited views. As Hurd puts it, ‘The Conservative Party will always contain within its ranks those who in Peel’s time were called the Ultras – men, and women too, who instinctively resist change and pine for a golden age that never was.’ In rehearsing Peel’s crucifixion by his own party, it would have been difficult for the author not to think of modern parallels. Indeed the book is peppered with direct comparisons between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as wise saws of the elder statesman. Apparently Edward Heath was in some ways like Robert Peel, with the same closed personality and the same head for administration. More surprisingly, there appears to be a link between Willie Whitelaw and Lord Althorp. And perhaps it is going too far to claim that Peel’s interest in free trade made him ‘one of the founders of globalisation’. Probably more acceptable is the reflection that ‘modesty is a virtue in a politician only up to a point, and in a Prime Minister can be almost as dangerous as arrogance’. Hurd’s account of Peel follows traditional lines. The

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

BIOGRAPHY

man’s strength lay in an unlimited capacity Peel more human, if only within the narfor work, a very good mind and a devotion row confines of a family circle. One would to statistics as the basis of policy. As he like to know more. Apart from this, the himself asserted, ‘There is nothing like a case is thin. Peel was a connoisseur of fact. Facts are ten times more valuable than Dutch painting, and put together a declamations’, a point which Hurd, having remarkable collection of canvases. He spent ‘a few days’ among the Home Office enjoyed building houses, but showed a Papers at Kew, fir mly takes on board. taste that the charitable might call eclectic. Detailed accounts of Peel’s rationalisation Above all, he shot game. Among his of the criminal law are alone sufficient to favourite statistics were precise enumeramake this plain. To this example could be tions of the daily bag. added the intelligent labour that Peel conAs the footnotes suggest, this biography tributed to the bullion question, the mysdepends heavily on pr inted mater ials. teries of Irish politics and the establishment Inevitably therefore, its conclusions are not of constabularies. Hurd honours all these intended to change established views of initiatives from the perspective of someone Peel. To do that, many manuscript collecwho knows just how often the dutiful tions would have had to be consulted. As a politician can be thwarted. result, this is not a book for the student or Peel: a cold, odd man When Peel answered dogma with facts the professional historian. With a good and figures, he was claiming a privileged role in politics, conscience they can, for the moment, go on wrestling because he was asking to be relieved, at crucial with Professors Gash and Boyd Hilton. For those, howmoments, of party responsibilities. Often he talked of ever, who like their history to be less demanding, and representing a ‘national interest’, which was a greater not too overwhelmed by Victorian theology and ecopriority than any sectional agenda. It is the language of a nomics, this book will meet the case splendidly. It is just senior civil servant who has taken a wrong turning and the thing for long journeys. It will no doubt find an found himself in politics. Peel’s first years in office were honoured place in the Library of the House of Lords. those of repeated crises. Napoleon, bankruptcy and To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18 insurrection had all to be defeated. In such times a ‘national interest’ was visible to most people, and it was reasonable to frame a code of politics around it. Unfortunately, when threats receded, party considerations reasserted themselves, and Peel’s words came to look like an excuse for self-indulgence. Predictably, however, it is the great parliamentary occasions that are most colourfully described in this book. On Catholic Emancipation, on Parliamentary Reform, and on Corn Law Repeal, the Conservatives “A riveting and major work. sniped and snapped at each other with an intensity that England’s First Family of Writers Peel’s double-first-class mind could barely comprehend. witnesses the rare mix of creativHis claim that, ‘if necessities were so pressing as to ity and philosophical rigor that demand it, there was no dishonour in relinquishing Carlson brings to scholarly writing opinions’, could not be accepted by Tory fundamentaland thinking about Romanticism MARY ists, for whom politics was a matter of belief, not adminand the larger set of relations WOLLSTONECRAFT, istration. Hurd has met this problem himself, and writes between living and writing in WILLIAM GODWIN, about it with a nice sense of personal involvement. This public culture.” is high politics written by a high politician. MARY SHELLEY —Theresa M. Kelley, Less successful is Hurd’s attempt to rehabilitate Peel as University of Wisconsin–Madison a man with warm blood in his veins. Noting that most £33.50 hardcover contemporaries agreed with Queen Victoria’s description of Peel as ‘a cold, odd man’, he tries hard to evoke THE JOHNS HOPKINS sympathy, if not affection, for his subject. Unusually for UNIVERSITY PRESS his time, Peel was the most uxorious of men, devoted to Distributed by John Wiley wife and children and careful in his behaviour. ‘Dipping Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu into’ the ‘huge number of letters’ that passed between husband and wife, Hurd is able, to some extent, to make

England’s First Family of Writers Julie A. Carlson

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BIOGRAPHY

slavers, came from Hull, which traded with the Baltic, while pro-slavery MPs such as Bamber Gascoyne were Liverpudlians, defending their vested interests in the Atlantic slave-trade triangle. Also, when Wilberforce was on the brink of launching his abolitionist campaign his W ILLIAM W ILBERFORCE : T HE L IFE OF THE health broke down. He seems to have suffered from a G REAT A NTI -S LAVE T RADE C AMPAIGNER stress-related illness, usually diagnosed as ulcerative colitis, ★ and for the rest of his life he was a martyr to this debilitatBy William Hague ing bowel disease. He treated it with opium, and became a lifelong opium addict. Hague tells us that this was the (HarperPress 592pp £25) only medication available at the time, which is no doubt true; but he could have done more to explore the effects ONCE BARELY NOTICED, the history of the anti-slavery of long-term opium use on Wilberforce’s mind and body. campaign has gathered such momentum that it has now Wilberforce ate very little and counted his alcohol units become the central narrative of Our Island Story. The (three glasses of wine daily and never more than six) as hero of this tale is William Wilberforce, and a new biogpart of his Evangelical regime; but if he was meanwhile raphy is overdue. Wilberforce’s struggle to ban slavery using opium this abstemiousness was has been dramatised in the biopic slightly less of a feat. Amazing Grace. Now, nicely timed for Wilberforce was a man of great perthe bicentenary year, William Hague sonal charm. Privately, in his diary, he has written his life. agonised about his backsliding, his The story of William Wilberforce time-wasting or his failure to pray, but (1759–1833) is an extraordinary one. with his friends he was always gregariThe heir to a Hull merchant’s fortune, ous, a wonderful conversationalist, the he became an MP at the age of twenlife and soul of the party. Hague tells ty-one, was best mates with the endearing stories about Wilberforce’s younger Pitt and a rich young man chaotic lack of organisation, his about town until the age of twenty-six, mountains of unanswered corresponwhen he underwent a classic dence, the sacks full of letters which Evangelical conversion experience and he would drag around with him to vowed to dedicate himself to moral answer. His house was filled with refor mation. Influenced by John guests all day long, and people queued Newton, the ex-slaver sea captain to see him in the street. He travelled turned abolitionist man of God, and with a huge retinue of servants, many also by Pitt himself , Wilberforce of whom were useless, but he could resolved to work within the world never bear to sack anyone. Hague rather than withdraw into private life. paints a memorable picture of the vetEncouraged by Pitt, he introduced a eran campaigner, prematurely stooped, motion for the abolition of the slave Wilberforce: life and soul of the party pockets bulg ing with books and trade in 1789, making an epic threepapers, scribbling feverishly as he sat listening to debates and-a-half-hour speech: henceforth it became the leadin the House. But Hague could do more to explain the ing crusade of his life. He was not yet thirty. contrast between Wilberforce and his acolytes, the Saints Hague tells this story of youthful success vividly and of the Clapham Sect – priggish, earnest killjoys who alas with empathy – after all, his own life story is not all that had far more influence on the moral tone of Victorian different: he too is a Yorkshireman who became a star England than their leader. speaker and political prodigy. Wilberforce’s greatest Being a politician perhaps means that Hague is overly political asset was his parliamentary oratory, and Hague conscious of the importance of protecting privacy, or peranalyses this illuminatingly. He has an innate underhaps he’s just too nice – but as a biographer he is strangely standing of parliamentary manoeuvres, of the energising lacking in nosiness. It would be good to know more, for effect of the election campaigns that Wilberforce fought instance, about the sources of Wilberforce’s almost inexas a member for the high-prestige county seat of haustible income, much of which he gave away to charity, Yorkshire. He is good, too, on the enduring and rather but none of which he earned. Then there’s his marriage. touching friendship between Wilberforce, who was a His wife Barbara Spooner, the daughter of a Birmingham tiny five foot four, and Pitt, who stood a foot taller. merchant, was eighteen years younger than him. There are tricks which Hague misses. For example, it’s Wilberforce proposed a week after they met and within surely significant that Wilberforce, along with other anti-

J ANE R IDLEY

THE RIGHTEOUS REFORMER

6 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

BIOGRAPHY Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research six weeks they were man and wife. He was then thirtyseven. This is all a bit rum, but Hague tells us nothing about Wilberforce’s previous sexual experiences or lack of them. Barbara disliked entertaining and was not much liked; Dorothy Wordsworth thought her shy, whiny and self-righteous. If the marriage worked, as Hague says it did, this needs a bit more explaining. The truth is, Hague is not really interested in what went on in Wilberforce’s bedroom or his medicine chest. This is straight political biography, the story of the life and times. Sometimes there’s just too much about the times. Hague tells us, for example, that the eighteenth century ‘saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the “Age of Enlightenment”’, and he then laboriously explains what this was, going back to Isaac Newton & co (perhaps Wikipedia hasn’t arrived in Yorkshire?). For Hague the life of Wilberforce is primarily the story of the campaign against the slave trade. Doggedly Wilberforce presented his motion year after year, but the anti-slavery cause was rendered hopeless by the French Revolution, and Wilberforce eventually triumphed only in 1807 after a campaign of almost twenty years. Hague gives a detailed and informed analysis of the skilled parliamentary manoeuvring and tactics that allowed Wilberforce to carry his great reform in 1807. For Hague, abolition was to a great extent the result of Wilberforce’s ability to persuade Parliament of the moral case against slavery. This is classic old-style Whig history – parliamentarypolitical, present-minded, handing out marks to those on the r ight side of prog ress. Never mind that Wilberforce’s motives were religious not political. Play down the fact that Wilberforce sweated blood for slaves he had never seen, but supported Pitt’s measures suppressing political protest, backed the Combination Laws banning trade unions and showed little interest in the child factory slaves in his own Yorkshire backyard. Guardianistas will trounce Hague for writing patronising white man’s history which discounts the role of the Africans themselves, underestimating the impact of the slave rebellions in Saint-Dominique (Haiti), where the white men were massacred and the slaves formed their own republic. Abolishing the slave trade was a way of making a virtue out of necessity and recognising the reality that slavery was a high-risk liability. But these criticisms are really beside the point. Hague is a politician, and he writes history in the way that politicians from Macaulay to Winston Churchill have always written it. This is history with a political purpose: to connect the present with the past. Free-flowing, authoritative and absorbing, he deserves to be read, partly as a counter to those politicians such as Tony Blair who have no sense of historical process, but above all because he tells a good story and tells it well. To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18

Introductory Course: Freud-Lacan The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis Sept 2007 – July 2008 The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research offers a one year introduction to the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. It examines Freudian concepts of psychoanalysis and introduces some of Lacan’s central theories. Topics include Female Sexuality, Anxiety and Phobia, the Phantasy, and the Drive. The course consists of a series of lectures, complemented by a reading group and tutorials. It can be followed by a clinical training in psychoanalysis.

Annual Conference 2007 Children’s Minds: New Perspectives on Autism Saturday 7 July 2007 10.00 am – 5.30 pm (registration 9.30 am) Entrance fee: £40 (Concessions: £30)

Venue: Lecture Theatre B01, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, 27-29 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

For full details of all CFAR programmes and the conference please visit our website or contact: Tel: 0845 838 0829 Email: [emailprotected] CFAR is a registered charity no 1085368 CFAR is a Member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy Website: www.cfar.org.uk Public lecture details available on website

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

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French democracy was clever, energetic, ambitious and, as Dwyer regularly emphasises, a genius at self-publicity. N APOLEON : T HE PATH TO P OWER In the era before effi1769–1799 cient mass communication, propaganda was ★ even more vital than in By Philip Dwyer the days of Dr (Bloomsbury 651pp £20) Goebbels, or even in the present day. Up to W RITING A BIOGRAPHY of the Emperor Napoleon the Brumaire coup and requires an ambition that is, well, Napoleonic. for a decade beyond, Fortunately, few people alive know as much about Napoleon understood Napoleon Bonaparte as Philip Dwyer, biographer of how to spin every event Talleyrand and Senior Lecturer in Modern European from his life to create a History at the University of Newcastle in Australia. This myth. Nowhere was life of his hero in two volumes – of which The Path to Napoleon: master of spin this more evident than Power is the first – is the work that Dwyer was placed on after his disastrous invasion of Egypt. Relying on the fact earth to write. This book ends with its subject barely that little news got back to France through the Britishthirty years old, at the time of the Brumaire coup of dominated Mediterranean, he somehow managed to perNovember 1799, but includes over one hundred pages suade the French that the Egyptian campaign had been a of notes and bibliography that testify to Dwyer’s tremenmilitary, cultural and political victory. The truth – that he dous scholarship. We are thus clearly in the presence of had left his stranded and beleaguered forces in the desert what will be a monumental work. to dash back to Paris – did not start percolating through Because Dwyer is so expert in the secondary material to France until after his successful coup d’état. of the Napoleonic epic as well as the primary, he is able The Napoleon who emerges from Dwyer’s pages is psyto sum up every issue, telling us what historians have chologically a deeply complex person, who if he had not said about each problem as it arises. Usually he judibecome First Consul of France would have made a fine ciously comes down on one side or the other, although lifetime’s study for a pre-Freudian shrink. The young occasionally he just leaves it up to the reader to decide. Bonaparte seems to have despised his lightweight father Did Napoleon’s mother sleep with Corsica’s governor, Carlo, who died when Napoleon was fifteen, because he the Comte de Marbeuf (effectively in order to pay the had turned quisling against the Corsican nationalist leader boy’s school-fees)? Did Napoleon fall into a ditch at the Paoli. (Carlo must have had some qualities, however, as he battle of Arcola? Did he have such a tough time at had been appointed private secretary to the brilliant and school as he subsequently claimed? Did he lose his vircharismatic Paoli, a shrewd judge of men.) Napoleon ginity to a Palais-Royal prostitute? Dwyer lets you know might also have suspected Carlo to have been cuckolded what contemporaries believed, then what historians by Marbeuf, but Dwyer is rightly reticent on this subject think, and finally what he himself reckons. as there is so little evidence at this distance of time. Just as Of course there is far less reliable evidence of Napoleon sought to magnify himself throughout his life, Napoleon’s earlier life than later on, when the eyes of and his supporters carried on the world were fastened as diligent curators of his legupon him, gazing half in end long after his death, so admiration, half in admontoo did Napoleon’s enemies ishment, but always in astonfind ingenious ways to detract ishment. Yet what we have from his myth, and an adulof the early period, Dwyer – MA Degree in Biography terous mother might simply who was tutored by the Starting January 2007 g reatest living Napoleon Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or have been one of their invenscholar, Jean Tulard – has two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first tions. Small wonder therefore that Dwyer steps warily. fully mastered. The thirty- postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. Course director: Jane Ridley Carlo’s early death from year-old who brought off – Contact: [emailprotected] or write to her at stomach cancer made though not without some The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG Napoleon – not the eldest very scary moments – the Tel: 01280 814080 child – the effective head of Brumaire coup against

A NDREW R OBERTS

AN EMPEROR APPARENT

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the family and its ultimate provider, at a cruelly young age. If Carlo Bonaparte had had a complicated, tempestuous relationship with Paoli, so too did his son. Finding himself teased at school for his strong Corsican accent (one chapter is perceptively entitled ‘A Corsican in France, a Frenchman in Corsica’), Napoleon did what any red-blooded schoolboy would do and became yet prouder and more defensive of his heritage. He did this by idolising Paoli and romantic Corsican nationalism, a view he only grew out of after the Revolution. The fall of the Bastille, and Napoleon’s adoption of the political views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom he saw as a misunderstood foreign prophet like himself), suddenly left the young meteor with both the opportunity to get on in life and a philosophy that seemed to make sense of it. Under the Ancien Régime a lad with so tenuous a claim to aristocracy as Napoleon – his mother had eked the necessary paperwork out of Marbeuf – might have had to wait decades before attaining any serious military command. With the mass exodus of aristocrats under the shadow of the guillotine during the Terror, promotion was rapid for anyone with a hint of promise. As Dwyer shows, Napoleon had more than just that, as well as the willingness to put in the long hours necessary to shine in the brave new world of Revolutionary France. As well as pursuing his military studies – especially historical biography – Napoleon read widely in the greats of modern French literature. One of the problems of Napoleon-biography – and there is an entire wall of the London Library crammed with nothing but such books – is that the author needs simultaneously to be a diplomatic, social, but above all a military historian, as well as to possess the subtler skills of a biographer. Fortunately Dwyer’s accounts of the Italian and Egyptian campaigns are as good as his evocation of Napoleon’s evolving character and beliefs. On some issues – such as whether Napoleon was socially awkward in youth as the Duchess d’Abrantes maintained, or was in fact rather jolly as other contemporaries averred – Dwyer’s academic objectivity is simply too strong to allow him to take sides. ‘Women were, in his eyes, fortresses to be stormed with all the vigour and enthusiasm that could be mustered, and were all the more desirable for being unobtainable.’ The story of Napoleon’s love-life – which itself takes up about a quarter of that wall in St James’s Square – is dealt with in a wholly scholarly and objective manner. Even after relating Napoleon’s own account of the loss of his virginity in the autumn of 1787, Dwyer warns us that ‘it is entirely possible that the account is fictional, nothing more than a fanciful exercise of the pen’. It is ver y much unlike, therefore, this meticulously researched and well-written first volume, which leaves the reader keenly anticipating the second. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18

J ONATHAN M IRSKY

A GIANT AMONG PYGMIES J OHN K ENNETH G ALBRAITH : H IS L IFE , H IS P OLITICS, H IS E CONOMICS ★

By Richard Parker (Old Street Publishing 822pp £25)

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL is an increasingly rare species. I don’t mean academic celebrities with their television series and regular op-ed columns. Public intellectuals are men or women of considerable intellectual attainment, usually professors at the older universities, who are also committed to public service where their wisdom and experience are admired and their judgement sought. Such figures need not be politically neutral; indeed, they may fall out with political leaders who come to dislike their blunt advice, perhaps given in private and public. In this country, John Maynard Keynes was a public intellectual, admired at Cambridge as more than an economist – he made King’s College rich and encouraged the arts in many forms. On both sides of the Atlantic his economic advice was incorporated in the highest affairs of state, while in academia ‘Keynesianism’ was adopted as a mantra: even Richard Nixon claimed he was a Keynesian, although he didn’t know what it meant. In America there was John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year, aged ninety-seven, a year after this stupendous biography was published there. He was Keynes’s equal in public life, although he was not as creative as an economist. A Harvard professor, he was additionally an important official under Roosevelt and Truman, advisor to Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, ambassador to India, author of well over forty books – some of them bestsellers – and thousands of articles, and a friend of the very rich and famous. A six-foot-eight farm boy from Canada with a liberal, public-spirited father, Galbraith conceived his supreme goal which was to drag the poor into better lives so that they could participate in shaping the decent society he described in his best writing. What singled Galbraith out from most other economists of his and later generations, as Richard Parker says in his always lucid prose, was his assertion that ‘economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, that the work of economics is far messier than the blackboard models that claim hegemony’. Throughout his career this conviction often attracted – as was the case with Keynes, Galbraith’s life-long inspiration – the contempt of some professional colleagues. I can’t imagine anyone tackling the life and times of

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Galbraith again after this huge, comprewere without health insurance while hensive, admir ing but fair book. the thousand richest Americans had Richard Parker, a fellow of Harvard’s combined incomes which ‘exceeded Kennedy School (I declare an interest: I the GDP of dozens of poor countries’. spent a term there a few years ago), By the Reagan–Bush Sr years, ‘one describes how Galbraith always swam out of five American children was against the current, and not just the bor n into poverty’. Galbraith, one in his particular field. Asked by ‘notwithstanding the elegant detachRoosevelt to estimate the efficacy of ment he still affected, was irate’. the strategic bombing of Germany and Detachment. That was the hallmark Japan, Galbraith enraged the service of Galbraith’s inner self . But in chiefs by showing that war production 1952–53 he felt that ‘some cord – in both countr ies rose despite the something vitally connecting my past bombing, which deliberately slaughwith the present – had snapped’. For tered countless civilians. At Harvard he months he languished in depression defended colleagues who lost their jobs and heavy drinking, afflicted by a because of their politics, and during the ‘sense of permanent darkness’. He Vietnam War he antagonised his fellow could barely teach. This crisis ended professors by defending student (it recurred occasionally) with a sixGalbraith: advisor to Kennedy demonstrations against the university month, thirty-countr y solo tr ip and some of its guests. At the State Department around the world. Such constant travelling and writing – Galbraith urged negotiation and cooperation with the a kind of mania, it seems to me – was life-long, and its Soviet Union, rather than preparation for war against it. roots remain opaque. This is not a criticism of Parker. A close friend of the Kennedys, he bombarded the Galbraith was the son of Scotch-Canadian farmers, men President, for whom he had written speeches, with and women who, to put it perhaps too generally, were warnings of where the Vietnam War was heading and unreflective straight-shooters. He lived in and through entreated him to abandon any thought of victory. his work. That work and his opinions were the man. I Always as witty as he was trenchant, he told Kennedy can’t imagine him reading Freud or Proust, and if he did that if 250,000 American soldiers (that number would it would be to see how they operated as writers. One of soon double) couldn’t defeat fifteen to eighteen thouhis favourite authors was Trollope, in whose wonderful sand guerrillas, ‘the United States would hardly be safe novels (Galbraith himself wrote unremarkable romans-àagainst the Sioux’. In 1965, when President Johnson was clef), of course, the characters reveal themselves by their floundering ever more deeply into the Vietnam quagacts, not by reference to their inner lives. mire, Galbraith wrote (in words that would be appropriBut compared to the Nobel winners in economics ate now, both in Washington and London), ‘People are (brainy pygmies, many of them), Galbraith was a giant. tired of the litany of our foreign policy – with its endless The economist Amartya Sen, a Nobel non-pygmy, told calls for vigilance, the pious assertions of our own a Harvard audience in 2000 that he read Galbraith’s virtue, the continuing assurances that we are toughAmerican Capitalism almost fifty years earlier in a Calcutta minded and hard-headed and will never allow our better coffeehouse. What Galbraith wrote about power and its instincts to prevail.’ possibilities for social advancement struck Sen as vitally But the US saddened Galbraith in the last period of important, and that sense, he said, never left him. To his life. He was, Parker Galbraith, Parker says, observes, ‘isolated from the ‘Understanding the material academic mainstream’. The world was, as it was for mathematicians were firmly PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED Keynes, not the goal but the in the saddle, despite the Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena means by which to realise a is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first Nobel prize-winning Daniel Press dream’. Richard Parker has time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are Kahneman’s showing that less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing done a great thing: he premost ordinary people reject- houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. sents here a champion of ed the mainstream econo- We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary principle, political action, other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic, mists’ certainty of ‘rational and and courage, whose deepest spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others. choice’ in their economic spr ings we cannot see. A Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS behaviour. In the r ichest public intellectual. HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK. country ever, Galbraith con- QUEEN’S To order this book at £20, see e-mail: [emailprotected] www.athenapress.com tended, 44 million citizens LR Bookshop on page 18

NEW AUTHORS

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BIOGRAPHY

office. The modest post at least left him time to think. Not until 1909, after his famous equation, did he get a professorship at all, at the University of Bern. He married Maric but never saw the daughter she produced. A few years and two sons later, having met his beautiful and sophisticated cousin Elsa Löwenthal in Berlin, he was seeking a divorce. As a lure, he promised Maric the Nobel Prize money he knew would be his some day. E INSTEIN : H IS L IFE AND U NIVERSE By 1913, eager to return to Berlin, he accepted a ★ clutch of prestigious offers, including membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. War notwithstanding, he By Walter Isaacson turned his thoughts to a general theory of gravitation. (Simon & Schuster 675pp £25) This resulted in 1915 in his general theory of relativity, which proclaimed that space and time are curved and W ITH HIS WILD hair, merry eyes, baggy T-shirt and that the universe curves back on itself. When this theory sockless ankles, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) looked the was confirmed by observations in a 1919 eclipse of the way the world wants a scientist to look. ‘Why does sun, Einstein became a world celebrity with world headeverybody love me when nobody understands me?’ he lines such as ‘Lights All Askew in the Heavens’ in the puzzled. Some of the explanation for his celebrity may New York Times. In 1919 also he married the patient Elsa. lie in a gift for aphorism that has been compared to By then the celebrity’s lack of a Nobel prize began to Oscar Wilde’s. embarrass the Nobel committee. Its trouble was that As Walter Isaacson reminds us in this brilliant biograEinstein’s genius lay in theorising, while the Stockholm phy, rich with newly available archival material, Einstein pundits, funded by the inventor of was unquestionably a genius. His great dynamite, saw science as the product discoveries were the result of ‘thought of experiment. The solution in 1921 experiments’. No equipment needed. was to award Einstein the Nobel for Just an empty room and time to think. his discovery of a ‘law’ for the photoWhat might it be like to ride at the electr ic effect – how light was speed of light beside a light beam? absorbed and emitted in discrete This contemplative tactic led in 1905 quanta. In 1922 the prize money, the to the special theory of relativity. equivalent of $32,250, finally reached Einstein preceded it with four short his ex-wife. papers written between March and The human side of the Einstein June in which he analysed light as if it story is sad. Einstein was not devoid were made up of point-like particles or of feeling and had many affairs, but as bundles of energy – not of continuous he once said, the scientist makes sciwaves. By September he had worked ence ‘the pivot of his emotional life, out the relationship between speed and in order to find in this way the peace mass and set it out in what became the and security which he cannot find in most famous equation in the history of the narrow whirlpool of personal science: e=mc2. Energy, it says, equals experience’. mass times the square of the speed of In Germany his relativity theory left light. The corollary was that a tiny him open to the charge of producing amount of matter, converted complete‘Jewish science’ with no fixed values. ly into energy, had enormous power. Sensibly he left Ger many for the Yet the genius still lacked a doctorate. Sage at home United States at the end of 1932, Everything came late to this displaced renouncing his German citizenship, and by October secular Jew. Born in south-western Germany to an 1933 was settled happily in Princeton at the Institute for entrepreneurial family who later moved to northern Advanced Studies, where he spent the rest of his life. Italy, Einstein, after schooling in Munich, wangled a His biographer, Walter Isaacson, director of the Aspen place at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he was a good Institute and former head of CNN and managing editor but undistinguished student. He fell in love, gave up his of Time, has plumbed much fresh material, not least German citizenship and became Swiss. When his lover, Einstein’s letters and FBI files. a fellow student and Serb mathematician, Mileva Maric, The most riveting passages concern Einstein’s role in became pregnant, he was desperate to find a job but the development of the atomic bomb. His famous letter managed no better than a place at the Bern patent

B RENDA M ADDOX

Maybe He Does Play Dice

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of 1939 warned President Franklin D Roosevelt that the chain reaction of uranium atoms could be harnessed to make a powerful bomb. ‘This requires action’ Roosevelt said. The result was that he immediately started the Manhattan Project in a race to develop the bomb before the Germans did. Ironically, and happily for Einstein, essentially a pacifist, he was deemed a security risk and allowed to remain at Princeton rather than sent to Los Alamos. His FBI files show that the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, never trusted him. In the spring of 1945, with Germany on the brink of defeat and nowhere near a bomb of their own, Einstein wrote another letter to Roosevelt, urging him to meet with concerned scientists. Roosevelt died on 12 April, never having read it. Nor did his successor, Harry Truman, who went ahead and dropped the bomb anyway, not once but twice. Einstein thereafter had to live with the label, as Newsweek headlined, ‘The Man Who Started It All’. Isaacson tells this absorbing story by encompassing the bits of theoretical physics in clear, short paragraphs just a few sentences long. It must be admitted, however, that his impressive skill and succinctness are insufficient to enable the non-scientific reader to digest what has been

explained. Even so, Isaacson is very comprehensible on the later development of Einstein’s theories. Always a loner, Einstein did not follow his fellow physicists into the next theoretical jump, into quantum physics. He simply could not accept Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle enunciated in 1927. In this, Heisenberg declared that it was possible to know either the position or the momentum of an electron but not both. Moreover, he said, the electron had neither property until it was observed. In other words, there was no objective reality, only observation. This concept of an either/or universe was too wobbly for Einstein. He dismissed the uncertainty principle with his most famous aphorism, God ‘does not play dice’. But he did not believe in a personal God. Always loyal to his Jewish origins, he also remained sceptical of ardent Zionism. In 1948 he turned down the offer of the presidency of the new state of Israel. Until his death at Princeton in 1955 he worked hard against nationalism and for peace, and kept on searching for a unified theory that would bring together relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Would it dismay or satisfy him that we still do not have it yet? To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18

