JULY 2006 £3.

00

WHAT DID THE ROMANS DO FOR US?

Peter Jones on Britain under the Caesars

Richard Overy on the Nazi Economy

Donald Rayfield on a Russian Anne Frank

Hemingway and Dos Passos Fall Out

Stravinsky in Exile
Tintin in Trouble

PESKY VEGETARIANS

The Black Hole of Calcutta ★ The Commonwealth of Thieves

The Somme Remembered

ON THE ROAD: Alistair Cooke ★ Jason Burke ★ Pankaj Mishra

 FROM THE PULPIT
W HEN I STARTED out in J EREMY L EWIS
publishing, nearly forty years
ago, the book trade was more
elderly than it is today. ‘Billy’
Collins and ‘Jamie’ Hamilton
HOPPING THE FENCE
were in their late sixties;
‘Fred’ Warburg and Victor Gollancz were even older,
and Sir Stanley Unwin, with his white goatee beard,
looked as old as the hills. Longevity has become less
prized in the intervening years. George Weidenfeld is
still active in his eighties, and Ernest Hecht of the
Souvenir Press is as effervescent as ever: but very few of
my contemporaries have survived the course. Red-faced
men in chalk-striped suits have been elbowed aside by
high-powered lady publishers; long, boozy lunches at
the Garrick are tolerated, just, for the few survivors of
the ancien régime.
Literary agents, on the other hand, seem exempt from
the cult of youth. Many of the top agents of today –
Michael Sissons, Pat Kavanagh, Deborah Rogers, Gillon
Aitken, Bruce Hunter – were the top agents of my
youth, and show no signs of slowing down or jumping
ship. Nor is there any good reason for them ever to
retire. Successful agents are said to earn more than all but fact that starting up an agency is relatively cheap makes it
a few bestselling authors, far outstripping publishers and
booksellers; and because they embody their businesses,
they are the masters of their fates to a far greater extent
than most publishers can ever hope to be. Whereas pub-
lishing houses consist of warehouses full of books, work-
in-progress and contracts as well as the people who work
there, agencies are, in essence, no more and no less than
the accumulated experience, shrewdness and rapacity of
the agents themselves. Back in the Seventies and Eighties
many independent publishers sold out to the conglomer-
ates, and found themselves, often to their surprise, being
shown the door by their new owners; but agents who sell
out will be begged to stay on, since without them and
their authors agencies dissolve into thin air. Publishers
come and go, it seems, but agents go on for ever.
Not surprisingly, many people who, in earlier times,
might have become editors now aspire to be agents instead
– so much so that every time I open The Bookseller I
expect to read how yet another eminent publisher has
hopped over the fence. Back in the Seventies, Ed Victor
and Gillon Aitken set the pattern, and were followed in
due course by David Godwin; recent apostates include
Peter Straus, late of Picador, Caroline Michel from
HarperCollins, Clare Alexander from Macmillan and the
ebullient Patrick Janson-Smith of Transworld – whose
father, Peter, represented Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler and
Gavin Maxwell back in the Fifties, and has recently set up
shop once more. Publishing, they tell us, has become
intolerably corporate and bureaucratic, too dominated by
salesmen and accountants. In the Nineties we were told
that, with editors always on the move from one firm to
another, the agent had become
the one fixed point in an
author’s life; and the agent of
today is as much a manager as a
quasi-accountant, involving
himself in editorial labours,
advising on publicity and jackets, and advancing his clients’
careers in film and television as well as the printed word.
But since agents are essentially businessfolk, all this
reflects realpolitik as well as the desire to be more closely
involved with their authors’ work. In the old days, pub-
lishers ruled the literary roost, for good or for bad, but
towards the end of the Eighties they ceded power to the
new bookselling chains and to the literary agents: with
the result that the great publishing conglomerates tend to
combine massivity with powerlessness. Agents seem, by
comparison, enviably free spirits; and whereas a publish-
er’s mistakes are invariably expensive, with money tied up
in unearned advances and unsold stock, an agent’s dead
duck represents little more than time wasted and a blow
to the morale. Setting up and running a publishing house
is a hugely expensive business; working on a commission
basis, agents are recipients rather than investors, and the
an attractive option for editors who have recently been
sacked or want to cast corporate shackles aside.
This Gadarene rush into literary agency has come at a
curious time. As the publishing conglomerates become
ever larger, swallowing up one firm after another (the
few remaining independents include Bloomsbury, Faber,
Granta, Profile, Duckworth and Constable), the number
of outlets to whom agents can sell their wares is bound
to diminish. This coincides with a widening gulf
between the haves and the have-nots of the literary
world, with publishers concentrating their firepower –
in the form of advances and publicity budgets – on a
few hoped-for bestsellers, often ghostwritten for celebri-
ties and sportsmen. The ‘midlist’ – those worthy books
which get large reviews, sell in modest quantities, are
more productive of réclame than profit, and are of no
great interest to chains and supermarkets – has been
under siege for as long as I can remember, with doom-
sters predicting its imminent demise; judging by the
threadbare look of some publishers’ autumn catalogues,
the moment of truth may be upon us.
There is always a great gulf set between what an
author needs to write a book and what a publisher
should sensibly pay for it, and whereas agents both
prompted and profited from the inflated advances paid
over the last twenty years even for modest-selling books,
there are signs that, for midlist titles at least, advances are
tumbling down. Bestsellers are, by definition, few and
far between; the rewards of the midlist are not what they
were; what, one wonders, will all these agents be up to
in five or ten years’ time? A job in publishing, perhaps?
1
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006

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 paper-
back from Penguin. He is currently
working on a book about the
Greene family for Jonathan Cape.
C HRISTOPHER R OSS is a writer
living in Paris. He spent five years in
Japan in the 1990s, returning in 2002
to research his latest book, Mishima’s
Sword, on the spectacular suicide of
Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.
J ASON G OODWIN is the author of
The Janissary Tree, an Ottoman
thriller (Faber & Faber).
CHRISTOPHER HART’s first volume of
his blockbuster Attila trilogy, written
under the pseudonym William
Napier, is now available in paperback.
U RSULA B UCHAN has written the
Gardens column in The Spectator for
more than 20 years. Her latest book,
The English Garden, will be published
by Frances Lincoln in October.
P ETER J ONES is the Founder of
Friends of Classics.
CHRIS BRAY, whose mother says he
will never be happy, is film critic of
the First Post. His book on Michael
Caine and post-war Britain is out
from Faber & Faber.
ALICE PITMAN is The Oldie’s shop-
ping correspondent.
CHANDAK SENGOOPTA is Reader in
History at Birkbeck College, University
of London. He is writing The City of
Dreadful Myths, a history of Western
images of his hometown Calcutta.
M ARTYN B EDFORD ’s fifth novel,
The Island of Lost Souls, was
published in May by Bloomsbury.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 J EREMY L EWIS
HISTORY 4 R ICHARD O VERY The Wages of Destruction: The
Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy Adam Tooze
6 D ONALD R AYFIELD I Want to Live: The Diary of a Young
Girl in Stalin’s Russia Nina Lugovskaya
7 P ETER J ONES An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman
Empire, 54 BC – AD 409 David Mattingly
9 J A S O N G O O D W I N Victory of the West: The Story of the
Battle of Lepanto Niccolò Capponi
10 FRANK FAIRFIELD The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos
Passos, and the Murder of José Robles Stephen Koch Guerra!
Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War Jason Webster
12 NIGEL JONES ON THE SOMME
14 GILES MACDONOGH Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the
Olympic Dream Guy Walters
15 CHANDAK SENGOOPTA The Black Hole: Money, Myth and
Empire Jan Dalley
MUSIC 17 S IMON H EFFER Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and
America, 1934–1971, Vol 2 Stephen Walsh
19 PATRICK O’CONNOR Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Adventures of
Mozart’s Librettist in the Old and New Worlds Rodney Bolt
The Man Who Wrote Mozart Anthony Holden
21 WILLIAM PALMER And They All Sang: The Great Musicians of
the 20th Century Talk About Their Music Studs Terkel
VEGETABLE MATTERS 22 JULIA KEAY The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and
the Discovery of India Tristram Stuart
24 CHARLES ELLIOTT Seed to Seed Nicholas Harberd
BIOGRAPHY & 25 R ICHARD H OLMES Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir
MEMOIRS Michael Howard Michael Howard
26 F RANK M C L YNN Bette Davis: The Girl Who Walked
Home Alone Charlotte Chandler
28 URSULA BUCHAN My Darling Herriott: Henrietta Luxborough,
Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile Jane Brown
29 DOMINIC SANDBROOK The Man Who Saved Britain Simon Winder
TROUBLE SPOTS 30 H AZHIR T EIMOURIAN On the Road to Kandahar: Travels
through Conflict in the Islamic World Jason Burke
32 J OHN S WEENEY City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa
Adam LeBor
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistants: PHILIP WOMACK
Business Manager: ROBERT POSNER
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Advertising Assistant: MATTHEW EDMONDS
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 334
2
 JULY 2006

ART 33 J OHN M C E WEN John Constable Anthony Bailey R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
34 H ENRIETTA G ARNETT The Private Lives of the Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
awarded the Wolfson Prize for
Impressionists Sue Roe
History 2005 and is available in
paperback from Penguin.
FOREIGN PARTS 36 A LLAN M ASSIE Paris: The Secret History Andrew Hussey
37 JUSTIN MAROZZI Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in R ICHARD H OLMES is professor of
India, Pakistan and Beyond Pankaj Mishra military and security studies at
Cranfield University. His most
38 JOHN CLAY The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the
recent book, Dusty Warriors: The
Founding of Australia Thomas Keneally Bound for Botany Bay Modern Soldier at War, was published
Alan Brooke and David Brandon The Fever of Discovery: The in April by HarperCollins.
Story of Matthew Flinders Marion Body
40 D ENNIS S EWELL Alistair Cooke’s American Journey: Life on A C GRAYLING’s Descartes: The Life of
René Descartes and Its Place in His Times
the Home Front in the Second World War Alistair Cooke
was published in October by Free Press.
41 C HRISTOPHER R OSS Atomic Sushi Simon May
DONALD RAYFIELD’s Stalin and his
GENERAL 42 A C GRAYLING Isaiah Berlin: Political Ideas in the Romantic Age Hangmen is published in paperback
(Ed) Henry Hardy by Viking.
43 D ES S PENCE One in Three Adam Wishart
DOMINIC SANDBROOK is the author
44 MICHAEL BURLEIGH The Moral Imagination: From Edmund of Never Had It So Good, a history of
Burke to Lionel Trilling Gertrude Himmelfarb Britain in the early 1960s. Its sequel,
45 M ARCUS B ERKMANN Tintin and the Secret of Literature White Heat, is published next month
Tom McCarthy by Little, Brown.
46 A LICE P ITMAN The Wal-Mart Effect Charles Fishman
J OHN C LAY is the author of
47 CHRISTOPHER BRAY ON HAPPINESS Maconochie’s Experiment: How One
48 K A T H Y W A T S O N On Trying to Keep Still Jenny Diski Man’s Extraordinary Vision Saved
Transported Convicts from Degradation
FICTION 50 J OHN D UGDALE The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and Despair (John Murray).
includes In Persuasion Nation Collection George Saunders
N IGEL J ONES ’s The War Walk: A
51 C HRISTOPHER H ART Gathering the Water Robert Edric Journey along the Western Front is
52 S USANNA J ONES Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Haruki published by Cassell.
Murakami
53 MARTYN BEDFORD Talk Talk T C Boyle GILES MACDONOGH has written six
books on modern German history.
54 P AUL B INDING The Sunlight on the Garden Francis King
After the Reich: From the Fall of Vienna
55 R ICHARD G ODWIN ON F IRST N OVELS to the Berlin Airlift will be published
56 W ILLIAM B RETT Whiteman Tony D’Souza by John Murray in April 2007.
57 M ARCELLA E DWARDS The Free and Easy Anne Haverty
57 P HILIP W OMACK Adverbs Daniel Handler MARCUS BERKMANN’s most recent
book about cricket, Zimmer Men, is
available in paperback from Abacus.
CRIME 58 J ESSICA M ANN His next offering, The Prince of Wales
POETRY COMPETITION 62 (Highgate) Quiz Book (Hodder &
AUDIOBOOK 63 S USAN C ROSLAND Stoughton), will appear in October.
SILENCED VOICES 64 L UCY P OPESCU He is currently wondering what to
do next.
LETTERS 22 LR BOOKSHOP 16 LR CROSSWORD 20 CLASSIFIEDS 60