S ARAH W ISE

Europe, the Americas, southern Africa and across Asia. To its perpetrators, women ranked only just above the animals – a non-hardy form of livestock to be traded, controlled, abandoned and even slaughtered if that were more expedient. The mass migrations of males to the industrial and mining boom-towns of the late nineteenth century led to gender imbalances in these new communities as extreme as ten males to one female. In such rapidly expanding cities as Pittsburgh, Johannesburg and Kimberley, policing and the judiciary failed to evolve quickly enough to deal with their volatile new populations. Border controls and immigration policies for the most part did not exist, or were poorly implemented, and white-slave traders were easily able to out-run bureaucratic attempts to trace who was going where, and why. Silver was born in 1868 in Kielce, halfway between Warsaw and Krakow, in Tsarist ‘Russian Poland’. His burglarious family were a source of shame and disgrace to fellow Jews in the town. He left for England when he was sixteen, arriving, it is believed, in East London in 1885. For the next thirty years, he founded various small vice empires across ‘the Atlantic World’, raping, beating and psychologically torturing as a routine part of his procurement procedure, and supplying girls for the burgeoning brothels of the boom-towns: the Fox’s trail leads to New York, Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Paris and Antwerp as he and his cohorts crossed and re-crossed the ocean on the steamships that had made international travel affordable

THE EMPEROR OF VICE THE FOX AND THE FLIES: THE WORLD OF JOSEPH SILVER, RACKETEER AND PSYCHOPATH ★

By Charles van Onselen (Jonathan Cape 646pp £20)

IN 1978, THE author of this book, an academic based in South Africa, first glimpsed the name Joseph Lis in a late-Victorian newspaper cutting. Lis (meaning ‘fox’), who later adopted the surname Silver, was a Polish-born pimp and sex-trafficker extraordinaire – a violent, syphilitic super-criminal, who during his thirty-year career had the police forces and attorneys of several cities in his pocket. Charles van Onselen has spent almost three decades hunting the Fox through the archives of four continents, and the result of his researches is a book that is profoundly unsettling, containing virtually no acts of kindness or decency. It catalogues crimes of relentless brutality and lifts many stones to reveal a subculture so squalid that reading The Fox and the Flies, you feel you want to take your brain out and scrub it. ‘White-slave trading’ was the melodramatic and inaccurate fin-de-siècle name for the trafficking of poor and/or vulnerable women to brothels in Continental

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and unprecedentedly swift. The white-slave trade was dominated by French criminals; but close behind in ‘over-representation’ in this crime (to use modern sociological parlance) were Eastern European Jews, moving westwards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they fled increasingly violent persecution. Van Onselen could not have written so comprehensively about white-slaving, and probed Silver: the pits so forensically, if he had suppressed this aspect of the trade – one made devastating use of by anti-Semites then and subsequently. But he explores with sympathy why the centuries-long vilification and marginalisation of an entire race could drive some of its members into antisocial and criminal activity – barred as they were from so many legitimate trades, forms of ownership and rights of settlement. The horror felt by more established, settled Jewish communities in Britain, France and the Americas about their Eastern European co-religionists’ level of involvement in vice led them to make strenuous efforts to stamp it out – but little credit would be accorded them, as van Onselen points out. If Flaubert was correct that writing history is drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful, van Onselen’s cup runneth over, and it’s a top-quality brew. The underworlds of eleven cities at the turn of the century are laid bare, and not the least feat of this book is its detailed description of the mechanics of corruption – precisely how criminals and the authorities fed off each other, and how it was that organised crime got itself organised. Local-government structures – rather than parliamentary activity and party politics – determine the nature of civic life, and van Onselen has rightly shone his spotlight into these neglected and unfashionable corners of historical research. In his appendix, ‘Clio and the Fox’, van Onselen describes the difficulties of tracing habitual liars through surviving documentation – people who went by several aliases, with false birth-dates and invented autobiographies. And if, among the tumultuous events and variety of locations related here, the personality of Silver is lost, it is perhaps churlish to expect a historian to be able to reconstruct the inner workings of a mind so pathologically unknowable. All that can be fruitfully undertaken by a historian – and van Onselen does it well – is to chart how society accommodated itself around such a deadly, insatiable creature as Silver. Over his lifetime (1868–1918), his activities would be increasingly circumscribed by the development of fingerprinting and

photo identification, by increasing anti-vice agitation in the press, and by immigration policy and international accords to stamp out sex-trafficking. Van Onselen invokes the latest findings of psychiatry to help ‘explain’ the Fox himself, and – more specifically – to present the more crowd-pleasing aspect of his book. For it is posited that Silver was Jack the Ripper. It’s an audacious claim, and it hangs by extremely slender threads. Van Onselen is unable even to prove that Silver was in Whitechapel in 1888, and constructs the case against the Fox from his proven violent misogyny and psychopathy; his deep involvement in the lives of prostitutes; his later evasions about his movements in 1888 (though he lied about many things); and from an ingenious reading of five Ripper crime scenes as illustrative of the Book of Ezekiel’s advice on how prostitutes should be dealt with. More convincingly, Silver’s appearance largely matched the description given by the only person to have seen the Ripper full-face (George Hutchinson, who stood at the end of Miller’s Court on the night of Mary Kelly’s evisceration, and was glared at by a well-dressed man ‘of Jewish appearance’, who passed up the Court with Kelly). ‘What then are you, members of history’s jury, to make of this case?’, van Onselen asks, rather loftily, in his final chapter. This juror would have to plump for the Scottish verdict. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18

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FOREIGN PARTS

sets out, with Herodotus and a pile of Socialist convictions in his baggage, on what was to be a lifeT RAVELS WITH H ERODOTUS time of travelling is not ★ just attracted by the stereotypically exotic. By Ryszard Kapuscinski The two parag raphs (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 288pp £20) that communicate the sudden, dazzling LONG-TERM ADMIRERS OF Ryszard Kapuscinski may be appar ition of Rome disappointed to learn that in Travels with Herodotus, his glimpsed from a cirlast work, the Polish journalist and writer is mellower, Kapuscinski: curious cling plane, the first kinder, warmer than in books published in the spit and fully illuminated city Kapuscinski had ever seen, are fury of his younger years. The opening lines – a descripmagnificent. In Khartoum, Kapuscinski sees Louis tion of the moment when, as a young student in a devArmstrong play in a silent outdoor auditorium. With his astated post-war Poland, he first heard the name of the typically acute and human eye, Kapuscinski notes that Greek historian – lack the rawness of those other works. ‘Armstrong during the concert was … merry, cheerful, The preface of Another Day of Life, Kapuscinski’s minor animated … Armstrong immediately after was heavy, masterpiece on the war in Angola in 1975, commences exhausted, weak, his face covered in wrinkles, extinwith the words: ‘this is a book … about being alone and guished.’ And all those who have worked and written in lost’. The first chapter starts with the bald statement: Kabul – Kapuscinski was there in the Fifties – have ‘For three months I lived in Luanda, in the Tivoli struggled to communicate the stunning clarity of the air, Hotel.’ From his hotel room, Kapuscinski said, he could of the sky above the city on its dusty plateau, and of the see the freighters out to sea sailing away when the news frigid nights. After sundown, Kapuscinski says, ‘the from the front was so dismal that there was no point in streets look as if a spontaneous, improvised mystery play staying. He of course stayed. The author of Travels with were being staged upon them. The all-pervasive darkHerodotus is a happier man than the driven reporter of ness is pierced only by oil lamps and torches burning on earlier works. So nor is there the horrific immediacy of the street stalls … People pass silently – hunched, covKapuscinski’s descriptions of demonstrations in Tehran ered figures whipped on by the cold and the wind.’ in 1979 that mark another great work, The Shah of There is also Kapuscinski’s typical portrayal of his own Shahs. In that, a typically economic description of the profession. He uses Herodotus as the paradigm of the government security forces carefully picking off a conscientious reporter. ‘How does Herodotus work?’ he wheelchair-bound protestor left to his fate in the middle asks: ‘He wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he of a street by the crowd has a harrowing power. The can later note down what he learned and saw or simply image has stayed with me and surfaced at odd times, to remember better.’ Yet this noble aim often gets particularly while reporting from Iraq in recent years. swamped by the reality of logistics, newsdesks, deadlines. Nor is there the sheer fear that permeates many of the Trying to get out of a war-racked, flooded Congo, other episodes that Kapuscinski relates. Indeed most of Kapuscinski explains, is not easy. For a start, he does not the stories that the author, who died in January, tells are know where he is. Secondly, there is no transport availself-deprecating or comic. They are far from being able. He hopes, he says, to macho war-stor ies. The get to Uganda, from where, most bloody episodes are via London, he might be found in Herodotus himself able to get a dispatch finally where Greeks, Persians, to his office in Warsaw. ‘In Babylonians and others this profession, the pleasure butcher each other with an of travelling and the fascinaastonishing enthusiasm, crution with what one sees is elty and nonchalance. inevitably subordinate to the We do have, however, imperative of maintaining much that is classic one’s ties with headquarters Kapuscinski. Firstly, there Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms and of transmitting to them are the brief, beautiful pas“This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents what is current and imporsages of descr iption. The tant. That is why we are sent young 25-year-old Pole who

J ASON B URKE

BEYOND THE SPECTACLE

www.lifelinespress.co.uk

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FOREIGN PARTS

out into the world – and there are no other self-justifications.’ Nothing, as any honest correspondent will tell you, is more true. Two other themes preoccupy Kapuscinski. The first is, unsurprisingly, the importance of words and of language. As a young man, trying to work with little success and less English in India, he had run headlong into ‘the wall’ of a language that he did not speak. The book is full of references to various languages, to identities based on languages, to differences based in language. The second is history. Kapuscinski quotes long – perhaps too long – chunks of Herodotus. Some are revealing. It is difficult not to read the Greek historian’s account of how ‘the tight, rigid, monolithic’ Persian armies – the superpower of the day – were outfought and outfaced by the ‘loose, mobile, ever-shifting configurations of small tactical cells’ favoured by the Scythians without thinking of an obvious contemporary parallel. Elsewhere Kapuscinski talks of the ‘chronological provincialism’ of those who are as limited in their historical perspective as others might be geographically. Recently there has been a fashion of picking factual holes in Kapuscinski’s various accounts. There are indeed mistakes (sometimes glaring), as you would expect from a reporter working on the ground without the benefit of decades of academic learning about a subject. There is always a tension between journalists working in the field and academic experts, many of whom rarely visit the more far-flung corners of their supposed areas of study and often do not themselves speak local languages. The latter, possibly justifiably, begrudge the fact that it is the reporters who essentially represent a given place, nation, problem or question to a mass audience. But journalists are not academics; they work faster and under rougher conditions than most university researchers. Even those of the relative r igour of Kapuscinski are far from infallible. Picking holes in his narrative because he is mistaken on the exact practices of certain Nile tribes seems more than a little churlish. One criticism that is just is of Kapuscinski’s jarring tendency to err into the worst sort of Eurocentric generalisation. In The Shadow of the Sun he wrote that ‘the European and the African … have an entirely different concept of time’. In Travels with Herodotus, he talks about ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the Indian’, the former naturally inscrutable and the latter excitable or child-like. This is a shame. Yet the simple fact remains that Kapuscinski was more than a reporter and more than a writer. His spare, stripped prose is a thing of beauty; like the Herodotus he so affectionately describes, he was rigorous, curious and, as he says explicitly in this book, always sought to go beyond the spectacle and the spectacular to try and understand the truth about what was happening in his world. His last book is a fitting testament. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18

D ONALD R AYFIELD

DISPATCHES FROM RUSSIA A RUSSIAN D IARY By Anna Politkovskaya (Translated by Arch Tait) (Harvill Secker 323pp £17.99)

B ESLAN : T HE T RAGEDY

OF

S CHOOL N O.1

By Timothy Phillips (Granta Books 291pp £10.99)

RUSSIA ’ S I SLAMIC T HREAT By Gordon M Hahn (Yale University Press 349pp £25)

ANYONE WHO TAKES these books to heart will wonder whether we are in a situation ominously similar to that of 1935, when the menace of Hitler’s Germany left the bulk of Britain’s and America’s politicians completely unperturbed. In one way we are worse off: at least during the Thirties there was Winston Churchill, with the necessary stature and persistence to go on crying wolf. Now not one figure in our political establishment dares utter a word. Even after killing Litvinenko and shamelessly leaving a trail of radioactivity across London, Putin’s men have total impunity: a Russian hospital nurse might be refused a visa by the British Consulate, lest she seek work in the NHS, but an FSB killer – never. Our cowardly politicians’ main mistake is to assume (as does Gordon Hahn in his book) that we have only one enemy – Islamic terrorism – and can therefore ignore Russia’s reversion to brutal and totally corrupt autocracy. In any case, a demonstration of moral courage might force our government to look for other sources of gas and oil. Anna Politkovskaya’s previous book, Putin’s Russia, is very similar to her A Russian Diary. Like other reviewers, I was struck by horror when she published that earlier book, fairly sure that she would pay the highest possible price for writing it. The posthumous Diary is perhaps even less of a sustained argument: it is the reaction of a completely honest and fearless journalist to the cynical lies that the Russian authorities give in response to any questions from the victims of the disasters and injustices they have visited on the population, and a record of the evasiveness of other Russian journalists and the utter depravity of Russia’s politicians (including once promising young democrats like Nemtsov) in the face of Putin’s threats. The Diary is easy reading, in that it comes in short chunks and is very well translated by Arch Tait, but it is hard to digest, since Politkovskaya reacts to a number of different issues and leaps from subject to subject. Politkovskaya’s first topic is the conquest of Chechnya

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by making it a fiefdom for Ramzan Kadyrov – as if Bush and Blair had invaded Iraq and then handed it over to Qusay and Uday Hussein to run. Chechnya has thus been destroyed not just physically, but morally; while its ruling clique is awash with billions of dollars, the ordinary population dies of untreated TB, torture by Kadyrov’s thugs, and the violence of drunken Russian soldiers. The second, perhaps more hurtful, theme for the diarist is the desertion of professional journalists and parliamentarians to the Putin camp, resulting in the total disappearance of democracy in Russia: today’s Duma is the Supreme Soviet, and today’s provincial governors are just the same as the old Party secretaries. Politkovskaya trembles for the few free spir its still left: Ir ina Khakamada, who, like a number of women before her, mistakenly considers herself less likely to be assassinated than a man for the offence of garnering the support of 2 per cent of the population; and Garri Kasparov, whose international status as a chess grandmaster will probably delay the murder Putin’s men have in mind. The third theme of Politkovskaya’s diary, perhaps the most depressing of all, is the reluctance of the population, except for the Soldiers’ Mothers’ organisation and those bereaved by the catastrophes in the Nord-Ost theatre and the Beslan school, to offer any resistance. Putin does not need, any more than did Stalin, to liquidate his opponents: the electorate will vote for the strong man. Politics in

Russia is like sewage: the population wants it to be taken care of silently, without its participation. The Beslan school siege of 2004, as a result of which a handful of degenerate Ingush and Chechen terrorists and a mass of even more degenerate local Ossetian and Russian federal authorities must bear responsibility for the deaths of over 300 Politkovskaya: fearless children and their parents and teachers, makes some of the most disturbing pages in Politkovskaya’s Diary. She herself, however, was prevented first by poison and then by murder from investigating on the spot. Timothy Phillips, on the other hand, has done a heroic and, one might have thought for a foreigner, impossible job: he has reconstructed from the testimony of many hundreds of witnesses the hellish events of that September, and produced a full list of the casualties (except for the terrorists). His work is a fit memorial to the dead. What is missing is, however, the crucial element: the witnesses cannot provide a coherent or credible answer to the questions of why and how the massacre was allowed to happen. As they are nearly all Ossetians, their traditional hatred of their Ingush neighbours provides implausible explanations: Tsalieva, the headmistress, who tried to maintain order and came out from the carnage with her hairdo intact, is alleged to have been in cahoots with the terrorists; General Ruslan Aushev, the head of the Ingush until Putin replaced him with the FSB idiot Zyazikov, is alleged to have entered the building not as an unarmed and fearless negotiator, but as a conniving accomplice. As for the succession of shootings and explosions that ended the siege, it is impossible to know who began them – local fathers with hunting rifles, FSB forces, or desperate (or careless) terrorists. The essential truth we shall not know for decades, not until Russia again emerges into a short period of light when the archives are opened. The terrorists were, allegedly, shot, except for one man, who gave the evidence the authorities asked him to. How the terrorists got through all the police checkpoints on the roads of the North Caucasus, how they brought so many bombs into the school, and with whose help, remains a mystery. As with the siege of Nord-Ost, where the ‘rescuers’ managed to kill 129 hostages and all the terrorist witnesses, we can only be sure that the promised report will either never be issued or will be a tissue of lies. In the meantime, Timothy Phillips’s book provides the victims’ story. The perpetrators have yet to be induced to tell theirs. Gordon M Hahn’s Russia’s Islamic Threat is as strongly motivated as Politkovskaya’s book and as well researched as Phillips’s. Hahn has researched three areas particularly closely: the republic of Tatarstan 400 miles east of Moscow; the Kabarda-Balkar republic in the North

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16 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

FOREIGN PARTS

Caucasus (where there is antagonism between the aboriginal Kabarda Circassians, the Turkic Balkar, who have lived there less than a millennium, and the Russian colonists of the last 200 years); and Dagestan in the North East Caucasus, where some thirty different ethnic units have lived for centuries in a fractious and fragile society, once under Persian and for the last two centuries under Russian suzerainty. Hahn has studied every written source and website (although there is no evidence of actual work in the field) to conclude that Islam in these areas is making such strides that it is a threat to Putin’s Russia and part of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism. It is true that whenever Chechens or Dagestanis have had to rally their own people and their neighbours against Russian oppression, they have done so under an Islamic flag. It is also true that Dagestan has been a centre for Islamic mysticism, especially Sufism, for generations. Undoubtedly, individual Chechens have found their way into Al-Qaeda’s camps. But any Caucasologist with a feel for the area and its history will be sceptical about Hahn’s arguments. One can just as easily search Russian websites and conclude that a Jewish-Freemason conspiracy is taking over Russia’s banks and universities, or that Nato has infiltrated the Russian Army. Imams are not the only cranks on the Internet. In fact, Islam in Tatarstan and the North Caucasus is about as great a force as Christianity in Tunbridge Wells. The real tension stems from national, even clan, feuds and oppression. The Chechen resistance was only as Islamic as, for example, the Algerian resistance to French colonialism. Circassians and Chechens, if they have any deep religion, are pagan animists; just as in the tenth century they became Christian to gain Byzantine protection, so now they wave Islamic flags to get Saudi funding. I shall never forget a night in September 1990, spent with a hundred or so Circassians, stuck overnight in their Cadillacs between the Soviet and Turkish frontiers. They had driven up from Jordan to visit their Circassian cousins in the now moribund USSR, full of joy at being reunited after the mass expulsions of Circassians in 1864. To their horror they found their Caucasian relatives were now no better than pagans or infidels. While all Jordanian Circassians were good Muslims, Caucasian Circassians enjoyed their vodka and wine, danced with the opposite sex and worshipped ancestral walnut trees. Similarly, secularism is so strong in Tatarstan and the North Caucasus that Islamic jihad can only be a cover for anti-Russian guerrilla warfare – which one might argue is at least as justified as the resistance of the Maquis to the Nazis – and only the isolated psychopathic youth from Nalchik (or Bradford for that matter) is likely to pose a genuine Islamic terrorist threat. Hahn proposes we encourage and help Putin deal decisive blows to Islamic jihad on his own territory and make Bush’s war a truly global one. If that goes ahead, far worse tragedies than Beslan are in the offing. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 18

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THE TERRIFIED TRAVELLER B LOOD R IVER : A J OURNEY TO A FRICA ’ S B ROKEN H EART ★

By Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus 363pp £12.99)

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TIM BUTCHER WAS for a while the Daily Telegraph’s man in Africa. In 2002, he chose a lull in the conflict that has riven the Democratic Republic of Congo since the fall of Mobutu in 1994 to follow the route of H M Stanley’s epic journey between October 1876 and September 1877 from the western shore of Lake Tanganyika to the mouth of the Congo River. Stanley thus charted the greater part of the course of that mighty river, then unknown. Butcher’s was a plucky intention, since the Congo (which we had to call Zaire under Mobutu) has been notoriously chaotic and virtually lawless for decades across most of its territory, equal in size to Western Europe. He was ‘driven’ to make the trip by an obsession partly stoked by his mother, who, before he was born, had travelled by train across the country in its latter days as a Belgian colony. He describes setting forth: The eastern sky was slowly growing more pale, but I turned to face west. Out there between me and the Atlantic Ocean lay a primeval riot of jungle, river, plain and mountain stretching for thousands of kilometres. For years I had stared at maps dominated by the Congo River, a silver-bladed sickle, its handle anchored on the coast, its tip buried deep in the equatorial forest, but now I could feel its looming sense of vastness. It scared me … Feeling as if my legs were about to collapse, I croaked a faint curse against the obsession that had drawn me to the most daunting, backward country on earth. Phew! Stanley would not have admitted to collapsing knees on such a departure. But times have changed. The Butcher style of writing, with its emotional vulnerability, is the fashion in the genre just now. By his own account, Butcher scares easily. In the event, he did the whole trip in six weeks, the first part by motorbike (which makes his backside numb) as far as the river port of Kindu, with a companion; then in a UN patrol boat and a four-day lazy-river ride in a jumbo dugout; then back on the bike – to bypass the rapids – for Kisangani (Stanleyville of yore), where he has his ‘first proper shower for three weeks’. Next, aboard another UN vessel, he journeys 1000 km to Mbandaka (formerly Coquilhatville) where, feeling queasy, he hitches a lift in a UN helicopter that takes him the 700 km to Kinshasa

FOREIGN PARTS

(Leopoldville). The final stretch, 300 km to the river’s estuary, again dodging the rapids which all but did for Stanley, took him a couple of days by jeep. Butcher lodged on the way with aid workers, mostly belonging to the Christian organisation CARE, with priests, a Bishop, and various UN personnel. He frequently recalls how afraid he was, especially in the dark; but, thank goodness, he was never hurt or even menaced. He was afraid of malaria, indeed of a single mosquito that stung him in the cabin of his UN riverboat. (Had he forgotten to take his prophylactic?) These days, it seems, to be counted brave one’s first got to be sick with fear. Yet it was tough. Evidently never learning how to sterilise water, with water all around him Butcher got dreadfully thirsty. His mum’s railway lines had entirely vanished (except, in patches, as a route for well-sprung motorbikes), as had virtually all the roads (which were reduced to tracks at best) and as had all but a tiny remnant of the hundreds of former river-steamers. It was no joyride. He lost weight. Luckily he had the cash for the bribes necessary for local passes. A product of Johannesburg and presumably of partsettler inheritance, the author claims to abominate all empire everywhere – the entire colonial endeavour. Though alarmed by native Africans left to themselves, he throws in passages expressing disgust at European intrusion upon Rousseau-esque primality. He claims that all forms of colonial governance in Africa have been similarly exploitative and cruel in style and aim – British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Spanish. In an erstwhile Africa correspondent for a serious newspaper,

such ignorance astonishes. To justify his ‘obsessive’ call to journey through the Congo – a shambles from the fourth day after its independence on 1 July 1960, and descending into comprehensive dereliction thereafter – Butcher has it typifying the entire post-colonial subSaharan continent. Here is a lazy writer who uses words without precision and has no will to clean his prose or reconcile his own conflicting views. He checks few facts, and is wrong about so much. Conrad never rose to be a ‘skipper’. The Congo was ‘at war’ with no one, not even itself, ‘within a year of 1958’. As for Livingstone travelling with ‘barely more than a change of clothes and a bible’, he moved off on his last exploration (in the course of which Stanley ‘found’ him) with a party of thirty-nine and a train of oxen. And so on. Least forgivably, Tim Butcher is factually wrong on Stanley, whose definitive biography by Tim Jeal published earlier this year exposed once and for all (one might have hoped) the misinformation clinging to him, which Butcher now repeats – such as that he was adopted by a rich American called Stanley (he simply took the name), or that he championed King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo (Leopold deceived him), or that his sobriquet ‘Breaker of Rocks’ derived from ruthlessness (it came from his engineer’s clearance of obstacles in building the road from the estuary to Stanley Pool). Jeal’s biography was surely available before this book went to press. Chatto should have delayed publication until their author had read it, saving them both lasting embarrassment. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18

LETTERS PULPIT OR CESSPIT?

not lack of space. Rather, it is the narrowness of literary editors’ interests and imagination. Yours faithfully, Anthony Haynes Newmarket, Suffolk

Sir, Alas, the ‘tide of rubbish’ advances… A deplorable neglect of your editorial role led you to print Mr Taylor’s unwelcome quotation (LR, May). Not all your readers will share his sense of humour, as you could surely have judged. Pulpit – or cesspit? Are you able to assure us that, after this lapse, the LR will recover as an ‘oasis of sanity and high-mindedness’? Yours faithfully, Andrew Hooper Sidmouth, Devon

TARQUIN & LUCRETIA Sir, In Peter Jones’ enjoyable round-up of ancient frolics (LR, May), he neglected to mention the greatest store of Bad Sex in ancient – if not modern – literature: Petronius Arbiter’s scurrilous Satyricon. Here is one of the more tasteful parts, in which the young Giton relates how he was assaulted by Ascyltos: ‘Cum ego proclamarem, gladium strinxit et “Si Lucretia es”, inquit, “Tarquinium invenisti.”’ ‘When I screamed, he pulled out his sword and said, “If you’re a Lucretia, you’ve found your Tarquin.”’ Yours faithfully, William Goodman Bath

NARROW INTERESTS? Sir, I take issue with D J Taylor’s defence of literary editors (From the Pulpit, LR, May). The literary editors of Britain’s broadsheets all choose the same books to review. I estimate that, as a result, only about 1 per cent of new titles are reviewed in their pages. The problem is

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might have examined other, more contemporary examples: for example, Ali Sharati, the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian Islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah, took his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death from Martin Heidegger, who for a Husain: candour time saw himself as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by the Western ideologues who – whether they realised it or not – supplied the intellectual armoury of twentiethcentury totalitarianism. A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century. All the telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim boys’ school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there was talk of a ‘gay-Jewish conspiracy’ to undermine Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of secrecy – familiar to anyone who knows the workings of communist and Trotskyist parties – which aimed at penetrating other organisations (including George Galloway’s Respect party) and using them as front organisations. Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes of the world they struggled to maintain a united front, and as Husain observes they did have one thing in common: ‘we all despised traditional Islam’. Far from being an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal identity based on rejection of the past. For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudiating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a pious Muslim appalled by his son’s attachment to radical Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam’s incompatibility with secular politics and then of a friend with links with the radical East London mosque, he began to view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent overthrow of Western governments. It was as much the cruelty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain’s

J OHN G RAY

THE PATHOLOGY OF FAITH T HE I SLAMIST: W HY I J OINED R ADICAL I SLAM IN B RITAIN, W HAT I S AW I NSIDE , AND W HY I L EFT ★

By Ed Husain (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 288pp £8.99)

ED HUSAIN BEGINS one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb’s most influential book: ‘I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.’ Qutb’s use of the concept of the vanguard reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and antiWestern, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology, and – though the fact is rarely noted – the type of terrorism with which Islamist movements are most often identified originates not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a MarxistLeninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. For all its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism. Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic state, he writes, is ‘not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)’. Rather, it is a response to secular modernity. It is striking how much Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected traditional religions in order to promote surrogate political faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel and Marx, while Nabhani’s contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau. ‘Nabhani’s ideas’, Husain concludes, ‘were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought.’ He

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disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tradition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably more humane version of his religion than that promoted by Islamists. From his confusion – which he recounts with fearless candour – he achieved a sense of spiritual purpose, which rather than alienating him from British society enabled him to appreciate its virtues. The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal narrative, but it also carries a powerful and – for some – unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his

links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity – as secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering what he describes as ‘classical, traditional Islam’, which includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathology of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors. To order this book at £7.19, see LR Bookshop on page 18

P AUL J OHNSON

afternoon in August, sitting at his table with a huge Latin dictionary before him, writing furiously, dipping his pen into a jam-jar full of ink. His chief object of study was the gruesome Manilius, a writer from the time of Tiber ius about whom nothing is known Housman: pedant and poet but who left behind him five books of verse about astrology and the signs of the zodiac. Housman admitted that Manilius was ‘a very poor poet’ and that his subject matter is repellent. Yet he attracted the attention of Bentley, greatest of all classical scholars and, in our own time, of the weird Shackleton Bailey (whose chief claim to fame, however, is his brief marriage to the fascinating Hilly, first wife of Kingsley Amis). To Manilius Housman effectively devoted his professional life, and the five volumes he published on him between 1903 and 1930 are his abiding monument. However, in 1896 Housman astonished even those who knew him best by publishing a volume of sixtythree poems, A Shropshire Lad, which achieved success even at the time and assured him immortality. He was not a professional poet, could not write to order or at will, and needed a powerful personal stimulus to versify at all. He said he composed most of the poems in 1895 under ‘continuous excitement’. Thereafter he wrote little, though a further volume was reluctantly published in 1922 and a few more poems after his death. What are we to make of this strange man? His letters provide a few clues. This is by far the best and fullest edition, printing every letter that has been found, some 2327 complete and four fragments. In my view Housman was one of the great letter-writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centur ies. But he is an acquired taste. The word which applies best to him is

From Bromsgrove to Trinity T HE L ETTERS

OF

A E H OUSMAN

Edited by Archie Burnett (Oxford University Press 2 vols 960pp £180)

HOUSMAN, ONE OF the egregious eccentrics of English poetry, was the son of a busy solicitor who practised in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He had two sisters and four brothers, one of whom, Laurence, wrote a West End smash, Victoria Regina. He had a passion for Latin and Greek but not much interest in classical history and philosophy. Hence, at St John’s, Oxford, he took a first in Mods but flopped in Greats and had to seek employment in the Patent Office (like Einstein). However, his powerful pieces on classical philology in learned journals eventually led to recognition as a scholar and in 1892, when he was thirty-three, he was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. Nearly twenty years later, his career was crowned by his election, against a strong field, to the chair of Latin at Cambridge. Thus he exchanged a dim house in Pinner for a splendid set of rooms in Trinity, where he lived till his death in 1936. In the vain attempt to solve the mystery of Housman, who, despite many efforts – including a superb play by Tom Stoppard – remains elusive, it must be grasped that virtually all his working life was spent on teaching, lecturing on and publishing the work of obscure Latin authors, devoting to them bone-grinding industry which to us is inexplicable and was pretty odd even a century ago. There is an eye-witness description of him, on a hot Saturday

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laconic, the pithy brevity of Sparta. A high proportion of the letters are to his publisher Grant Richards, and most are a single sentence, acknowledging proofs or giving a direction. Very occasionally he lets himself go, as when describing the political relationship between A J Balfour and his own bête noire, Joe Chamberlain. There is a tiny masterpiece on the subject of understanding poetry which characteristically has been cut to the bare bone and is worth quoting in full: When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it means to the reader. Many letters deal with classical problems. This, for instance, is typical: In Mart. XI 99 5-6 I quite agree with you about nimias, and I think Minyas absurd as well as ungrammatical, but I have never been able to stomach magni, because culus is proktos, not puge, and there seems to be no point in accusing the lady of euruproktia.