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LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
R ICHARD O VERY
COUNTING THE COST
T HE WAGES OF D ESTRUCTION : T HE M AKING
AND B REAKING OF THE N AZI E CONOMY
★ on American finance and the early ‘Americanisation’ of
By Adam Tooze
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 799pp £30)
IT IS REMARKABLE that, in the huge tide of material
written on Hitler’s Third Reich over the past half-
century, there has not been a single-volume history of
the Reich’s economy in English (though there are, of
course, a number in German); even more so, given the
persistent arguments about why the German economy
recovered in the 1930s, or over the extent of German
mobilisation for war, or the convoluted explorations of
the role of Albert Speer, that malign sphinx who told
the world that he ran the German war economy because
he enjoyed the technical chal-
lenges in doing so.
Adam Tooze has r isen to
this challenge in a powerful
and provocative reassessment
of the whole story. This is, as
he makes clear from the start,
more than just economic his-
tory, though the economics
are refreshingly up to date and
accessibly presented. His pur-
pose is to inject back into the
history of the Third Reich the
missing dimension. For too
long ‘economic history’ has
had its own concerns – indeed
much of the post-war writing Albert Speer rallies armaments workers, May 1944
on the Ger man economy
under Hitler made no mention of the Jews and almost
none of the National Socialist party and its ideology. It
was as if economics as a study implied some kind of
political neutrality, its rhythms and priorities above the
murky history of state violence and war-making. Tooze
will have none of this. Though he moves confidently
with the economic material, he argues that under Hitler
the Germans chose a vast and risky experiment in which
the economy became simply instrumentalised as the
means to create a new German empire and to hold
back, or destroy, the economic power of the United
States and a rapidly modernising Soviet Union, both of
which were the tools of world Jewry.
This perspective allows Tooze to say a great deal that is
original and thought-provoking, but above all it pulls
the German story away from the long preoccupation
4
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
historians have had with the anti-Communist, anti-
Soviet part of the account (the need for Lebensraum in
the East, the destruction of Jewish Bolshevism, etc) and
suggests that the key element after all was Germany’s
perception of the growing might of the United States.
He traces this back to the 1920s, when Germany was
faced, after the First World War, with a growing reliance
German popular consumer culture. Some Germans
welcomed this as the only way out of the post-war crisis.
But Hitler, Tooze argues, did not. He hated the thought
of the American triumph in Europe and did not believe
that a state dominated by Jewish business and media
elites was capable of helping Germany, or any of the
other European powers. In 1933 Hitler closed the door
on America and by the end of the 1930s was apparently
more concerned with the threat from the West (Britain,
France and their American backers) than with that from
the East. German military production, the argument
continues, was geared, between 1938 and 1942, more
to a forthcoming showdown with the West than to a
confrontation with Stalin.
The shift in the nicknames
for German heavy bombers
from ‘Uralbomber’ in 1936
to the ‘Amer ikabomber’
in 1939 adds weight to
Tooze’s contention.
This strategic vision, with
the hint of apocalyptic strug-
gle with the United States
rather than Stalin’s USSR,
forced Hitler’s hand. Tooze
argues convincingly that a
huge rearmament effort was
made in the 1930s (though
this is hardly as new as he
seems to think), so that
Germany could do some-
thing quickly. By 1939 an impasse in rearmament creat-
ed by severe balance-of-payments problems pushed
Hitler to launch a war with the West, and then, follow-
ing French defeat, to attack the USSR in a swift
campaign so that the resources of the East could fuel his
war with the United States. When this went wrong it
was too late to turn back. The German economy under
Speer and other National Socialist enthusiasts displayed
extraordinary productive efforts but could only keep
going by terrorising the workforce (a process in which
the ambitious and self-serving Speer was, Tooze shows,
entirely implicated). In the end, American economic
power was decisive, and its cost-efficient bombing
of the German economy disabled any prospect of
German victory.
This is a bold thesis, though some of it is perhaps
 HISTORY
more familiar than Tooze will concede. At a stroke the
German economic revival becomes a story of large-scale
rearmament; Tooze rightly shows that living standards
were never top priority and were squeezed tighter and
tighter as the 1930s drew on; the German government
succeeded in a remarkable macroeconomic project
which prevented massive inflation, controlled trade, and
delivered the key products for a modern armed force.
But his argument that it was never enough to meet
Hitler’s fantasies of world politics begs many questions.
For instance, although he makes clear that huge invest-
ments were made between 1938 and 1942 to fuel the
war economy, and that there were few of the constraints
from domestic politics that worried the democratic
British and Americans, there can surely be no doubt that
more could have been extracted from the quantity of
resources available in Germany and the occupied and
satellite territories. If the German army had been willing
to accept the technical reductions in production and
performance that allowed the huge mass-production
runs in the Soviet Union and the United States, their
situation would have been very different.
It also begs questions about military performance and
popular enthusiasm. The young Germans who streamed
into Belgium and France in 1940 had a will to win and
indifference to brutality that neither Western army
possessed. German fighting skills in the Soviet Union,
backed by more than four million men, ought to have
produced victory in 1941, as Hitler hoped. Then the
war would have taken a very different turn. It was not
weakness that destroyed that prospect in 1941 but the
fact that the rump Soviet Union simply did not behave
like a Western state by obligingly giving up when almost
all its armed forces were destroyed and its economy
reduced to a fraction of its pre-war size.
These wider issues matter only because Tooze has
chosen to use economic factors as the decisive field for
understanding the wider dynamics of Hitler’s dictator-
ship and the choices Hitler made. This works up to a
point, but it plays down the other issues – above all, as
Evan Mawdsley has recently argued in reference to the
Soviet-German war, that politics mattered a great deal.
Different political choices, a more intelligent diplomacy,
better intelligence in its military sense, might well have
produced a different outcome or allowed more room for
manoeuvre. So too the problem of what to do with a
population so fired up by the image of a bright new
German order that something had to be delivered.
The deterministic role of economics is made evident
in Tooze’s radical reassessment of the outbreak of war in
September 1939. He insists that there was no miscalcula-
tion on Hitler’s part about British and French intentions.
Like Gerhard Weinberg before him, Tooze sees the war
with Britain and France as a deliberate choice; the
weaknesses in German rearmament in summer 1939
5
forced Hitler to wage war sooner rather than later. To
support this claim, which is what it is, he suggests that
the diplomatic evidence is clear. I searched hard to find
it. In fact Tooze himself admits that it is not known how
Hitler reacted to the economic information he was fed,
while the large body of evidence that shows Hitler’s
growing conviction of Western hesitancy or abstention
is swept aside. It is perfectly possible to argue that Hitler
did see the need for a war with Poland (but not Britain
and France), which would engross new resources and
unravel the European power balance in Germany’s
favour entirely, while giving the opportunity to absorb
and exploit the very large resource base constituted by
all the territorial gains from Austria onwards. This base
could then be used for a number of contingencies, but
particularly the drive to the East, without which the
imperial dreams just could not be realised. The docu-
mentary evidence after the outbreak of war suggests that
Hitler really wanted someone else to make up his mind
for him, which Chamberlain and Daladier reluctantly
did; but it is still an open question, depending on the
way the evidence is weighed, whether he really wanted
this of all outcomes in September 1939.
Tooze is right to argue that economics mattered, and
mattered a great deal to Hitler, but many of the issues
remain more complicated than a simple recognition of
Germany’s relative economic weakness. On one issue,
economics has clearly forced historians to rethink. The
Holocaust is explored here in ways which many readers,
unfamiliar with the way Holocaust Studies has been
moving, will find surprising. But the destruction of the
Jews was linked both to the war in the East, where Jews
were in the way of the economic and ethnic remodel-
ling of the whole region, and to the war in the West,
which Hitler blamed on Jews in London and
Washington. Getting rid of the Jews made a great deal of
economic sense, and gave a common rationale for the
global conflict that Germany now faced. Auschwitz-
Birkenau was the symbol of the hideous marriage
between economic rationality and race hatred.
The final defeat of Germany enabled the world to get
back on track. But there is a danger in seeing the whole
crisis of the age as a German crisis. The strategic eco-
nomic options described for Germany were embraced,
also with great risk, by Italy and Japan, and for largely the
same reasons. Britain, France and the Soviet Union were
scarcely passive parties, doing what they did only because
of the Germans. Redrawing the political geography of
the world, building new orders, anticipating an economic
revolution were general activities, not particular to the
issue of Germany. While Adam Tooze has opened up a
series of fascinating and challenging perspectives on the
Third Reich, there are more questions to ask about the
slide into the abyss of war and violation after 1939.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
D ONALD R AYFIELD
A RUSSIAN ANNE FRANK
I WANT TO L IVE : T HE D IARY OF A YOUNG
G IRL IN S TALIN ’ S RUSSIA
★ the most unbelievable feature of the story: Nina’s mother
By Nina Lugovskaya
(Translated by Andrew Bromfield)
(Doubleday 267pp £16.99)
WHEN THIS DIARY was published in Russia two years
ago, it was immediately, and inevitably, compared with
the diary of Anne Frank. It is a very articulate record by
an adolescent girl, living in an ever more threatening
totalitarian environment, of her fears and frustrations,
and it mingles the emotional pains of a girl going
through puberty with the anguish of a trapped animal
feeling the hunters getting nearer. For a girl of thirteen
years old, in a society where there was no information
but official propaganda and market rumour, Nina was
remarkably well informed and perspicacious: she reports
the famine and cannibalism that took the lives of millions
of peasants in 1933, when not just the Moscow press but
Moscow’s inhabitants were genuinely unaware of the dis-
aster happening five hundred miles to the south. Andrew
Bromfield speculates that she may have had access to
underground Menshevik or Social Revolutionary litera-
ture, but this seems unlikely in the 1930s when all
dissidence had been suppressed. Nina’s perspicacity is one
of the most mysterious elements in her diary.
Of the millions who shared the fates of Anne Frank
and Nina Lugovskaya, only a tiny fraction left behind a
record of what they went through. On the other hand,
the differences between Anne Frank and Nina
Lugovskaya are perhaps more important than the simi-
larities. The most interesting feature of this diary is that
it has been pre-digested for us: when Nina Lugovskaya
was arrested and interrogated in January 1937, at the
height of Stalin’s great terror, her NKVD interrogator
went through the diary, marking up all the passages that
made it so easy for him to indict an eighteen-year-old
girl as a dangerous terrorist.
Andrew Bromfield has printed these marked passages in
charcoal font and we can thus read two minds simultane-
ously, that of the victim and that of her persecutor. Nina
writes at several points of her hatred for the Bolsheviks in
general and Stalin in particular, who have made their lives
and in particular the life of her idealistic socialist father
such hell. She rejoices to hear of the assassination of
Stalin’s closest associate, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934,
and she calls for Stalin himself to be killed.
In some ways, Nina was a typical Soviet schoolgirl, liv-
ing the double life that schoolgirls from educated and
6
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
thoughtful Russian families had to live right until the late
1980s. School was a place where you feared revealing to
your teachers and fellow pupils what you thought or what
your parents talked about. Most Soviet parents brought up
their children to be consummate hypocrites: it was the
only tolerable way to find moral salvation for the family
between the mid 1920s and mid 1980s. This brings us to
discovered the diary, read passages of it, and even crossed
out a few lines – but she did not destroy it, even though
her husband was already classed as an ideological enemy
and banned from living in Moscow. The diary was to save
the NKVD from having to fabricate evidence and
doomed the entire family to the Gulag. What was going
through the mind of Nina’s mother, to leave this docu-
ment virtually intact? Though Nina says far less about her
mother than about her father, whom she loves and some-
times hates with passion, by inference the mother, of an
educated bourgeois background, was the real rebel in the
family. Her decision not to destroy the diary was an act
far bolder than her daughter’s persistence in creating such
compromising material.
Anne Frank’s diary, had the Gestapo read it when they
took her away, would have made no difference to her fate.
That is why it reads so movingly: we know the inevitable
end. Nina’s diary-keeping, however grateful posterity is
for a rare record of how people lived and felt when they
were muted by terror, was a crazy, irresponsible act. Had
it not been written, she and her sisters might have had
rather different lives, even if their parents were doomed to
go through the great mincing machine of the NKVD.
By some miracle, all the Lugovskoi family lived
through their sentences in the worst part of the Gulag,
the dreaded Kolyma with its nine-month winters, where
nearly a third of the prisoners died each year, and the
chances of surviving a ten-year sentence were a mere
two in a hundred. The womenfolk were released after
just five years, and Nina’s father lived for a decade or so
after his release in 1947. Nina never became the writer
that her diaries hint she should have become, but she
married and became a very successful artist.
She lived long enough to see the Soviet Union col-
lapse around her, her adolescent dreams fulfilled. One
wants to know what enabled her and her remarkable
family to come through the hell for which the contents
of this diary were just an initiation; unfortunately, even
when it became safe to do so, she no longer appears to
have recorded a word of her feelings. The diary remains
a monument to a girl’s reckless defiance of indoctrina-
tion and intimidation. Anne Frank’s diary leaves us not
wanting or needing to know any more. I finished Nina
Lugovskaya’s diary frustrated, despite the excellent back-
ground information Andrew Bromfield provides, as if I
had left the theatre after just Act I of the tragedy.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 HISTORY

P ETER J ONES

Britons Never
Shall Be Slaves
A N I MPERIAL P OSSESSION : B RITAIN IN THE
ROMAN E MPIRE , 54 BC – AD 409
★
By David Mattingly
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 621pp £30)

THERE ARE TWO stories about Roman Britain. One is

that ancient Brits were gentle, egalitarian souls, ideologi-
cally committed to the concept of community, passionate
about the arts and culture, and with a nuanced sensitivity
to dance rhythms. The arrival of horrid Romans with
their rough armies came as a terrible shock to this warm-
ly liberal pre-Guardian culture. The other is that the Brits
were brutal, ignorant, naked, woad-spattered, murderous,
ululating slobs to whom the arrival of civilised Romans,
with their superb language, mighty economy and strong
sense of legal process, all accompanied by the smack
of firm government, was the best thing that could ever
have happened.
These alternative stories bring into focus two comple-
mentary and crucial issues. How do you write a history
of a conquered people when the few written sources
that have survived, literary and epigraphic, were the
product of the imperial conquerors? And how do you
determine in whose eyes any generalisations that we make
about Britain under the Romans might have been true?
The great Roman historian Tacitus made strenuous
efforts to get inside the mind of Rome’s enemies. In his
Agricola, an account of his father-in-law’s governorship
of Britain in the first century AD and an absolutely cen-
tral document for our understanding of the period, he
invents a speech to put into the mouth of the Scottish
leader Calgacus, who is attempting to stop Agricola’s
advance into Scotland in AD 83:
Plunderers of the world, they have exhausted the
land and now ransack the sea. Enemy wealth excites
their greed, enemy poverty their lust for power – as
is obvious, since neither East nor West has yet glutted
them … While relatives are being torn from us by
conscription to slave it in other lands, our wives and
sisters, even if they are not raped by our enemies, are
defiled by those who masquerade as ‘friends’ and
‘guests’. Our goods and fortunes are drained to pay
taxes, the produce of our land to pay corn levies, and
our very bodies and hands to build roads through
forests and swamps, under blows and insults …
It is a view with which David Mattingly, scion of a family

LITERARY REVIEW July 2006

 HISTORY
of distinguished ancient historians, is
sympathetic. In this long, detailed and
scrupulously fair account, he brings all
the evidence he can muster to bear on
the analysis: Roman history, biography,
geography; ancient road-maps, adminis-
trative lists, epigraphic material (letters,
coins, decrees, inscriptions, dedications,
curse-tablets and so on); and archaeology
(mostly carried out only on major mili-
tary sites, which in itself automatically
skews the picture). From his findings,
Mattingly attempts to distinguish three
different types of experience of ‘life in
Roman Britain’: the military, the urban
and the rural.
He begins by outlining the history of
Roman militar y engagement with
Britain from Caesar’s investigative assaults A local lovely
in 55 and 54 BC – which got nowhere
but, in Mattingly’s view, brought Britain firmly within
the ambit of the Roman world – to Claudius’s full-scale
invasion in AD 43. Here the Romans played their usual
game of iron fist and velvet glove: ruthless against resis-
tance, but flexible and accommodating with local elites
who knuckled under and agreed to do the routine work
of local government in return for kick-backs. Wales
remained a centre of revolt, and it was while the
Romans were dealing with trouble there that Boudicca
launched her rebellion in the South in AD 61. It failed
partly because client kings like Togidubnus in the area
south of the Thames remained loyal to Rome. The
effect was to delay further subjugation of the province;
but when Agricola did extend Roman domination into
Scotland in the 80s, the Romans could not consolidate,
and eventually settled uneasily for a frontier along
Hadrian’s Wall. Wales was finally brought to heel on the
principle of divide and rule, the Romans keeping local
tribal groupings separate and therefore weak by using
networks of roads and forts to occupy the spaces
between them. In all this, Mattingly argues that the
army, far from imbuing locals with a sense of all-
embracing Romanitas, went out of its way to emphasise
its power, difference and distance from local civilians.
That was the key to military identity in Roman Britain.
Urban communities, Mattingly argues, developed very
differently from those in the rest of the empire, for two
reasons: first, Britons had nothing remotely resembling
townships on the Mediterranean model; and second,
while in most of the rest of the empire Romans came,
saw, conquered, established a functioning local adminis-
tration and left, Britain remained under permanent mili-
tary occupation. The result was a large influx of foreign
merchants and craftsmen who knew Roman ways, spoke
Latin and could provide the services that Britons could
8
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
not. These too were keen to maintain
their distance from the locals. Further,
the Roman ‘benefaction culture’ so
typical of much of the rest of the empire
– local elites winning prestige by ‘doing
good’ for the community and proclaim-
ing it in boastful Latin inscriptions – is
notably lacking here; elite Britons sim-
ply did not want to become ‘like them’.
Huge changes, of course, appeared on
the surface in architecture, building
techniques, transport, communications,
productivity, the arts, social practices,
education, and so on. Tacitus talks of
Britons learning Latin, wearing togas,
building temples, forums and arcades
and enjoying baths and sumptuous
banquets. But Roman urban culture
never sank deep roots into the British
social soil. When the Romans left in
AD 409, what survived of their culture left with them.
As for rural communities, the Roman invasion gener-
ated tremendous changes. The Roman land-surveyor
Siculus Flaccus neatly summarises the principles:
certain peoples have continued to wage war against
the Romans, others have kept the peace, others have
declared their submission to Rome and frequently
taken up arms against their enemies. That is why
each people has received a [different] legal settlement
according to merit…
The point is that a conquered enemy’s land was regarded
by Romans as theirs to dispose of as they saw fit, and
much of it would be assigned to retired soldiers, leased
out to raise revenue (especially if it was rich in natural
resources), and so on. This may explain the relative
poverty and underdevelopment of local populations in
the bolshy West and North of Britain. Meanwhile, ‘free’
Britain (north of Hadrian’s Wall) was paradoxically all
the stronger for the Roman presence, since the foreign
occupation had the effect of binding previously warring
tribes into cohesive and more powerful groupings.
This review can only scratch the surface of a large,
important and extremely clearly written book, whose
conclusions are based on the intensive consideration of
myriad small examples. Mattingly sees the Roman occu-
pation in less than rosy terms: colonial, exploitative and
self-interested, squeezing the provincials for all they
were worth in order to support the occupation, whatever
benefits may have accrued for the few. He would agree
with the famous judgement Tacitus put in the mouth
of Calgacus:
Perverting language, they call robbery, butchery and
extortion ‘government’, and when they make a
desert, they call it ‘peace’.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 HISTORY
J ASON G OODWIN
BATTEN THE HATCHES
V ICTORY OF THE W EST : T HE S TORY OF THE
B ATTLE OF L EPANTO
★ it is not until page 265 that the fleets even come close,
By Niccolò Capponi
(Macmillan 356pp £20)
COMING HARD ON the heels of the Ottoman occupation
of Venetian Cyprus, the Battle of Lepanto was the first
major victory that the Christians had ever carried against
the Turks, and has been duly celebrated ever since as
marking the moment that the tide turned against the
Ottoman project. Only Voltaire demurred; he thought
the battle was inconsequential. Niccolò Capponi dismisses
this as the error of a man living in an age when victory
meant territory: Lepanto gained its victors very little.
Unlike their predecessors, who tur ned the
Mediterranean into a Muslim lake in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, the Ottomans were not a seafaring
people: but they were patient and resourceful. Their style
at sea was always a little lubberly, but they could freshen
things up with the help of the corsairs of North Africa,
direct descendants of those earlier Muslim seadogs. In
1571 they had Uluc Ali Pasha, a Calabrian who may have
been a Dominican friar before his capture and conversion
by Barbary corsairs; he was Beylerbey of Algiers and had
captured Tunis the previous year. Kara Hodja, a notorious
corsair, was also said to have been a Dominican friar.
Capponi suggests that by 1571 the Christians were not so
much technologically advanced as better prepared to control
the seas, psychologically and systemically. Demonstrating
this takes him on a vast round sweep of history, so that it
isn’t until page 253 that the pennants flutter in the breeze,
the masts creak, and the rowing benches are covered with
planks on which to fight. Cervantes – who lost the use of
his left hand at the battle – might have got there faster. G K
Chesterton did the whole thing in 150 lines.
Most of this book is concerned with the va-et-vient of
Italians and Spaniards before the event, all the kings, car-
dinals, sailors, popes, bankers and shipwrights who met
and crossed one another and formed alliances and broke
faith, out of whose deals and diplomacy a Western fleet
was eventually assembled to go against the Ottomans at
sea. But we also get the history of the Ottomans, and
another of the Reformation – too much use of first
gear, maybe, as the story lurches back and forth, break-
ing up a perfectly good forward narrative with constant
and confusing plunges into the distant past.
As a military historian Capponi knows all the detail of
medieval seafaring. He gives fascinating insights into the
relative merits of galleys and sail-ships – galleys, far from
9
being anachronistic, survived in fleets until the mid
eighteenth century, because they moved fast and were
immune to winds. He also has total command of his
sources, and there is excellent reportage of the backbit-
ing and disagreements on both sides: one North African
aristocrat denounces his fellow Ottoman commanders as
renegades ‘with pork flesh still stuck in their teeth’. But
and we learn that Don Juan retired to his cabin, confi-
dent that battle would soon commence, and danced a
galliard. Great stuff, and I wish it had happened sooner.
Did the Ottoman admiral dance that night? Probably
not. Don Juan was very young, very handsome, a ladies’
man and a gallant, and the bastard son of Charles V.
Müezzinzade Ali Pasha was new to naval warfare – it has
been suggested that he was appointed by the Grand
Vizier as a means of encompassing his downfall – but he
was an older and more experienced man.
Capponi’s explanation of the strategies of both fleets draws
brilliantly on the lie of the sea and the shape of the land. It
was a battle in three places at once, for as the ships sailed
towards each other the Ottomans took on a horned crescent
formation and the Christians split into three squadrons. The
Ottomans’ failure to understand the deployment of the
Venetian galleasses proved fatal. The Provveditore of the
Venetian arsenal had turned a dozen or so of these huge
transports into floating gun-platforms, which destroyed or
damaged maybe a third of the close-packed Ottoman fleet as
it advanced to the attack. Fire from the galleasses actually
knocked one of the Ottoman ships up and out of the water,
its oars raking feebly in the air, before it plunged and sank.
Alliance gunnery was generally better, and afterwards it was
found that many Turkish ships had failed to fire their loaded
cannon at all. But as always, it is the detail that strikes. A tiny
Turkish boat had run up hard against a Venetian galleass, lurk-
ing beneath its guns; the Venetians simply rocked their ship
until it swung down and battered the little boat under the sea.
And the upshot? The Christians captured 130 ships,
destroyed about eighty – the Ottomans also lost about
25,000 men, to the Christians’ 20,000. The Venetians
wanted the fleet to recapture some of its lost territory,
but everybody else wanted to go home. The fleet
looked in at Lefkada, but decided it would take two
weeks to capture the island. Home it went.
Capponi avoids a lengthy post-mortem, leaving events to
speak for themselves. The Ottomans were back in business
the following year, roundly declaring that if they had lost
their beard, it would soon grow; whereas the Venetians,
having lost Cyprus, had lost an irreplaceable arm.
Capponi thinks it was only a few fingers, and he may
be right. But Voltaire was half right, too. Lepanto had
been so costly to both sides that everyone afterwards
avoided sea battles, and the political geography of the
Mediterranean, at least, was shaped for centuries.
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
F RANK FAIRFIELD
For Whom
The Bell Tolls
T HE B REAKING P OINT: H EMINGWAY, D OS
PASSOS, AND THE M URDER OF J OSÉ ROBLES
★ Mann and André Gide among them. Others (Dashiell
By Stephen Koch
(Robson Books 294pp £12.99)
G UERRA ! L IVING IN THE S HADOWS OF THE
S PANISH C IVIL WAR
★ – so engaged Koch’s appalled attention that he has
By Jason Webster
(Doubleday 294pp £12.99)
IN HIS 1943 essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil
War’, George Orwell wrote: ‘I think we will come to
see that Stalin’s policy in Spain, which we now regard as
so devilishly clever, was merely stupid and opportunistic.’
Orwell’s interest in Stalin and Spain, of course, was more
than merely academic: crossing the Soviet dictator’s
Spanish stooges had almost cost Orwell his life, and
decisively altered his politics. Animal Farm and 1984
were the bitter fruits of Orwell’s Spanish sojourn. When
he wrote in the latter novel, ‘If you want a vision of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face –
forever’, it was probably the face of one of his comrades
in Spain, Bob Smillie, of which he was thinking.
(Smillie was kicked to death in a
Stalinist secret prison.)
Both these searing books are con-
cerned with the long shadows thrown
by the Civil War. The Breaking Point
explores the fate of another victim of
Stalin, and the Spanish experiences of
another great literary name: Ernest
Hemingway. It is one of those rare
books – Charles Nicholl’s The
Reckoning on Marlowe’s murder, or Ian
Gibson’s Death of Lorca are of the same
company – that deploy a literary
murder mystery to produce a black,
sizzling brew. The fact that the author
of this thrilling, melodramatic tale is a
professor of literature at Columbia
University is just one of many refresh-
ing things about it. After all, an
American academic who writes like an
angel is not something you come
across every day. José Robles: shot as a spy
10
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
The Breaking Point began as a spin-off from Koch’s previ-
ous book, Double Lives, an investigation into the sticky
web woven by Stalin’s Comintern propaganda chief, Willi
Münzenberg. The wily Münzenberg’s speciality lay in lur-
ing well-meaning left-liberal literati into joining, writing
for, or otherwise lending their names to respectable-
sounding ‘Popular Front’ journals and organisations that
were really slavishly obedient to the whims of Stalin’s
terror and lie machine. Many famous Western cultural
icons fell into Münzenberg’s trap – H G Wells, Thomas
Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Bertolt Brecht, André
Malraux, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Koestler), to their eter-
nal shame, were conscious, even eager servants of Stalin.
One episode in Double Lives – the murder of a young
leftist Spanish intellectual, José Robles, by the Stalinists
fleshed it out in this passionate indictment of those
Western apologists who, knowing the horrible truth,
covered up this and many other crimes for the cause
they succoured. They were indeed, in the notorious
phrase of W H Auden, who was briefly one of them,
complicit in the ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the
necessary murder’. Chief among those fearlessly assailed
by Koch are the illustrious figures of Hemingway and
his then girlfriend – later third wife – Martha Gellhorn.
The complex politics of Republican Spain – familiar
to readers of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia – boiled
down, by spring 1937, to this: by virtue of the strangle-
hold he exerted as the Republic’s main supplier of arms,
credit, and cannon fodder (in the for m of the
Communist-controlled International Brigades), Stalin
was turning it into a secret-police state modelled on his
own Soviet paradise. In order to
achieve complete domination, however,
he needed to liquidate all non-Stalinist
forces. That meant the elimination of
anarchists, socialists, and independent
Marxists – such as the POUM party,
to which Orwell was affiliated. To
cover up this brutal process of disap-
pearances, illegal detentions, hidden
prisons and gruesome torture cham-
bers, Stalin’s hatchet men threw up a
smokescreen of lies to convince
Western opinion that the Republic
was still a heroic democracy, gallantly
battling against Franco’s Nazi- and
Fascist-backed forces. And this was
where Hemingway came in.
In the 1930s, Hemingway was
among the world’s most celebrated
writers, and getting him onside would
be one of the Cominter n’s finest
coups. Koch demonstrates how ‘Hem’
 HISTORY

was played like one of his own marlin fish: cajoled and marked, paranoid master in the Kremlin. This is a brave,
flattered by Comintern agents until his larger-than-life fine, sad book. Anyone interested in the literature and
carcase was safely lashed to the Stalinist ship. Nobbling politics of the terrible twentieth century should read it.
Hem not only suited Stalin’s short-term Spanish goals, it Jason Webster, a youngish British expat in Spain, has
also neatly coincided with a change in Communist cul- carved out an enviable reputation as an expert on all
tural strategy. Until 1935, the Kremlin had encouraged things Hispanic on the strength of two titles: Duende, his
‘modernism’ in all its forms. But that year Comintern passionate evocation of the spirit of flamenco that first
boss Karl Radek signalled a shift in policy, attacking drew him to Spain, and Andalus, his lament for the lost
modernism as bourgeois individualism, and proclaiming culture of Moorish Spain. With Guerra!, the final part of
the new doctrine of ‘Socialist realism’. Heroic tractor his Spanish trilogy, he engages just as profoundly with the
drivers were in, and unstructured novels were out. tragic legacy of the Civil War. The book skilfully dovetails
This sea-change was bad news for John Dos Passos. Webster’s own travels to the war’s significant sites around
Once mentioned in the same breath as James Joyce, Dos Spain with potted stories of its more famous and infa-
Passos, the leading American apostle of literary mod- mous episodes. Murders and massacres feature prominent-
ernism, is sadly forgotten today. His epic novels Three ly as he advances the thesis that the Spanish penchant for
Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer and his sprawling trilogy, cruelty, violence and extremism may not lie buried in the
USA, go unread. But throughout the 1920s and into the past, forgotten along with the thousands of nameless
Thirties ‘Dos’ was the key radical in American fiction, and victims of the war – but may be resurrected all over again.
hence a prime target for Stalin’s wooers. In addition, he One does not have to share Webster’s fears for the future
had been Hemingway’s best buddy since they had driven of his adopted homeland, nor his slightly starry-eyed
ambulances together in Italy in the First World War. romanticising of the Republican cause, to recognise that
So the two old pals collaborated on a prestige propa- this is an absorbing book that conveys the raw Spanish
ganda project: a film, The Spanish Earth, dramatising the experience – its heat, dust, light and shade – with rare and
Republic’s struggle against fascism in tear-jerking, heroic startling actuality. Admirers of his first two books will have
tractor-driver terms. their high regard confirmed by this one. Newcomers
Both men came to besieged Madrid for the film. But should start here. They will not be disappointed.
Dos was in trouble on every front: his friendship with To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Hem was souring thanks to his rival’s jealousy and the
implacable hostility of Gellhorn; his literary superstar
status was fading because of the Comintern’s swerve away
from modernism; and (most perilous of all) he was
regarded as politically unreliable by the Stalinist thugs
who ran Republican Spain. Unaware of the mounting
danger, Dos, with dogged decency, persisted in making
inquiries about his other old friend, José Robles, who had
been snatched from his wife and children by secret police-
men and had vanished. No one knew – or wanted to
know – what had happened to him until the secret police
set up a willing Hem to break the bad news, which he
did with sadistic glee: Robles had been shot as a spy.
This is Koch’s breaking point: when Dos broke with
Communism and Hem broke with Dos, and the great,
brave cause of the Republic was irretrievably lost – not
to its inevitable military defeat, but to Orwell’s enemies,
namely lies and tyranny. With the shining exception of
Dos – who, though too late to save Robles, heroically
rescued another victim from Stalinist vengeance – no one
emerges from this book with much credit. But Koch is
honest and generous enough to recognise that the novel
Hemingway produced when his moment of Stalinist
madness had subsided – For Whom the Bell Tolls – is a
flawed masterpiece. Naturally, the bell tolled for Stalin’s
killers too, most of whom were summoned back from
Spain, greeted as heroes, and then shot – shot not for any
cause save the lunatic behest of their dwarfish, pock-

11
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY

N IGEL J ONES overview of the battle’s causes, course and consequences.

TOO MANY TO SPEAK OF
SOMME: THE HEROISM AND HORROR OF WAR
★ Indeed, it is Churchill who contributes the one original
By Martin Gilbert
(John Murray 332pp £20)
T HROUGH G ERMAN E YES : T HE B RITISH AND
THE S OMME , 1916
★ after draft of unprotected cannon fodder at uncut barbed
By Christopher Duffy
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 383pp £25)
T WELVE DAYS ON THE S OMME : A M EMOIR
OF THE T RENCHES, 1916
★ hensive book that he gives no satisfactory answers.
By Sidney Rogerson
(Greenhill 172pp £19.99)
T HE M EMORIAL TO THE M ISSING OF
THE S OMME
★
By Gavin Stamp
(Profile 214pp £14.99)
NINETY YEARS AGO, at 7.30am on Saturday, 1 July 1916,
a summer day whose weather, as Siegfried Sassoon
wrote, was ‘of the kind commonly described as heavenly’,
whistles blew along the trenches of the Somme Front.
Thousands of men, encumbered by sixty pounds of kit,
climbed laboriously but obediently over the top and
walked into No Man’s Land and history. It was the start
of ‘the Big Push’: an offensive that has become a byword
for the monstrous stupidity of war. Nearly a century on,
as these four books attest, the myth of the greatest battle
of the Great War looms as large as ever in the British
national consciousness.
The statistics of the Somme are staggering: on that
first day, 60,000 Britons were cut down, 20,000 never to
rise again. And that was just the start. By the end of the
battle, four and a half months later, more than 450,000
young men of the British Empire had joined the casualty
list at an average rate of 3,000 a day – along with a simi-
lar number of Germans, and 200,000 Frenchmen. The
net Allied gain was six miles of blasted ground, an area
that can be crossed in an easy day’s walk, along with half
a dozen ruined villages and surrounding woodland.
As both admirers and critics of his massive biography
of Churchill would expect, Sir Martin Gilbert’s survey
of the battle reflects both the strengths and weaknesses
of his life’s work. Almost entirely eschewing any analysis
or primary research, he sets out to give a straightforward
His flat and neutral narrative delivers just what it says on
the tin, or rather jacket: a balanced, readable account of
‘the heroism and horrors of war’ – a catastrophe almost
unparalleled, as Churchill himself would say, in the long
and lamentable annals of human folly.
touch to Gilbert’s book, as the author repeatedly quotes
his hero’s (privately expressed) doubts on the wisdom of
the whole Somme offensive as it ground remorselessly on.
Even this belligerent warlord, it seems, thought there
must be a better way to win the war than throwing draft
wire and chattering guns. Why, then, a modern reader
might ask, did the battle take place at all, and why,
perhaps more puzzlingly, was it continued for so long
after the ghastly failure of the initial attack on 1 July?
It is a flaw in Gilbert’s otherwise admirably compre-
Although he dutifully details the strategic imperatives
that dictated the decision by Haig, the Br itish
Commander, to mount the great offensive (mainly to
take pressure off the French), and the choice of the
unpromising Somme sector as its location (it was where
the French and British armies joined), we never feel that
we are inside the heads of the Generals as they make
their fateful choices. We are taken step by dragging step
through each agonising phase of the battle until it peters
out in the glutinous autumn mud. But, curiously for a
distinguished historian, Gilbert doesn’t take sides in the
great historical debate on the Somme: was it a futile
bloodbath dreamed up by criminally incompetent
donkeys, or a necessary battle of attrition that decisively
weakened the German enemy and saved Britain’s embat-
tled French ally from collapse, albeit at the cost of so
many lions?
Gilbert is content to let the eye-witnesses speak for
him. Fortunately, the passages he selects are so tersely
terrible that the strong authorial voices that made
Alistair Horne’s Price of Glory or Antony Beevor’s
Stalingrad such classics of war writing, are not much
missed. Gilbert’s rather repetitive style actually suits the
battle itself: each nibbling, weary British advance is
matched with a participant’s description, then a laconic
account of the witness’s almost inevitable demise – and
then a pointer to where his grave or memorial is to be
found. All the familiar anecdotes are here: how Captain
Wilfred Nevill issued his company with footballs to kick
across No Man’s Land, as if the Somme was some sort of
World Cup; how the writer ‘Saki’, felled by a sniper
attracted by a flaring match, gave, too late, a furious
famous last order: ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’; and
how, by contrast, the Prime Minister’s golden son,
Raymond Asquith, mortally wounded, died lighting up
a cigarette to encourage his men.