Always laconic, Housman was also diffident, though far from humble. He loved saying No: to universities offering him honorary degrees, to government honours (he turned down the OM), above all to publishers who wanted to include his poems in anthologies. He referred to Latin as his ‘trade’, called himself a ‘pedant’ rather than a scholar and wrote: ‘I am only a connoisseur and not a critic.’ Declining to join the Cambridge governing body, he explained he was ‘an egotistical hedonist. It would find me quite useless, and it can very well dispense with any lustre which might be shed upon it by my exiguous (though eximious) output.’ He could be sharp. He refused to be included in an anthology with Meredith ‘as I am a respectable character and do not care to be seen in the company of galvanised corpses. By this time [1903] he stinketh for he has been dead twenty years.’ He wrote: ‘I do not want to write letters to a woman whose name is Birdie.’ He wrote: ‘Mr Thomas thanks me for “a poem”, and prints two: which is the one he doesn’t thank me for?’ Here is a letter received by another anthologist called Moore of Burton-upon-Trent: Permission to quote is one thing, permission to misquote is another. First you take certain verses of mine and disfigure them with illiterate alterations, then you ask me to let you attribute them publicly to me, and now, because I do not abet you in injuring my reputation, you think it rather hard. Why was Burton built on Trent? But though he often refused permission to quote, he also declined fees and royalties. He wrote: Vanity, not avarice, is my ruling passion; and so long as young men write to me from America saying that they would rather part with their hair than with their copy of my book, I do not feel the need of food and drink. This brings us to his other ruling passion. Housman was in love for most of his life with a man called Jackson. But this was never consummated. Jackson married, had children, went out of reach in Canada. When he died in 1923, Housman marked the event with a laconic cry: ‘Now I can die myself: I could not have borne to leave him behind me in a world where anything might happen to him.’ Whether Housman ever had affairs is unknowable. On one of his constant trips to France, he reports that he was accompanied by ‘a young Frenchman’. In another letter he says he always keeps enough in his current account to enable him to ‘flee the country’. He lived through the Wilde scandal and another involving Norman Douglas, who jumped his bail and fled into exile in Capri after an incident with a young man in the V&A. Of course Housman may have been joking. He found a few things in life funny. But for the most part existence appalled him. His last written word was ‘Ugh!’

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her, much to her amusement – whereupon Birgit, the Ger man nurse in charge, rushes in and disentangles them. ‘“Now I shall make report about this incident,” Birgit promised. “I have to do. It is the law.” “Fuck the law.” the old woman retorted. “This is England, girl. You ain’t in Germany now. You leave Thompson: pitch-perfect well alone.”’ It is all, as almost throughout, pitch-perfect. The 1950s have, of course, an almost immovably entrenched mythology – family, domesticity, security, conformity – and on the whole Clever Girl adds detail and nuance to the accepted picture rather than fundamentally subverting it. The mastertext for the doggedly long courtship followed by the early marriage is Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, which Thompson and his wifeto-be go to see at the Embassy in Waltham Cross (where Bert has whisked his family to live at the start of the book). A classic romantic weepie, it inspires thoughts of marital bliss in a Cotswold cottage with roses over the door. ‘Owlish, immature, yet willing ourselves into middle age, we were two innocents – and, for all our bookish aspirations, Hollywood knew where we lived.’ So too with other evoked aspects of Britain before the cultural revolution. The neighbours in Waltham Cross invest their hopes for the future not in politics or ‘the future of Europe’, but in the day when their young ‘Tony or Phil, Angie or June left school and started bringing in the dosh’; simultaneously, there is the new, unending, utterly secular battle of home improvement, with ‘on most Sundays the yelp and rasp of saws as men fashioned occasional furniture from marine plywood and lengths of woolly battening’. Naturally, dress remained largely monochrome and staid (Thompson’s green thornproof suit and Hush Puppies getting dirty looks on the Central Line), while generally ‘the trick was to act modestly, at work and in the home’. The teenager was just being invented as a distinctive socio-economic force, but for the most part the streets were still ‘peopled with trainee adults’. Most of those trainees went to secondary moderns, dead-end jobs and permanent obscurity. By contrast, there has been a surfeit of memoirs from the beneficiar ies of Butler’s 1944

D AVID K YNASTON

LOOK BACK IN AMUSEMENT C LEVER G IRL : A S ENTIMENTAL E DUCATION ★

By Brian Thompson (Atlantic Books 247pp £14.99)

E VEN IN THIS golden age of autobiography, Brian Thompson’s Keeping Mum made a deservedly huge impact when it appeared last year. The catastrophic marriage between his manic-depressive mother (Peggy, aka Squibs) and ruthlessly unfeeling, upwardly mobile father (Bert), the irrational decision to send him during the war from safe Cambridge to his uncle and aunt off the Kingston bypass (where the house was duly blitzed), the disastrously ill-conceived family holiday in Hastings, the tragicomic death of his grandmother (Queenie) in Lambeth Walk, the painfully clumsy early fumblings with girls – the whole had an irresistibly picaresque flavour, full of pungent dialogue and sharply observed scenes, unclouded by sentimentality. The book ended in 1951, with Thompson’s headmaster realising that the sixteenyear-old had academic potential and successfully insisting to Bert that he stay on at school after his O levels. We now, in gratifyingly quick order, have the followup. Clever Girl takes the story on another seven years, during which Thompson secures a place at Cambridge, does his National Service (mainly in Kenya, where he fights the Mau-Mau and spends time at close quarters with Idi Amin), reads English at Trinity College, and marries the clever girl of the title almost as soon as he comes down. We leave him in Shrewsbury, where he has started teaching at a grammar school. ‘After only a few months of marriage and the marking of exercise books,’ he reflects in the final, bittersweet sentence, ‘it never occurred to me that I could be anyone other than who I was.’ If less obviously extraordinary than its predecessor, Clever Girl is still just as much a page-turner and in some ways more involving (especially his torturous relationship with his father), and not quite such a freak-show. It is also impossible not to be impressed anew – indeed at times bowled over – by the sheer economy of style and sure-footedness of pacing. Take the scene where, temporar ily working in a nursing home, Thompson gives a bath to an oversize, elderly female patient and accidentally falls in on top of

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Education Act, which made grammar schools free to everyone (if they could pass the eleven-plus), with a good chance of university afterwards. Thompson’s is another, but he treats the familiar trajectory with typical freshness and lack of self-importance. The snobbishness at Hertford Grammar School (reading The Times’s first leader a particular affectation), the inspiring English teacher, the prevailing oppressive public-school tone at Cambridge, the sheer apartness of gown and town – all are deftly covered, together with the almost statutory motif of parental bewilderment, as liable to shade into contempt as pride. Indeed, in keeping with his lifelong view that ‘going to university was the postponement of something far more serious, something he liked to describe as the real world’, Bert takes pleasure in sending young Brian to a different job each vacation. The first, as a relief porter at Liverpool Street station in the run-up to Christmas 1955, is the subject of a virtuoso description of a small but perhaps representative corner of the dirty, Victorian, over-manned, under-incentivised railway industry. Another holiday job is humping bricks and knocking up cement for a new building just opposite Cheshunt Public Library, where later, in his last Easter vacation, Thompson sits writing a long essay on D H Lawrence and sex, having managed for once to get a paternal exemption. There he has an exchange with one of the labourers he used to know and suggests a drink or a smoke, but is firmly rebuffed. ‘We ain’t mates, Brizo,’

the labourer says. ‘We never was.’ And he goes on: ‘Know what your problem is? You want everybody to like you, not just a bit here and there but all the bleeding time. Can’t happen. Won’t never happen. Even the dopiest kids can work that out. Look after yourself, m’older.’ Having said which he leaves, crossing the road with ‘one hand held up to stop the oncoming traffic, the other hitching his trousers’. It is a moment of epiphany in a marvellous book that is arguably as much about class as anything else. It was class that ran like a fault-line through almost every activity in Britain in the 1950s, and so it is here. The fact that Thompson plays many of his scenes for laughs – typified by the knockabout of his fruitless interview with the snooty man at the University Appointments Board – does not make them any less charged as social documents. The first night of Look Back in Anger, at the Royal Court in May 1956, is almost absurdly iconic, but Thompson here adds a delicious sidelight, as he suffers the wrath of a middle-aged, middle-class theatregoer who could have passed as Jimmy Porter’s father-in-law. ‘Bloody man’s in our seats,’ he complains to the frontof-house manager. ‘Won’t budge, impudent little shit.’ The dispute is settled only when it turns out that the complainant’s ticket is for the following evening. Change was in the air, a meritocracy was starting to emerge centre stage, and I am not alone in looking forward impatiently to Brian Thompson’s next tranche. To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18

L UCY L ETHBRIDGE

than that, I am fine. I am nearsighted and do have soft teeth. Both inherited, my eyes from my father, my teeth from my mother.’ When they did meet, in the Oyster Bar of the New York Plaza, Ellen, with big hair and dressed up in shabby fur, had a Baileys Irish Cream and a lobster Homes: acute eye salad. Homes sipped a Coke and made mental notes of what she would tell her friends about the encounter. A relationship of sorts began: Ellen was needy and rang often and demandingly; Homes began to dread her calls. She met her father, Norman Hecht, a country-club suburban type who was still married to his wife and whose other children knew nothing of that unwanted baby. He agreed to a DNA test (positive) and filled Homes in on the names in his own background. They made occasional contact – she could call him on his car phone, he told her, because his wife was not usually with him when he was driving. The years passed and Ellen died; Homes made a trip to her melancholy apartment, with its hoards of lipsticks

A FAMILY AFFAIR T HE M ISTRESS ’ S DAUGHTER : A M EMOIR ★

By A M Homes (Granta Books 256pp £12.99)

A M HOMES, NOVELIST AND New Yorker, was in her thirties when her adoptive mother received a telephone call from a lawyer saying that Homes’s biological mother wanted to get in touch with her. In 1961, Ellen Bellman, a young shop assistant having an affair with her married boss, had given up her newborn daughter for adoption; an agency for finding Jewish adopters found the baby a home with a family who had, six months before, lost their nine-year-old son. Now Ellen, still unmarried and living a cranky, lonely and financially precarious life, wrote Homes a letter in which she set out the story of that first, sad affair, and described herself to her daughter in the terms of one tentatively offering the gift of her genetic inheritance: ‘Damp weather is not for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other

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and knick-knacks, and photographed every corner of it, taking away some boxes of papers and scraps which she stacked in her own home in New York. Seven years later, she opened them up, sifted through these sad remains of her mother’s life, and began an obsessive search for her own lineage. She became an addict of Internet genealogy, an ‘electronic anthropologist’ tracking down marriage certificates and divorce records. When she discovered that, on her father’s side, she had the right to be a Daughter of the Revolution, she applied to him for a copy of that DNA test. But he stonewalled her and continues to do so to this day. And this in a sense is both the end and the beginning of this curious, sometimes gripping, beautifully written book. It begins with Homes’s anger at her mother – ‘I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unloveable’ – and it ends in a tirade against Norman Hecht, put in an imaginary dock to explain himself: ‘Are you proud of your daughter, Mr Hecht? Have you read her work? Did you ask your daughter to meet you in hotels? Why not coffee shops? What is the nature of your thoughts about your daughter?’ Well, almost ends: the coda consists of the birth of Homes’s own daughter and the death of her beloved, much-admired adoptive grandmother – both of

P

R I Z E Sponsored by HarperPress

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which events, she acknowledges, put her own search for herself into perspective. Homes writes so well, has such an acute eye and ear for pathos, that the undertow of mercilessness in this book is disturbing. There are too many unanswered questions and there is too little critical distance. When, for example, she tells us that Norman has refused to speak to her, she does not tell us until much later that she had earlier written a piece in the New Yorker about Ellen and Norman of which he had known nothing until he got a call from the magazine’s fact-checkers. For someone so ruthlessly keen-eyed about other people, Homes often betrays a startling lack of self-awareness. For most parents who had long ago been forced to give up their children, it would be discombobulating to discover that that child had become an acclaimed novelist. Imagine then how it would feel to find yourself written into a book, your awkward, inarticulate letters laid bare and the sad snatches of your life picked over as part of your child’s own quest for identity. This book makes abundantly, terrifyingly, clear how important it is for people to know where they come from, what root-stock has fed them; but if you are looking for a lost parent or child, you should hope that they won’t turn out to be a writer. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18

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HarperPress have generously agreed to sponsor the prizes for this month’s crossword. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles received by noon on 15 May 2007. Each will receive a copy of the long-awaited William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, by William Hague, published by HarperPress. The winners of our March competition are Roy Bland of Cornwall, Donald Murchie of Ayrshire, Nigel Sutton of London NW3, C J Lyon of Northampton, and D H Lewis of Devizes. Each will receive a copy of RItes of Peace by Adam Zamoyski, published by HarperPress. Solution to the May puzzle: ACROSS: 1 Rowling, 5 Cabin, 8 Ngaio, 9 Amiss, 10 Nonet, 14 Macedon, 16 Rheum, 17 Bacon, 18 Tadpole, 22 Sloop, 25 Drama, 26 Races, 27 Rabbi, 28 Lowdown. DOWN: 1 Ransom, 2 Wear, 3 Iron, 4 Grand National, 5 Chat, 6 Bail, 7 Nash, 11 Aesop, 12 Chaps, 13 Hull, 15 Alas, 19 Edison, 20 Oder, 21 Lamb, 22 Saki, 23 Prow, 24 Echo.

ACROSS 1 Iron man, or woman (6) 4 One could not choose a subject for Gay’s opera? (6) 9 Composer frequently listening to another (9) 10 Street urchin makes profit pocketing large amount (5) 11 Presently denoting authorship unknown (4) 12 Lowest point of drain perhaps (5) 14 Rider turning out with less liquid (5) 15 Stylish ball attended by Marx (5) 17 Imitating a short ringing sound (5) 19 Iota found in first half of the alphabet? (4) 21 Gold part of bridle seen on circuit (5) 23 Song with snare backing ministerial address? (6,3) 24 Fish doctor consumed on treeless plain (6) 25 Bird’s large quarry (6) DOWN 1 Try to take pastry dish around with drink container (6) 2 Imam set out to cause injury (4) 3 Painter seen on a road with sign providing cover (8) 5 Stake raised by one likely to erupt? (4) 6 Vandalism identified as American on the big screen? (8) 7 Try again smuggling ambassador into the back (6) 8 A metrical unit in the air (5) 13 Large number turning up with an employee in milking establishment (8) 14 Suit forever seen in Fleming’s work? (8) 15 Small seal, we hear, or a young bird (6) 16 Missouri, say (5) 18 Guns provided by Fitzgerald’s hero (6) 20 Tragic king who wrote nonsense? (4) 22 Coffin stand in cowshed reportedly (4)

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FICTION I

(later Carl), whose eloquent, candid confessions captivate her. She arranges a meeting, and – despite his age and a face twice described as penis-shaped – starts sleeping with him; but meanwhile she has passed on phrases from his zany monologues to Bedwin, without indicating their origin, to complete Lethem: dashing unfinished songs and inspire new ones. One of the names they eventually adopt, ‘Monster Eyes’, comes from a song unwittingly derived from Carl. Having doubled their repertoire, the band go down a storm at a party held by Jules, a pretentious friend of Falmouth’s. A celebrated veteran DJ, Fancher Autumnbreast, is there and invites them to go on his show. Carl, though, also attends the party gig, recognises his formative role, and asks to join as keyboard player. When the original band members turn up for Autumnbreast’s show, their hopes are wrecked by the horn-locking of their two eccentric would-be patrons: the gnomic radio host and their inconveniently garrulous new recruit. Technically accomplished and stylistically dashing, Lethem is always a joy to read. And never before has he aimed so simply to please. The disastrous radio gig is the novel’s brilliant comic centrepiece, but it’s preceded by plenty of other scenes almost as strong, ranging from Jules’s ridiculous ‘A-party’ (where guests dance to their own iPods) to Lucinda and Denise’s discovery that a depressed kangaroo is living in Matthew’s bathroom. Alongside straightforward humour such as this, sly games are being played, mostly involving self-mockery. Lethem evinced a penchant for kangaroos in an early novel, and has recalled in an essay being as movie-fixated as Bedwin. In the case of Carl, the self-parody works on more than one level: as a middle-aged man hanging out with youngsters (presumably how the 43-year-old writer gathered material), in his initial role as someone making lengthy, verbally inventive complaints about life to an invisible stranger (isn’t that what novelists do?), and in his relationship with the band. Carl is a fantasy version of Lethem, in that the novelist openly hopes to inspire rock musicians, as other writers have without intending to. But he’s like Lucinda in knowingly feeding off someone else’s words: Pynchon’s LA novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the prime candidate, featuring as it does an adorable heroine, a rock band, a DJ with a daft name, and an elaborate comic sex scene. He may also be like the band’s songwriter Bedwin, unconsciously ‘sampling’. It would be mistaken, however, to extract from this a serious exploration of creativity and originality. You Don’t Love Me Yet is a slight, diverting comedy, and some readers will find it insubstantial. Clearly aware that that’s likely, Lethem ends with a last line that is a wry plea for the merits of lightness (‘you can’t be deep without a surface,’

J OHN D UGDALE

LA STORY YOU D ON ’ T L OVE M E Y ET ★

By Jonathan Lethem (Faber & Faber 224pp £10.99)

F AMOUSLY, MOST OF the defining novels about California have not been produced by Californians. The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Big Sleep, The Loved One, The Crying of Lot 49, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tales of the City – all written by authors for whom the West Coast was the exotic antithesis of the (East Coast, Midwestern, European) worlds that for them represented normality. Jonathan Lethem grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and so belongs to this tradition of outsider observers. In fact he lived in California in the Eighties and Nineties, and much of the heavily sci-fi-influenced fiction he wrote before the New York-based novels for which he is best known, the dazzling Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and the over-ambitious The Fortress of Solitude (2003), is set there; his new, seventh novel, about part-time rock musicians in Los Angeles, is hence a reprise in which he returns to the same territory but as a different kind of writer. It’s no accident that Gertrude Stein’s much-quoted remark about Oakland, ‘there is no there there’, is usually assumed to be about California as a whole. Novelists have often exploited this blank canvas to impose their own vision. Lethem, however, leaves the canvas blank, making no attempt at a definition of his own. The phenomena that dominate earlier literary and cinematic representations of Los Angeles – Hollywood, murder, the LAPD, gangs, freeways, smog, Silicon Valley, media overload, Latinos – are simply absent in a clearing-away of clichés. LA in You Don’t Love Me Yet is above all strangely empty (the opening depicts downtown in mid-afternoon as a ‘canyon of vacated plazas’) and devoid of menace or madness. True, there is a pervasive nuttiness, but it’s innocuous and is never ascribed to interracial tension, living in a centreless city or being at a continent’s edge. The novel’s likeable protagonist, Lucinda, is the bass player in an unnamed, recently formed band whose other members are her ex-boyfriend Matthew, weird, film-obsessed Bedwin, and sensible Denise. All except the reclusive Bedwin have day-jobs. Denise works in a sex shop. Matthew is a zoo vet, but has just quit. Lucinda is employed in an art gallery by another ex-boyfriend, Falmouth. Her role there, as part of a peculiar conceptual project, is to listen to callers responding to ads inviting them to complain about anything they choose. Through this she meets an older man initially known as ‘the Complainer’

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says Lucinda, on being told she’s ‘superficial’). He tried to make us love him with The Fortress of Solitude, but got rebuffed for lacking the weightiness needed for a Great

American Novel. So, bouncing back, he’s content for the moment for us just to be amused by him. To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 18

H UGH C ECIL

which the Battle of Sudden Flame has reduced a once fair and green countryside. While recovering from recurrent trench fever, he started work on the first of many versions of Túrin’s sorrowful life, the violent and vengeful spirit of which partly reflects those hate-filled years. Inspiration of course came from numerous other sources. As Tolkien himself pointed out, Túrin’s story mirrors in many respects that of the mixed-up young wizardhero Kullervo in the Finnish Kallevala, who, following a miserable childhood, seduces a girl (unaware she is his sister), butchers his uncle’s family and eventually falls on his own sword after consulting it on whether it would like to shed his blood. However the spirit of The Children of Húrin seems very different. Reflecting Tolkien’s refined, latenineteenth-century English upbringing, it lacks the colourful earthiness of Finnish folk-legend, where sex and drinking-bouts are treated much more as parts of daily life. It is a moot point whether illustrations are desirable in a work of this kind. With its scenes of brutality, cursing, incestuous marriage and suicide, The Children of Húrin is not a children’s book. The shadowy half-tone decorations to its text do indeed capture something of its grim spirit and are greatly preferable to the book’s dramatic full-page colour pictures, which interfere with the reader’s imagination; but really the only illustrations that have enhanced Tolkien’s books have been his own drawings and designs, as in The Hobbit and on the original cover of The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps H J Ford, the inspired illustrator of many of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, with his magnificently evil sorcerers, demons and trolls, and his enchanting princesses, might have done justice to Tolkien’s prose; but he, alas, is long gone. There is still a school of criticism which refuses to take Tolkien’s work seriously as literature and condemns it as escapist, mere childish ‘fantasy’. But his extraordinary popular success, against the odds, arises not just from a desire to escape into a make-believe world. It rests in his power to awake in us a sense of our links with our own remote past and of the vital myths that underlie our existence, which go back thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of years and from which – we are only too aware – the cataclysmic changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have alienated us. More than any other author of ‘imaginative fiction’, J R R Tolkien has created a world convincingly based on a structure of past myth, because his preoccupation has been with language, the thread that connects us with unbelievably ancient times. His folklore is his own, but it embodies an imaginative vision of folk mythology – especially Northern European folk mythology – which the reader immediately recognises. To order this book at £12.79, see LR Bookshop on page 18

A MYTH REBORN T HE C HILDREN

OF

H URIN

By J R R Tolkien (Edited by Christopher Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee) (HarperCollins 320pp £18.99)

THE APPEARANCE OF a new work by J R R Tolkien is a major literary event. It is true that the same dark story, of the ill-starred Túrin Turambar, has appeared before, in different fragments, as part of the corpus of Tolkien’s posthumously published writings, edited by his son Christopher over the past thirty years; but this does not diminish the significance of the new book, which offers, to a larger readership, a free-standing and uninterrupted narrative, pruned of footnotes and commentaries. Christopher Tolkien rightly believes that many enthusiasts of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, deterred by the plethora of scholarly textual editions in recent years, have missed out on work at the heart of his father’s imagination. By reinstating passages excised from earlier published versions, by the (minimal) addition of linking sentences and by limiting commentary to brief introductions and appendices, he has achieved a book likely to be more popular than any of his father’s other posthumous works – at least until the story of Beren and Lúthien, of similar length and vintage, receives the same treatment. The Children of Húrin opens slowly but soon develops into a compelling tale of doom and tragic climax, with an eerie dreamlike beauty. Though lacking the three-dimensional characters and vivid descriptions of scenery and nature which are the strength of the Hobbit books, it is nonetheless powerful and intense. Tolkien was a true poet, more successfully so in his prose than in his verse, which seldom achieved its intended effect. Here, one can see his written style at an early stage, with cadences echoing, most frequently, the Bible, as well as nineteenth-century translations of Norse sagas and Celtic legends. The Túrin story was among his first works. Twenty years would pass before his most memorable characters, Gandalf, Gollum and the Hobbits, made their appearance. The First World War, during which he lost some of his closest friends, was profoundly important in forming his spiritual landscape. As an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers he saw action during the Battle of the Somme, which left him with a vision of desolation that recurs in his works – in this book it appears as Anfauglith, the plain of ‘gasping dust’ to

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the background; it is just before midnight when she encounters Takahashi, a student like her, who needs food to fuel his allnight jazz practice in a room near by. He plays the trombone, like Tony Takitani’s father in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, eats chicken salad (not a strand of spaghetti to be seen Murakami: disquieting in this book), and once went on a sort-of date with Mari and her sister, the enigmatic but emotionally troubled, Snow White-like Eri. They talk, he leaves promising to return later in the night, and shortly afterwards Kaoru, a friend of Takahashi’s and a former female wrestler turned love-hotel manager, bursts in on Mari to plead urgently for her help. She explains that a Chinese prostitute has been beaten up at her hotel, and that she needs Mari’s Chinese-language skills to get to the bottom of what happened. Mari moves from restaurant to love hotel to park bench to bar and back again in a series of conversations. So far, so real. Intercut with the night-time tales and dialogue, however, is a surreal, voyeuristic vision of Eri deeply asleep in bed, soon seeming to pass into another dimension (possibly through the screen of an unplugged television) into a room which might be the office of the prostitute-assaulting computer nerd Shirakawa and which is now empty and locked up. Before this takes place Eri seems to be watched by a man we can see on the television who has neither a face nor a name. This surreal thread is oddly affecting and leaves one speculating on who stands for what. Is Eri Japan’s beautiful traditional culture, now asleep? Is the man with no face representative of a bland, corporate, personality-challenged drone in a mad modern society cut off from its roots? Is muscle-bound Shirakawa, who inexplicably beat the Chinese prostitute, a personification of Murakami’s belief that Japanese culture is rooted in violence? As with Murakami’s most successful fiction, After Dark is both oddly cosy and deeply disquieting. It is easy to read, you feel you know the main characters within seconds of first encountering them, and it is stylishly written, tending to express profound points simply – possibly leaving the book open to the criticisms that Murakami is stating the obvious or is mired in banality, although neither is true. Jay Rubin’s translation is excellent, the only flaw being his attempt to render zokugo, or Japanese slang, into an English idiom of truncated words and zippy chat. The issues raised in After Dark are serious and invite careful reflection: the unbridgeable distance between individuals and the thirst for intimacy in large cities; the function of memory and the dangers of forgetting; the relationship of thought and action; that your life is more precarious than you ever imagine. It is a book to read

C HRISTOPHER R OSS

THE BIG SLEEP A FTER DARK ★

By Haruki Murakami (Translated by Jay Rubin) (Harvill Secker 201pp £14.99)

Yukio Mishima lived in a Spanish baroque house that he designed himself and stuffed with European antiques. A visiting French TV documentary crew asked him, inevitably, where all the Japanese art was and why he lived like a Westerner. He replied, ‘here only what you cannot see is Japanese’. Haruki Murakami now occupies the position formerly taken by Mishima as Japan’s most translated writer and its best-selling novelist, but in one important sense does not resemble Mishima: his novels and stories, although nominally set in Japan, could take place anywhere – or possibly nowhere. Any large alienating city will do as a canvas on which to play games with apparently ordinary protagonists and their reality-blurring, extraordinary adventures: and only what you cannot see is Japanese. For Murakami, like Mishima, has only one topic – his own alienation from the land of his birth. It echoes throughout the endlessly repeating themes of his writing. Alienation, identity crisis, and loss of meaning are so widespread in the postmodern flux of contemporary life that by considering these subjects Murakami reaches around the world. If Mishima was desperately trying to hold on to the past, Murakami ignores it, other than acknowledging recent history as a trauma you can’t do anything about – like a once lost child who can never recover from the terror of abandonment, but must simply learn to live with it. Murakami’s assessment of contemporary Japan is bleak, a hollowed-out ghostscape where no one connects or can work out what is real and what to feel. In After Dark, the latest Murakami novel – or perhaps novella or even long short story – to be translated into English, the action (although not that much happens, and what does take place is just a frame for a number of searching conversations) is set between 11.56pm and 6.52am one night, somewhere in an area of Tokyo replete with 24/7 eateries and love hotels. Over a time frame of just under seven hours we learn a number of interlocking stories turning around a bookish, sensitive nineteen-year-old student of Chinese called Mari Asai and her inability to sleep – and her beautiful elder sister Eri’s inability to wake up. Mari sits reading in a branch of Denny’s, ‘Go Away Little Girl’ by Percy Faith and His Orchestra playing in

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closely and would have you re-read it to unlock its secrets. Despite the boy-(probably)-gets-girl ending, the coming of dawn heralds a pessimistic realism: ‘The night has begun to open up at last. There will be time until the next darkness arrives.’ I read this book when it was first published in Japanese in 2004 and since that time

J OHN

DE

Murakami, like Mishima before him, has become politically more and more outspoken. With the political shift to the right, following the appointment of Shinzo Abe as Prime Minister, Murakami reasonably fears for the future, sensing a risk of the next darkness descending. To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18 her through his friend Howard, a viola teacher who tells him that he has a new pupil, a five-year-old prodigy from Estonia called Jaan. It soon transpires that Jaan’s mother is Kaja, who has brought him to London to meet his father. The situation unsettles Jack. He would like to see his son and support Kaja financially, but even though she might still love him he doesn’t want to resume their affair. For while Milly might conceivably Thorpe: sensitive forgive him for his affair six years ago, he knows that Jaan’s existence would be unbearable to her. Every aspect of this tale is described with startling technical virtuosity and sensitivity, but it is fundamentally ordinary. Jack is complacent, lazy, foolish; the life he and Milly lead in Hampstead is far from heroic and Thorpe satirises it mercilessly. The spectacle of Jack sliding into chaos would be excruciating in the hands of a less able writer. But Thorpe makes it thrilling because he imagines every step of the slide with Dickensian care and animates each one with vivid personal detail. Milly’s richly portrayed kindness to others, and her conversational and sexual intimacy with Jack, generate enough sense of her integrity to make the reader sympathise acutely with her, in spite of all the Hampstead flim-flam. But the most strikingly imagined details concern Jack’s music. It is fitting that Thorpe should write a novel with a composer as the main character because, as he demonstrated in his first novel, Ulverton, and in each of his subsequent books, he has a supremely good ear. Between Each Breath is shot through with what Jack hears: whether it’s the neighbour’s strimmer driving him mad, or his blind mother’s washing line, or the tonalities of a stream, Jack always notices sound, which Thorpe descr ibes with a precision that is comparable to Nabokov’s descriptions of colour. Sound animates Jack, so that when he messes up his personal life and fails to measure up in grimly, humanly predictable ways, his unusualness emerges with a profundity and vitality that make Milly’s and then Kaja’s love for him convincing. Thorpe has not made him heroic, he has made him unique, and this gives a touching quality to the love story at the centre of the novel. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

FALBE

NOT SO ORDINARY B ETWEEN E ACH B REATH ★

By Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape 419pp £16.99)

I LIKED THIS book very much. Quoting from Dombey and Son in his epigraph – ‘“We are dreadfully real, Mr Carker”, said Mrs Skewton; “are we not?”’ – Adam Thorpe announces that he has set out to write a story about the particular intensities of ordinary people. Jack Middleton, a composer, visits Estonia hoping to find inspiration for a piece he has been commissioned to write for the opening of the Millennium Dome. To his astonishment, instead of inspiring music, the freedom he finds there causes him to have an affair with Kaja, a beautiful waitress. Convinced that this is a closed episode, he returns to London and his wife Milly and resumes his usual existence. His own origins are poor: he was a prodigy, born on a housing estate in Hayes, near Heathrow, where his parents still live; his mother is blind. But he married an heiress who now, at last, is expecting their first child. In anticipation of this longed-for event, they move from a large house in Richmond to a larger one beside Hampstead Heath. While the material benefits of his life sometimes disgust Jack, he is too comfortable to want to rebel. His wife’s wealth provides him with the leisure to compose. She is a desirable, kind woman with a robust social conscience. When she miscarries, she is distraught: her grief is persistent and moving, and she channels her energies into numerous projects for saving the planet. Jack often says that he ‘loves her to bits’ and this cliché is revealing because, in Thorpe’s hands, it signifies an unchallenged assumption: Jack hides behind the ready phrase, vaguely aware that his life would be very difficult if it were not true. But as their hopes for a baby fade, it becomes plainer that something is very wrong. It might not matter that his career is flagging if it weren’t that he knows, deep down, that the music he writes is not as good as it could be, and he minds this, and it makes him irritable about many aspects of his life. Into the sultry summer of 2005, just after the London Tube bombings, Kaja reappears. Jack becomes aware of

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sapphism and drink, and died of cancer in her early forties. She is here accorded a skimpy résumé of her life that will leave both new and old readers feeling short-changed. The only heterosexual encounters on offer are between the daughter of Michael’s closest straight chum and the clients whom she services in a brothel called ‘The Lusty Lady’. Divided from them by a Perspex screen, she gives satisfaction by no more than talk and display. Subsequently she details each such encounter in her increasingly popular blog ‘Grrrl [sic] on the Loose’. It may seem odd that a writer whose novels constantly seethe with gay sexual activity should have so many enthusiastic straight readers. The answer to this is, I should guess, a paradoxical one. Precisely because so much of this sexual activity is weird and extreme, it seems to belong not to life as most of us, whether homosexual or heterosexual, know it but to a world of erotic fantasy. As a result, like the brazen innuendoes of our own Graham Norton, it does not disconcert or repel. If Dickens had been a gay writer of talent, rather than a straight one of genius, living in the San Francisco of today, he might well have written the Tales and this novel. In common with Dickens, Maupin first produced the Tales for serialisation. Like him, he can create a host of characters who, though often grotesquely exaggerated, somehow triumphantly overcome the reader’s disbelief. But sadly what Maupin lacks is Dickens’s masterly control of narrative. This book zigzags from one entertaining episode to another, without any sense of a purposeful, planned itinerary. From a gay hotel’s welcome offering of orchids placed not on the dressing or bedside table but floating in the ‘toilet’ bowl, to a telephone nestling at the heart of a funeral wreath as an indication that the dear departed and the bereaved are still in touch, to Michael ‘wanking off with scant satisfaction to a porn video in which all the Texan Rangers have Czechoslovakian accents’, there is a lot to savour in Maupin’s depiction of life in a country with customs and attitudes so piquantly different from our own. There is also a lot to smile at in a confession like ‘I went to orgies as though they were brunches’, a description like ‘He has the watery eye thing, so that the slightest nip in the air can make him leak like a colander’, and a snatch of dialogue like ‘Have you seen my cock ring?’ followed by ‘In the soap dish’. Through all the mockery and the constant recording of disasters and deaths, Maupin maintains a romantic, benevolent, even sentimental attitude to the world. This must, I suspect, be the major reason for an international popularity that has sold more than a million copies of his previous books and will no doubt sell many copies of this one. Unfortunately, old grouch that I am, I found myself becoming increasingly resistant to the Little Miss Sunshine side of an indisputably impressive talent to amuse. To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18

F RANCIS K ING

GRRRL ON THE LOOSE M ICHAEL TOLLIVER L IVES ★

By Armistead Maupin (Doubleday 282pp £17.99)

THE LAST OF the six volumes of Armistead Maupin’s hugely successful Tales of the City appeared in 1989. Now he has produced what is, he insists, not an addition but a pendant to it. To allay any possible disappointment, the jacket declares that ‘a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way’. But these faces are more likely to bewilder than reassure anyone either unfamiliar with the series or, after so many years, possessing no more than wisps of recollection of it. Michael Tolliver, protagonist of Tales, once more occupies the central role. Witty, kindly and tolerant, he remains both loveable and believable. Having survived, thanks to the new anti-retroviral drugs, what appeared to be a death-sentence when he was first found to be HIV positive twenty years back, he is healthy enough to continue to work as an upmarket San Francisco gardener and to maintain a hectic social and sexual life – even if his youthful lover, a joiner called Ben, has to inject him with testosterone to ginger him up as a prelude to their love-making. The other major revenant from the series is the transsexual earth mother Anna (formerly Andy). Michael is much closer to her than to his own mother, a fundamentalist who, until she meets and is charmed by Ben, strongly disapproves of her son’s references to ‘my husband’. When Michael is on his way to his real mother’s deathbed, he is deflected by the news that the surrogate one is also dying and so rushes to her instead – needlessly, since the tough old bird yet again survives a near-fatal illness. Michael’s assistant, Joe, is another transsexual, with a stocky physique and a beard. Unfortunately he still also possesses a vagina, which excites his new gay lover. When Joe refuses to allow the lover to use this channel of communication, the relationship reaches a dead end. On a visit to his brother and his family, Michael decides that, because his eight-year-old nephew prefers puppets to baseball, he must be gay. Since almost all the characters in this novel are gay, one accepts this surely premature diagnosis with a resigned shrug. Even Michael’s mother’s black male nurse is gay, with the result that he, Michael and Ben are soon enjoying a toothsome threesome. Before her sex change, Anna/Andy, brought up in her mother’s brothel, produced a daughter. This daughter, having married an impoverished gay English peer so that he could procure his green card, then took up residence in his dilapidated English country mansion, succumbed to

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depiction of the way music can both damage a relationship and deepen it, and there is another pivotal scene at the Royal Court Theatre when it becomes clear that his new love, Sophie, is in thrall to fashion rather than genuine feeling. More of this would have been a bonus because there are problems with Lev for the first half of the novel. So much of him is rooted in his past that he seems nothing more than one long memory about his wife, his daredevil friend Rudi and the Poland he has left behind; what one wants as a reader is to see our world through alien eyes. He encounters odd people – like a fashionable hatter who makes miniature top-hats for celebrities – and becomes friendly with his drunken Irish landlord from whom he rents a child’s room, and with Ruby, a rich old lady. Lev’s love for English Sophie destroys his ‘beautiful life’ of friendship and possibilities in London, and he ends up picking asparagus in Suffolk with other immigrants. It is in this last part that the novel really takes off. Back home, his village is scheduled to be flooded by a new dam, and despair almost overwhelms him. Yet, like the Chinese vegetable-seller in The Colour, his life comes good when he least expects it. He has a Big Idea (which readers will spot a mile off) and then he has some Big Luck too. It is Rose Tremain’s ability to pluck triumph from disaster which makes her such an engaging writer, if also a little too consolatory in The Road Home. Lev’s story is all too common, but what is uncommon is the way Tremain, away from the fairytale tropes she is drawn to, makes us understand him. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

A MANDA C RAIG

POLES APART T HE ROAD H OME ★

By Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus 320pp £16.99)

IT IS STRANGE to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and most recently The Colour, she has acquired a lustrous Establishment sheen as the respectable face of historical fiction. Yet just as impressive, and interesting, are the fictions set in modern times. Tremain has explored the minds of batty old Marxists, property developers in France, transsexuals in America and a teenaged boy in love with a very much older woman. It is these works that have pushed her to develop most, although they are probably less commercially successful. Lev, in The Road Home, is not therefore such a big change of direction, though he embodies what is surely one of the pressing problems of our time. Marina Lewycka has written two splendidly funny novels about immigrants. The story of the Eastern Europeans has overtaken that of Jews, Hindus, Muslims and AfroCaribbeans as the latest arrivals on our shores. We first meet Lev on the bus journey from Poland to London, when he gets talking to Lydia, a pleasant, plain, well-educated translator who shares her boiled eggs with him. Lev is a widower, his beloved wife Marina having died. He has left a daughter behind, having no option, once the mill where he worked closed, but to come to Europe. He knows almost nothing about Britain, though he has a little English, some useful advice from his classes, and the idea that all English people are like those in The Bridge On the River Kwai. Lev is a good man. Everybody likes him, even the bullying restaurateur G K Ashe (who seems to be modelled on Gordon Ramsay) for whom he works as washer-up, then sous-chef. Lev learns how to cook – skills that come in useful when he helps sexy Sophie on Christmas Day in an old people’s home. Distinguished by his good looks and honest heart, Lev has problems because both Lydia and Sophie fancy him, and the novel is partly about which woman he is going to choose. Poor, intellectual, speckled Lydia (cruelly nicknamed ‘Muesli’ by the children in Highgate whom she au pairs) gives Lev a copy of Hamlet and invites him to hear one of Rostropovich’s last concerts. To Lev’s horror his newly acquired mobile goes off, just as the conductor is about to start the final movement, and he flees in mortification. It is a wonderful moment, typically Tremainian in its

The British Academy Spring Lectures 2007 Br itish Academy lectures are free and open to the general public and ever yone is welcome. The lectures take place at 10 Carlton House Ter race, London SW1 and beg in at 5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm.

5.30pm, Thursday 31 May 2007 Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Culture Artists and Craftsmen in the Late Bronze Age of China (eighth third centur ies B.C.): Art in Transition Professor Alain Thote, École Pratique Des Hautes Études, Par is

Further infor mation and abstracts are available at www.br itac.ac.uk/events/2007 The Br itish Academ Tel: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228 Email: lectures@br itac.ac.uk

Email: [emailprotected]

31 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

FICTION I

HISTORY

P HILIP W OMACK

C HRISTOPHER C OKER

STREETS AHEAD

TIPPING POINTS

BARNABY GRIMES: CURSE OF THE NIGHT WOLF

FATEFUL C HOICES : T EN D ECISIONS THAT C HANGED THE WORLD, 1940–1941

By Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

(Doubleday 211pp £8.99)

By Ian Kershaw (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 623pp £30)

IN THE SMOKY, tumbledown north of a sprawling city, where governesses duel with umbrellas and the gap between poor and rich is vast, lives a young lad called Barnaby Grimes. Dapper, self-assured, and handy with a sword-stick, he races around the roofs of the city – ‘highstacking’, as it is called – running errands as a ‘tick-tock’ lad. He is messenger, courier, assistant and researcher, always ahead of the clock. He knows the quickest routes across town, which puts him (literally) streets ahead of the rest. If only London produced such ‘clerks errant’… Barnaby narrates the story with a winning and cheeky charm – he has an eye for pretty shop assistants, and has a genuine concern for his fellow man: he loves his city, from the gleaming spires of the financial district to the brawl-filled gloaming of ‘the Wasps’ Nest’, and would do anything to protect it. The ‘terrible dark evil’ of this story begins with the ‘seemingly innocent fashion for fur collars and cuffs, known as the Westphalian trim’. On the same night that his friend Old Benjamin the coachman disappears, Barnaby is attacked by a vicious ‘night wolf ’. He survives, barely, and kills the wolf, and is led to a certain Doctor Cadwallader, a man ‘as cool and collected as a fishmonger’s cat’. Cadwallader is engaged in what seems like an altruistic exercise: giving the poor and needy a tonic that cures them of their ailments – but, as Barnaby soon finds out, it has much more serious side effects, not so much philanthropic as lycanthropic. He is thrown into a desperate race, where he needs all his skills to survive. The writing is enlivened by Chris Riddell’s spindly, spidery illustrations, which show in lustrous detail the nightwolves’ fur, or depict in diagrammatical form a particularly inventive jump that Grimes performs down a chimney. One shows two ‘river-toughs’ with ‘intricate chin tattoos’ emerging menacingly from a run-down sail yard, wearing cravats and embroidered waistcoats: they capture perfectly the eccentric, ebullient nature of the book, with the gleam of menace in their eyes hinting at darker terrors. This is the first of the Barnaby Grimes adventures, and our young hero casually drops hints to others, involving temple demons, a mine-owner’s daughter and bluefaced baboons, promising more quirky, riotous escapades for this engaging young man. Quite graphic in its violence, this one will be relished by boys of nine and up. To order this book at £7.19, see LR Bookshop on page 18

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

GIVEN THE ENDLESS stream of books on the Second World War that appear on the bookshelves every year, I must confess that I think it might be time for historians to call an armistice. Indeed the story is so familiar that I must confess also to a sneaking sympathy for Don DeLillo’s Morehouse Professor of Latent History, a wonderful, if bizarre, character who appears in DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street. It is axiomatic, the Professor reminds his readers, that history is the record of events. ‘But what of Latent History? We all think we know what happened. But did it really happen? Or did something else happen?’ DeLillo’s professor studies events that almost took place, events that definitely took place but went unseen, as well as events that probably took place but were not chronicled at the time. Like many of the author’s characters the Morehouse Professor is a marvellous creation of the postmodern sensibility, especially our fascination with counterfactual history. Ian Kershaw is not a postmodern writer. His book, he tells us from the beginning, is not counterfactual or Virtual History, of the type which makes an intellectual guessing game of some distant future and projects what might have happened had some event not taken place. Kershaw is one of our most distinguished contemporary historians, with a much-praised two-volume biography of Hitler to his name. And the stories he tells (there are ten in all) relay the critical decisions of the Second World War taken by its principal actors. They are all decisions which determined the shape of the second half of the century, and whose influence can still be seen in the landscape of the world in which we live. In many respects Kershaw tells a familiar story, but he is eager to stress that 1940–1 really was the fulcrum of world history. Despite the odds against them, the Axis powers could have won the war, and almost did. History viewed ‘from the front’ rather than ‘from the back’, he insists, sometimes reveals surprises. There is nothing that is really surprising in this book, but that in no way detracts from its overall merits. For a start, the story bears retelling. As the twentieth century drew to a close it became even more evident that the Second World War was the defining moment, both in Europe and in Asia. National bankruptcy and resurgent anti-colonialism put paid to Great Britain’s world empire.

HISTORY

The war lifted the United States out of the Great Depression and launched it on the road to becoming a superpower (something that had been in the offing as early as the 1880s). If ever a country was reluctant to mobilise its resources in pursuit of power, the United States was it. It was only towards the end of the war that Henry Luce, the founding editor of Time, coined the phrase ‘The American Century’. The war also gave rise to the Cold War and that brief moment in which Soviet Communism commanded the moral high ground in the eyes of many people. Looking back from our vantage point, perhaps the most important outcome of all was the rise of China. Mao’s republic was a prime legatee of the demise of Japan as a Great Power. Finally, the Second World War left humanity with a new and horrible word – genocide. The last of the decisions Kershaw looks at is the most horrendous of all: the one to press ahead with the Final Solution. Of all the fateful decisions he considers, that to kill the Jews is the one he feels was the most inevitable. If the invasion of the Soviet Union had proceeded as the German leadership hoped, the Final Solution would not have taken its particular form. The killing fields, in all probability, would have mainly been in the Soviet Union, not Poland. But as long as the Nazi regime was in power and engaged in the war, the Jews would have perished in one way or another. Only the method and timing would have differed. The chapters that form the bulk of the book are a model of scholarship. Kershaw captures the three days when the British Cabinet seriously debated the possibility of a negotiated peace with Berlin (a very different story from the account given by Churchill in his memoirs, who told his readers that the supreme question of whether to fight on had never found a place on the Cabinet agenda). The story, of course, is now well known, and is captured especially vividly in John Lukas’s Five Days in May (Yale University Press, 1999). Britain’s defiance forced Hitler to invade Russia. Kershaw is particularly good at reminding us that in the real world, rather than the counterfactual world of fantasy and imagination, no other choice was possible in 1940. Hitler’s only option was to gamble further, to take, as always, the bold, forward move, one that would sweep over the Russians ‘like a hailstorm’ and make the world ‘hold its breath’. It was madness, for there was little chance of success. Even the blitzkrieg of the early months of the invasion cost the Wehrmacht 830,000 casualties – more than Germany had incurred in the battles of Verdun and the Somme combined, although the size of the killing ground and the glamour of visit Literary the manoeuvres still persuade some of us that it was the German army’s ‘finest hour’. By then, Japan had made its own

gamble, which, as Kershaw reminds us, also looks inevitable from a historian’s perspective. Japan was not a world power and didn’t think in geopolitical terms. It would have been wiser, perhaps, in the circumstances, to have waited until the very end of December 1941 to see whether the German army would take Moscow or not. But the war was foreshadowed long before then. Better relations with the United States would have meant capitulating over China. In the eyes of the country’s leaders this would have entailed a colossal loss of prestige, with incalculable internal consequences, as well as leaving the country even more dependent on the United States for its long-term future. America’s entry into the war was also inevitable long before Pearl Harbor. At no time did Roosevelt ever consider taking the country to war. Just as Wilson had promised the Democratic Convention in 1916 that the United States was ‘too proud to fight’, so Roosevelt had assured the American people in Boston in October 1940, during his own re-election campaign, that he would never send Amer ican troops to fight in a European war. But by supporting the United Kingdom as far as he could and toughing it out with Japan he forced both Axis powers into a strategic endgame. By early 1941 Germany and Japan faced the prospect that if they didn’t end the war soon and on their own terms their tactical successes, impressive though they were, would merely end in strategic ruin. The United States was essentially at war with both powers long before most Amer ican troops were sent into battle. As Roosevelt told the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, ‘declarations of war were going out of fashion’. In a sense, Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor can be seen as neither grandiloquent nor puzzling. From his perspective he was only anticipating the inevitable. All the same, Kershaw adds, it’s possible that he knew that with the German army stalled in front of Moscow, the war was lost, or at the very least that the prospect of total victory was beyond his grasp. It was a momentary flickering but a significant one, and it was revealed in a remark (a point he was to return to in the face of catastrophe in the last months of his life) that if in the end the German people should not prove strong enough then they deserved to go under. And so it transpired. When the terrible war was over both Germany and Japan found themselves more dependent economically upon the United States than had been foreseeable when the conflict broke out. Both were deprived of their Great Power status. Europe Review online was left in ruins. Fortunately endings are also beginnings. To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 18

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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

HISTORY

they would be stopped by the fortifications of the Maginot Line. An Allied attack was planned for 1941 or 1942. All this looked good on paper, and was reassuring for the civilian population. ‘Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes plus forts.’ But the unexpected German F LEEING H ITLER : F RANCE 1940 attack through the Ardennes and the rapidity of their ★ advance caught everyone by surprise, and the civilian population fled. Panic is contagious, and soon the roads By Hanna Diamond were full of families in flight. Something like three(Oxford University Press 253pp £16.99) quarters of Parisians left the city. It seemed like the collapse of a civilisation. Diamond quotes one Parisian WARS DISPLACE PEOPLE. The ‘exodus’ – the flight south writer, Camille Bourniquel, as saying it was as if the in May and June 1940 of a good part of the population Middle Ages had been reinvented. The mayor of one of northern France, including Paris – was remarkable. village in the north urged people to flee saying ‘it’s But it was not unique. Less than five years later there going to be like what it was in 1914, they rape the would be a comparable exodus in eastern Europe, as women and they cut the young girls’ hands off ’. No Germans – many belonging to families settled for generwonder morale cracked. No wonder they fled. No wonations in the Baltic States, Poland, and the territories der there was utter confusion, a situation which also that were once part of the Habsburg empire – fled hampered the efforts of the army to bring up reinforcebefore the conquering Red Army. When the Hitler war ments and organise a new defensive line. ended there were millions of unfortunates officially The Government and the ministries also abandoned labelled DPs – Displaced Persons (refugees, as we would the capital. There were now say) – to be resetprecedents: in 1870 tled. Those old enough and 1914 the to remember newsreels Government had been of the Korean War will transfer red to recall pictures of South Bordeaux. They headKorean peasants and the ed that way again, citizens of Seoul in flight though for a couple of from the Communist weeks the various minarmies of North Korea isters were housed in and China. This should various chateaux of the be remembered. The Loire – which added to French exodus in 1940 the chaos and the sense was not exceptional. that all was lost. There Hanna Diamond, a had been government Senior Lecturer in plans for an orderly French History at the evacuation of civilians, University of Bath, tells Exodus but the suddenness of the stor y vividly and the German breakthrough made it impossible to impleeven-handedly. Panic unquestionably set in. It was all ment these. It was a matter of each for himself or herself the greater because for seven months after war was or their family. Many families were separated. In some declared in September 1939, nothing happened in the cases, ‘mothers, exhausted by carrying children or strugWest. This was what we called the Phoney War and the gling to keep up, welcomed the offer of a lift for the French ‘le drôle de guerre’. It was possible to believe children from an unknown quarter and subsequently that nothing would happen, that it would all be could not track them down’. To make matters worse, arranged. Certainly there were politicians in office in the Germans – for good military reasons – ‘set about an both France and the United Kingdom who hoped and extensive bombing campaign and gunned down the even supposed this might be possible. So the shock of columns of refugees’. Later some would present the the German attack was all the greater. Moreover, the exodus as the first act of Resistance. ‘Escaping the French government had made great efforts to instil a enemy became a duty’ depriving the conquerors of mood of confidence. Why not? They were confident ‘human supplies’ – factory workers. enough themselves. French and British strategists were It is not surprising that for the majority the change of planning for a long war. An economic blockade would government which brought Marshal Pétain to power came sap Germany’s strength (as it had done in 1917–18). as a relief; he was already convinced that the war was lost Meanwhile, if the Germans were rash enough to attack

A LLAN M ASSIE

PANIC IN PARIS

34 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

HISTORY

and committed to an Armistice. It was humiliating. It was the best they could hope for. Very few people heard General de Gaulle’s famous broadcast of 18 June. In any case ‘no propaganda had prepared people for the possible continuation of the battle outside France. To join de Gaulle they were obliged to leave their social or family milieu.’ One young woman remembered that ‘painful discussions divided families. Relieved that their sons had escaped the rounding up of prisoners, parents forbade the slightest gesture of revolt’, which, in the first years of the Occupation, would have been futile anyway. Many also believed that ‘the Germans will go home as soon as they have beaten the English, it’s only a question of months’. This was not an unreasonable expectation.