12
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
O v e r w h e l m i n g l y,
Martin Gilbert’s witnesses
are British – the enemy
do not get much of
a look-in. This gap is
br illiantly filled by the
militar y histor ian
Christopher Duffy, who
has had the excellent idea
of telling the familiar story
of the Somme through
unfamiliar German words.
He bases his account on
Ger man intelligence
reports culled from the
inter rogation of newly
captured British prisoners
– or, in a few cases, Thiepval Memorial
deserters. This new evi-
dence, Duffy implies, reinforces the arguments of revi-
sionist historians who say that the Somme, for all its
British blunders and unimaginable losses, was justified
because it so wore down the German army that their
lingering hopes of victory became unsustainable. (This
argument, for me, is somewhat negated by the irony that
the Germans, in 1918, swept across the old battlefields
of the Somme again – retaking in a few hours the terri-
tory they had lost over so many weeks, and at the cost of
so much blood, two years before.)
Duffy provides fascinating first-hand reports from what
the military historian (and Somme veteran) Basil Liddell
Hart called ‘the other side of the hill’. He presents a
picture of the healthy respect which the Germans held for
their foes. If the British lived in fear of German machine
guns and their inevitable counter-attacks, then the
Germans dreaded the Trommelfeuer of the merciless British
artillery and the dogged persistence with which the
Tommies – and the Australians, New Zealanders, South
Africans and Canadians – kept on coming on, despite
their losses. The Germans were also in mortal terror of a
new British wonder-weapon which made its debut on
the Somme: the tank. And both sides feared gas.
This enlightening, if dry book is marred only by a
couple of blots – Premier Asquith’s first name was
Herbert, not ‘Hubert’; and Duffy seems unaware that
the prisoner of war F W Harvey, whose evidence he
cites at length, was a noted poet – and the bosom friend
of that tormented genius, Ivor Gurney.
The conditions that helped drive a sensitive soul like
Gurney out of his mind were meat and drink to the more
robust, if inexperienced subaltern Sidney Rogerson, who
tells us without irony that the war, for many of his fellow
warriors, was ‘the best days of their lives’. Military publish-
ers Greenhill have handsomely reissued Rogerson’s classic
trench memoir, Twelve Days on the Somme. Rogerson, who
13
survived to become a PR
man, is clearly disposed to
look on the bright side of
life – and finds it even on
the Somme.
He and his fellow
Yorkshiremen were
thrown into the battle
straight from training in
England at the fag end of
the long struggle. They
were lucky – they simply
had to hold on to a bat-
tered section of trench
before they were relieved.
Their time there was
relatively uneventful. A
few men died, and an
officer mysteriously van-
ished – perhaps to become one of the deserters quoted
by Duffy? But even a quiet week on the Somme was
hellish, and by the end, as Rogerson stumbles out of
Gehenna, we come to believe his assertion that his men’s
comradeship, humour and stoical endurance made it all
bearable – but only just.
After the Somme returned to a silence broken only by
the song of skylarks, the bodies were gathered into neat
and ordered cemeteries. But there were still gaps in the
ranks. The 73,000 Britons whose bodies were atomised,
pulverised into the mud or shredded by the millions of
shells which had pounded the tortured soil are com-
memorated on the walls of the vast arch designed by Sir
Edwin Lutyens, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing,
at the very heart of the battlefield, the subject of Gavin
Stamp’s moving and eloquent book. Stamp cannot con-
ceal two overriding emotions: his reverence for Lutyens,
whom he persuasively claims as the greatest ever British
architect, with the Arch as his finest work – and his utter
disgust at the slaughter of the men memorialised,
Sassoon’s ‘intolerably nameless names’, who he believes
died in vain.
One can agree or disagree with Stamp, but in the end
it doesn’t matter: the arguments are academic to the
men who are one with the wind and the rain and the
ancient sunlight. In the words of a Somme survivor,
Guy Chapman, later a distinguished historian of France,
quoted by Gilbert: ‘No. 1 company is badly knocked
out. Lauder and Young both badly wounded. Sergeant-
Major Dell wounded. Farrington killed. Sgt Brown not
expected to live. Sgt Baker wounded. Westle, poor
fellow, killed. Foley – the last of his family – killed, a lot
of other good men, too many to speak of.’ The names
of Farrington, Westle and Foley are on Lutyens’ Arch –
all that remains of them.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY

G ILES M AC D ONOGH Olympics was nationalism. Since their revival at the end
of the nineteenth century, the Games have provoked

NAZIS AND NARCISSISM exaggerated demonstrations of patriotism, nationalism

and xenophobia, albeit in a far milder form than football.
For most readers the joy of this book will be the
B ERLIN G AMES : H OW H ITLER S TOLE THE reliving of the 1936 summer Olympics, which Walters
O LYMPIC D REAM evokes with all the cut and dash of an accomplished sports
★ writer. For others who are less inclined towards sport,
By Guy Walters there is the macabre spectacle of the festivities surrounding
(John Murray 384pp £20) the Games, and the lavish parties thrown by Hitler and his
henchmen, most of whom would have been awkward in
HITLER’S ABUSE OF the Berlin Olympics has become white tie and tails.
one of the great milestones of the 1930s and the descent Personally, I could have done with a little more on the
into war. Everyone recalls the moment when the Aryan- origins of the German interest in sport. Walters mentions
supremacist Hitler was forced to watch his own athletes ‘Turnvater’ Jahn, the xenophobic gymnast who encour-
trounced by a mere Neger, in the person of sprinter and aged Prussian boys to strengthen their bodies in prepara-
long-jumper Jesse Owens. But as Walters points out, in tion for fighting against Napoleon’s armies, but the roots
1936 the Germans were impeccably well behaved, and go deeper. The Prussians’ military prowess, coupled with
were even happy to cheer him on, though their govern- the austerity of their lifestyle, always tempted comparisons
ment had defined him as an Untermensch. with Sparta; while the eighteenth-century art historian
And just as acts of violence against racial minorities are Winckelmann added his own gymnopaedic gloss, which
not confined to Germany today, racial intolerance was later found an echo in the Olympic film which the Nazis
not their exclusive domain in the Thirties either. commissioned from Leni Riefenstahl. Incidentally, we
America’s black athletes may have stolen at least some of learn from this book that she had a Games-time fling
the show in 1936, but back home they had no better with an impulsive American athlete.
time of it than Germany’s Jews. True, they were not The Prusso-German obsession with the body beauti-
destined to be rounded up and killed, but for the time ful developed into a particular form of narcissism by the
being, no one could accurately predict the degree of end of the nineteenth century, when Germans inspired
persecution the Jews were going to suffer, which only by Grecian models were already flitting in and out of
became clear after November 1938. chilly Baltic dunes in the nude. The Nazis continued the
Germany was certainly not all sweetness and light, and Spartan theme when they instituted compulsory training
some of the most repulsive realities of German life were in martial arts or Wehrsport. By the time the Olympics
covered up for the duration of the tournament. The came round, physical jerks were an unavoidable side of
Nuremberg Laws had been enacted only a year before. German life.
Jews had been removed from the national community or Walters bases his story on interviews with the sports-
Volksgemeinschaft. To please international guests, however, men, some of whom are still alive. Memories can be
the many outward signs of racial persecution were defective, especially after seventy years, however, and the
removed, along with the park benches designated for athletes don’t always remember events as they happened.
Aryan use only. Helene Mayer, a half-Jewish Mischling, Owens told stories which were wide of the truth, and
was allowed to fence for Germany, and on the rostrum the runner Helen Stephens produced a peach: a most
she responded by giving the so-called ‘German salute’ in unlikely story of her attempted seduction in the
return for her silver medal. course of an orgy given by
The book begins with the Her mann Gör ing. The
Winter Olympics in rotund minister had been
Garmisch-Partenkirchen – shot in the groin during the
then the home of Richard Beer Hall Putsch, and the
Strauss, author of the birth of his daughter Edda in
Olympic Hymn – and the MA Degree in Biography 1938 was believed by many
Starting September 2006
botched attempts to boycott Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or to have been a case of
the Games. There was the two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first immaculate conception. If
usual wrangling between the postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. that was not enough, the
political and apolitical Course director: Jane Ridley dirty deed was supposed
schools of sport. One thing Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at to have taken place at
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
which could not be realisti- Tel: 01280 814080 the Goebbelses’ house in
cally excised from the Schwanenwerder. There was

14
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
no love lost between the for mer air ace and the
Propaganda Minister, however, and it is inconceivable
that Goebbels would have turned his house over to
Göring’s use. If there was a lecherous Nazi on the prowl
that night it was probably Goebbels. He had a consider-
able track record: in his way he was an Olympian.
Germany may have been the world’s greatest pariah in
1936, but, as Walters reminds us, she actually won the
games, and by a very large margin. Germany achieved
eighty-nine medals, compared to the fifty-six awarded to
her closest rival, the United States. Walters does not
discuss the German athletes very much, except in the
case of the Communist wrestler Seelenbinder, who was
beheaded as an opponent of the regime. It is suggested
that they might have cheated a bit here and there, and
that they had the odd hermaphrodite contesting in the
ladies’ events – but they were not alone in this: so did
C HANDAK S ENGOOPTA
NIGHT OF DOOM
T HE B LACK H OLE : M ONEY, M YTH
AND E MPIRE
★ Bengal. British closeness to disaffected members of the
By Jan Dalley
(Fig Tree 221pp £16.99)
GIVEN HOW POWERFUL the British Empire seemed to be
to its subjects, it is curious that the public at home has
always shown more interest in its disasters than in its
triumphs. Think of Khartoum, Cawnpore, the Amritsar
massacre, Mau Mau or the subject of this book – the
Black Hole. The tale of a hundred-odd
British soldiers suffocating to death in a
tiny room on a sweltering night in eigh-
teenth-century Calcutta has horrified
and inspired the British for so long that
it is bound to come up whenever the
city is mentioned, even though the his-
torical reality of the Black Hole, as Jan
Dalley shows, is actually quite elusive.
In the mid eighteenth century, the
British merely ran a few trading outposts
in India and had little political power.
The subcontinent was governed by the
Mughal emperor in theory but each
region was in fact controlled by local
kings and nobles. In prosperous, agrarian
Bengal, where the Br itish, French,
Dutch and Danes vied for mercantile
supremacy, effective authority lay with
the Nawab, who was only technically a
viceroy of the Mughals. The foreign Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula
15
the Americans.
In the end I remain slightly baffled as to why Hitler and
the Nazis were so keen to stage the Games, which occa-
sioned a most uncharacteristic and reckless spending spree
when the state was heading for bankruptcy. They found
the ‘solution’ to this when they instituted a systematic
robbery of the Jews eighteen months later. They certainly
wanted to show the world some of the things they had
achieved since 1933 (if not their new weapons), but this
fits ill with the attitude they demonstrated towards the
outside world just three years later when they wanted to
impress that world in a rather different way. Perhaps the
Berlin Olympics reveal the fact that Hitler had yet to
divulge to his immediate circle that he intended to bring
the house down on their heads. For the time being it was
fun and games and Pax Germanica.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16
traders were tolerated as long as they paid their dues,
but this toleration could be withdrawn at any time. Still,
the British did quite well out of the system and by
the mid 1700s, a major city was developing around
their trading station in Calcutta. Worried by their
growing might, Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula accused the
English of planning to challenge his authority over
Nawab’s court intensified Siraj’s anxiety, and the situa-
tion worsened when the Nawab’s envoy was expelled by
Roger Drake, the inexperienced Governor of the
British settlement.
Siraj now set out with his troops towards Calcutta.
Despite early insouciance, the British soon realised that
their resources were quite inadequate for the imminent
battle. Many, including Drake himself, fled by ship, and
an inadequate, poorly-armed force was
left to be routed by the Nawab’s men.
After the battle was over, the Nawab’s
commander locked up the surviving
Britons in the cell that had been used
by the British for the detention of their
own soldiers. This cell had always been
known as the ‘black hole’ and, accord-
ing to the later account of the incarcer-
ation by John Zephaniah Holwell, it
measured only about twenty square
feet. Some 146 people were crammed
into it on the hot and airless night of 20
June 1756; most of them died in acute
agony and only about twenty were still
alive in the morning. Retaliation was
swift. Forces from Madras, led by
Robert Clive, had reconquered
Calcutta by January 1757, and Siraj’s
army was defeated (more by bribery
than by military might) later that year
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 HISTORY
Literary Review Bookshop
in the epochal Battle of Plassey. British dominion over
India was never seriously in danger after that.
The episode of the Black Hole, then, marked the end
of Britain’s early and relatively non-colonial presence in
India, but how true is the story? Given the nature of the
incident, chroniclers and historians have found it hard to
approach it objectively. Classic British accounts focus on
the cruelty of the Nawab and the indomitable courage
of the beleaguered garrison in Calcutta. The early-
twentieth-century Viceroy Lord Curzon even erected a
monument in Calcutta to those ‘whose martyrdom on
that night of doom … had laid the foundation stone
of British Dominion in Bengal’. For believers in the
British imperial mission, the Black Hole tragedy was
always a prime example of the kind of Oriental brutality
that the Raj put an end to. Many Indian scholars and
nationalist commentators have focused, instead, on the
implausibility of British accounts and their internal
inconsistencies, or tried to explain the tragedy as the
result of error and incompetence on the part of the
Nawab’s commander – the man simply had not bothered
20% discount on all to find out how big the ‘black hole’ was before ordering
the captives into it.
Not that it is easy to reconstruct the simple, factual
titles under review history of the incident. There is only one detailed eye-
witness account (that of Holwell) and nobody would
dream of calling it objective. Instead of trying to discover
what really happened on the night of doom, Jan Dalley
Call our Order Hotline attempts to place the tragedy in the context of British
mercantile and pre-colonial adventures in India and to
explore the meanings and morals that subsequent gener-
0870 429 6608 ations have read into it. Unfortunately, this approach
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All major credit and debit cards East India trade, its attractions and dangers, and the peo-
ple who conducted it, that Dalley’s chapters on these
By email: subjects are, at best, competent summaries of easily
available works. The Black Hole calamity, it is true, has
send your order to
not been discussed in much detail recently, but that is
literaryreview@bertrams.com because of the paucity of dependable sources. What little
is known for certain has been recounted time and again
By post: in popular as well as academic accounts of the early days
send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to of the East India Company. Still, those who use the
‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to: phrase without knowing much about its history should
Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams, profit from Dalley’s balanced treatment, which is partic-
1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF ularly deft in identifying the many ambiguities in the
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send your order, quoting Literary Review, to original contribution of this book, however, is to show
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 MUSIC
S IMON H EFFER
His Genius
Preceded Him
S TRAVINSKY: T HE S ECOND E XILE , F RANCE
AND A MERICA , 1934–1971, VOL 2
★ of his gifts.
By Stephen Walsh
(Jonathan Cape 736pp £30)
STEPHEN WALSH WAS already an authority on the music
of Igor Stravinsky when he published, to great acclaim,
the first volume of his life of the composer in 2000. He
took the story up to 1934, with the exiled maestro
living a dual life in France entre deux guerres. In Paris he
would spend as much time as he could with his worldly
mistress, the ex-actress Vera Sudeykina, in between
tiring excursions to the countryside near Grenoble –
nine hours away in those days before the TGV – to be
with his wife Catherine, or Katya, and their children.
The country was where Stravinsky could write his
music, but Par is was where he could be himself.
Unfortunately for him, Mme Stravinsky began to feel
bored and marginalised, and soon after Walsh’s narrative
resumes, at the beginning of this second and concluding
volume, the family decide to decamp to Paris.
The obvious strain this creates in Stravinsky’s life –
having wife and mistress living on top of each other – is
not the only difficulty in a close, patriarchal family exis-
tence. Most of his family, including his
wife and (later on) himself, appear to
have tuberculosis, and doctors soon
order them to a sanatorium in the
French Alps for long and sporadic
periods of recuperation. Stravinsky is
also strapped for cash, living way
beyond his means, and far from secure
about either the success of his music or
his ability to earn money from it.
With the rise of the Nazis Stravinsky
found his work banned in Germany
for being unduly progressive: though,
somewhat shamefully, he appears for
largely financial reasons to have come
to some sort of accommodation with
the Third Reich by about 1938.
Humanitar ian causes were not
Stravinsky’s thing: he was at best
ambivalent about Franco’s seizure of
power in Spain, was happy to rub
along with the regimes in Germany Stravinsky: discordant old age
17
and Italy if it meant he acquired some cash flow, and was
at great pains whenever possible at this time to tell all
and sundry that he had not a drop of Jewish blood in his
veins (a protest he felt it necessary to make because, by a
quirk of nature, he looked exceedingly Semitic). But
then this was a man who would depute his wife to meet
his mistress Vera at regular intervals in Paris to hand over
the allowance he provided for her. He was not, we may
safely say, an especially nice man, a view of him that is
shared by the author, whose objectivity is not the least
This second volume also begins at a time crucial to
Stravinsky’s artistic development: he has moved from his
earlier neoclassical roots, still audible in such supposedly
revolutionary works as Le Sacre du Printemps and
L’Oiseau de Feu, to a more or less full commitment to
atonalism. Berg and Schoenberg are his new gods: later,
he will admire Boulez and Henze. The anti-listener
nature of this school of music might explain why so
much of what remains of Stravinsky’s music in the
repertoire today is from the early period of his life.
Walsh inserts concise and helpful analyses of Stravinsky’s
works as he comes across them in the narrative, but we
are never clear – perhaps Walsh himself isn’t – about
whether the maestro, by these last decades, had much
regard for his audience.
Between December 1938 and the spring of 1939,
with the Stravinskys sharing the apprehension of much
of France about the probability of war, three blows fell
upon the composer. His daughter, his wife and finally
his mother all died, the first two from TB. His other
children having grown up, he closed up his apartment in
the rue St Honoré, put his precious manuscripts into
a bank vault (where they happily
survived the ensuing conflagration)
and headed for America. A series of
manipulations enabled Vera to get
out and follow him, and they were
soon mar r ied – bigamously, as
Sudeykin was alive and well and liv-
ing in New York – and found them-
selves washed up in Los Angeles,
touting for business.
While the climate suited the mae-
stro’s own tubercular recovery pro-
gramme, Vera hated California, but
suffered mostly in silence for the
next thirty years. Stravinsky had the
benefits, in a town where even then
celebr ity counted for more than
most things, of having a name. This
enabled him and Vera to move
relatively effortlessly into Hollywood
society, making friends with the likes
of Charlie Chaplin and Edward
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 MUSIC
G Robinson. The latter, born Emmanuel Goldenberg in
a Romanian ghetto in 1893, sponsored the Stravinskys’
naturalisation, only for it to be found that he himself still
had the status of an illegal immigrant from when his
parents had brought him into the country in 1903.
During the war years, Stravinsky had to give composi-
tion lessons at twenty-five dollars a time to make ends
meet. While he was revered as a genius, there was little
call for his music. There were many abortive attempts to
do deals with film studios, including Mayer, Goldwyn
and Disney. Stravinsky sold Disney the rights to the
Firebird, which was duly butchered and set to animation.
In the effort to survive, all compromises were accept-
able: in so doing, he did not scrape the barrel in the way
that his pianist son, trapped in France, did in seeking
permission to go to perform in Nazi Germany itself.
In time, the lion-hunters of America drummed up
enough commissions to elevate Stravinsky to a decent
level of earnings, and several academic posts also came to
his assistance. He continued to churn out music that
never quite obtained the popularity or currency of his
earlier works, but his genius preceded him. By the late
1940s he and Vera were well established, and either
collaborating with, or seeking collaborations with, some
of the best writers in the world: Auden, Aldous Huxley,
Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot among them. There was
also an excruciating encounter with an obtusely rude
Evelyn Waugh in 1949, which occurred on the strength
of the Stravinskys’ admiration for his writings. The
maestro seems to have coped manfully with Waugh’s
proclamation, over the lunch at which they met, that he
found all music painful.
Walsh’s greatest talent is to whip the story on, which
he does reasonably well through 560 pages. At times it is
hard going: an endless round of transatlantic travel,
financial chicanery (old Igor was nothing if not sharp
about money, and permanently at war with the taxman,
whom he seems successfully to have defrauded for
decades) and rather queeny bitchings with collaborators,
conductors and impresarios about the exact nature of
the presentation and interpretation of his works. As
Stravinsky gets older he
becomes yet more egotisti-
cal, more insecure, more
selfish and more impossible
to live with. He and Vera
both come to detest
California so much that they
accept almost any offer for
well-remunerated foreign
travel, including tr ips of www.lifelinespress.co.uk
doubtful moral value to Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms
South Africa in 1962 and, in “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents stunning achievement.
the same year, to the Soviet
Union – both of which are
18
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
exploited by the unsavoury regimes concerned for the
maximum propaganda value. Stravinsky also becomes a
serious drunk, consuming so much vodka and Dom
Perignon on a visit to Paris that he is unable to meet
Marc Chagall to discuss a collaboration about a potential
sacred work.
Walsh deals sensitively and fairly with the late arrival
into Stravinsky’s family of the young, clever but self-
loathing music student Robert Craft. He importuned
Stravinsky not long after the war and soon offered himself
to the maestro as, more or less, his slave. By the 1960s
Craft had attained a status somewhere between son,
collaborator and factotum. As Stravinsky aged, Craft
would conduct his music in rehearsal and even, some-
times to audience disapproval, take his own place on the
rostrum in performance. Stravinsky’s grasp of English was
never better than shaky, and Craft would write his letters
for him, frequently towards the end without much
consultation with Stravinsky himself. It also seems that
Craft wrote some of what we understand to be the later
Stravinsky canon. He has written much biographical
material about the maestro, a lot of which Walsh proves to
be not entirely accurate: and towards the end of
Stravinsky’s life, Craft appears to be in league with Vera
not merely in preventing access to the old man – even for
his own family – but in stirring up difficulties about the
eventual inheritance of the Stravinsky estate. Nonetheless,
Walsh pays a warm tribute to Craft, who rarely sought to
promote himself through his association with Stravinsky,
and whose assistance to him was, Walsh concedes, vital in
the production of several of the later works. There was
something of a mess left after Stravinsky’s death in 1971,
but this was not least of old Igor’s own making: had he
been straighter with his family, his associates and the tax-
man, things would have been far easier.
Whether taken on its own or with the first volume,
this is a magnificent work of biography. Although Walsh’s
writing can from time to time be a little precious –
witness some of his chapter titles – his narrative has real
pace, an achievement considering how boring much of
Stravinsky’s long life was. Anyone wanting to know more
about the music itself should
consult Walsh’s own writings
on the subject, which are
author itative. The only
shortcoming in these pages is
that the reader is rarely given
a sense of what inspired the
composer, or how he
evolved so greatly during his
compositional career. That
caveat aside, this work is a
To order this book at £24, see
LR Bookshop on page 16
 MUSIC
P ATRICK O’C ONNOR
A LIBERTINE LIBRETTIST
L ORENZO DA P ONTE : T HE A DVENTURES OF
M OZART ’ S L IBRETTIST IN THE O LD AND
N EW WORLDS
★ This good man, the
By Rodney Bolt
(Bloomsbury 428pp £20)
T HE M AN WHO W ROTE M OZART: T HE
E XTRAORDINARY L IFE OF L ORENZO
DA P ONTE
★ priesthood. This was
By Anthony Holden
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 238pp £18.99)
I N N OVEMBER 1825 there arrived in New York a
company of opera singers, led by the famous Spanish
tenor Manuel Garcia and his daughter Maria. They were
to give the local premiere of Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
One of the first New Yorkers to greet them was the
76-year-old Lorenzo da Ponte, at that time established as
the first Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia
University. When he introduced himself as the librettist
of Don Giovanni, Garcia was so delighted that he
grabbed the old man and danced him around the room
to the tune of Mozart’s ‘Champagne aria’. It was soon
enough agreed that not only would the company
perform Rossini’s work, they would also introduce New
Yorkers to an authentic Don Giovanni. Four perfor-
mances were given, and although the local press did not
seem to find anything out of the ordinary, historians and
all of Da Ponte’s biographers have been taken with the
idea of the elderly poet hearing in the New World the
opera that he and Mozart had created in Prague nearly
forty years earlier.
Da Ponte is an amusing, bewildering figure. Late in
his life he published an autobiography in five volumes,
and both Rodney Bolt and Anthony Holden, like all
their predecessors, are obliged to depend on Da Ponte’s
memoirs for the backbone of their story. The fact that
much of the material is suspect, partly because it is the
recollection in old age of the author, and partly because
he was a chameleon-like character anyway, always ready
to embroider a tale to his advan-
tage, does not detract from the
allure of such an adventurous life.
Lorenzo Da Ponte was not his
visit Literary Review online
real name. He was bor n
Emanuele Conegliano, son of a www.literaryreview.co.uk
Jewish leatherworker, in Ceneda,
a small city in the state of Venice.
19
When his father
converted to
Christianity, in order
to marry his second
wife, at his baptism
the fourteen-year-
old took the name
of the local bishop.
‘real’ Lorenzo Da
Ponte, encouraged
the child in his stud-
ies and his interest in
literature, and saw to
it that he entered the
not a calling for Da Ponte: respectable old age
which the lad was
suited, and although in Italy, and later in Austria and
Bohemia, he styled himself the ‘Abbe’ Da Ponte, his
memoirs are thick with his accounts of various love
affairs he had along the way. In Venice he became such a
figure of scandal that he was banished for fifteen years,
and never returned to live there. His wit and charm
worked on men and women. By the time he arrived in
Vienna, although he had built a reputation as a poet and
raconteur, he had not written anything for the stage, yet
somehow succeeded in gaining the post of Poet to the
Imperial Theatre. The Emperor Joseph II seemed to
take a fancy to him, but must also have recognised a rare
talent. While in the Imperial service Da Ponte not only
wrote the three works for which he is still famous (the
libretti for Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and
Così fan tutte), but also operas for Salieri, Weigl, Stephen
Storace and – the greatest success of his years in the
Austrian capitol – Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara. This
outstripped the popularity of even Figaro – both operas
were premiered in 1786 – so much that, as Rodney Bolt
writes, ‘A craze for Una cosa rara swept through Vienna
... at every performance 300 to 400 people had to be
turned away.’
The following season, while he was working on Don
Giovanni for Mozart, Da Ponte also took on commis-
sions from Salieri for Axur, re d’Ormus, and another for
Martín y Soler, L’arbore di Diana. Asked how he could
possibly meet all the deadlines, Da Ponte explained: ‘I
shall write in the evening for Mozart, imagining I am
reading the Inferno; mornings I
shall work for Martín and pre-
tend I am studying Petrarch;
my after noons will be for
Salieri. He is my Tasso.’ All of
Da Ponte’s libretti were to
a g reater or lesser extent
re-workings of plays by others.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 MUSIC

In this there was nothing unusual. It was Da Ponte’s
skill, as the tenor Michael Kelly described it, referring to
his libretto for Storace’s Gli equivoci, based on The
Comedy of Errors: ‘Deftly reducing five acts to two, intro-
ducing ar ias ... while retaining the essence of
Shakespeare’s comedy.’
For all that he is known to posterity as a librettist, it was
his love of Italian literature that lay at the heart of Da
Ponte’s career. Eventually banished from Vienna, as he had
been from Venice, he went to London, where he opened
a bookshop, started a printing press, and lost a fortune in
an ill-starred theatre project. He strove to educate the
English, as he later would the Americans, in the Italian
classics. As a child he had been caught stealing calfskins
from his father’s workshop, so that he could swap them
with a local bookbinder for editions of Dante and Guarini.
At the end of his life, the books he imported into America
helped to lay the foundations of the Italian collections at
Columbia University and the Library of Congress.
As its title implies, Anthony Holden’s book is more
concerned with Da Ponte’s work with Mozart, and he
devotes almost a quarter of his text to three chapters
analysing the trio of immortal masterpieces. In this he is
well placed, having made a successful translation of Don
Giovanni for English National Opera. Bolt’s much longer
book covers a wider range, and in it he has selected
excellent contemporary quotes to evoke the cities in
which Da Ponte lived. In Venice he knew Casanova, in
Vienna Metastasio. Coming to London he found sympa-
thetic clients, among them the Duchess of Devonshire
and George Spencer. His New York friends included
Clement Moore, founder of the General Theological
Seminary, and the author of The Night Before Christmas.
Both authors are much kinder to Da Ponte than some
of his earlier biographers. April Fitzlyon, for instance, in
her 1955 study The Libertine Librettist, called him ‘a sanc-
timonious prig’ and ‘an egocentric, petty individual’.
For Bolt, though, Da Ponte is ‘the lonely child of
Ceneda, who escaped through books and found in
words a sense of belonging and the means to build
himself a fragile fame’. In the world of musical theatre,
the wordsmith is frequently given equal billing with the
composer (Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and
Hammerstein, Brecht and Weill). Da Ponte is the only
librettist regularly accorded this distinction, when people
refer to the Mozart-Da Ponte operas. No one could
argue with Holden, who concludes, ‘His poetry will be
heard in opera houses all over the world, every night of
every year, for as long as the world turns.’
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16