Hanna Diamond’s account of these terrible months is admirable. It can’t compare with their fictional reconstruction in Irène Némirovsky’s marvellous Suite Française (she disapprovingly remarks that the novel is ‘cur iously lacking in ideology’ – one of its many strengths to my mind). But her own book benefits greatly from the vast number of eyewitness memoirs from which she quotes appositely. There is – she insists – no one simple truthful story of the exodus, just as there is none either of Vichy or the Resistance. She writes with sympathy but also with the detachment proper to a historian, trying to tell it as it was in its confusion, uncertainties and contradictions. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

P IERS B RENDON

fiasco, marked by deception, hypocrisy, myopia and confusion, and ending in humiliating failure’. Hyam is mordant about the quirks as well as the calamities of the dying Empire. He notes that one latterday Governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining, complained of not being able to attract as settlers decent British farmers, only ‘BBC violinists, bar-tenders and hairdressers’. By contrast Twining’s more progressive successor, Sir Richard Turnbull, was a rowing fanatic who taught his beloved parrot to swear roundly before reciting the Lord’s Prayer. As befits the author of that seminal work, Empire and Sexuality (1990), Hyam is especially perceptive about what went on underneath the imperialists. He observes that Europeans could sleep with the natives of Sarawak and the Solomon Islands but not with Indians in Simla or Africans in Salisbury. He takes the view that Ewart ‘Grogs’ Grogan, the first man to walk from the Cape to Cairo, was ‘sexually over-engined’. He quotes the wife of the third White Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, who said that her husband ‘made love just as he played golf – in a nervous unimaginative flurry’. Hyam also recounts how the Daughters of the American Revolution took the British government to task during the 1950s for its failure to prevent a 102year-old king in the Cameroons from keeping a hundred wives. The monarch could not understand the fuss but eventually complied with the United Nations demand to sack his wives – which gave him the opportunity to marry a number of younger women. Somehow, Hyam remarks dr yly, the Daughters of the Amer ican Revolution managed not to catch up with King Sobhuza of Swaziland, who had 120 wives. Using a cricketing metaphor, Hyam says that there are four main explanations for the ending of empire. The British were bowled out, by colonial nationalists and freedom fighters; or they were run out, by overstretching their resources at a time of economic constraint; or they retired hurt as a result of declining morale and a failure of will; or they were booed off the pitch by anti-colonial critics

THE SUN DOES SET B RITAIN ’ S D ECLINING E MPIRE : T HE ROAD TO D ECOLONISATION, 1918–1968 ★

By Ronald Hyam (Cambridge University Press 464pp £17.99)

THIS MAGISTERIAL VOLUME, a sequel to Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914 (1976), is the distillation of a lifetime’s learning and teaching about the British Empire. The earlier work, Ronald Hyam explains, was a kind of ‘user’s handbook’. The present study, based on mountains of documentary evidence, concentrates more specifically on the politics of decolonisation. Such a rigorous scholarly enterprise would have every excuse to be dr y. But as became instantly apparent to his Cambridge pupils (of whom, to declare an interest, I was one), Hyam is entertaining, incisive and sardonic to the point of ribaldry. Witness his verdict on characters who played important parts during the last days of the Empire. Arthur Creech Jones, Labour’s Colonial Secretary, was an ‘uncharismatic blatherer’. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, Governor of Burma, was the aloof embodiment of ‘a certain type of ineffably awful Old Harrovian’. The Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison was ignorant of foreign affairs and unwilling to learn – Hyam endorses Attlee’s view that Morrison was ‘a terrible flop’. He also seems to agree that Anthony Eden was ‘the worst Prime Minister since Lord North’. Hyam is equally acerbic about the disasters that presaged Britain’s imperial demise. He quotes a soldier in the Allied forces at Singapore, which vastly outnumbered the Japanese to whom they surrendered in 1942: ‘Never have so many been fucked about by so few.’ As for the Suez invasion of 1956, it was ‘a counter-productive, catastrophic

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around the world and especially in the summed up in a 1967 Cabinet paper United Nations. which declared that Britain had long Hyam principally favours the fourth been committed to decolonisation and explanation, though he attaches due that its pace was ‘strongly influenced by weight to the others. This appears in his the increasing insistence of world opinluminous opening account of the British ion on the right of peoples to govern Empire, which had been a world-shapthemselves’. At least as early as 1959 it ing force during the Victorian age but had become clear that holding on to was overwhelmed by its responsibilities overseas possessions was more damaging by 1918 and lacked the strength to meet to British prestige than letting them go. new challenges. Hyam examines key Of course, there must be no appeardysfunctional factors: the inadequacy of ance of what Churchill had called ‘scutthe system of indirect rule through local tle’. But a controlled withdrawal, it was ‘chiefs’; the fantasy that Kenya could be hoped, would enable Britain to turn a ‘white man’s country’; the absurdity of imperial liabilities into Commonwealth building a vice-regal palace for a collapsassets, to exchange evanescent power ing Raj; the vacuity of the Anglofor per manent influence. So, with King Sobhuza: much married American special relationship. notable exceptions such as Kenya, Such matters are set in the context of the danger posed Cyprus and Aden, the Br itish Empire underwent by totalitarian aggression throughout most of the twentieuthanasia. Thanks to pragmatic and reactive policies eth century. The fate of the Empire was always less developed in London, it suffered what Hyam calls ‘a important than the survival of the United Kingdom. Thus quiet and easy death’. Chamberlain was willing to appease Hitler by sacrificing His book is so well informed by archival research that colonies and, indeed, by redrawing the whole map of it gives a uniquely clear reflection of Whitehall’s ‘official Africa. Attlee, whose moral and political judgement mind’. This was itself often clouded by confusion; yet to Hyam rightly extols, said that any attempt to maintain the see its ideas translated into practice comes as something old form of colonialism would aid Communists during of a revelation. One can niggle about the nuances. In the Cold War. He opposed a Palmerstonian assault on the unhealthy neo-imperialist climate of today, for Persia in 1951 because ‘we are working under an entirely example, I take a somewhat more jaundiced view of the different code’ determined by the United Nations – a Empire and its liquidation than does Hyam. But he is a code not understood by Tony Blair. consummate historian with a transcendent literary style Macmillan and Harold Wilson, though they someand he has crowned his career with a tour de force. times wobbled, essentially took Attlee’s line. It was To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18 successfully. But twenty years later war and diplomacy had only confirmed their isolation from the Empire: Roman Britannia was mutating into Anglo-Saxon England. It’s from this point that Simon Young’s ‘family saga’ begins. The narrator attends his father’s funeral. There (in accordance with Roman custom) the funeral masks of his ancestors are paraded, and he looks back over twelve generations which have witnessed the rise and decline of ‘Roman Britain’, starting from the first reconnaissance that the Gaulish chieftain Commius conducts on behalf of Julius Caesar (Commius later rebelled, escaped to Britain, and settled as ruler of the Atrebates from the Thames southward to the sea). Two generations later, in AD 43, the Roman army arrives in force, despatched by the Emperor Claudius, a stammering pedant much in need of military glamour. And so (as the Romans saw it) a third-world patch of tall, tattooed, beer-drinking trouser-wearers joins civilisation. King Togidubnus, himself a Roman citizen, proclaims himself, in Latin, ‘Great King of Britain’; Chichester sports a Temple of Neptune and Minerva, and imported craftsmen create mosaic

P ETER P ARSONS

VALETE ROMANI! FAREWELL B RITANNIA : A FAMILY S AGA ROMAN B RITAIN

OF

By Simon Young (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 286pp £16.99)

AD 410, AND the lamps were going out all over Europe. German tribes had finally broken through the Rhine frontier; Alaric and his Goths were about to sack Rome itself, 1,163 years after its foundation. The Roman Emperor Honorius, in his safe retreat among the marshes of Ravenna, had enough to do to guarantee his own safety. When, therefore, the cities of his most northerly province appealed for help against the raiding Saxons, he replied in a letter that his Greek historian summarises in two words: ‘Defend yourselves’. And so, for a time, they did, quite

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floors for a seaside palace at Fishbourne. With time the Roman army advances into Wales and Scotland, undeterred by the rebellion of Boudicca (AD 60/1). The Scottish Highlands defeat them, and in the end (towards AD 200) they pull back to Hadrian’s wall, where they maintain the frontier for two hundred years. Two centuries, by and large, of peace, assimilation and increasing prosperity ensue. All the inhabitants have Roman citizenship. Celtic gods merge with Roman ones in temples built in Celtic style, even as Christianity establishes a foothold. Oxfordshire potters export to France; the studios of Cirencester supply their own style of mosaics for handsome villas. Yet there are external enemies in waiting, and in AD 367, ominously, those enemies combine forces, the Picts from the north and the Scots from Ireland (‘peoples partly different in habits’, wrote Gildas later, ‘but agreeing in one and the same greed for shedding blood, their villainous faces more concealed by hair than their private parts by clothing’) – and, finally and decisively, the Saxons from across the North Sea. The Roman garrison, once a full tenth of the imperial forces, drains away: in 383 and again in 407 an ambitious commander proclaims himself Emperor, and takes his troops across the Channel to fight for the supreme prize. By AD 410 Roman Britain stands empty of Roman authority. Simon Young is an expert in things Celtic and AngloSaxon, who commands the sparse ancient sources and the extensive modern literature with ease and insight. His ‘family saga’ unites real people, or at least real names, in a family which is (except in the first two generations) fictional. The fiction proceeds by vignettes, with an afterword and notes to reveal the facts, historical and archaeological, behind each one. Some picture the major events of local history. Others sketch scenes of peace: dinner at the villa, bathing at Bath, Claudia Severa’s birthday party near Hadrian’s wall, for which we still have the invitation – written on a postcard-sized slice of wood, since papyrus was not to be had out here on the periphery. Enthusiasts of Roman Britain will admire the virtuosity with which Young conjures new life into old bones. Other readers will simply enjoy the infancy of the island race, presented with such verve and immediacy. The past is another country, but it’s one whose realities Young reinvents with a rare combination of scholarship and imagination. The stage fills with figures who now survive only through passing references in literature or chance archaeological finds. We meet Paul, inquisitor to the paranoid Emperor Constantius II, nicknamed ‘the Chain’ from his ability to weave complex webs of calumny; and Silvius Bonus (‘Good Silvius’) the critic, who incautiously attacked the arriviste poet Ausonius of Bordeaux (‘No Brit is a Good Brit’, replied Ausonius). We meet Iamcilla, whose name is engraved on the Christian silverware buried at Water Newton, and Victorinus, who appears as

‘interpreter of dreams’ on a religious mosaic from Lydney, and Lucius Artorius Castus (whom we know from a memorial plaque far away in Croatia), general of cavalry in Britain and thought by some to be the original King Arthur. We see them in the landscape they inhabited, with its wolves and bears, its farms transformed by such Roman imports as apples and plums, carrots and cabbages; and in the society of their time, with its abandoned babies and its secret police, its veteran soldiers whose calloused necks showed twenty years of wearing the chinstrap, its imported slaves whose chalk-whitened feet identified them for customs-duty. Young’s chronicle, a fictional history more than a historical fiction, vividly recreates the four centuries of Roman Britain, a short episode long to be remembered. Rome remained a name to conjure with, and Roman buildings littered the landscape like dinosaur bones. In the AngloSaxon epoch, a poet meditated on the ruins of a Roman bath, ‘works of giants’. Not long after the Norman conquest, William of Malmesbury noted in York the signs of ‘Roman elegance’. Over centuries, we have clawed back some Roman comforts: roads and concrete, piped water and central heating. We still stop short of the common currency. And we are working hard to reform away the most central and continuous of all our links with Britannia, the knowledge of the Latin language. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

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37 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

HISTORY

into the Scots for having betrayed Charles I, and calling Cromwell, who was still a hero to many, ‘the most infamous hypocrite and profligate Atheist of all Usurpers that any age produced’. Significantly, he was not even arrested. Then in December Monck led his half of the army from Coldstream, on the Tweed (giving its name to what became the Coldstream Guards), having trained and instructed them rigorously, but also having carefully consulted with them about their preferences. His first object was to overcome Lambert’s half of the army, which he did without a battle; and then to get rid of the tyrannical Rump, by reinstating the members who had been excluded from it earlier in Pride’s Purge and holding an election in April 1660. All this time he was giving cautious undertakings not to support a return to the Monarchy; while over in Brussels Charles and his mentor Hyde were not at all optimistic about their chances. The ever taciturn Monck was now all-powerful, and ‘paraded through London with four silver trumpets before him, and twenty troopers in black velvet coats’. He was also awarded a gift of £20,000 by Parliament. By the end of March he was able to declare publicly for the King, who had published the Declaration of Breda, drafted for him brilliantly by Hyde. It contained the offer of a general pardon, a ‘desire for a liberty to tender consciences’, and proposals for the ownership of land. Milton, that ardent republican, had made the mistake of publishing a Readie and Easie Way to establish a free Commonwealth, showing that his political gifts were about on a par with those of Michael Foot three centuries later. At the ensuing general election, virtually no republicans were elected. Charles had shrewdly followed Hyde’s advice and waited for an invitation from Parliament, which now included a restored House of Lords. In Macaulay’s words, the legacy of Cromwell’s dictatorship had displayed ‘the restlessness and irresolution of aspiring mediocrity’, not a bad epitaph for Blair’s decaying government today. Parliament’s subsequent invitation was unconditional, and Charles was able to exclaim: ‘I can now say I am a King, not a Doge.’ After his triumphant return (on his thirtieth birthday), Charles remained wary of his subjects’ ‘sudden over-enthusiastic response’, realising that the conversion of many was superficial, and skilfully fending off most of the swarm of petitioners for rewards for real or imaginary services rendered. The author is of course directly descended from the King, and Barbara Villiers. But he has also shown himself a real scholar in his treatment of the many various sources which he lists. From his useful summary of Cromwell’s career at the outset, to his analysis of the complex events of the interregnum, he displays an admirable mastery of the whole story, brief in months but incalculably important for posterity. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18

J OHN J OLLIFFE

A KING, NOT A DOGE R ETURN

OF THE OF

K ING : T HE R ESTORATION C HARLES II ★

By Charles Fitzroy (Sutton Publishing 252pp £20)

Throughout the enforced idleness of his exile, Charles II lived on credit, which became increasingly difficult for him, and harder still for his companions and suppliers, to obtain. All the time, however, he showed a patient determination to regain the throne, rejecting various plans to return to an England which was not yet ready for him. His steadiness prevailed, in spite of his liking for frivolous and dissolute company. His first serious mistress, Lucy Walters, bore him a son whom he later created Duke of Monmouth, but she behaved so scandalously that the King prevented her from bringing him up. The first message of this well-researched book is that it was the disagreements and rivalries between Cromwell’s followers after his death, rather than any success on the part of Charles’s own supporters, that were to bring the monarch back to the throne. The first four-fifths of the book are almost entirely concerned with these disputes among the would-be political and military heirs of the Protector, rather than with Charles himself. It is in them that the Restoration had its roots, and thanks to them that it succeeded. How was the Army to be paid, and kept quiet? Didn’t most Englishmen regard it as the destroyer, rather than the preserver, of liberty? What about the wounded survivors of the Civil Wars, and the 4,000 widows and orphans of those who had fallen? What was to become of the Navy when the Admiralty Commissioners resigned en masse? On the resignation, after a few months, of Richard Cromwell, the heir apparent who came to be known as Tumbledown Dick, the Rump Parliament and the Army formed a so-called Council of State, whose members were much ridiculed in pamphlets. It included a Colonel Thompson, ‘as wooden a head as leg’; Mr Wallop, ‘a silent Hampshire gentleman much in debt’, and the Protector’s brother-in-law Desborough, ‘a country clown without fear or wit’. Throughout the summer of 1659, Charles’s supporters were rightly afraid to make a move for fear of reuniting the Rump and the Army. Piecemeal royalist risings were put down, though without severity. What followed briefly was a ‘Sword Government’ by Lambert’s half of the New Model Army, which included many political and Nonconformist dissidents. In London John Evelyn bravely published An Apology for the Royal Party, pitching

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For five days the sergeant risks but had shown a strange C LAIRE K EEGAN kept the letter in the inside gift for reading the enemy. pocket of his uniform. There The timber spluttered into was something hard in the flame and its light momenletter but his desire to open it tarily struck the steel buttons was matched by his fear of of the sergeant’s tunic. He what it might contain. Her bent over, folded the trouser letters, in recent times, withlegs and secured the bicycle out ever changing course, clips. When he opened the had taken on a different tone and he had heard that door, the wind blew a hard, dappled rain over the flaganother man, a schoolteacher, was grazing a pony on stones. The sergeant went out and stood for a moment, her father’s land. Her father’s fields were on the mounlooking at the day. Always, he liked to stand for a tain. What grazing would be there was poor and daubed moment. When he turned back to Doherty, the guard with rushes. If the sergeant was to do as he had intendfelt sure he could read his mind. ed, there was but little time. Life, he felt, was pushing ‘Don’t scorch the tail of your skirt,’ he said, and went him into a corner. off without bothering to close the door. All that day, he went about his duties. If Doherty, the Doherty got up and watched him cycling down the guard in the dayroom, found him short, he did not pass barracks road. There was something half comical about any remarks, for the length of the sergeant’s fuse was the sergeant and his bike going off down the road but never disputed. It was a wet December day and there the remark lingered. was nothing to be done. Doherty kept his head down It was the easiest thing in the world to humiliate someand went over the minute particulars of the permit once body. He had said this aloud at his wife’s side in bed one again. Turning a page, he felt the paper cold against his night, in the darkness, thinking she was asleep, but she skin. He looked up and stared, with a degree of longing, had answered back, saying it was sometimes harder not to at the hearth. The fire was so low it was almost out. The humiliate someone, that it was a weakness people had a sergeant insisted always on a fire but never a fire that Christian duty to resist. He had stayed awake pondering would throw out any decent heat. The guard rose from the statement long after her breathing changed. What did the desk and went slowly out into the rain. it mean? Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and The sergeant watched him as he came back and posiyet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy tioned two lumps of timber at either side of the flame. thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract ‘Is it cold you are?’ said the sergeant, smiling. a man and frighten him all at once. ‘No more than usual,’ answered Doherty. The barracks was quiet but there was no peace; never ‘Pull up tight to her there, why don’t you?’ was there any peace in this place. Winter was here, with ‘It’s December,’ said the guard, reasonably. the rain belting down and the wind scratching the bare ‘It’s December,’ mimicked the Sergeant. ‘Don’t you hills. Doherty felt the child’s urge to go out for more know there’s a war on?’ timber, to build up the fire and make it blaze but at any ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ moment the sergeant could come back and as little as ‘The people of this country love sitting in at the fire. that could mean the end. His post was nothing more At the rate we’re going, we may go back to Westminster than a fiction and could easily be dissolved. All it would to warm our hands.’ take was the stroke of a pen. He pulled the chair up to Doherty sighed. ‘Should I go out and see what’s hapthe fire and thought of his wife and child. Another was pening on the roads?’ on the way. He thought about his life and little else until ‘You’ll go nowhere.’ he realised his thoughts were unlikely to reach any conThe sergeant stood up and put his cap on. It was a clusion; then he looked at his hands, stretched out to the new cap, stiff, with a shining peak. When he reached flame. What the sergeant wouldn’t say if he came back out for the big black cape at the back of the door, he and saw the firelight on his palms. threw it dramatically over his shoulders. Never once had Down the road, the sergeant had dismounted and was the guard seen him rush. Every move he made was standing still under the yews. The yews were planted in deliberate and enhanced by his good looks. It was hard different times, and it gave him pleasure to stand and not to look at him but he was not, in any case, the type take their shelter. The same dark smoke was still batterof man you’d turn your back on. If his moods often ing down on the barracks roof. He’d stood there for changed, the expression in his eyes was always the same, close to an hour, on watch, but the quality of the smoke intemperate blue. The men who had fought with him hadn’t changed; neither was there any sign of Doherty said they couldn’t ever predict his moves. They said also going back out to the shed. The way you rear your little that his own were always the last to know. He had taken pup, you’ll have your little dog. As soon as the rain

Surrender

(after McGahern)

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eased, he moved out from the patch of sheltered ground and pushed on for town. Further along the road, a couple had stopped and was talking. The youth, a MacManus off the hill, was leaning over the saddle of his bike with his cap pushed well back off his face. The girl was laughing but as soon as she laid eyes on the sergeant, she went still. ‘A fine day it is for doing nothing,’ said the sergeant expansively. ‘Wouldn’t I love to be out in the broad daylight sweet-talking girls?’ The girl blushed and turned her head away. ‘I better be going on, Francie,’ she said. The youth held his ground. ‘Don’t you know it’s the wrong side of the road you’re on?’ demanded the sergeant. ‘Does the youth of this country not even know which end of ye is up?’ The young man turned his bicycle in the opposite direction. ‘Does this suit you any better?’ He was saying it for the girl’s benefit but the girl had gone on. ‘What would suit me is to see the youth of this country rolling up their sleeves,’ the sergeant said. ‘Men didn’t risk their lives so the likes of ye could stand around idle.’ If we can’t be idle, what can we be? the young man wanted to say but his courage had gone, with the girl. He threw his leg over the crossbar and rode on, calling after her. The girl did not look back and kept her head down when the sergeant passed. The sergeant knew her mother, a widow who gave him butter and rhubarb in the summertime but all she had was a rough acre behind the house. As it turned out, there was hardly a woman in the entire district with land. He rode on into the town and leant his bicycle against Duignan’s wall. The back door was on the latch. He pushed it open and entered a smoky kitchen whose walls were painted brown. Nobody was within but there was the smell of bread baking and someone had recently fried onions. A pang of hunger struck him; he’d gone without since morning. He went to the hearth and stared at the cast-iron pan on its heavy iron hook, the lid covered in embers. Close by, a cat was washing herself with a sput paw. Talk was filtering in from the front room that served as a shop. The sergeant could hear every word. ‘But isn’t he some man to cock his hat?’ ‘What do they see in him at all?’ ‘It’s not as though he hasn’t the looks,’ said another. ‘Sure hasn’t he the uniform?’ ‘A cold bloody thing it would be to lie up against in the middle of the night,’ and there was a cackle that was a woman’s laughter. The sergeant grew still. It was the old, still feeling of the upper hand that made lesser men freeze but the sergeant came alive. He felt himself back under the gorse with a Tommy in the sight of his gun; the old thrill of conspiracy, the raw nerve. He was about to stand closer to the shop door when suddenly it opened and the

woman came in. She hardly paused when she saw him. ‘Hello, Sergeant!’ she called out, same as he was far away. The banter in the shop drew to a sharp halt. There was a rough whisper and the clink of porter bottles. The woman came towards the pan with a cloth and swung the hook away from the fire. She removed the iron lid without letting an ember fall and took up the loaf. It was a white loaf with a cross cut deep into the surface of the dough. The sergeant had not seen a white loaf in months. Three times the woman rapped it with her knuckles and the sound it made was a hollow sound. The sergeant had to hand it to her: her head was cool. There were few women in the country like her left. She went to the shop door and without looking beyond, shut it. ‘I don’t suppose those pigeons came in to roost?’ ‘They came in last night,’ she said. ‘They didn’t all come?’ ‘They’re all there. The even dozen, fresh from the barrow.’ ‘A fine price they must be.’ When she told him what price they were, a fresh thrill ran down the entire length of his body. It was almost twice what he had anticipated and the extravagance was, in his experience, without comparison but he hid his pleasure. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take them now,’ he grunted. ‘It’s as you please,’ the woman said. The shop door flew open and a small boy, one of her troops, ran in from the shop. ‘Slide the bolt there, Sean, good boy,’ the woman said. The boy leant against the door until the latch caught then slid the bolt across. He drew up close to the woman and stared at the loaf. ‘Is there bread?’ the boy asked, tilting his head back. The boy’s face was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. ‘You can have it when it cools,’ said the woman, propping the loaf against the window. She threw the bolt on the back door and opened the lower part of the dresser. The light, wooden crate was covered by a cloth. When she pulled the cloth away, the sergeant got their scent. They lay on a bed of wood chippings, each wrapped in fine, pink tissue. The boy leaned in over the table and stared. ‘What are they, Mammy?’ ‘They’re onions,’ she said. ‘They’re not!’ he cried. ‘They are,’ she said. The boy reached out to stroke the tissue and stared up at the sergeant. The sergeant felt the boy’s hungry gaze. He took the tissue off each one and lifted it to his nose before he pushed back his cape and reached into his pocket for the money. As he was reaching in, his fingers lingered unnecessarily over the envelope and he realised his hand was half covetous of the letter. The woman wrapped the crate in a flour sack while the sergeant stood waiting. ‘Is it for Christmas you be wanting them, Sergeant?’

40 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

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‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Ay.’ She counted out the money on the kitchen table, and when he offered her something extra for the loaf, she looked at the boy. The boy’s face was paler now. His skin was chalky. When he saw his mother wrapping the loaf in the brown paper, he began to cry. ‘Mammy,’ he wailed. ‘My bread!’ ‘Hush, a leanbh. I’ll make you another,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it just as soon as the sergeant leaves.’ The sergeant took the parcel out the back and tied it carefully on to the carrier of his bike. He was ready now for the bar racks but he walked back through the kitchen, unlocked the door and entered the shop. The talk that had seized up when his presence was made known had risen back to neutral speech. This, too, seized up on his entry. Walking in through the silence, he felt the same old distance and superiority he always felt. He was reared near here, they knew his people but he would never be one of them. He stood at the counter and looked at the stains on the dark wood. ‘Isn’t it a harsh day?’ Always, there was someone who could not stand the silence. This was the type of man who, in other circumstances, could get another killed. ‘It’s a day for the fire,’ said another. The sergeant hoped one of them would open his gob and make an open strike but not one of them had the courage. To his face, their talk would stay in the shallow, furtive waters of idle banter; anything of significance they had to say would be said just after he was gone. He paused at the front door where a calendar was hanging from a nail. He studied it closely though he well knew the date. Standing there, looking at the month of December, a blade of conviction passed through him. He opened the front door and went out into the rain without having uttered a word. ‘Well!’ said Duignan, watching the sergeant pushing his bike eagerly up the road. ‘Whoever would have thought it?’ ‘If you want to know me, come live with me!’ The porter bottles came back out. Duignan took a draught, straightened himself and put his hands behind his back. In a perfect imitation, he slowly marched over to the wall and put his nose against the calendar. ‘It isn’t December?’ ‘Ay, Sergeant.’ ‘Do you think oranges would be ripe at this time of the year?’ As soon as he mentioned the word, there was a ripple of laughter. Each man, in his own mind, had a vision of the sergeant, the big IRA man, sitting into the feed of oranges. Duignan went to the counter and sniffed the wood. Stiffly, he swung back towards the men. ‘It isn’t porter I smell?’ ‘It’s on the stage you should be!’

SHORT STORY

‘No, Sergeant!’ cried another. ‘‘Tis oranges!’ Duignan carried on. There were fresh waves of laughter but it did not come to a head until the woman, her hands covered in flour, came in from the kitchen asking what, in the name of God, it was that had them so entertained? The sergeant saw all this in his mind as he pushed his bicycle back to the barracks in the rain. Let them laugh. The last laugh would be his. The rain was coming down, hopping off the handlebars, his cape, the mudguard. It was down for the evening. There had not been a dry day for over a week and the roads were rough and sloppy. When he reached the dayroom, he softly pushed the door open and there was Doherty, fast asleep, in the chair. The sergeant stole over to the desk, lifted the box of papers, and let it fall. Doherty woke in a splash of fear. ‘I think it’s nearly time that you were gone out of this!’ the sergeant cried. ‘I didn’t –’ ‘You didn’t! You didn’t what?’ ‘I didn’t –’ ‘You didn’t! You didn’t! Get up off your arse and go home!’ the sergeant cried. He looked at the ledger. ‘Did you not even bother your arse to record the rain?’ The guard stumbled out, half asleep, into the rain and read the gauge. All this was new to him. He came back and wrote a figure in the book and signed it. ‘I hope you’ll be in better form tomorrow,’ Doherty said, blotting the page. ‘I’ll be as I am,’ said the sergeant. ‘And don’t think just because you’re getting off early that you’ll not have to make up for it some other day.’ ‘Amn’t I always here,’ sighed Doherty.

‘Do you think I haven’t noticed? Amn’t I tripping over you?’ ‘I do whatever –’ ‘But are you ever useful? That’s the question. If you’re of no use, then mightn’t you be as well off elsewhere?’ Doherty looked at him and put his coat on. ‘Is there anything more?’ ‘That’ll be all,’ the sergeant clipped. ‘It’s clearly as much if not more than you’re able for. God help us, but I can’t help but think sometimes that the force mightn’t be better off with a clatter of women.’ The guard put on his coat, went out, and softly closed the door. The sergeant went to the window and watched him, how eagerly he pedalled on home. Doherty could ill afford to lose his post, the sergeant knew. He watched him until he had turned the corner then he went out for the coal. The coal was a turn from a Protestant for whom he’d done a favour. He pushed the poker deep into the fire and raked over all the old timber. He placed lumps of coal on the embers knowing, before long, that it would blaze. He wheeled the bike up close to the hearth and untied the parcel. Then he took off the clips and hung his cape on the back of the door and sat down. There was relief in sitting down, in being alone, finally. He looked at the marks of the tyres, of his feet, of the rain dripping off his cape onto the flagstones. He looked at these marks that he had made until the fire had warmed the room and the floor was dry. Then he took his tunic off and opened the letter. As soon as he opened the letter, the ring fell into his hand but his hand was expecting this. He looked at it briefly and went on to read: December 9th Dear Michael, I have decided it is impossible for us to go on. I have waited long enough and this ring, which I took as a token of your affection, is now an ornament. Nothing is as I had expected. I had thought that we would be married by now and getting on with our lives. I don’t know what it is you are doing up there or why you stay away. It must not be convenient for you to continue on with this engagement and it no longer suits me. The time has come for us to be together or remain apart. I see no cause for any further delay. I hear you are throwing your hat at other women. You were seen outside McGuire’s last week and the week before. If your heart has changed, it is your duty to let me know. I enclose your ring and pray God this finds you in good health as we are all down here. Yours, Susan

“This is a book to animate both our reading and our theater-going.” Kenneth Gross, author of Shylock Is Shakespeare

This Wide and Universal Theater Shakespeare in Perfor mance, Then and Now David Bevington

It was as he suspected: she was calling him in. He felt solace in the knowledge that he was right and yet it struck him sore that he had hoped it might be otherwise.

The University of Chicago Press 256 pp. £15.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-04478-1

42 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

SHORT STORY

Hope always was the last thing to die; he had learned this as a child and seen it, first hand, as a soldier. He held the ring up to the fire and looked at it. The stone was smaller than he had realised and the thin gold band was battered as though she hadn’t bothered to take it off while labouring. He did not read over the letter again; the message was clear. He folded it back as it was, placed it in the heavy metal box and locked it. He placed the key and the ring on the desk and rolled up his sleeves. The room was warm and the chain, at this stage, would be dry. The firelight was striking the rims, the handlebars, the spokes. He turned the bicycle upsidedown and, with one hand slowly turning the pedal, he placed the nozzle of the oil-can against the chain. Oiling it, watching the chain going round, it struck him how perfectly the links engaged the sprocket, how the cogs were made for the chain. Somewhere, a man believed he could propel himself using his own weight. He had seen it in his mind and went on to make it happen. Oiling the bike stoked up the old pleasure he had felt in cleaning the guns: forcing the cloth down the length of the barrel, dull gleam of the metal, how snugly the bullet slid into the chamber. Everything was made for something else in whose presence things ran smoothly. He had once, as a child, knocked the sugar bowl off the table. The sugar had spilled and was wasted, for it could not be sieved out from the glass. He could see it still, the bright shock of it on the flagstones. His mother had taken him out to the bicycle and spun the wheel, holding his fingers at an angle, tight to the spokes. It went on for an age and the pain he felt could not have been worse had she actually dismembered him. It was one of the first lessons he had learned and he would carry it all through life. Now, he felt a childish pride in owning the bike. He turned it right side up and pumped the tyres until he felt hot and satisfied. When he was sure the tyres could take his weight for the distance, he propped the bike against the desk. Then he took the crate from the sack and positioned himself at the hearth. In reaching out, he hesitated but the fruit he chose felt heavy. The rind did not come away easily and his thumbnail left an oily track over the flesh. When he tasted it, it tasted sweet and bitter all at once. There were a great many seeds. He took each seed from his mouth and threw it on the fire. Juice was staining his uniform but he would leave a note for Doherty to take it down to the Duignan woman and have it pressed. Before he had swallowed the last segment of the first orange his hand was reaching out for the next. This time he kept his thumbnail tight to the skin so as not to break to the flesh. The peelings singed for while on the open coals but shrank and in time became part of the fire. His knowledge of women swept across his mind. He tried to think of each one separately – of what she said or

how, exactly, she was dressed – but they were not so much mixed up in his mind as all the one: the same bulge at the top of the stocking, the shallow gasp, the smell of malt vinegar in their hair. How quickly all of that was over. He ate the oranges and thought about these women, concluding that there was little difference between them. By the time the last seed was on the coals, he was glutted. ‘Another casualty,’ he said aloud in the empty room. The clock on the wall ticked on and the rain was beating strong and hard against the barracks door. He burned the crate and threw the coal dust on the embers. When he was sure no evidence of how he had spent the night remained, he lit the candle and climbed the stairs, feeling a shake in himself that made the light tremble. He did not take off his clothes. He got into the bed as he was and reached out for the clock. As he wound it and felt the spring tighten, the old desire to wind it until it seized came over him but he fought against it, as always, and blew the candle out. Then he rolled over into the middle of the cold bed. When he closed his eyes, the same old anxiety was there shining like dark water at the back of his mind but he soon fell asleep. Before first light, he groped his way blindly to the outhouse and felt the oranges passing through his body. There was a satisfaction in this that renewed and deepened the extravagance, all at once. When he came inside, he lit the lamp, made tea and buttered some of the white bread. He took the razor off the shelf, sharpened it on the leather strap, and shaved. There were unaccountable shadows in the mirror but they did not distract him. He washed, changed into his good brown suit, gathered up the ring and key and went outside to look at the day. No rain was falling but there were clouds stacked up on one side of the sky. He wrote the note for Doherty, put on the clips and threw the cape over his shoulders. When he got up on the saddle, he felt the springs give under his weight. He reassured himself that he had the ring, the key, and stood on the pedals, to get started. Soon he was labouring over the hills, knowing full well that the days of idling and making women blush were coming to a close. A cold feeling surged through him. It was new to him and like all new feelings it made him anxious, but he rode on, composing the speech. By the time he was pushing on for her part of the country, he grew conscious of the rain and the noise it made, the rattle of it like beads on the handlebars. When he entered her townsland he saw the rushes and knew the clay beneath them was shallow clay. With a bitter taste in his mouth, he faced up the mountain but before he was halfway up, his breath gave out and he had to dismount. Marching on, he could feel his future: the woman’s bony hand striking a hollow sound in the loaf and the boy with the hungry gaze asking for bread. Taken from ‘Walk the Blue Fields’, Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, published by Faber & Faber, £10.99

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ARCADIA

his private beliefs – and possibly his political leanings. The progress of the landscape garden was anything but straightforward. The early Whig supporters of William of Orange brought Dutch canals and topiary into their gardens (still to be seen in such restorations as Westbury T HE A RCADIAN F RIENDS : I NVENTING THE Park in Gloucestershire), but designers also continued to E NGLISH L ANDSCAPE G ARDEN draw on French and Italian styles, while Sir William ★ Temple and Sir William Bentinck, both closely associated with the new monarch, introduced ‘wiggles’ – serpentine By Tim Richardson paths wandering through loosely planted woodland. (Bantam Press 359pp £25) Then there was Charles Howard, Duke of Carlisle, whose enormous Castle Howard and its gardens decisiveIN 1733 A disgruntled but extremely rich Whig minister ly domesticated landscape design as a British art form. and one-time military man named Richard Temple, First In a laudable if not entirely successful attempt to bring Viscount Cobham, lost his political position and retired order to his history, Richardson’s title implies that a to his country estate in Buckinghamshire. What he chose group of like-minded designers, builders and estate ownto do then gives a whole new meaning to the expression ers was responsible for the creation of the landscape gar‘gardening leave’, for in his exile from power Cobham den. That makes it sound simple. True enough, there completed Stowe, the most celebrated and influential of were groupings like the famous Kit-Cat Club, a body of all English landscape gardens. Representing the efforts of powerful Whigs (Carlisle was a key member) intent on at least three of the premier designers of the era (Charles seeing George I onto the throne, Bridgeman, William Kent and which also cared about gardening Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown), along with political intr igue, who worked on the garden over dr inking, and business deals. the course of forty years, Stowe Alexander Pope was certainly still survives – in rather diminwidely acquainted, with fellow ished form, it has to be said – as a gardeners among others, but his testament to the heights achieved own famous garden by the by this most British of art forms. Thames in Twickenham was For Tim Richardson, the fact absolutely idiosyncratic. Similarly that Cobham was a Whig, and a Cobham, creator of Stowe, or particular brand of anti-Walpolian Henry Hoare, whose later Whig, is a matter of some signifiStourhead remains an exquisite cance. Though The Arcadian Friends example of landscape art at its is a history of the ‘invention’ of the Stourhead, in Wiltshire finest, achieved what they did English landscape garden during mainly with the help of money and expert advice. This is the closing years of the seventeenth century and the first not to minimise what they accomplished; it is just that it half of the eighteenth, it is hardly a bucolic tale of trees and may be impossible in a single volume, even one as long earthworks. On the contrary, if we are to take Richardson’s and detailed and replete with first-rate scholarship as this, word for it, the whole phenomenon appears to have had as to make the narrative track. There were too many garmuch to do with politics as with parterres. deners, too many gardens, too many disparate influences. Admittedly, from the time of the Glorious Revolution Even so, there are many delights here. Richardson’s in 1688 the British political scene was in extraordinary description of Pope’s garden-making is excellent. I liked ferment. Among the tastemakers, the poets, the aristohearing about Jonathan Tyers, the owner of the London crats and the newly rich, politics touched virtually pleasure ground Vauxhall Gardens, who went to the everything. Party affiliations took shape around religion, other extreme at his country estate by building a thoraround attitudes towards the royal succession, around oughly morbid garden centred on a Temple of Death. historical differences, around public policy on such matAnd it is hard to forget the aristocratic landscape architers as war and finance. Under these circumstances, it tect and proto-vegan Henry Herbert, Ninth Earl of may not be surprising that gardening – large-scale landPembroke, who decided to live on watercress and beetscape gardening, anyway – was influenced too. One key root, nearly dying in the attempt. In fact, Arcadian reason for this, in Richardson’s view, is that gardens Friends is enjoyable in most respects except for certain of could and did function as a means of personal expresthe chapter titles, whose clumsy wit suggests that the sion. Using symbolism and allusions (say a statue of author could not have been responsible for them. Hercules, referring to William III and the original Whig To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18 ideals), an estate owner might make a statement about

C HARLES E LLIOTT

POLITICS AND PARTERRES

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Night’s Dream will never be forgotten. Incidentally, if, like me and my g randson, you are fond of Bottom jokes, you will not be disappointed here: var ious Every sod was from Surrey actors are complimented on their ‘well-rounded’ Bottoms. I particularly liked the passage: ‘Ian gave us his Bottom again (an onion was added in the “play scene” to induce dramatic tears)’. I should think it did. Conville makes the point that theatre was born in the open air, and even in supposedly inclement Britain (though, as he says, ‘the vast majority of performances are acted in good weather’), pastoral playing has a rich ancestral line going back to medieval ‘mystery’ plays. And Shakespeare, of course, is ‘especially close to nature’. The present theatre in The Park opened in 1932 under the management of Atkins and the Australian impresario Sydney Carroll, who was very proud of the specially imported Surrey greensward. ‘And I wish you to know’, he proclaimed, ‘that every sod on this stage comes from Richmond’. Atkins, who took over full management from Carroll in 1940, conducted all his business at The Volunteer public house near by, where the landlady’s parrot would attack auditioning actors. Conville writes with an enjoyably light touch and delivers some delicious anecdotes. My favourites included the occasion when he and Timothy West laid on a scrumptious tea for the then Arts Minister Norman St John-Stevas’s ‘godchildren’, only to find that the godchildren were ‘hefty young men’ who all asked for whisky. Then there was the time the veteran actor-manager Ben Greet spotted ‘a furcoated interloper’ at the back of a Canadian open-air theatre. He sent the young Sybil Thorndike to get rid of the intruder. She reported that it was a bear. Greet replied: ‘Pity we’re not doing The Winter’s Tale.’ In the best Park tradition, so evocatively captured in this excellent volume, a fox came and sat beside me last year and watched attentively for several scenes before the high kicks of Madcap Maisie (the spectacular Miss Summer Strallen) encouraged him to slope off into the bushes. Doubtless he’ll be back this season (alas, Ian Talbot’s last), which features not only Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the musicals Lady Be Good and (hurrah!) The Boy Friend, but also the children’s show Fantastic Mr Fox, adapted from Roald Dahl’s story by David Ward. Book now for the best fun, and indeed the best sausages, in London – on 08700 601811.

H UGH M ASSINGBERD

THIS GREEN PLOT T HE PARK : T HE S TORY OF THE O PEN A IR T HEATRE , R EGENT ’ S PARK ★

By David Conville (Oberon Books 144pp £15)

AT A LOW ebb last summer between chemotherapy sessions, I was dozing underneath a mulberry tree in Regent’s Park when, as if in a dream, I heard the magical sound of a fruity voice warbling ‘It’s Never Too Late to Fall in Love’, with orchestral accompaniment, wafting towards my deck-chair. On investigation through the undergrowth, I discovered that the voice belonged to Ian Talbot, artistic director of the New Shakespeare Company (which runs the Open Air Theatre), rehearsing the role of Lord Brockhurst for his own production of Sandy Wilson’s musical comedy The Boy Friend. Happily it was not too late for me to fall in love all over again with ‘The Park’ (as the Open Air Theatre is always known) and regular visits to this delightful show, performed with an exuberant innocence that eschewed tongue-in-cheek campery, proved more efficacious a tonic than any cancer drug. I was lucky enough to be there on the first night when the octogenarian Sandy Wilson mounted the stage to say that he had feared The Boy Friend (first produced in 1953) had become an old man, but that tonight it had become young again. We stood and cheered him in the gloaming. How right Dame Judi Dench is to claim in her foreword to this book, which marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Open Air Theatre, that The Park ‘has become an integral part of summer life in London’. As she says, David Conville is the ideal person to write its history, as he took over from the legendary Shakespearean Robert Atkins in 1962 and formed the New Shakespeare Company, of which he is now the Honorary President. He is too genial and modest a man to blow his own trumpet, but Dame Judi pays proper tribute to his having been the driving force in building the present auditorium in the 1970s, ‘and banishing the old deck-chair era’. She has seen The Park grow and evolve under Conville’s guidance. A host of young actors have started their careers here (including Ralph Fiennes, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Bonneville, Benedict Cumberbatch), and numerous veteran actors have returned – such as the lamented Ronnie Fraser, splendidly depicted with Falstaffian antlers; the eccentric Peter Bayliss, whose ashes, in accordance with his wishes, were flushed down a lavatory on the stage; and Roy Hudd, joyfully still with us, whose great Bottom in the ever popular A Midsummer

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Ozersk, of whose 85,000 inhabitants, 14,000 were employed in a factory complex at Mayak, one of the USSR’s former facilities for processing materials for nuclear warheads. For some years now Mayak has been a US dependency, since the US has ploughed US$350 million into building a ‘Plutonium Palace’, a vast warehouse to store and monitor 40 per cent of Russia’s fissile materials. A new culture of computerised bar codes has stopped the locals fiddling the books or filching whatever they fancy. Other American agencies have installed elaborate radiation detectors at the gates in and out of this complex, their efficiency somewhat vitiated by the fact that they are not switched on, since every fish from a local lake wrapped in a newspaper on the lap of a bus passenger would set the alarms off, so total is the radioactive pollution the surrounding area has suffered. Although it might be possible to buy or steal bombmaking materials, such places as Ozersk are so remote, and the locals so suspicious of strangers, that one would be unlikely to get them out of the country. Russia, like any rational state actor, does not want to be blamed for the first terrorist nuclear strike, and its FSB would go to great lengths to stop you, using cruder methods than an overdose of radioactive poison. Just in case they failed, the US has spent further billions beefing up customs operations on key smuggling routes, creating facilities like the so-called ‘Red Bridge’, a deluxe complex where Georgia meets Azerbaijan. This also has elaborate computer systems, closed circuit TV and radiation detectors, although no technology will solve the corruptibility of Georgian officialdom. The trouble, according to Langewiesche, is that such facilities may interdict lorries and the like, but what if the smugglers decide to use horses and mules and ply the back routes favoured by drug traffickers? After all, a couple of bricks of HEU can easily fit into a pair of saddle bags. Using knowledge gleaned from Kurdish tribal leaders, Langewiesche asks why the US persists in dealing with corrupt governments when the real power, and knowledge of every movement, resides in the hands of such sub-statal potentates. The short answer to that, which the author does not provide, is that the US government has massively cut back on field agents with the cultural and linguistic skills for such assignments, ready to work for federal salaries equivalent to that of a doorman at Microsoft. Like a lot of Amer ican journalists, Langewiesche doesn’t trace his criticisms of US policy far back enough into US values. Confirming the impression that Langewiesche has woven together discrete journalistic essays, the concluding two thirds of the book are a study of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, one of the fathers of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, and the criminal mastermind who sold this technology to everyone with a large enough bank account. These are the best parts of the book, much of it indebted to the dogged researches of freelance investigator Mark

M ICHAEL B URLEIGH

LOOSE NUKES T HE ATOMIC B AZAAR : T HE R ISE N UCLEAR P OOR

OF THE

By William Langewiesche (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 179pp £20)

CHANNEL-HOPPERS MAY RECALL the 1994 Hollywood action comedy True Lies, in which Islamist jihadists purloined nuclear warheads stolen in Kazakhstan (a state which has actually decommissioned its nuclear arsenal) and used them to menace America. Capably assisted by wife Jamie Lee Curtis, agent Arnold Schwarzenegger saved the day, using a missile fired from a Harrier jump jet to despatch the lead malefactor to fiery oblivion. After soberly reminding readers of how a nuclear bomb works and what it can do, William Langewiesche concludes that this is not something that can be knocked up in a suburban garage. Theoretically, all one needs is a stepladder and two 75-pound bricks of 90 per cent heavily enriched uranium. You put one brick on the ground, climb the ladder, and drop the other brick on it. If all goes well the two bricks will collide, setting off a chain reaction and a ten-kiloton explosion that is two thirds of the way to a Hiroshima; most probably, you’ll cause more fizzle than fusion, as the neutrons fire prematurely before the bricks meet, although the blast from that may demolish a building or two. In reality, however, even in a garage or workshop in a noisy and densely populated Third World city, would-be terrorist atomic bombers need a nuclear physicist or engineer, skilled machinists and a lot of precision equipment to shape uranium, an explosives expert, and an electronics whizz to make a trigger. Given these complications, and the lack of an industrial capacity to make the fissile materials in the first place, it is more likely that terrorists would seek to make a ‘dirty bomb’, wrapping radioactive waste materials around a conventional explosive – or, the scenario explored in this book, purchase a ready-made bomb in the ‘bazaar’ that Langewiesche chronicles. Unlike Europeans, for whom the threat from terrorism comes from within our midst, Americans think of it as something which has to be kept ‘out there’. Reasonably enough, they have spent billions, not only on subsidies to their allies in the ‘war on terror’ but in trying to prevent nuclear weapons either falling into the hands of terrorists or, failing that, being smuggled with impunity. Langewiesche describes the ten ‘closed cities’ around Ekaterinburg in the former Soviet Union, huge places that until recently did not figure on any maps and were identified only by post-box numbers. They include

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Hibbs for such publications as Nucleonics Week or NuclearFuel – stablemates of the delightfully named Megawatt Daily and Dirty Tankerwire. An egomaniacal monster given to referring to Indians as ‘Hindu bastards’, Khan illicitly purloined key technologies from the dozy and greedy Dutch firms he worked for, thus enabling Pakistan to make nuclear bombs. On 27 May 1998, India and Pakistan came within hours of a nuclear exchange when the Saudis unhelpfully told Islamabad that Israeli planes were en route to destroy their nuclear facilities on behalf of India. With or without government connivance, and using a front company in Dubai, Khan went on to sell his expertise to all and sundry, including Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea, who gave Pakistan longrange missile know-how in return. Thanks to the work of Hibbs and others, the US has eventually forced Pakistan to curb Khan’s activities, although he appears to

have suffered few financial penalties as opposed to blows to his ego. But what Khan did is ‘out there’ all right, as President Ahmadinejad reminds us every time we see grainy footage of his multiplying gas centrifuges. In other words, proliferation is an unstoppable process. All countries are entitled to develop nuclear energy capacities; some will use the technology to manufacture nuclear weapons. William Langewiesche concludes that a limited nuclear war between some of these poorer states is highly probable, given the erratic bellicosity of their governments and poor communications or command and control systems. He doesn’t think such wars will result in a nuclear apocalypse. I wouldn’t be so sanguine if terrorists ever got their hands on a nuclear weapon, since such a prospect has had even Jacques Chirac talking darkly about the briefcase his attaché goes around with. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18

G ILLIAN T INDALL

Excess (that is, sexual tales about the rich) but discussing a more unusual subject he really knows about, he is good value: he has some excellent pages on the wartime SOE, on Orwell’s original locations for Nineteen Eighty-Four and on the gay dialect ‘Polari’, and he is generally informative about Soho gangs and turf wars. Historically, he is better on such encapsulated fun-subjects as cults, revolutionaries, nouveau riche building projects and Tyburn executions than he is on the wider picture of why and how his district has developed and changed over three centuries. His idea that Centrepoint and several other 1960ish skyscrapers were built to conceal a network of Secret Service Cold War bunkers is ingenious but (I am reliably informed) bunkum. And I find it hard to overlook this remark, produced apparently without irony: ‘The West End was central to the growth of one of the most exciting developments in twentieth-century living – the notion of shopping for shopping’s sake.’ Exciting? Among other words he misuses are infamous, decimated, antebellum, classic, emasculated, homily, wheedled, wax (as a verb) and, rather oddly, Anglo-Catholic. And yet this book has been published by a great publishing house, who one might hope would have copy-editors. In contrast, Anthony Adolph’s book has not been through the usual publishing mill because he has had to publish it himself, and he has made a very good job of it. The title phrase (a quotation) is produced rather too often, and I began to feel sorry for another lord when reminded for the fifth time that he had a large nose, but these are minor blemishes in a fascinating tale. Henry Jermyn was the son of a landed country family related to the Killigrews and to Francis Bacon and with other useful contacts, in a world which ran almost entirely on recommendation and patronage. A natural survivor in this world, astute, pliable but determined, he rose from being an unimportant boy around the Court of James I to the secretary, intimate adviser, Lord Chamberlain and probably

WEST END WONDERS F ULL

OF

S OUP AND G OLD : T HE L IFE H ENRY J ERMYN

OF

By Anthony Adolph (anthonyadolph.co.uk 324pp £17.95)

W EST E ND C HRONICLES : T HREE H UNDRED Y EARS OF G LAMOUR AND E XCESS IN THE H EART OF L ONDON ★

By Ed Glinert (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 289pp £25)

THESE TWO BOOKS both describe, in passing, the origins of the West End of London that grew up in the late seventeenth century around St James’s Square, but in every other respect they are in contrast to one another. Anthony Adolph’s is a passionately committed and scholarly study of one of the Stuarts’ more illustrious henchmen, complete with detailed notes on sources that have never previously been brought together. He aims to rescue Henry Jermyn, Lord St Albans, begetter of Jermyn Street and possibly of Charles II too, from obscurity and obloquy, and very nearly succeeds. Ed Glinert, however, races round a much larger tract of the West End with boundless zeal, enthusiasm and many nuggets of real information, but with such a slapdash disregard for strict accuracy or for a well-balanced phrase that one begins to feel tired and cross. To be fair, this book is probably better read in short bursts. Glinert guides tourists in real life, and he may be very popular with them. When he is not trumpeting Glamour and

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lover of Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, Charles I’s queen. He was with her throughout her lonely and chaotic exile in France after her husband’s execution and the years of the Commonwealth – and I had not realised, until I read this book, what a catalogue of dangerous escapes, perilous sea-voyages, real hardship, money worries and constant scheming with other parties this exile involved. He was a loyal adviser to Charles II, and returned with him in triumph to England in 1660 as the Earl of St Albans. Was he really, as was widely rumoured in his lifetime, Charles II’s father? The King was physically and mentally more like Jermyn than he was like Charles I. Henrietta Maria as a young queen in a strange land had more in common with the French-speaking Jermyn than with anyone else, and their attachment to one another through the decades is evident – though their letters, sadly, are lost. It is generally accepted that Louis XIV, Henrietta Maria’s nephew, was really the son of Cardinal Mazarin rather than of Louis XIII: Adolph makes out a good case for a similar situation in the Stuart family tree, though without insisting upon it. Charles himself, no fool or innocent, must have been aware of the rumour. After the Restoration Jermyn maintained a position of

power and influence into old age, despite the enmity of Lord Chancellor Hyde. Adolph claims that Hyde’s written version of events has prevailed down the centuries, unfairly blackening Jermyn’s character. I would suggest that nineteenth-century censoriousness about a worldly, loose-living Royalist (Jermyn was a great gambler) has had a hand in forming his reputation too, and also perhaps the twentieth-century Marx-influenced version of history with its belief in the moral superiority of the Roundhead cause. Another question mark hangs over the subject of Jermyn’s Freemasonry. Was Masonry, as Adolph is inclined to think, a powerful element in the world in which Jermyn moved, linking him with figures such as Francis Bacon, Inigo Jones, Wren, the poets D’Avenant and Cowley and the carver Grinling Gibbons? Or did it barely exist before the eighteenth century? Certainly the plans Jermyn himself nurtured both for Greenwich and for the St James’s Square area can be related to Masonic concepts. How many of those who, today, buy expensive shirts and shaving brushes in Jermyn Street know to whose taste and indomitable enterprise we owe the street itself? Let’s hope this book is on sale there too. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 18

S IMON H EFFER

their little car more than half a century ago. Essex has a wealth of modern architecture and, as Bettley says, no serious student of that school can afford to neglect the county. That much modern building in Essex is so comparatively inoffensive goes back to the Essex Design Guide of 1973, in which, to prevent the county from being victim to anonymous mass-produced developments of the sort that were blighting and homogenising the landscape around the Home Counties at the time, the County Council sensibly laid down requirements of style and materials to attempt to ensure that the new blended in with the old. It is little wonder that the first edition was so wanting. Pevsner was, at the time, engaged on the intimidating project of cataloguing the buildings of the whole country, and there was no time for lengthy investigations or much rumination. He ‘did’ Essex in something under eight weeks, a remarkable achievement when one considers that this included all that is now in the easter n boroughs of Layer Marney Tower, c 1520

Ignore the Girls, Look at the Gables T HE B UILDINGS

OF

E NGLAND : E SSEX

By James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner (Yale University Press 939pp £29.95)

THE VOLUME OF Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series that covers Essex has long been one of the more inadequate titles in the series. Though famed for its atrociousness, Essex actually has more listed buildings than any but six other counties. Once one gets away from the hideous dormitory towns, and especially from the sprawl along the north bank of the Thames estuary, the wealth of architectural heritage should be plain to all but the most ignorant, or bigoted, observer. When Pevsner wrote his original volume in 1954 Essex was notably rich in two sorts of building: medieval parish churches and timber-framed houses from the late medieval period. In this magnificent, and long overdue, revision of that volume (itself revised in a somewhat pawky way by Enid Radcliffe in 1965), James Bettley fully exploits those two treasure chests. He is able to add to it something that has occurred, for better or worse, in Essex since Pevsner and his wife pottered round it in

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Greater London (his writings on which can be found in London 5: East, which Yale published in 2005). Bettley, who took five years (albeit working part time), has inevitably produced a work that is far more compendious, far more scholarly, and far more representative and indicative of the architectural riches of the county. He also writes in an era alert to the importance of conservation: in the 1950s, after Pevsner had written, certain notable country houses in Essex were pulled down, and only their ghosts are present in this revision. Churches have fared better: although many have gone into redundancy, they have been converted to other uses, in several cases to private housing. Bettley laments, as many Essex people do, the demolition as late as 1995 of St Erkenwald’s Church in suburban Southend, a design of Sir Walter Tapper begun in 1905 in the Early English Gothic style, and still unfinished at the time of its destruction. The main enemy of Essex’s architectural heritage now is the threat of the second runway at Stansted airport, which Bettley (in a sound judgement that might be considered by some – though not by this reviewer – to be unduly political for a work of this nature) deplores, not least because it would remove more than a score of listed buildings from the parish of Takeley, and destroy some of the best countryside left in the county. Almost the best thing about the original volume was the superbly vitriolic opening of Pevsner’s introduction, remarkable for a man widely regarded as having a truly German sense of humour. ‘Essex is not as popular a touring and sight-seeing county as it deserves to be,’ he wrote. ‘People say that is due to the squalor of Liverpool Street Station. Looking round the suicidal waiting room on platform 9 and the cavernous left luggage counters behind platforms 9 and 10, I am inclined to agree.’ To his credit, Bettley reproduces this at the start of his own volume, and infers that ‘Pevsner did not altogether enjoy Essex’. Bettley lives in the county, so his own feelings might be taken to be more positive. What lifts his own superb scholarship out of the swamps of dry academia is his own shar p tongue, invar iably well directed. Introducing his entry on Chelmsford (a living embodiment of the assertion that affluence and good taste seldom go well together), he quotes a bon mot of Dickens’s that Essex’s county town was ‘the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth’ and adds that this is ‘a judgement with which many would still agree’. Bettley’s reference to the preposterous Freeport Designer Village outside Braintree describes it as a place ‘where the Essex Design Guide and shopping come together in a grotesque parody of a “village” that epitomises the triumph of commerce over culture at the end of the twentieth century’. Yet in dealing with much that has happened in Essex in the last half-century Bettley is surprisingly generous.