ACROSS
1 Man leading the Spanish to place of worship (6)
Sponsored by 4 Bird seen by quiet enthusiast (6)
9 Small roll needed for game played on lawn, note (9)
10 Father’s given thanks for Italian 25 (5)
11 Offensive position? (4)
12 Rapper’s language contains colloquialisms (5)
14 Preside over seat (5)
15 Deity preceding books for one who does not show up? (5)
17 Sample discrimination (5)
19 Got back a garment from Rome (4)
21 Illumination needed for answer to crossword clue (5)
23 Garland certainly put together in an unhurried way (9)
24 Irritate right leg joint (6)
25 Pleats unfolded with paper fastener (6)

DOWN
1 French novelist concealed page in
university grounds (6)
2 Almost wrong identifying author (4)
3 French delicacy poorly set around freight (8)
Five winners will be selected from the correct crosswords received by noon on 5 Praise God out loud (4)
6 Old stagers steer van off course (8)
July 17th. Each will receive a Sheaffer Signature Pen, generously donated by the
7 Allude to accepting ecstasy and marijuana cigarette (6)
Sheaffer Pen Company. 8 Amount of flesh required by Shylock and Ezra (5)
The winners of our June crossword competition are: Ann Skea of London SW1, 13 Inspection of accounts covering something charged
Rufus Morton of Cranleigh, Donald Huxley of Loughborough, Yuri Schroeder of for interview (8)
Notting Hill and Dinah Lax of Corbridge, 14 Chemical substance obtained from Calcium,
Tritium, Yttrium and salt mixture (8)
Answers to the June crossword: ACROSS: 1 Winston, 5 Shrug, 8 Looks, 9 Fatal, 15 Hedda is heartless fast talker (6)
10 Sofia, 14 Natural, 16 Stein, 17 Petty, 18 Babysit, 22 Clout, 25 Romeo, 26 16 Character on card (5)
Union, 27 Green, 28 Scallop.DOWN: 1 Walton, 2 Noon, 3 Tess, 4 Norfolk Broads, 18 Large car needed for housing development (6)
5 Sofa, 6 Rate, 7 Gall, 11 Suite, 12 Stays, 13 Kiwi, 15 Ahem, 19 Turnip, 20 Drag, 20 Body of ship in English port (4)
21 Smee, 22 Coin, 23 Tuba, 24 Gill. 22 Understanding of traction (4)
 MUSIC
W ILLIAM P ALMER
BEFORE ELVIS
A ND T HEY A LL S ANG : T HE G REAT
M USICIANS OF THE 20 TH C ENTURY TALK
ABOUT T HEIR M USIC
★ lard for a month’s work of
By Studs Terkel
(Granta Books 301pp £15.99)
AMONG THE MANY things that John Lennon said, one of
the more stupid was that ‘there was nothing before
Elvis’. Well, Studs Terkel’s new book is made up of
interviews with singers and musicians, mostly from the
first half of the last century, who worked in this ante-
diluvian world, striving to fill the gap before the coming
of the Memphis One.
It’s rather a shame that the musicians are placed together
in categories; opera and lieder singers together, folk, jazz,
and blues artists all in their separate compartments. It
would perhaps have been better to present the subjects in
chronological order, so that we had, say, blues guitarist
and singer Big Bill Broonzy following on from classical
guitarist Andrés Segovia, to give the same effect as Terkel’s
own radio show, which he presented for many years from
Chicago, in which ‘a Caruso aria … might have been
followed by Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues”. In turn
a Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl ballad…’. The programme
grew to include interviews with authors and musicians,
and was the beginning of Terkel’s pioneering work in oral
history that resulted in such books as Hard Times and The
Good War, assembled from interviews with a huge variety
of ordinary American men and women who had lived
through the Depression and the Second World War.
Most of the names in And They All Sang will be well
known, though some are rescued from undeserved
obscurity. One of these is John Jacob Niles, a collector
and singer of American folk music, who, ‘accompanying
himself on a dulcimer or a lute, sang in a haunting voice
resembling that of a Southern banshee’. Niles was born
in 1892 and lived until 1980. In his interview he speaks
in a tremendously grand, formal manner, although to
collect his songs he ‘never dealt with the respectable peo-
ple. I consorted with roughnecks and drunks.’ His way of
speech, together with most of the music, has disappeared
by the end of book when Janis Joplin talks mostly
nonsense, interpolated with ‘groovy’ and ‘fantastic’.
But there are good stories in the part of the book that
could be seen as dealing with ‘respectable people’. Tito
Gobbi recounts how he steeled his nerves on his operatic
debut by drinking a whole bottle of brandy. Geraint
Evans, too short to play Don Giovanni, settled for being
a marvellous Leporello, and remembers drinking and
21
singing the night away with
fellow Welshmen Richard
Burton and Stanley Baker.
Josef Kr ips, the g reat
Mozart conductor, recalls
the inflationar y days of
Weimar Germany, when he
was paid four pounds of
twenty-eight performances.
Many of the contributors
to this book were inter- Studs Terkel: recording angel
viewed in the 1960s and
1970s as already old men and women, and one thing that
comes out of all their reminiscences is the sense of a world
immeasurably quieter than our own. Nicolas Slonimsky,
interviewed at the age of ninety-four, grew up in a time
when the loudest noise was that of natural human bustle,
and where music grew out of silence. Alfred Brendel
believes that ‘There is a connection between good music
and silence … it is simply a quality pop music does not
have.’ The guitarist Segovia refused always to play with any
form of amplification even in the largest halls, insisting that
people should make an effort to listen. The tenor saxo-
phonist Stan Getz used to turn off the microphone in
clubs so that people could hear what a musical instrument
actually sounded like.
Some of the interviews with jazz and blues musicians
seem a little perfunctory, working musicians caught on the
hoof and going over already well-trodden ground. But
Earl Hines is fascinating on the patronage of gangsters in
Prohibition Chicago – would there have been any real jazz
without the interest of those latter-day Borgias? There are
longer pieces on the blues musician turned gospel song-
writer, Thomas A Dorsey, aka Georgia Tom, and on that
wonderful singer Mahalia Jackson. But the piece that is
most moving is the description of the last recording made
by Big Bill Broonzy shortly before his death, with its
heart-wrenching mixture of warmth and anguish.
Minor cavils apart (Thelonious Monk certainly never
played on any Billie Holiday recording, as stated in the
interview with John Hammond), this is a consistently
entertaining and illuminating collection. Throughout
there is sense of the greatness of many of these artists,
although there is also a feeling of valediction to the
whole book; of a farewell to song.
After Elvis? A case can be made for seeing The Beatles
and Bob Dylan as the last heirs of an age-old song-writ-
ing and singing tradition, rather than being the progeni-
tors of something utterly new. Time will sort out which
of their songs survive, though I can’t help thinking that
even the most lachrymose of Irish tenors would have
found it difficult to put across a song as musically feeble
and emotionally vapid as Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’.
To order this book at £12.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 VEGETABLE MATTERS
JULIA K EAY
How To Be Lank,
Fleet and Nimble
T HE B LOODLESS R EVOLUTION : R ADICAL
V EGETARIANS AND THE D ISCOVERY
OF I NDIA
★ (particularly in Britain – the land of the rosbifs) essential
By Tristram Stuart
(HarperCollins 416pp £25)
O NE OF THE hardest things about writing on what
might be called a ‘special interest’ must be convincing
potential readers that you are not going to preach at
them. Rest assured. Tristram Stuart doesn’t preach.
What he does do is try to make us think about what we
eat, and why, and what effect our choice of diet
has on ourselves, the animal world, and the
ecology of the planet. And, in spite of his
misleading subtitle, he succeeds
triumphantly. ‘Radical Vegetarians
and the Discovery of India’ suggests
a claim to spectacular achievement
on the part of a fr inge group
trying to enhance its credentials.
In fact The Bloodless Revolution
is a scholarly, wide-rang ing
and utterly absorbing history
of vegetarianism.
Although the word ‘vegetari-
an’ was not coined until the
1840s, as long ago as the sixth
centur y BC Pythagoras pro-
pounded a theory of immortality
that involved the transmigration of
the soul between living creatures –
and thus the immorality of eating the
flesh of any of them. Pythagoras was
thought to have encountered this theory
while travelling in Egypt, to which country
it was believed to have been introduced by
philosophers from India. His doctrines were
later advocated by such philosophical giants as Socrates,
Diogenes and Plato and would become a seminal part of
the Hellenistic philosophical tradition. Pythagoras may
not have visited India himself, but Alexander the Great
certainly did; and when Alexander arrived in Taxila
(now in Pakistan) in 326 BC and encountered Brahmin,
Jain and Buddhist ascetics (he called them ‘gym-
nosophists’) who also believed in reincarnation and non-
violence and therefore did not eat meat, the link with (if
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
not ‘the Discovery of ’) India was confirmed. Just as this
evidence of an early and exotic provenance lent credibil-
ity to Greek philosophy, so the existence of a culture
that had survived – even thrived – for so long on a
meat-free diet has inspired the vegetarian movement
ever since.
In western Europe, where Alexander’s encounters
with the Brahmins were soon forgotten if they had ever
been widely known, those who survived on a meat-free
diet were not called vegetarians, they were called the
poor. Meat-eating had status. It was also considered
for strength and virility. The French physician François
Bernier, who arr ived at the court of the Mughal
Emperor Aurangzeb in the 1660s, was astonished to
discover that vegetarianism was not only a viable option,
it was a military asset. ‘Whereas European armies were
weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of
wine – without which the European soldier would
absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly
content with readily transportable dried foods
such as lentils and rice.’ To assert, as Stuart
does, that ‘Hindu culture shook
Europe’s self-centredness to the core’
is probably overstating the case, but
it certainly opened a few eyes.
Nowadays, when vegetarian-
ism is so widespread and unre-
markable (there are 4 million
vegetarians in the UK alone),
it is hard to imagine it was
ever such a contentious
subject. While diehard meat-
eaters der ided anyone who
abstained from eating meat
as effeminate, weak and lazy,
radical vegetar ians like the
‘Pythagorean’ Thomas Tryon
preached that ‘eating our
Brethren and Fellow Creatures
qualifies Men to be sordid, surly and
soldiers’. Even the churches got them-
selves tied up in knots over it. In Protestant
England fasting of any description (even
Pluck me when it was only abstaining from meat)
was seen as a superstitious vestige of
Catholicism, while the Catholic Church, which taught
that the world and everything in it (including animals)
had been made for man’s use, regarded those who
rejected this teaching as dangerously subversive, possibly
even heretical. Not eating meat was a form of penance;
but come Friday abstinence, it was fillet of fish not nut
cutlets that got the priestly nod.
People decide to be vegetarian for the same reasons
now as 2,000 years ago – it is good for their health and
22

VEGETABLE MATTERS
they don’t like the idea of killing animals. In Europe, at
least, religious considerations and the debate over
whether or not animals have souls play a smaller part in
that decision than they used to; health concerns, on the
other hand, have been forced to the fore by modern
intensive farming methods and our reluctance to partake
at second hand of the cocktail of chemicals – antibiotics,
growth hormones, etc – that goes into meat production.
The most potent arguments, however, and this is where
Stuart is at his most compelling, are ecological and
economic. It has long been known that a vegetable diet
sustains many more people per acre than meat, yet great
swathes of irreplaceable rainforest are being destroyed
every year to make way for grazing and for the cultiva-
tion of soya beans, ‘the bulk of which are used to feed
animals which end up on the plates of the affluent West
and, increasingly, China’. Even the most resolute of
meat-eaters must surely agree that something has
to change.
Although sections of the book, particularly those on
literature, are overlong, it is rescued from indigestibility
by a cast of extraordinary characters. George Cheyne,
‘the fattest man in Europe’, lost sixteen stone and
became ‘lank, fleet and nimble’ on a diet of milk
(which, since it came from a cow that ate only grass, he
defined as ‘semi-digested vegetables’); the free-thinking
physician Erasmus Darwin, on the other hand, argued
that ‘ecosystems as a whole gained more “pleasure” from
an individual animal’s death than the animal lost in
dying’ (however did he quantify that?); while Percy
Bysshe Shelley, who had joined an eccentric network of
nudist vegetarians in Bracknell, was warned by his doc-
tors that his declining health would never recover unless
he abandoned his vegetarian diet.
Stuart is awesomely well-read (his bibliography runs to
sixty-eight pages and his footnotes to ninety-one more)
and he writes fluently and with extraordinary confi-
dence on the philosophical, religious, political, medical,
literary and ecological history of his subject. In his
eagerness to make his readers understand he is inclined to
keep hammering when his point has already struck
home. He also sometimes finds it hard to gauge his
readers’ intelligence. While some (maybe even most)
might need help with the distinction between
metempsychosis, reincarnation and the transmigration of
souls, few need to be told the difference between a
Jacobite and a Jacobin or need a translation of sans-
culotte. But these are mere quibbles. His enthusiasm is
infectious and his commitment to his subject admirable.
Surprisingly, he is not apparently a vegetarian himself.
He describes himself as an ecologist and a ‘freegan’, an
‘anti-consumerist who eats supermarket waste that
would otherwise be thrown away’. His book, too,
should open a few eyes.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
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CFAR offers a number of courses in the field of psychoanalytic studies.
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Public lecture series available on website
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 VEGETABLE MATTERS

C HARLES E LLIOTT presented here, they are making excellent headway.

Seed to Seed presumes to be more, however, than a text-

BIOLOGICAL BEAUTY book. Nicholas Harberd is a man deeply interested in the

natural world on a macroscopic level too, to the point of
being a bit of a mystic. He frames his book as a diary of a
S EED TO S EED : T HE S ECRET L IFE OF P LANTS year, incorporating the close observation of a single weed, a
★ thale-cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) growing on a grave in the
By Nicholas Harberd Norfolk countryside not far from his home. For him thale-
(Bloomsbury 311pp £16.99) cress is a logical choice, because the same species is his prin-
cipal experimental plant; its relatively small genome has been
BE AFRAID. Be very afraid: completely mapped, it is easy to grow, and it matures rapidly.
As if tied to a plumb-line by the sequential action of We hear a lot about that thale-cress on the grave, from
gravitational stimulus-sensing amyloplasts, an alter- the time its rosette of leaves begins to extend, through its
ation in the reverse flow of auxin, a modulation of near-death by slug, to its flowering and setting of seed. I
DELLA properties (perhaps... we’ll know this soon) found the account less engaging than Harberd apparently
and resultant orientations of growth... does, but he uses his narrative as a device both to illus-
When I first opened Seed to Seed it was this passage on trate his science and to relate the science to the natural
page 263 that caught my eye and caused my heart to world outside the lab. ‘The trick’, he writes, ‘is to keep
sink. Nevertheless, I repressed my dismay and went back the spring’s beauty and the knowledge of the protein
to start the book from the beginning. I’m glad I did: together in the mind at one and the same time.’ In fact,
given a certain amount of close attention and persis- this is his principal theme and worry – that by limiting
tence, it will tell you more about plant physiology, about themselves to a search for understanding of the technical
the linkage between submicroscopic life processes and details of life, the functions of genes and hormones, the
the larger world around us, and – in extremely practical small gritty facts explaining how and why, scientists may
terms – about the way science really works than any- well be overlooking much larger connections.
thing I’ve come upon before. It will also, incidentally, It must be to Harberd’s credit that he encourages this
make perfectly clear what Nicholas Harberd was talking kind of thinking. In his own work he has already taken
about when he wrote the sentence quoted in part above. useful steps toward such globalisation, having among
Harberd is a biologist who heads a team at the John other important discoveries established how a plant can
Innes Centre in Norwich. His field is the mechanics of relate directly to its environmental circumstances by con-
plant growth and – since this is the twenty-first century – trolling growth speed with a built-in governing system. I
that means trying to figure out how and why genes func- wish I could be as enthusiastic about his nature writing,
tion as they do. Needless to say, it isn’t a simple matter, nor which despite its laudable intent strikes me most of the
is it easy to explain. Just getting the average unscientific time as pretty strained and inadequately integrated. I’d
reader (eg me) up to speed on the terminology and basic prefer that he stuck to the harder science.
facts requires several chapters and numerous diagrams, and Because it is here that he really scores. Whether it is his
there were times when I felt as though I was back in description of purifying DNA (‘that wonderful dread stuff
Biology 101 being battered by chromosomes. But Harberd of life’), the exultation after an experiment that finally goes
is sympathetic, a skilful and careful instructor, and almost right, or the brain-cracking struggle to come up with a
without noticing you gradually realise that it is all making new avenue of research, all rings wonderfully true. Then,
sense. Being an inveterate autodidact, I found this exciting. too, there are his findings – new information about genes
Yet still more exciting is and hormones and mutants,
what he leads us to see – that
there is nothing foregone NEW AUTHORS bits of ‘enhanced vision’ that
bring us, ‘by tiny increments,
about the way plants grow. PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED closer to the world, to being
Stems form, roots thrust them- Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena more of a part of it’. I wish I
selves deep into the earth, Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first
time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
were competent to describe
flowers bloom as they do only less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing these findings, because they
because of an enormously houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. are fascinating. Best to read
complex series of processes at We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary Seed to Seed yourself. Nicholas
the genetic level. It is the busi- and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic,
spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others.
Harberd will make it all
ness of scientists like Harberd clear, even that quote from
and his team to disentangle Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS page 263.
and understand those pro- QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK. To order this book at £13.59,
e-mail: info@athenapress.com www.athenapress.com
cesses. And on the evidence see LR Bookshop on page 16