The government decreed two new towns in Essex immediately after the war – Harlow and Basildon – and the County Council set up a third, much smaller one in South Woodham Ferrers after 1973, which was to be the manifestation of the Design Guide. Harlow had, according to Bettley, the benefit of the consistent vision of Sir Fred Gibberd, who was the chief architect to the development corporation there for the entire span of its existence, from 1947 to 1980. Gibberd, whose buildings are often remarkably horrible and unfit for purpose (he was, most famously, responsible for the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, the leaking, crumbling absurdity now universally derided as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’), was at least a true believer in Harlow: he built himself a house there. And, certainly, for the people who moved there in the 1950s from bombed-out London, it was undeniably a satisfactory exercise in social amelioration. Bettley is right to stress that the infrastructures of the villages upon and around which Harlow was built were allowed to remain in place, lanes and footpaths giving a sense of anchorage to the new communities: he is also right to point out that the predominantly two-storeyed terraced housing that was built was well laid out, of a variety of styles, and of strong Scandinavian influence rather than of the singularly hideous Modernist school of Le Corbusier. This does give Harlow a human aspect, but there remains a uniformity that is drab and soulless. This may well be due to the cheapness of most of the building materials, which in turn have ensured that the town has not aged well. There is an interesting point of comparison with the relative success of Welwyn Garden City, a few miles to the west in Hertfordshire, which was built after the Great War to higher specifications. That Bettley can see some merit in Harlow is a tribute to the objectivity he brings to bear throughout his scholarship. Basildon is much more of a mess, not least because so much has been bolted on to it since its original conception; it suffered especially during architecture’s worst decade, the 1970s, presenting an image to the world of windswept, damp-stained concrete. It is certainly an essential destination for architectural students, in the cause of seeing what not to do. Bettley’s real achievement, though, comes when he gets out into the villages, many of which are remarkable survivals considering how close they are to London. He maintains the current high standards of these guides in detailed descriptions of churches, and includes many more vernacular houses than did Pevsner himself, who took them somewhat for granted. He is no slave to any particular ideology of building in the way that his predecessor was and, with the benefit of having witnessed the predations progress has made on our stock of fine old buildings, is careful in his assessments of what Pevsner would have considered mundane, or condemned as pastiche. Essex is Quinlan Terry country, and Bettley’s

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judgements on two of his most notable buildings, the Roman Catholic cathedral at Brentwood and Merks Hall near Dunmow, are especially well turned. Pevsner has always been best as a book to be thrown on the back seat of the car (it is now far too big for the glovebox) and taken on an idle tour around the countryside: and at last, after decades of making do, the traveller in Essex has a worthy companion to enlighten him or her about the church that is coming into view, or the stately pile on the horizon. The gazetteer entries are preceded by Bettley’s judicious introduction, and learned articles by other contributors on (among other things) the county’s prehistory, its geology, and its tim-

ber-framed buildings. There are more than 130 superb colour photographs illustrating the best examples from a rich field of architecture. Essex may have no proper cathedral (Chelmsford’s is a late entrant into the stakes, promoted from a parish church in 1913 and, despite a horrible and destructive reordering in 1983, still looking like one), it may have few great houses, and all the best churches might be just across the border in Suffolk. But it has enough to detain a serious architectural historian like Bettley for five years, even in the morass of the new towns. A book of this quality – which does not merely confirm the standards of the series, but sets new ones – should make people rediscover Essex.

his reputation today appears bomb-proof against fashion, with his pictures fetching a million plus at auction and Salford’s Lowry Centre museum and arts complex booming. The prosecution is led by the peerless Brian Sewell: ‘I don’t care about his profound provincialism – many a backwater has produced great artists. I don’t even care that his work is inept, tedious, repetitive, lacklustre and stuck in a rut. I care only that the English, L S L OWRY: A L IFE who for centuries were the best collectors in Europe, ★ should have so far lost their connoisseurship that they take to their bosoms this half-baked amateur and turn By Shelley Rohde him into a folk hero.’ (Haus Books 260pp £25) The defence is encapsulated by John Betjeman, who, late in Lowry’s life, was the first to call for a museum of SHELLEY ROHDE MADE an award-winning TV docuthe artist’s work. ‘He is associated in the public mind mentary with L S Lowry (1887–1976) and in the with simplified Gothic against a wide sky under which process became ‘an intemperate admirer of both the hurry crowds of factory workers, children and parents. man and the artist’. Now, with the benefit of subseBut, gathered into one room, his paintings range much quently released private papers, she adds this compact further – onto a grey North Sea with nothing on it at all, picture-book tribute to the canon. down into Cornwall and a remote stone circle, up onto Lowry, an only child, had a reasonably privileged the Brontë-haunted moors and out into the prosperous upbringing in suburban Manchester. Then his father, an Manchester suburbs which are his birthplace. His work is estate agent, fell on hard times and the family moved best appreciated, its colour, its variety, humour and lonedownmarket to the industrial hinterland. Young Lowry liness, when assembled in a single gallery.’ It is typically avoided First World War conscription because of flat against the grain that Lowry feet, and after his father died was a regular exhibitor at the looked after his mother until Paris Salon des Indépendants her death. She was bedfast for and Salon d’Automne long eight years. He was fifty-two before he gained academic when she died and that he acceptance in London. remained equally bound by her Andras Kalman has champimemory is an insistent theme. oned Lowry since the artist ‘Marry and make a life of your first encouraged him as a pioown,’ he once advised a simineer ing contemporar y art larly tied young man. His gallery owner in Manchester mother disparaged his artistic sixty years ago. ‘From the achievements and yet persuaded beginning there was a strong him to persevere. ‘She underintegrity about him – you had stood me and that was enough,’ to be an insensitive moron not he said. to see it in the man. From his Professional opinions as to repression came his strength, Lowry’s artistic merit differ but Lowry: peripatetic painter

J OHN M C E WEN

More than Just Matchstick Men

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from his insularity came the power to concentrate upon his direction.’ Lowry himself made light of artistic theory. When asked why he collected the pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘the only man I have ever wanted to possess’, he said he did not know. As for his own work: ‘I have no message at all – it’s simply my way of looking at things.’ It is a pity Rohde did not question the distinguished likes of Craigie Aitchison and Paula Rego, who came into contact with Lowry as students at the Slade when he was a visiting artist. Aitchison for one remains indebted to him for saying he did not put in shadows because he did not know how to do them – although it must be said, there was never any need. ‘I never do a jolly picture. You’ll never see the sun in one of my pictures.’ His Slade students enjoyed Lowry’s self-deprecating encouragement, at benign odds with the hostility of crabby highbrows like John Piper. The sedentary simpleton was one of several personae that Lowry adopted. Playing the simpleton for the benefit of journalists and others amused him. ‘Not brainy enough to do anything else but art’ was his refrain. In fact he attended art school and nothing irritated him more in later life than to be described as self-taught. It was for this reason that he was so anxious that no one in the art world should know that until he was sixty-five he worked for a Manchester property company as a rentcollector and clerk. It was an ideal job as it enabled him to do what he liked doing best, wandering about the city observing people. He insisted his pictures were all about people ‘despite what others might say’. After his mother died he continued to live in the house, looked after by a daily housekeeper, painting late into the night to quell loneliness, meeting each new day with a necktie and detachable collar. He filled the vacuum his mother left by having a series of paternal friendships with younger women. To the last of them, also called Lowry but no relation, he left his entire estate – typically, without telling her. The book dispels any notion of Lowry as a creepy character. He compartmentalised his friends but there was no shortage of them and, often in their company, he travelled extensively in Britain and Ireland. One of his favourite towns was the thoroughly rural Berwick-onTweed, where today a ‘Lowry Walk’ takes in the places he chose to paint or draw. In friendship he could be a convivial companion or a thoughtful connoisseur. Shelley Rohde includes two interviews as a postscript. The one with Lowry is a delight, the other is with an Irish psychiatrist. The psychiatrist solemnly declares Lowry a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, characterised by number-crunching, social isolation and a total lack of humour. Lowry would surely have been much amused by such conclusions. To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18

A C G RAYLING

THE COUNTRY OF THE WORD AT

THE

S AME T IME ★

By Susan Sontag (Hamish Hamilton 256pp £18.99)

SUSAN SONTAG’S REPUTATION stands high in both her homelands – the United States of America and the republic of letters. She was a writer of choice skills, she was absolutely sincere in her commitment to ideals of justice and right in politics and international affairs, and all her work is animated by a strong controlling intelligence that was forthright, clear, and committed. Every one of these qualities is fully present in her last collection of essays, even though – as her editors, and her son David Rieff in his personal preface, tell us – it is likely that if she had lived she would have wished to polish them further. Sontag saw herself as a literary figure, and this expression embraces and explains the variety of her work: four novels, a play, books about photography and illness, and collections of essays. As a commentator on politics and human rights she saw herself as a representative of the country of the word, the place where (to adapt Lionel Trilling’s phrase) the chief responsibility is ‘to be intelligent’. She often iterated her belief that literature is a ‘passport to enter a larger life, that is, the zone of freedom’; as a maker of literature, the correlative responsibility was to export the privileges of that freedom to the general debate, in the hope of making the world a better place. Her essays are the chief vehicle of her endeavour to do so. Sontag sets out her view of literature and its role in society in her essay on Nadine Gordimer. ‘By literature’, she writes, ‘I mean literature in the normative sense, the sense in which [it] incarnates and defends high standards.’ And the role of the writer, correlatively, is to evoke ‘the better standards of justice and truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live’. This means that she sees the writer as a moral agent, not in the sense of a moraliser – one who seeks to legislate how others should think and behave – but in the sense of one who, through stories, narratives, and imaginative portrayals of lived practicalities, explores the variety and diversity of human experience, and thus educates our moral sense. The first group of essays examines this indirectly by discussion of (among others) Rilke, Dostoevsky, Victor Serge and Halldór Laxness. Sontag’s perceptive commentaries make them all deeply attractive writers, not least because what she finds in them are the attractive

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qualities she aims for in her own work. Commitment and its difficult sincerities are exemplified in her essays reacting to the 9/11 atrocities; she was quick to grasp all the negative implications of those events and to anticipate the reaction of President George W Bush and those in his administration who saw in them not just a tragedy and a crime but an opportunity – of the wrong sort, as her subsequent lacerating essay on Abu Ghraib shows. It is in Sontag’s own spirit of truthfulness and keenness for high standards that one notes, in the essay that gives the collection its title, a mistake of an interesting kind. The essay, which is about Nadine Gordimer, has as its subtitle ‘the Novelist and Moral Reasoning’, and one of its organising ideas is that a novel is ‘a vehicle both of space and time’, in the sense that it shows that not everything happens at the same time, and not everything happens to just one person – this being an application of a philosophical joke explaining what time and space are for. Sontag introduces the trope by recalling her own struggles as a graduate student in philosophy with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in particular his account of ‘the barely comprehensible categories of space and time’. It happens that space and time are expressly and very importantly not ‘categories’ in Kant’s great theory. The

categories are general concepts of the understanding, derivable from the forms of judgement in logic; space and time are ‘forms of sensibility’ and are discussed in detail in the opening part of the Critique of Pure Reason, dauntingly but thrillingly entitled ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’, as a propaedeutic for a discussion of the categories themselves. For anyone bred up in philosophy the mistake is far from a trivial one, and here Sontag makes it in arranging the backbone of an essay. The point is not that this is uncharacteristic of a mind so clever and well furnished as Sontag’s, but that it is characteristic (and here all who walk the same woods must hold up their hands and confess lapses) of our intellectual culture, where the effort to say things afresh among such a Babel of commentary makes writers reach for materials from all quarters, inaccurately at times. The two great desiderata of any collection of essays – pleasure and instruction – are here in abundance. The editors might be right that she would have wished, had she lived, to work on them further, but they have all the elegance of her best work, and add to the already lustrous reputation for fine prose and acute thought that places her in the first rank of contemporary American writers. To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 18

W ILLIAM P ALMER

MUSIC & RUM A NACAONA : T HE A MAZING A DVENTURES OF C UBA ’ S F IRST A LL -G IRL DANCE B AND ★

By Alicia Castro, with Ingrid Kummels Translated by Steven Murray (Atlantic Books 394pp £19.99)

BEFORE READING THIS book I knew of only two other all-women bands. One was The Inter national Sweethearts of Rhythm, a swing ing big band in America during the Second World War; the other was the immortal, if fictional, Sweet Sue’s Syncopators in the film Some Like It Hot. The Cuban band Anacaona is a worthy addition to this short and exclusive list, more remarkable in that it was made up of eleven sisters. Alicia Castro, who tells their story, was born in 1920. Her parents, ten sisters and two brothers lived in Lawton, the old tobacco workers’ district in Havana. Her father was Chinese, the son of one of thousands of workers recruited to work on the sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. He took his surname from his employer and married the daughter of a Cuban musician in 1904. He opened a grocery store and prospered, but remained always a staunch Communist, even calling one of his sons Lenin, a name which came in handy years later.

The original spice girls

The many children grew up in an atmosphere of music, poetry, and politics. And as they grew their father was able to put up a notice in his store advertising their various abilities to give ‘instruction in music theory, song and piano; embroidery, seamstress, and hairdresser services’. Cuchito, the eldest daughter, was a firm feminist and champion of traditional Cuban culture. She came up with the idea for an all-woman band to play son, the Cuban music that is a mixture of African and Spanish rhythms. Even in the overwhelmingly macho culture of their day, they were a great success from the start. Avoiding the cheap dance ‘academies’ that were little more than vertical brothels, they played expensive hotels and white-only country clubs, although their music was reckoned wild and the lyrics of their songs sexually suggestive.

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FICTION II

Anacaona flourished in the early Thirties, the first years of the dictator Batista, a man who came to power on a reform ticket, but ruled with American government and Mafia support. Havana was a wide-open city, full of places in which musicians could make a good living. Alicia joined the band at the age of fourteen, playing clarinet, saxophone and sometimes double bass. They toured South and Central America: Alicia calls the Mexico City of 1936 the ‘Paris of the New World’, which shows how drastically things have changed. In 1937 they played in New York, on the same bill as Duke Ellington. The same year they sailed to Europe on the Ile-de-France, and jammed in Paris with Django Reinhardt. The band was locked in Cuba for most of the war; the good times came back with American tourism, fuelled by a massive building programme of hotels and casinos funded by Mafia money. Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, banned from the States, ran their US businesses from Havana: Frank Sinatra’s first appearance in the city coincided with a major Mafia conference in 1946. The Anacaona band was inspected by Mafia representatives because they did not believe that a bunch of women could play in a band, but must be ‘hookers in disguise’. They passed the test and played on in the new Americanised entertainment industry, although it operated an apartheid policy in this ostensibly racially-mixed society, so that, while her sisters were admitted, one of the Castro sisters was refused admittance to a club because of her slightly darker skin. The book is full of love affairs, with poets, seedy managers and handsome millionaires, and one sometimes loses track of the romantic complications of ten women. Alicia glosses over what look like rougher patches in their lives. Inevitably, as the years passed, the women aged and married and divorced and had children, but somehow the band hung together even after los barbudos (the bearded ones) overthrew Batista’s government in 1959. The name Castro suddenly came in handy. The sisters were in Brazil when they heard that the old regime had fallen; Fidel Castro sent a plane to bring them home. But the old world was almost immediately destroyed: the casinos, cabarets and brothels were closed, the American record companies shut down their branches in Havana. Music changed: son, the rumba and mambo were passé; the new songs were socially relevant and consequently dull. Slowly the band disintegrated, until only Alicia and her sister were left playing as a duo, booked by the state agency for ‘traditional music’. This is a superbly entertaining book, full of stories recalled by the three sisters left alive, all in their eighties, still playing music and drinking a little rum. Perhaps better than the words of their reminiscences are the photographs on almost every page, which show, over a period of almost fifty years, the beautiful and vivacious Castro sisters having a whale of a time. To order this book at £15.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18

S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE

ARDUOUS ASYLUM W HAT

IS THE

W HAT

By Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton 480pp £17.99)

AT FIRST GLANCE this book looks like a heartbreaking work of staggering worthiness. A prefacing note explains that all the author’s proceeds are going to Sudanese refugees, and the novel comes garlanded with a quote from a human rights organisation. When did you last read a novel endorsed by the International Crisis Group? Whatever you think of What is the What, you cannot fault Eggers for his noble intentions. The book is inspired by the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, who fled his Dinka homeland in Sudan and became one of the displaced refugees seeking asylum in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Eggers’s novel there are in fact two stories, that of Valentino the Lost Boy growing up in Africa and that of Valentino the Lost Man eking out a living in America. The story opens five years after he emigrates to Atlanta, when Valentino opens his door to a pair of gun-toting African-Americans. They beat him, truss him and gag him. The promised land of America turns out to be anything but. Robbed of his voice, Valentino addresses his life story to his assailants in silence. Like the Ancient Mariner, he has a ghastly tale to tell – one as harrowing as it is brutal. The author’s unadorned prose style allows the reader to focus on the bare bones of the story. Valentino’s first memory is as a six-year-old in Marial Bai, when he sees his mother’s yellow dress. Shortly afterwards, his village is razed to the ground by the Arab militias. Believing his parents to be dead, he and his fellow survivors walk through the desert to seek sanctuary in Ethiopia. En route they are mauled by lions, shot at by soldiers, bombed by planes, and under the constant threat of being attacked by the murahaleen, the Arab militias who terrorise the country on horseback. The biblical overtones are not exactly subtle. There is a boy called Moses and there are endless quasi-prophets whom Valentino encounters in the wilderness (the title refers to a Dinka creation myth). But it is a powerful read. At times it resembles a phantasmagoria. Valentino talks of ‘disconnected and miscolored images, as in fitful dream’. A blue dog flits in and out of the narrative; he meets a man with no face; and boys who he long thought had been killed keep reappearing as if they have come back from the dead. Eggers captures well the maelstrom of war. Everyone is a potential enemy, even those supposedly on your side. The boys discover they are utterly dispensable.

FICTION II

Valentino has to avoid enemy soldiers of the Khartoum regime, deadly Muslim militias who act by proxy for Khartoum, and liberation rebels who might draft him into the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Anyone who tries to leave the SPLA is killed as a deserter. He witnesses death on an unimaginable scale and also on a petty scale – he sees a twelve-year-old boy kick another to death whilst fighting over rations. There are many such haunting set-pieces. When Valentino flees Ethiopia chased by hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers, a woman beckons him and a group of boys forward with the words ‘Come to me, children! I am your mother!’ and then shoots two of them dead; another time 10,000 boys have to witness the public execution of seven men. In the end Eggers’s desire to bear witness rather dissipates the tension of the novel. It is far too long. The ten years Valentino spends in a Kenyan refugee camp are telescoped into the last quarter of the book, and the pacing here inevitably flags, the tone becoming slightly more preachy. Valentino, for example, takes issue with

placing refugee camps in inhospitable areas (‘I do not judge the UNHCR or any nation that takes in the nationless, but I do pose the question’). When Valentino departs for America from Kenya, his flight is delayed because it coincides with 9/11. This might have happened in real life but here it seems contrived. This book is emblematic enough without having to add 9/11 into the mix. We are told Princess Diana’s death also occasioned mass weeping in the streets of Nairobi, which I find hard to believe. In the book’s preface we learn that some of the book’s events are fictional, others are invented. Throughout the novel, as a result, you keep wondering not what is the what, but what is the truth. Nevertheless Dave Eggers should be commended for tackling the troubles of Sudan. At a time when most Anglophone fiction is so insular and navel-gazing this is a bold and spirited attempt to focus on a corner of a foreign field that is resolutely unAmerican. To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18

S AM L EITH

pillar of the community, big man of the hospital laundry and dedicated conservation campaigner; Kelly’s cowboybuilder uncle Harvey; Kelly’s horrendous old mum; an exasperated Kurdish chancer called Gaffer, who lapses into Gothic type when fulminating in his own tongue and is morbidly terrified of salad; Dory, a troubled friend of Beede prone to Barker: ebullient zone out and come to hours later having, for example, stolen a horse; Dory’s wife Elen, the sexually magnetic chiropodist; and their creepily prodigious son Fleet, who is building a cathedral out of matchsticks... To be fair (to myself), the first 100 pages are the least good. Nicola Barker pours out prose, pours out voice. Does she dictate this stuff, you think? It seems to emerge like water from a burst fire-hydrant: formless, without discipline, without the faintest sense the author has even reread the manuscript before sending it to the publisher. She makes Lucy Ellmann (a writer with a similar attraction to shouty typefaces and gratuitous parentheses and demotic babble) look like Basho. Take a few consecutive sentences from the early pages (describing a mysterious horseman – Dory, as it turns out – appearing at the window of a pub): He was handsome – vital, even – but with a distinctly delinquent air. He was wearing something strangely unfeasible in a bright yellow (a colour of such phenomenal intensity it’d cheerfully take the shine off a prize canary). The window was horse-high, only; its torso

Spirit of the Jester DARKMANS ★

By Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate 838pp £17.99)

DARKMANS IS A very strange novel; and, I should admit upfront, a very hard one to review. I began this book in a state of contemptuous irritation, and ended it with a sneaking feeling that the author might be a genius. I read the first 100 pages thinking that the author was as lazy and ill-disciplined as hell; and the final 100 suspecting that the laziness and lack of discipline was all my own. Darkmans is (as it emerges) deeply and cunningly preoccupied with medieval allegory, and yet told in a rushingly vatic style that’s closer to the William Blake / Christopher Smart visionary mode than its medieval predecessors. It slips between ecstatic illumination and drug-induced hallucination. And even if you didn’t know about Barker’s love of trashy telly, you’d probably notice that the novel’s rhetoric and plot owe a lot to soap-operas like EastEnders or Shameless, and – in the closing pages – Scooby Doo. Darkmans tells the story of an interrelated handful of characters in the transitional urban tangle of present-day Ashford. There’s Kane, charming purveyor of prescription drugs; Kelly, his potty-mouthed teenage ex-girlfriend, scion of the notorious Broad clan; Kane’s dad Beede –

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banged across the glass, steaming it over – so the man leaned down low to peek in, as if peering into the tank of an aquarium (or a display cabinet in a museum). Kane couldn’t tell – at first – what exactly it was that he was looking for, but he seemed absolutely enthralled by what he saw (seemed to delight in things – like a child – quite readily). He was smiling (although not in an entirely child-like way), and when his eyes alighted on Kane, the smile expanded, exponentially (small, neat, yellowed teeth, a touch of tongue). He reached out a hand and beckoned towards him… Just look at it: the ugly and indecisive asides; the lazy intensifiers – ‘phenomenal’; ‘exponentially’; the redundancies – is it an aquarium, or a display cabinet?; the meaningless expressions – ‘strangely unfeasible’ or ‘cheerfully take the shine off a prize canary’. Really, it’s a small masterclass in how not to write. There are passages like this everywhere. In this one about a church bell, descriptors fall like cluster-bombs: ‘But it had a fantastic bell. When it rang it produced an astonishingly pure, clear, old-fashioned sound; an elevated, almost ecstatic “peal”, a rousing, piercing, senergising clamour.’ But, oddly, such is the force and persistence of Barker’s linguistic gusher – not to mention the generosity and intensity of her imagination – that you start to be lifted and carried away by it. I suspect that the author does too; those tics, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps forced, start to thin out as the forward motion of the plot increases. Out of the babble there emerge some raucous comic set pieces, characters who start to really live on the page, and riddling hints of something altogether weirder. The babble, indeed, ends up making the case for itself. For Darkmans is all about the ebullience of language, the irruption of the past into the present, the seriousness and darkness of jokes. It defies moderation because it celebrates misrule. Its presiding spirit – not metaphorically: he seems to possess several of the characters at different times – is the medieval jester John Scoggin. Scoggin’s jests are not, incidentally, what we all might recognise as a good laugh: one of his finest involved locking a collection of vagrants into a barn and burning them alive. I can’t finally say for sure exactly what, if anything, this book is trying to tell us, or what even in more than the broadest outline is going on. I’m not even 100 per cent sure if it’s any good. But I know it’s doing something highly original and interesting, and doing it with conviction and sharp humour. I know I whipped through its more than 800 pages with attention unbroken. And I know that the very night I finished it, it showed up in my dreams. Seriously. I think that image of a broken fire-hydrant holds. Often, it does nothing but ruin the well-cut suits of passers-by and provide something for dogs to snap at. But when it catches the light in the right way, it makes rainbows. To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18

G ILL H ORNBY

LITTLE LAWRENCE W HEN W E W ERE ROMANS ★

By Matthew Kneale (Picador 296pp £16.99)

LAWRENCE, THE PROTAGONIST of Matthew Kneale’s new novel, is a charming seven-year-old. He is alert and interested in the sort of things we like little boys to be interested in – ancient Romans, soldiers, astronomy. He natters on, in his perky, off-beat first-person voice, about everything from his own domestic details to the biography of Caligula and the unpredictable behaviour of black holes – while his own little world is falling spectacularly apart. He is the literary first cousin of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke. Lawrence thinks that his story is the account of his journey to Rome with his mother, Hannah, and little sister, Jemima. Although he has been happy living in their cottage, likes his school and is taking his SATS ser iously, Lawrence is excited when his mother announces that they are going to pack up the car and go to Rome for a while. His mum has been tense lately, what with his dad following them down from Scotland, spying on them and turning the neighbours against them. It will be good to get away, to a place where his mum had once been so happy and which she talks so much about. And it is good, for a bit. There are numerous logistical disasters – the car breaks down, a passport gets stolen, the money runs out – but there is Rome. ‘I had never been to a town with a wall round it, especially a wall that was thousands of years old, so I thought “that’s intresting”’. And his mum’s friends are very nice at first. But then it becomes obvious – to his mum at least – that their dad has turned up and is poisoning everyone’s minds again. And when he starts breaking in and poisoning their food as well, it is time to move on. When We Were Romans is in fact an exploration of mental illness – how the psychological troubles of a parental mind are understood by, and then affect, the mind of a child. Lawrence alone has to bear the brunt of his mother’s paranoid manic depression. He has to develop unnatural self-control – ‘so though I was really angry I didn’t say anything, it was like I put all my anger in a little bag and did a knot’ – and learn to predict her moods and try to manipulate them: ‘This was bad, mum was scratching her arm now, so I thought “I must help her or she will fall down into a big hole.”’ He becomes adept and resourceful at thinking up diversions and plans to keep his mother on track and the family on the rails.

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While his family unit remains tight and it is the three of them against the world, Lawrence remains strong. But when his mother starts to meet up with past friends and past lovers – ‘mum was sitting next to him on the sofa and looking right at him like he was really interesting, it was like he was her favourite programme on telly’ – he becomes more complicated. The scenes of his own angry, violent, bad behaviour are narrated with a cool, almost scientific detachment: ‘and suddenly something happened. I felt so cross. I could feel it in my stomack and arms, it was in my teeth, it was like it might lift me right up, and I thought “I wonder what will happen now” I thought “I wonder what I will do?”’ It is a fact of life that children never produce quite the

quantity of poetic wisdom that one might like. And the often unconvincing aspect of fictional children is that they come out with slightly too much of it. After all, why go to the trouble of inventing a child for it to have all the limitations and irritations of the real thing? This child, though, is both captivating and credible. Caught up in his mother’s gothic psycho-drama, he remains bravely, prosaically matter-of-fact: ‘I felt so sad. I thought “sorry mum” because it was a real shame, we came all this way and it didn’t work. I wasn’t a hero after all, that was dreadfull.’ The heartbreak and the triumph of When We Were Romans is that little Lawrence is the real thing. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

S IMON W ILLIS

bear; and the November wind as it hammers against the windows. Here the wind has knives and the sky has fists. The shot that kills his terrier, Hobbes, pitches Julius into the state of war diagnosed by the dog’s illustrious namesake. Stunned by the cruelty of the act and searching for the culprit in a quest laced with paranoia, Julius takes his Lee-Enfield rifle, brought back from France by his grandfather after the First World War, into the woods. The men he finds there, those who are guilty by proximity alone, are dispatched with the equilibrium of the trained sniper; he shoots one through the teeth from four hundred yards, preparing a range card with the meticulous skill taught to him by his father. What was passed on with paternal affection in order to prepare a son for hard necessities is used with unnerving dispassion. These are killings that are left, for the reader, unassuaged by the palliative of revenge and which are greeted by Julius, in the moments of desolate lucidity that prick his narration, with little more than gentle regret. The violence may be shocking in its illogicality, but it is never savage. What lies at the heart of the novel, evidence of Donovan’s consummate skill and humanity, is an exposure of the tragedy of violence and the brutality of loneliness. Julius must feel both with their full force, for he has seen just enough affection to miss it when it has gone but not enough to enjoy it comfortably when it is there. He is ‘awkward up close, best at a distance’. It is a trait which puts paid to his only significant relationship with a woman. Claire leaves just as quickly as she came, not because of an absence of affection on his part (there is plenty), but because she cannot interpret his silence. But it is a trait that comes, literally, with the territory and it lends him an innocence and a sympathy which, while not absolving him, at least mediate his murderous culpability. Julius Winsome is written in the spare prose we have come to expect from Gerard Donovan. Here it is perfectly matched not only to the landscape, which is beautifully rendered, but also to Julius’s narration in all its prickly poetry. To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 18

TRAGEDY OF LONELINESS J ULIUS W INSOME ★

By Gerard Donovan (Faber & Faber 215pp £10.99)

VEINS OF HOSTILITY and menace run through Gerard Donovan’s fiction. Whether one thinks of the baker digg ing his own g rave in the Booker long-listed Schopenhauer’s Telescope, a novel animated by dialogue that reads like a litany of human barbarism, or the paranoid Sunless in the author’s second outing, Dr Salt, the lives of Donovan’s characters might easily be called ‘Hobbesian’. Now the name of the philosopher so famously associated with the solitude, brutality and brevity of life in the state of nature ricochets around the forests of Norther n Maine at the beg inning of Donovan’s third novel, the starkly beautiful and compelling Julius Winsome, as Julius shouts the name of his doomed dog, deliberately shot in the woods. Julius lives in the cabin built by his long-dead grandfather. In summer he works as a mechanic and part-time gardener for out-of-towners. In winter he retreats to the cabin, surrounded by his late father’s books – all 3,282 of them. Aside from occasional visits to Fort Kent for supplies, he sits and reads in the quietness that he once enjoyed with his father, when he would read Shakespeare and learn lists of exotic Elizabethan words – ‘besmoiled’, ‘geck’, ‘gallowglass’ – which now pepper his sentences. These words render him incomprehensible and suspicious to those whose paths he occasionally crosses. Julius measures the winters in books. This one is worth fifty and ‘fixes you to silence like a pinned insect’. The quietness of Julius’s existence intensifies the twin menaces of the season: the sound of rifles firing their rounds as hunters sit in their perches ‘harvesting’ deer, elk and

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S IMON B AKER THE CLICHÉ ‘EAGERLY awaited’ prose is elegant, and the narraseems appropr iate for The tive voice he uses is engaging Welsh Girl (Sceptre 344pp for being both outwardly ON F OUR F IRST N OVELS £11.99), by Peter Ho Davies, a brusque and inwardly wounddebut which finally appears four ed. His grasp of the allure and years after its author’s inclusion the emptiness of excess leads to on the Granta ‘Best of Young some genuinely penetrating British Novelists’ roster. It is set in 1944, in a North observations, but best of all are the climbing scenes, Wales village so quietly traditional that many locals speak which are tightly sprung and compulsively readable. English only haltingly. The novel contains three strands, Wales, 1944 again – but with a difference. In the main one about Esther, a young barmaid who Resistance (Faber & Faber 287pp £12.99), by Owen becomes pregnant after being raped by a British soldier, Sheers, the women residents of a border village in the the second about a bright German PoW held in a camp black mountains wake one morning to discover that in the village, who falls for Esther, and the third about a their husbands have gone, leaving no clue as to their German Jewish refugee working for British intelligence, location. This is odd, of course, but then, this is not who arrives to interrogate Rudolf Hess, who is impris1944 as we know it. Germany is winning the war. Its oned nearby. troops have invaded Britain, and (in a nod to the famous The Welsh Girl, as readers of Davies’s acclaimed short toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue) have pulled down stories would expect, is written with unostentatious Nelson’s Column. Churchill has run away to Canada, skill. Setting and characters are built patiently and with where he can ‘better continue the fight against the evil care, and as a result are always convincing. Dramatically, of fascism’ from a safe distance. however, there is a problem. This is a wilfully small WW2 lends itself to this type of alternative-history novel, one that takes its place unassumingly in the liternovel because we know that the outcome could so easily ary tradition; it therefore contains none of the naive selfhave been different. However, Sheers makes this an even importance or nervous knowingness of much debut more convincing spectacle by discarding the usual moral work, but its maturity is bought at the cost of narrative index of bully and victim. German soldiers soon arrive energy. The scenes possess verisimilitude, but that in in the village, led by Albrecht Wolfram, a scholarly, itself does not make them interesting. In scrupulously unsoldierly officer determined to keep his men in avoiding the sensational, Davies occasionally goes too far check. Albrecht is hardly a stereotypical marauder; in in the other direction, creating a competent, readable fact, he and his group merely want a quiet life in the novel but one that is muted in comparison with his black mountains, and to that end decide not to remind excellent shorter work. their superiors of their existence. They help the women When James, the narrator of Ivo Stourton’s The Night with the farming tasks that were until recently perClimbers (Doubleday 320pp £10), is visited by an old formed by their husbands, and start to become, in a friend, he learns that a past crime may be about to send sense, replacements. Sheers presents this curious yet him to pr ison. He is now a wealthy, emotionally compelling scenario with conviction and style. detached corporate solicitor, but a decade earlier he had The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review 376pp drifted towards the other side of the law. At a fictional £12.99), by Anita Amirrezvani, provoked great interest Cambridge college, he fell in with a glamorous group at last year’s London Book Fair. Set in seventeenth-cenwhose excesses were funded by its unofficial leader, tury Iran, it describes the growth to maturity of an Francis, the enchanting son of a Tory peer. After buying unnamed girl whose father dies leaving her and her all their coursework from former graduates, the group’s mother in poverty in their village. They travel to the members would eat lavishly each night, take drugs and city of Isfahan to live with the girl’s uncle Gostaham, a indulge in their favourite pastime of scaling the universimaster rug-maker, and aunt Gordiyeh, a status-obsessed ty’s most treacherous buildings. Eventually, their money woman who installs them as servants rather than equals. ran out following a public row between the increasingly The girl is entranced by the city and obsessed with rugdrunken Francis and his father, and so to maintain their making (a pursuit for which she has considerable talent); lifestyle they embarked on a scam involving one of the these must sustain her against false friends and hardship, university’s Picassos, which had been hanging in both of which soon arrive. Francis’s room on indefinite, authorised loan. Years later, Amirrezvani spent almost a decade writing this novel, it seems as though they are about to be found out. and her efforts are repaid in the impressive period There are a few overlong scenes, and the scam is detail. The novel also describes without pathos the lamfounded on an unlikely premise, but this debut has entable status of women in that era – unable to work, enough to comfortably transcend flaws that will they had to rely on men, but without money in the first doubtlessly slip away over the author’s career. Stourton’s place, they were not considered good prospects for 57 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

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marriage. (When the girl finally receives an offer, it is for a three-month ‘trial marriage’ only, after which she could be returned.) Stylistically, though, the novel begins with promises of a spiky narrative voice but then veers towards a pastiche of traditional fairytale modes of storytelling, with a deterministic plot and somewhat

predictable, magic-realist descriptions: ‘My breasts, which had been so small, were now like two ripe apples, and my hips curved like a melon.’ This novel will undoubtedly have book-club appeal, but its lack of originality and depth disappoints. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 18

L EO B ENEDICTUS

street lighting (unlikely) and a Jewish Cultural Institute (surely not?). These might be overlooked in a book with other merits. But not in this one. The prose is he-didthis-then-he-did-that flat, the characters are less human than the mechanical Turk himself, and the story, though packed with incident, is devoid of anything to believe in, care about or be surprised by. Löhr suspects as much, I fancy, as a good portion of the book is taken up with scurrying justifications for his characters’ increasingly improbable behaviour. No, what The Secrets of the Chess Machine fits seamlessly in with is the story of a screenwriter steeped in Hollywood convention hastily bashing out a novel. All the principal women, for instance, are beautiful and lascivious, and never more than twenty pages away from an irrelevant sex scene. Dialogue, meanwhile, consists either of action-hero platitudes (‘See you in Hell’) or of clunky exposition like: ‘You’ll never, not in a hundred years, get to be that towering figure in the world of chess, a grandmaster.’ (True enough, this one, as the rank of grandmaster was not even created until 1914.) We get the bit where the courtesan takes a job as a maid to seduce her way to Kempelen’s secret, the bit where the captive hero rubs through the rope binding his wrists to get free, and the bit where the gloating villain fails to kill the hero when he has the chance. And, in order to make even this preposterous story hang together, we need to believe that a dwarf in platform shoes no longer looks like a dwarf, and that not one of the three men having an affair with one female character notices that she is at least seven months pregnant at the time. Page 167, to top it all, describes arguably the least believable scene I have ever read in a piece of prose fiction – a moment of masturbation and sudden death that the reviewer’s code regrettably forbids me from ‘spoiling’ by describing it in detail. Short of staging a horse-and-carriage chase that demolishes a fruit market, in short, Löhr could scarcely have written a better parody of a pulpy erotic thriller, or a worse imitation of a decent literary novel, which I fear was the original plan. If The Secrets of the Chess Machine were a movie then at least generations of students could giggle drunkenly over such climactic lines as ‘It won’t end in a draw this time, chess player.’ But as a book, it is implausible, inaccurate, derivative, dull and not even particularly short. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18

See You in Hell, Chess Player T HE S ECRETS

OF THE

C HESS M ACHINE

By Robert Löhr (Translated by Anthea Bell) (Fig Tree 344pp £16.99)

I N 1770, THE court of Empress Mar ia Theresa of Austria-Hungary was held spellbound by the first demonstration of the Turk, a revolutionary automaton which could not only play chess against a human opponent, but usually won. Soon afterwards, however, the machine’s creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, became strangely reluctant to exhibit it, and the Turk was not seen again until it returned for a triumphal tour of Europe in 1783. Only many years after Kempelen’s death was the machine’s secret revealed: it had been a dwarf in a box all along. And now it is around these threads of history that the journalist and screenwriter Robert Löhr has chosen to weave his first novel, which was published in German last year and now appears in a translation by Anthea Bell. In Löhr’s imagined version of events, the tale begins when Tibor, an itinerant dwarf and chess genius, is thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge. He is visited in his cell by the mysterious Kempelen, who offers him a job as the brains inside the Turk. Initially horrified by the planned deception, Tibor changes his mind the next day when he accidentally kills a Venetian merchant and needs Kempelen’s help to skip town. After some teething problems, Tibor and Kempelen successfully present the Turk at court, before jealous onlookers and tensions among the fraudsters finally bring the scheme to its dramatic conclusion. ‘I have taken the liberty of making up my own story,’ says Löhr in an author’s note, ‘which I hope fits seamlessly into all that is known from that period.’ It doesn’t. For a start, Löhr is prone to dropping anachronistic clangers in almost every chapter. His depiction of 1770s Bratislava contains, for instance, such modern conveniences as a post office (maybe), public

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SILENCED VOICES

I N THE RUN - UP to the Beijing HRW condemns the system, which L UCY P OPESCU Olympics, campaign groups are includes ‘tapping and surveillance of preparing to increase the pressure on phone and Internet communications, Z HANG J IANHONG the host country to release prisoners visits and summons by the police, of conscience and clean up its human rights record. As close surveillance by plainclothes agents, unofficial houseChina’s international political and economic strength arrests, incommunicado confinement in distant policeintensifies, freedom of expression continues to suffer, with run guest houses, and custody in police stations’. the authorities restricting the work of the media and nonThe organisation documents cases similar to that of governmental organisations, while implementing even Zhang, involving journalists, bloggers, webmasters, writstricter controls on the Internet. According to Human ers, and editors, who risk prison sentences every time Rights Watch (HRW), conditions deteriorated signifithey send news out of China or merely debate politically cantly in 2006: ‘Several high-profile, politically-motivated sensitive ideas among themselves: ‘Censors use sophistiprosecutions of lawyers and journalists in 2006 put an end cated filters, blocking, and Internet police to limit incomto any hopes that President Hu Jintao would be a proing information ... Many cases come to trial charged with gressive reformer and sent an unambiguous warning to vaguely defined crimes such as “disrupting social order”, individuals and groups pressing for greater respect for the “leaking state secrets”, or “inciting subversion”.’ fundamental rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens.’ A member of the independent Chinese PEN centre, Over here we can write freely about the merits of Britain’s Zhang was previously imprisoned from 1989 to 1991 for hosting the 2012 Games, but prominent Chinese writer his pro-democracy activities. In August 2005 he foundZhang Jianhong (aka Li Hong) has recently been jailed for ed the literary and news website Aiqinhai (or ‘Aegean referring to Beijing’s intention to host the Olympics as ‘a Sea’ – http://www.aiqinhai.org), serving as editor-inscandal’, whilst criticising China’s human rights record. chief until it was banned by the authorities in March On 19 March 2007, 48-year-old Zhang was sentenced to 2006. He was also a regular contributor to the overseas six years in prison on subversion charges for articles calling Chinese sites Boxun (http://www.boxun.com) and the for political reform in China that he posted online between Epoch Times (http://www.dajiyuan.com). May and September 2006. According to PEN, he has been It is also reported that his six-year term is to be foldetained since his arrest on 6 September 2006, when more lowed by one year’s deprivation of political rights. Zhang’s than twenty police officers searched his home. His comlawyer believes his severe sentence is partly in retribution puters were confiscated and his wife was interrogated. for being mentioned in the US State Department’s Zhang was formally charged on 12 October 2006 and was Country Report on Human Rights Practices released just finally convicted of subversion by a court in Ningbo, before Zhang’s sentencing. Meanwhile, the Committee to Zhejiang Province, eastern China in March, for ‘defaming Protect Journalists speculate that the editor may be sufferthe Chinese government’ and ‘inciting subversion’. ing repercussions from another posting where he reported ‘This verdict is sadly yet another example of the judicial on allegations that the Chinese government illegally prosystem being used by the political authorities,’ Reporters cured organs from living prisoners. Whatever the real reawithout Borders said. ‘It is outrageous that cyber-dissisons behind his lengthy prison sentence, Zhang is known dents get severe prison sentences just for the views they for his fearless journalism, having often published articles express. Yet again, they are being made to pay a heavy depicting fraud and corruption and criticising the price for their commitment.’ Although Zhang intends to Chinese Communist Party, and his imprisonment follows appeal his sentence, it is unlikely that he will be acquitted. a pattern of harassment of dissidents routinely observed by Apparently, after handing down the six-year prison senhuman rights organisations. tence, the court claimed that it was showing clemency Readers may like to send appeals protesting against the because the defendant expressed remorse during the trial. detention of Zhang Jianhong (aka Li Hong), and calling HRW refers to China’s Internet restrictions as the for his immediate and unconditional release in accordance ‘Great Firewall of China’ and points to a recent crackwith Article 19 of the United Nations International down that is justified by Premier Wen Jiabao as ‘necesCovenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which China sary’ in order ‘to safeguard national, social and collective is a signatory. Seek assurances that he is treated humanely interests’. Similar restrictions apply to books, newspapers, and urge the authorities to grant him full access to his magazines, television, radio and film. In the last year the family, lawyers and any necessary medical care: Chinese government has stepped up its campaign against His Excellency Hu Jintao freedom of expression on the Internet and ‘moved aggresPresident of the People’s Republic of China sively to plug the wall’s holes and to punish transgressors’. c/o Her Excellency Madam Fu Ying The authorities employ a vast police and state security Chinese Embassy apparatus that enables them to enforce multiple layers of 49-51 Portland Place, London W1B 1JL control on critics, protesters and civil society activists. Fax: 0207 636 2981

59 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

CRIME

T HE B ETHLEHEM M URDERS ★

J ESSICA M ANN

By Matt Rees (Atlantic Books 272pp £12.99)

OMAR Yussef is a weary old teacher who tries to keep politics out of his home and classroom. But in Bethlehem conflict is inescapable; and though the Israelis are a fact of life, the real enemies are homegrown terrorists. When a Christian is accused of killing a ‘freedom fighter’ by leading the Israelis to him, Yussef knows the man is innocent and goes to dangerous lengths to prove it. ‘“What an old fool you are,” he told himself, “scrambling around in a battle zone in your nice shoes. Sometimes you can have a gun to your head and you still don’t know where your brains are.”’ The murder mystery is intricate and clever, but what makes this book so outstanding is its evocation of daily life in hideous circumstances, and the survival of human decency in an utterly indecent situation. This unlikely hero, burdened by fear for himself, his family and his pupils, fighting against the urge to feel that ‘all his life’s work was just so much destroyed hope and goodness befouled’, finds in himself strength and courage he never knew he had. It is an unusual adjective for a crime novel, but I’d call this one inspiring.

T HE D EATH L IST ★

By Paul Johnston (Mira Books 336pp £6.99)

IN his previous series, one featuring a future sleuth in a dystopian Edinburgh, the other a half-Greek half-Scots private eye in modern Greece, Paul Johnston produced some of the best crime fiction of recent years. He writes as well as ever here, though the acknowledgements preceding this book refer to ‘the ups and downs of my recent life’ and there seems to be a considerable autobiographical element in the portrait of a

once successful crime novelist, now ‘blocked good and proper’, dropped by his publishers, agent and wife, and overtaken by his professional rivals. That bitter state, familiar in fact and not unknown in fiction, leads on to a horror story, in which the author meets his last, greatest fan and is drawn into a sinister game with increasingly vicious revenge taken on everyone who ever slighted him. This is a nightmarish tale, but a very clever one.

T HE C ORONER ’ S L UNCH ★

By Colin Cotterill (Quercus 288pp £12.99)

IN 1976, a year after the Communist takeover in Laos, 72-year-old Dr Siri Paiboun is the state coroner; in fact, the country’s only coroner since his predecessor fled to Thailand. This unconventional hero was trained as a doctor in Paris but now has to work with one outdated medical textbook, few medical supplies, one devoted nurse and an orderly with Down’s syndrome. His work is obstructed by officialdom and bureaucracy, while secret enemies are determined to prevent him from proving that the wife of an important government official was murdered. Material help comes from his friends, a sandwich maker, a river man and others who have returned alive from ‘compulsory education’, and Siri has dreams in which he talks to, or even turns into dead people: these are not ghosts, but messages from Siri’s own subconscious, which eventually reveal the truth. The story is good, the characters interesting, the hero delightful and the setting fascinating: a find.

T HE A LIBI M AN ★

By Tami Hoag (Orion 368pp £12.99)

ELENA Estes has disowned her rich

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family, stopped working as an undercover cop, and is getting herself together after a traumatic attack by working in a fr iend’s stable. But when she finds the alligator-mauled body of another groom, Elena starts investigating, all the more enthusiastically when she realises that the chief suspect is her own one-time-fiancé, a man who has previously got away with rape and murder. He is one of the arrogant Palm Beach playboys who give each other alibis and buy themselves out of any trouble. But now the Russian mob has arrived in Florida and they play by different rules. To some extent this is writing by numbers: underdogs – grooms, detectives and even a bed-hopping professional polo player – are relatively decent, whilst politicians, lawyers, and the filthy rich have no redeeming features, and a Russian mobster is simply a cartoon villain; but the plot hangs together and the story swings snappily along.

MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH ★

By Ariana Franklin (Bantam 400pp £12.99)

A RIANA Franklin, aka Diana Norman, has written many enjoyable historical novels, and the addition of a mystery plot makes this one even more so. It is based on a true story, the death of eleven-year-old William of Norwich and the persecution of English Jews that ensued. Henry II needs his Jews working and paying taxes, while in Cambridge, where several Christian children have been murdered, the Jews have been penned up in the castle for their own safety. All the same, when more young children go missing, and then when their murdered bodies are found, the Jews are inevitably suspects – or scapegoats. Enter to the rescue a chippy girl ‘whose eyes regard a tree, a patch of grass with interrogation: what’s your name? What are you good for? If not, why not?’ This delightfully original detective heroine

CRIME

is a Sicilian doctor with forensic insight, no bedside manner and some revolutionary medical techniques. I hope we meet her again.

T HE LYING TONGUE ★

By Andrew Wilson (Canongate 320pp £10.99)

ALTHOUGH it’s set in Venice, this is not one of those travelogue crime novels worth saving up to read there, for the narrator, Adam, hardly sets foot outside the dusty palazzo where he has taken a job as companion, nurse and maid of all work to a famous, reclusive, one-book author. Andrew Wilson’s previous book was the biography of Patricia Highsmith, and this clever first novel shares many of her qualities: nothing and nobody is what they seem, the victim and the villain are men, the atmosphere is unsettling, the mystery claustrophobic and a guilty conscience is surplus to requirements.

D EVIL’ S P EAK

Also recommended:

By Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £14.99)

ONE needs to become acclimatised to rapid switches of viewpoint between perpetrators, their victims and the cops, but as the fog of misunderstanding gradually clears it becomes clear that this is one of those entertainment fictions that teaches one more than any textbook or documentary. This thriller is a fascinating portrayal of one aspect of life in post-apartheid South Africa. The story’s principal actors are a black, assegai-wielding former freedom fighter who turns into a vigilante and goes on a killing spree; a high-class tart; and a policeman who drinks to drown the screaming that’s waiting inside his head: ‘One day it will come out and I am scared that I am the one who will hear it.’ It does come out and he is the one who hears it, winding up the tension to a gripping, shocking climax. Highly recommended.

Frozen Tracks by Ake Edwardson (translated by Laurie Thompson) (Harvill 464pp £11.99) – in the genus ‘Scandinavian police procedural’. Rattling the Bones by Ann Granger (Headline 288pp £19.99) – a nice example of the young-woman-asprivate eye genre – with a heroine who is sparky, gutsy and undeterred by danger or disapproval. Trouble by Jesse Kellerman (Sphere 368pp £10.99) – a nightmarish psychological chiller in which a New York medical student discovers that no good deed goes unpunished. The Chatelet Apprentice by JeanFrançois Parot (Gallic Books 344pp £11.99) – introducing a police investigator in eighteenth-century France. An interesting book, and the first in a series.

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING THE SUBJECT OF ‘umbrella’ elicited prize and £150. All others printed some very original poems. I was receive £10 and the admiration of disappointed that none of the their friends and family. judges shared my love of Bill Webster’s ‘Six ways of lookNext month’s topic is ‘the choice’. Entries should arrive ing at an umbrella’, which didn’t therefore graduate, but all at 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW by 27 June. the poems printed are of excellent quality anyway. J R Poems should rhyme, scan and make sense, and be no Gillie wins first prize and £300, and J M Harvey second more than 24 lines in length. Compulsory too – it was death to refuse – A duffel coat then was the drill, An elegant waistcoat, a pair of suede shoes, And trousers of cavalry twill. A well-bred umbrella would crown the display, Tight-furled, with a smart brass ferrule. You could hear whole platoons of them tapping their way To the Science or History School.

FIRST PRIZE AUDEN’S UMBRELLA by J R Gillie He’d left it in the lodge, pushed for his train after a Christchurch lunch; this in the time of the famously fissured face (did rain, I wondered, linger in those lines?). The chime of Oxford bells told me I was too late to catch him, hand it over; so I stood testing the ancient frame, feeling the weight, noting its rusty silk, and polished wood.

Of trophies and tokens I keep very few, No oar is displayed on my wall. A few scraps of learning, a snapshot or two, And there, keeping faith in the hall, A greying umbrella, flamboyancy’s ghost, You might say we share our decline. I take it for outings – just here to the post – On days when the weather is fine.

I kept it, and I have it still. Since then a dozen birds have soiled it. One I caught (a crow) fancied it ‘facile’; while a hen clucked at ‘pretended wisdom, cheaply bought.’ Each night I plant it in the fields, and dream some wandering beast will steal it as I sleep; but dawn reveals it, firm of crook and seam, making a gloomy shelter for the sheep.

ENTROPY-SUR-MER by Iain Colley This is a scene of affluence and ease, of mint-condition sand the shade of wheat, of blinds and sun-defying canopies, a scene of sheer uninsulated heat; not the remotest tremor of a breeze.

SECOND PRIZE LOST PROPERTY by J M Harvey I have your black umbrella – you left it in the hall – it’s hanging there, still waiting collection since your call asking had I seen it and saying you’d drop by your voice as full of promise as any cloud-free sky.

A paper bumbershoot slopes in my glass, its pastel flutes preserving cocktail ice that crowds the inert flotsam of a sparse, bedraggled mint sprig and a wilted slice of lime. A swim? A healthy leg-stretch? Pass. The brazen stillness of the Midi glare beats on the deck umbrellas of the yachts. All motion suffers in the congealed air. Their frogged attendants sweat while the big shots hog the cool comforts of the millionaire.

I’ve kept this one belonging abandoned in such haste aware by now it’s certain we’ll both have been replaced unclaimed in all the flurry of your rash deceitful life – I’m left with your umbrella and you never left your wife.

Along the belle époque shore frontage stand whole regiments of terrace parasols, essentials shields. The bandstand lacks a band. Nobody – not one hungry dog – patrols the sunstruck streets or superheated sand.

ESSENTIALS OF EDUCATION by Noel Petty You had to have Latin in those distant days Or you’d not be allowed through the door, But in that initial bewildering phase You soon found you needed much more.

UMBRELLA by Ted Giles Umbrellas men use as a totem or ruse To establish some sort of mystique:

62 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

They believe they have charm with one furled on the arm And a new gravitas when they speak.

Depending on the weather. The stick, with his silvery knob a-shine, Went out in the sun to flirt; The umbrella, who had to face the rain, Came back with a soaking skirt.

No man carries a gamp to avoid getting damp At the feel of the first drop of rain; Nor to cause any fuss when it’s left on a bus Nor jam doors on an Underground train.

Their descendants, much less stylish, live In a corner by the door And their state is not what it used to be, It’s not as it was before. The stick is collapsible, sprung, and black, Accustomed to boots and dirt, The umbrella is coloured in segments With a Golf Club’s name on her skirt.

And a man wouldn’t fret if he got a bit wet, He would sit down and dry by the fire Thus avoiding the folly of shaking a brolly Indoors to some good lady’s ire. So what do we make of a man who would take An umbrella despite a blue sky? Is he striking a pose? Is he, worse, one of those Who’s intending to poison a spy?

Alas, the relationship suffers: The stick has a friend – they’re both gay And they go out together on rambles And lie about losing their way. The umbrella is very indignant But does not lament or complain: With a parasol, also abandoned, They’re safe from the sun and the rain.

To the Nazis we sent, with a brolly, a gent And they thought he was our paradigm; But guns, not umbrellas, swayed Munich beer cellars So we didn’t get ‘Peace in our Time’. UMBRELLA-WISH by Alison Prince Umbrellas are not civilised. They fight against the user’s grasp, fretting to ride the up-wind, and will commit suicide if bridled over-hard. Bred from a kite crossed with a dustbin lid, a trace of bat lies somewhere in their genes. The folds of skin stretched thin between the spiky bones are kin to bat anatomy. Requiescat in pace, we mutter, with fingers crossed at the perversity of these unique creatures that self- invert out of sheer pique.

AUDIOBOOK P OINT

OF

O RIGIN

By Patricia Cornwell (Abridged. Read by Joan Allen. Hachette Audio. 5 cds. £15.99)

I AM A Patricia Cornwell virgin, so to speak. Narrated by her celebrated heroine Dr Kay Scarpetta, a Chief Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist, the story’s end makes evident how many false clues have been planted and left dangling. An all-consuming fire devastates media mogul Kenneth Spark’s Virginia farm and racing stables. The horses’ screams are like human screams. What little remains of an exquisite young woman lies in the master bathroom. She was one of Spark’s girlfriends. He is victim or killer. Initially Kay assumes the latter, though he loved those horses passionately. Unsurprisingly, her view of mankind throughout is melancholy. Elsewhere Carrie Grethen, thwarted in her psychopathic efforts to destroy Kay and those closest to her, escapes from a psychiatric hospital. Others now at risk – one of them doomed – are Kay’s dearly loved companion Benton, and her young niece Lucy, once Carrie’s lover. The author is most famed, I expect, for the plentiful pathological information and criminal lore she imparts. Until the suspenseful end, the reader, Joan Allen, formerly acclaimed on stage as Mrs Nixon, seems not to turn a hair as she describes gruesome mutilations and repulsive acts of violence. Susan Crosland

Folded, they sulk and chafe, get themselves lost – or possibly they dematerialise into astral enigmas, their un-souls identified by physicists as holes black-hidden in the strangeness of the skies, which may be right. But on the other hand, umbrella-wish could fill infinity with ferruled clusters of divinity born of a bliss we do not understand. We should be careful, then, how we deploy these private shelters from the wind and rain. Respect their hidden wish, and we may gain a sudden soaring into fields of joy. THE UMBRELLA by D Shepherd They had their home in an elephant’s foot And spent their time together Except when one of them went out

63 LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

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