24
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
R ICHARD H OLMES
The Pen and
The Sword
C APTAIN P ROFESSOR : T HE M EMOIRS OF
S IR M ICHAEL H OWARD
★ mother into a depression from which she never recov-
By Michael Howard
(Continuum 232pp £19.99)
THERE CAN BE few military historians of my generation
who have not been influenced by Michael Howard. It
was reading his The Franco-Prussian War, published, it is
shocking to observe, in 1961, that really made me want
to be a military historian, and set a standard to which I
have aspired, with more determination than success,
ever since. He was the exter nal
examiner at my doctoral viva thirty
years ago, and there too he showed
just how the job should be done:
with penetration and erudition,
courtesy and humour, ending with a
gentle suggestion that if I wished to
tidy up the thesis for publication
there were a couple of spots that
needed some sandpaper.
Although I was aware that he had
served in the Coldstream Guards
and earned a Military Cross in Italy,
I knew surprisingly little else about
him. One of the many delights of
this book is that the greater part of it
deals with Michael Howard’s life
before he embarked upon an acade-
mic career in 1947. He was born
into what were then called ‘the
officer-producing classes’, son of a
director of Howard & Sons, manu-
facturers of phar maceutical and Howard: words and actions
industrial chemicals: ‘a good man,
bred by generations of good people, honourable, devout,
understanding, kind’. There was a family house (later
inherited by his parents) on the edge of Epping Forest,
and a home in Brompton Square, where Mrs Howard
had seven domestic staff, not to mention a chauffeur for
‘The Big Car’ and ‘The Little Car’, for her family of
five. Michael Howard remembers Nanny as ‘the domi-
nant person in my life … set as firmly in the classical
mould as a warrant officer in the Brigade of Guards, and
a splendid example of that magnificent breed’. The
London he grew up in was almost Victorian: there were
25
pea-souper fogs, organ-grinders with monkeys, muffin
men, lavender girls and lamp-lighters.
After day school in London he was sent to board at
the progressive Abinger Hill, near Dorking in Surrey,
followed by the more traditional Wellington, where he
enjoyed music and history, and ‘moved in a cloud of
affectionate friends’. Awareness of war came early: within
the family the gap left by his Uncle Val’s death in France
in 1918 never closed, and the recognition that she had
three boys approaching military age helped edge his
ered. He went up to Oxford in 1941, and joined the
army in 1942, attracted to the Coldstream Guards by the
fact that the OTC had both a Coldstream adjutant and
sergeant-major, seemed to combine ‘elegance and
efficiency’, and had Figaro’s aria Non più andrai adapted
as its slow march.
Commissioned after training at Mons Barracks in
Aldershot, he was first sent to a reinforcement depot in
North Africa. Posted to the 2nd Battalion at Salerno, he
had already come under fire on
patrol when he commanded his pla-
toon in a full-scale battalion attack.
He was evacuated with malar ia
immediately afterwards, and was
recuperating when he heard that he
had been awarded the MC. ‘This
gave me a surge of happy pride so
intense that it has never completely
died away,’ he declares. But he is
too honest not to admit, too, that
‘any fool can be brave in his first
action’, and to note that there were
to be times when he was ‘down-
right cowardly’. Much later he left a
wounded man out on patrol, for
what seem, to this reviewer, to be
perfectly understandable reasons.
‘Years later I sought out his grave,’
he writes, ‘and sat down beside it
for a long time, wondering what
else I could have done. I still won-
der. I only know that I should never
have abandoned him as I did.’
He returned to Oxford and finished his degree, but
had so many interests, including appearing as Wolsey in
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, that ‘I was lucky to scrape a
place in the then undivided second class.’ In 1947 he
began teaching at King’s College London, and in 1954
he was unexpectedly offered the chair of what were then
called ‘military studies’. He took a sabbatical year to
‘learn my new trade’, and eventually, though not with-
out much dog-in-the-mangerism from his head of
department, established what now flourishes as the
Department of War Studies at King’s. A succession of
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS

distinguished works followed The Franco-Prussian War;
his influence, especially in the realm of nuclear policy,
spread via Chatham House and the Institute for
Strategic Studies, to the USA. He moved to Oxford in
1968, the peace of his rooms ‘broken only by the occa-
sional click of croquet balls’, in contrast to King’s, where
he had occupied probably the noisiest office in the acad-
emic world. He was appointed to the Chichele chair of
military history in 1977 but suddenly found himself
offered the Regius chair of modern history, although, as
he admits, he ‘was not the first choice of the faculty’.
But eventually those administrative chores that he had
fled London to avoid caught up with him with a
vengeance – ‘I was turning into a stale apparatchik’ –
and when, in 1987, he was offered the new chair of mil-
itary and naval history at Yale, he duly accepted. On his
return to England after four happy years (which includ-
ed applauding the momentous changes accompanying
German reunification), he stacked his books about the
Cold War on the topmost shelves of his library and left
the new world order to others.
But 9/11 prevented him from sliding into ‘a somno-
lent and self-satisfied old age’. In the book’s concluding
pages, he reflects that one of the saddest experiences of
his life was to see the USA, a nation for which his grati-
tude and affection had been almost unbounded, become
‘regarded with hatred by half the world and mistrust by
most of the rest’. I suspect that this is probably Michael
Howard’s last book, which is a tragedy, for as I read it
I see that we need his wisdom now more than we
ever have.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16

F RANK M C LYNN

Witch, Bitch
or Ingénue?
B ETTE DAVIS : T HE G IRL W HO WALKED
H OME A LONE
★
By Charlotte Chandler
(Simon & Schuster 368pp £17.99)

THE MOST WRITTEN-ABOUT personality in twentieth-

century Hollywood is Alfred Hitchcock, but of the stars
themselves it is Bette Davis who has attracted the most
attention, with at least a dozen biographies extant. In
many ways this is appropriate, for Bette Davis is the
greatest actress in the history of the movies. There are
female actors more technically gifted and better suited to
the theatre, but none has rivalled Davis’s ability to make
that all-important magical connection with the camera.
In this respect she might be regarded as the female James
Cagney, for both of them are incapable of doing Bette: poor picker of men
anything boring on screen, even if it is just picking up a
telephone. Bette Davis has influenced every movie variety of issues, but especially the problems women
actress of any consequence, be it Meryl Streep, Liv have with men. Although Davis’s pronouncements make
Ullmann, or Jeanne Moreau. She was notoriously cross- it difficult to like her, she was undoubtedly shrewd and
grained, viperish and difficult, and the stories about her intelligent with, as one might have expected, a biting
are legion. But, it may be asked, is there anything signif- wit and a scalding line in sarcasm.
icant to add to the well-known hollow success story, the Chandler’s book is essentially the case for the defence,
four husbands, the feuds (with, for example, Joan as she gives Davis the benefit of the doubt in all cases,
Crawford and Miriam Hopkins), the prima donna antics pressing into service a wide range of people (from
on set, the rows with Jack Warner, and all the rest of it? Natalie Wood and Debbie Reynolds at one end to
Charlotte Chandler elbows her way through a crowded Michael Redgrave and Christopher Lee at the other) to
field on the strength of her many interviews with the testify to how charming she could be both in private
star, where we hear the authentic Davis voice on a and on the set. We do not hear from any of Bette’s bêtes

26
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS

noires but there is an ominous background of dissenting abysmal ignorance until twenty-three, Bette then
voices coming from those who worked with her and discovered sex and took to it with relish. Although
who wish to attest to her status as monster: Jerome never a great beauty, she was always totally convincing as
Robbins, Alec Guinness, Celeste Holm. It’s hard to get a redblooded heterosexual woman, unlike, say, Katharine
a fix on Bette Davis as her likes and dislikes seem to Hepburn, whose bisexual personality impaired her
have been wholly irrational and unpredictable. But she is attempts to pose as a romantic heroine. While she was
generous in her assessment of other actresses, among relatively young, rich and famous Bette Davis had no
whom she nominates Anna Magnani as her favourite. shortage of bedfellows, but the supply dried up round
By all accounts all four of Davis’s marriages were a about the same time as her major film roles. By fifty,
nightmare, but Chandler skips over the first three Davis looked prematurely aged and raddled and could
husbands to provide a rip-roaring portrait of the drunken no longer attract men. When the fourth marriage ended
midnight rows that characterised the final match with in an inferno of alcohol and broken glass, Bette found
Gary Merill, evidently made in hell. Davis was remark- herself, as she put it, once more a virgin. This was the
ably frank, and even indiscreet, when talking to cause of great sorrow in her life but, to her credit, she
Chandler, and about some of her fantasies we learn seems to have borne it with remarkable stoicism. She
more than we really need to know. She admits that her admits she was always a poor picker of men, and traces
favourite male fantasy figure was Laurence Olivier and this to her cold father, who walked out on her adored
talks interestingly about her many affairs: with the actor mother Ruthie when Bette was a child.
George Brent, the director William Wyler and It may seem a bit flip to hint at Aristotle and say that
(inevitably) Howard Hughes. Wyler, it seems, was the this book aroused both pity and terror, but when one
love of her life, but she played hard-to-get and so lost has recoiled from the vespine Bette Davis in full flight,
him, to her eternal regret. one can still find compassion for the woman who essen-
Despite her brilliance as a screen actress, there is no sin- tially failed in the task that meant most to her in life.
gle outstanding movie in the Davis filmography. Her best She was, as Chandler says, the most talented actress ever
films were Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Little Foxes, Now, to grace the silver screen. But as her own self, she truly
Voyager and All About Eve, with Dangerous, The Private was the girl who walked home alone.
Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Mr Skeffington and Whatever To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Happened to Baby Jane? at the top of the second class. It
would be worth investigating why the screen’s best actress
ʞʠʘʘʐʝ ʛʚʐʟʝʤ ʝʐʌʏʔʙʒʞ
never appeared in a truly great film, but, alas, this sort of 
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disinherited her. But her failure as a parent was only one XXXXPSETXPSUIPSHVL
of the crosses she had to bear. A virgin of the most

27
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
U RSULA B UCHAN
Get Thee to
a Shrubbery
M Y DARLING H ERRIOTT: H ENRIETTA
L UXBOROUGH , P OETIC G ARDENER AND
I RREPRESSIBLE E XILE
★ garden design. Jane Brown gives us a sense of what was
By Jane Brown
(HarperPress 264pp £20)
MY DARLING HERRIOTT is the story of a lively, cultured
and well-bred woman, Henrietta St John, who was born
in the last year of the seventeenth century, and lived until
1756. She was the much-loved half-sister of Harry,
Viscount Bolingbroke, the high Tory who fled to France
in 1715, at the Hanoverian succession, just before he was
charged with treason, and also great-
granddaughter of the Sir Oliver St
John who was Lord Chief Justice in
Cromwell’s day. Henrietta, who was
known to Bolingbroke as ‘Herriott’,
had the misfortune to make a loveless
match, and was then banished to
Barrells House, in the muddy depths
of the Warwickshire countryside,
after her husband, Robert Knight
(later Lord Luxborough), suspected
her of a dalliance with a poet. She
insisted that the relationship was ‘pla-
tonick’, and although Knight himself
took mistresses, he would not divorce
her, yet denied her access to her two
children and kept her on a tight rein
financially. She was shunned by a
number of the beau monde.
Her response to this calamity, which
would surely have laid low many of
her female contemporaries, was to Henrietta: ‘hands-on’
gather around her a circle of poets and
clergymen, from what Jane Brown calls the ‘understorey of
eighteenth-century society’, as well as to write letters,
many of which, because of her grand connections, have
survived, and to make a notable garden at Barrells. Her
best gardening friend was the famous poet-gardener,
William Shenstone of The Leasowes, who lived some thir-
ty miles away in what was then very rural Halesowen near
Birmingham, and made a ferme ornée there. Brown points
to the complexities of gardening styles in the early decades
of the eighteenth century. In particular, she makes clear
that there was no seamless transition from the seventeenth-
28
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
century formal Baroque garden to ‘Capability’ Brown’s
landscapes of rolling acres, limpid lakes and clumps of
trees, but emphasises that the beginnings of the English
Landscape Style, which we now assume was an inevitable
process, were tentative and fragile and, moreover, much of
the front-running was done by owners of smaller gardens,
like Barrells and The Leasowes.
Henrietta had known Alexander Pope and other opin-
ion-formers socially before her fall, and she lived through
a time of considerable intellectual ferment, some of
which centred upon the philosophical underpinnings of
happening to the middling size of garden at a time when
the great ‘landscapes’, such as Claremont, Rousham,
Stowe and Stourhead, were in the long process of devel-
opment. While exiled at Barrells, Henrietta made a
garden, surrounded by farmland that she called ‘my ferme
négligée’, which consisted of a flowery terrace, bowling
green and kitchen garden around the house, edged by a
ha-ha, and then a series of serpentine walks through the
surrounding woodland and chestnut coppice with, here
and there, carefully disposed seats,
memor ial or naments or garden
buildings, such as a Her mitage.
There was even a grotto, with shells
she stuck on herself, which became a
Temple of Venus. Close to the
kitchen garden was an orchard and
‘Shrubbery’ (a word she may have
invented). She was what we would
now call a ‘hands-on’ gardener.
Many of the elements of a full-blown
eighteenth-century landscape garden,
apart from the water and the earth-
sculpture, were there.
At times, however, Henr ietta
seems just as interested in the melons
growing in her hotbeds and there are
homely comparisons to be made
here with Gilbert White, who was
working in his garden at Selborne
not much later. The difference is that
White’s ideas, and garden, have
survived, whereas absolutely nothing
remains of Barrells.
Jane Brown also describes other gardens with which
Henrietta had a connection, notably Dawley, the one
made by Harry Bolingbroke after he was pardoned and
returned to England, as well as that at Marlborough
Castle, made by her friends Lord and Lady Hertford,
and Richings, laid out by Lord ‘Batty’ Bathurst, an ally
of Bolingbroke. It is interesting to note how often Tory
politicians have been keen makers of gardens; in our
own day, Lord Heseltine and Lord Tebbit spring instantly
to mind.
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS

Henrietta – poet, avid letter-writer, and good, loyal
friend – is, despite her flightiness and unruly tongue, or
perhaps because of them, a charming personality, and
Jane Brown has done well to tease out what facts there
are about her in this carefully researched and very
readable book. She does occasionally fall into the trap of
filling in with imaginative presumptions, in the form of
questions, where there is no hard evidence, which may
irritate the scholarly purist. I found myself responding
positively to Henrietta, and wishing that there were
more to know about a stout-hearted and clever woman
who had the misfortune to live in an age when gender
was almost always the immovable block to worldly fame.
We should be grateful to Jane Brown, a distinguished
and influential garden historian, for ensuring that, 250
years after her death, Henrietta’s actions smell sweet and
blossom in her dust.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16

D OMINIC S ANDBROOK of James Bond is hard to categorise: a mixture of

memoir, national history and cultural commentary. In

SOAKED IN 007 his day job, he edits Penguin’s spectacular history list,
but he self-deprecatingly insists that his own work is
‘breathtakingly selective and loaded with no doubt face-
T HE M AN W HO S AVED B RITAIN tious and callow interpretation’. Historians, he advises,
★ ‘should probably see about swapping this for something
By Simon Winder else’. But this is going too far. It’s true that Winder’s his-
(Picador 293pp £14.99) tory is a bit partial and partisan, so that the post-war
years emerge as unutterably monochrome and dreary,
THANKS TO MARCEL Proust, the unassuming madeleine the Empire as horrible, a succession of Prime Ministers
cake has become an indelible symbol of memory and loss. as ‘mad’ or ‘deranged’ and all things British as generally
But in the opening paragraphs of this terrific book, Simon tired, tawdry and ridiculous. This is probably a genera-
Winder gives us an appropriately British alternative: the tional tic: anyone who reached maturity in the late
jumbo bar of Old Jamaica. He remembers eating this splen- 1970s and early 1980s may well be condemned to view
didly bizarre treat of the 1970s, filled with rum essence and recent histor y as influenced by the Winter of
raisins, at one of the key moments in his cultural life – a Discontent, with everything tainted by guilt and decline.
screening of Live and Let Die at the Tunbridge Wells Odeon.
As Jane Seymour writhed in agony, surrounded by
madly convulsing voodoo worshippers, the ten-year-old
Winder reached a point of almost cosmic transcendence,
overwhelmed by ‘the reality of feeling sick, the percep-
tion of being drunk, and the confusion of the notionally
West Indian flavour of the treat and the loosely West
Indian setting of the film’. Even now, he writes, ‘rum
essence still flings me back to that cinema’, and to his
‘transformative encounter’ with James Bond.
Although the Bond industry shows no signs of diminu-
tion, with a twenty first Bond film due to reach our screens
this winter, the twentieth-century’s emblematic secret agent
is not the towering figure he once was. Between the late
1950s and the late 1970s, Bond’s cultural reach was simply
stunning; in Winder’s words, he was a ‘uniquely powerful,
strange presence in British life’. Invented almost to pass the
time by that supremely repellent upper-class leech Ian
Fleming, described here as a ‘sort of walking reproach to
capitalism as a rational system based on competitive
Darwinian struggle’, Bond unexpectedly turned into a
distillation of post-war British hopes and fantasies, a pallia-
tive masking the reality of imperial decline. ‘Our school
games were soaked in Bond,’ writes Winder, ‘our talk was
endlessly about the films and about the cruelty and sex in
the books: Bond was a sort of currency, albeit, and quite
unknown to me, one in steep decline in the open market’.
Winder’s gallant struggle with the historical significance

29
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
And the Empire surely mattered much less than Winder
suggests: instead of being ground down by misery at its
disappearance, most ordinary people simply could not care
less – never had, in fact, and never would. Various opinion
polls and surveys suggest that, as long as living standards
were rising, people felt remarkably cheerful about them-
selves and their country, and although post-war culture
always had a healthy pessimistic streak, only when the
pound was devalued and the economy ran aground in the
late 1960s did it become a national obsession.
In any case, nobody will be reading this book for a
scholarly discussion of post-war society, and its other
attractions are formidable indeed. Winder’s enthusiasm for
Fleming’s novels does not blind him to their often
horrendous limitations: as he notes, their appeal derives in
part from their curious mixture of skill (‘she breathed in
the victim’s screams like perfume’) and terrible ineptitude
(the whole of, say, The Spy Who Loved Me). He is very
good on Bond’s roots in ‘Imperial Leather’ bestsellers like
King Solomon’s Mines and in the novels of Anthony Hope,
John Buchan and Sapper, and there are some lovely snip-
pets from Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories.
Winder quite happily admits that ‘Rohmer was a nation-
al disgrace’, but he is equally happy to give us some high-
lights: ‘“It is my fly-trap!” shrieked the Chinaman. “And I
am the god of destruction!”’ One lamentable blind spot,
however, is his dislike of Biggles, whose air-ace career took
in two world wars, the end of Empire and innumerable
international conspiracies. How anyone can describe these
books as ‘genuinely worthless’ is simply beyond me. Has
this man never read Biggles Defies the Swastika?
His anti-Biggles prejudices aside, Winder is a funny and
insightful guide to James Bond’s bizarre world. His own
life, he says, has been uneventful and humdrum by
comparison with his hero’s adventures, although his remi-
niscences of life as a textbook salesman in Africa and the
Middle East are delightful. Indeed, however good an
editor he may be, Winder really ought to give up the day
job and write more books himself, because he has a lovely,
wry style that is a pleasure to read. Apparently the first
actor to play James Bond, an American who appeared in
a television special in 1954, had ‘a bizarre head, an impor-
tant percentage of which had been squeezed down into
his neck, the effect being to make the head seem tiny and
immobile as though supported on a neck brace’.
Sean Connery’s dense chest-hair, meanwhile, ‘must
have given women having sex with him the sensation that
their breasts were rubbing against a wolverine’. And
‘when faced with hundreds of government-backed
ninjas abseiling into their volcano lair’, surely SPECTRE’s
boiler-suited minions should ‘hastily change out of their
distinctive costumes and claim to be sanitary workers or
to be merely making a documentary about Blofeld’. But
of course they never learn, the fools.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
TROUBLE SPOTS
H AZHIR T EIMOURIAN
From the House
of the Believers
O N THE ROAD TO K ANDAHAR : T RAVELS
THROUGH C ONFLICT IN THE I SLAMIC WORLD
★
By Jason Burke
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 291pp £20)
IN THE SPRING of 1991, when public agitation in the
West forced the governments of Britain and America to
set up a ‘safe haven’ for the Kurds of Iraq to save them
from another attempted genocide, Jason Burke and a
fellow student left London for Iraqi Kurdistan and joined
the Peshmergah guerrillas there to fight Saddam Hussein’s
army. Luckily for them, the fighting was largely over by
then and the young Westerners were of greater value to
the Kurds as propaganda than as soldiers. They were
marched across the Kurdish mountains from campsite to
campsite and town to town, being shown off to the locals
to raise morale. He now says, a little unfairly to himself,
that his decision to go there had nothing to do with ide-
alism. He did not want to spend another summer on the
beaches of Thailand, even less stacking tomato tins on
shelves in yet another supermarket. He had also been
inspired by the autobiography of Don McCullin, the war
photographer, so he took two old cameras with him.
Once in place, he sent a postcard to his college bar and
another to a girlfriend who had dumped him a few
months earlier. Be that as it may, soon he regained his
senses and decided to return home, in the process
narrowly surviving abduction by a gang of uncouth men,
perhaps working for Turkish intelligence, who were
linked at the time to the murder of two British journalists
who had been reporting the Kurdish tide of refugees.
I know how scared he must have been. Nearly two
decades earlier, in the same spot, I myself had faced sim-
ilar danger, though at the hands of Saddam’s men, for
the sake of reporting the budding dictator’s preparations
for his first war. This brush with death fortunately cured
me of any lingering desire for more such entanglements
with barbarians. Burke’s seemingly became an addiction
and proved the making of him, as seen elsewhere in this
book of reportage from Beit al Islam, the House of the
Believers. Only thirty-six, he has become a star among
war correspondents in any language, and his courage,
energy and insight betray no signs of abating.
That early encounter with the Kurds was apparently a
better launch pad for a career reporting Islam than Burke
could have imagined. He found that the Muslims of
 TROUBLE SPOTS

Kurdistan wore their Islam kill their fellow citizens on London trains, even though,
lightly, and for good rea- when that atrocity did eventually take place, Burke says
sons. They had suffered he was no less angered or disappointed.
too many atrocities at the There are still a few areas of conflict in the Islamic world
hands of their coreligion- Burke has not visited, but all the major trouble spots from
ists, whether Arab, Turk or Algeria to Kashmir are covered in this book and his
Persian, not to see through writing is always engaging. In fact, there were chapters
the constant appeals of when I could hardly bear to put the book down. For
those peoples for ‘Muslim example, I found his reunion with his old Peshmergah
unity’. As a result, they comrades in Kurdistan moving, his interview with one of
hardly displayed any reli- Saddam’s unrepentant torturers chilling, and his repug-
giosity in their daily lives nance at the nearness of a Pakistani supporter of the
and bore no animosity Taliban after the London bombings of last July infectious.
Burke: star among correspondents towards Israel, which had Another salient feature of his writing is his honesty. We
– though for its own rea- share his changing moods, even though at times I wished
sons – helped them with money and expertise during their there were less opinion and more reporting. Thus we see
long struggle. In Kurdistan, he learnt that the ‘Islamic’ him joining the anti-war marches of London in early 2003
world was much more complex than he suspected. In fact, – ‘for an hour, anyway’ – before telling us that he did not
had he stayed longer among the Kurds, he would have feel morally competent to tell the people of Iraq why they
learnt that hundreds of thousands of them were not should remain under their monstrous tyrant in the greater
Muslims at all, but secret adherents of religions seemingly interest of ‘the international community’.
dead for a millennium and more. Altogether, and despite the author’s youthful optimism
Thus began numerous freelance journeys to Pakistan that, for example, all will be fine in the end if we keep
and Afghanistan to sell the odd photograph to an agency quiet about the present massive migration of Muslims
and the odd report to a newspaper. He investigated the into Europe, I salute this book as both informative and
alleged whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, reported the instructive.
barbarities of the Taliban, interviewed Ahmad Shah To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Massood – their Islamist opponent in the Northern
Alliance, who was ‘mythologized into a secular hero by
Western journalists, especially in France’ – and talked to
the brutal owners of some Pakistani religious schools
who brainwashed their poor and vulnerable charges,
inciting them to blow themselves up in their rivals’
shops. In 2000, he was appointed chief reporter of The
Observer, and that enabled him to fly to trouble spots at
short notice ‘with $10,000 stuffed into my shoes’.
Burke’s previous book, Al Qaeda: The True Story of
Radical Islam (LR, September 2003), was a remarkable
work of investigative journalism. It showed that the
terrorist organisation was not, as some had portrayed it,
a huge international web of operatives in the hand of a
puppet master in the Hindu Kush, but an idea and an
example. It had no more than a hundred employees at
its hard core. What made it so dangerous was that
conservative Muslims everywhere, and particularly those
settled in the West, were traumatised by the challenges
of modern times. As their communities came into con-
tact with other peoples and as strange habits and ideas
travelled easily and instantaneously, they felt their very
identity as Muslims under attack. When a few of Bin
Laden’s men showed that they could strike far and wide,
from American warships off the coast of Yemen to sky-
scrapers in Manhattan, millions of other Muslims were
inspired and emboldened. Thus it was only a matter of
time before British-born Muslims blew themselves up to

31
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 TROUBLE SPOTS
J OHN S WEENEY
A LOST WORLD
C ITY OF O RANGES : A RABS AND J EWS IN JAFFA
★ family, who settled in nineteenth-century Jaffa. Aharon
By Adam LeBor
(Bloomsbury 357pp £18.99)
HUNGOVER AFTER A hard night on the tiles in Tel Aviv, it
has become a habit of mine to walk down the beach, past
the high-rise shoebox hotels, the pseudo Miami Beach with
its roller-skaters, sand dudes, kite surfers and demi-monde
of fashionable lefty/don’t-give-a-damn Israel, to Jaffa.
Here, the soothing stone of the old Ottoman port
calms the mind. The finger of the minaret of the
mosque by the sea is a reminder of the old dispensation,
of the time before April 1948 when Jaffa was a city of
100,000 Palestinian Arabs. Only a few thousand remain.
To the north, a symbol of much that feels wrong about
the modern world, is the Sheraton Hotel, a concrete shrine
to modernity and Americana, its gardens built – I read
somewhere – on the site of an old Muslim cemetery. To the
south, a fishing port, old stone houses. These days people
call it ‘Chocolate Jaffa’ – a kind of Middle Eastern Covent
Garden, its historic Arabness gutted and replaced with chic
boutiques and laid-back wine bars, with a few old residents
who can remember the time before the disaster, the naqba.
This bi-polar walk through history and ethnicity is the
stuffing of Adam LeBor’s beautifully written biography
of the city. It’s a far kinder and more human way into
the migraine of Middle Eastern politics than most
books. You can see the history slowly revealing itself in
front of your eyes, through the stories of a couple of
hand-picked families, both Jewish and Arab.
The book opens with the most succinct description of the
battle in the Middle East I have ever read, by the Arab writer
Najib Azouri, who said in 1905: ‘Two important phenome-
na, of the same nature but opposed, are emerging at this
moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awakening of the
Arab nation and the latent
efforts of the Jews to reconsti-
tute on a very large scale the THEDRAWBRIDGE
ancient kingdom of Israel. Issue 2: The Impossible City
These movements are destined
to fight each other continually
John Berger/ Qalqilya: Marooned beyond the wall
until one of them wins.’ Hugo Chávez /
The Israelis won. You can
see it simply by looking at TariqAli / On entering forbidden towns from behind
the twin cities of Tel Aviv
and Jaffa. The first is mod- Howard Sooley/
ern, twenty-first-century,
high-tech, high-rise, wired Nicholas Blincoe/
in, wired up, bursting with Subscribe at www.thedrawbridge.org.uk
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
money, energy, scientific exploration, ideas, wealth. The
second is old, nineteenth-century, slow, backward, poor,
and shows itself best in the sepia tints of old photographs.
Nevertheless, Jaffa feels more human and more lovely
than Tel Aviv. LeBor takes three Jaffa dynasties and tells
his story through them. The first is the Jewish Chelouche
was a jeweller and money-changer in an Ottoman Empire
town where the majority of people were Muslim.
But the British Empire was worried, even then, about
the price of oil. When the First World War came, the
British saw their opportunity to carve up the Ottoman set-
tlement and carve out some nice, loyal oil monarchies
among the Arab tribes. The thorn in the side of the British
stitch-up was the hopes of the Jews of the diaspora who
wanted to come ‘home’ to an Israel which did not exist
and which they had never visited. But slowly the dream of
the Jewish state became a fact. Arab revolt followed Arab
revolt, all of them bloody, all of them ineffective. Reading
about the Arab Hammami family struggling to come to
terms with their new neighbours in a civilised and decent
fashion – and yet retaining something of their home city –
is an astonishing example of history repeating itself.
The Hammami family’s woes speak volumes about the
Palestinians’ weakness. Take Hasan, who fled Jaffa with
his family as a youngster and ended up in America, where
he became an international businessman for Proctor and
Gamble. He returned to the Occupied Territories in the
post-Oslo false dawn of the mid-Nineties to try and build
up an orange juice business in Gaza.
But the Israelis – for all the talk of peace – still
blocked the roads out of the city, and the fruit rotted.
Hasan, a shrewd businessman, went straight to the top
and saw Arafat. Nothing happened. The old fool never
applied his mind to rebuilding Gaza’s economy and
Hasan’s hopes sank back into the mire.
His cousin, Said Hammami, took a different tack. He was
the PLO ambassador to London, trying to rebuild his coun-
try in the counsels of Europe. He was assassinated in 1978.
The most successful Palestinian Arabs in Jaffa are the
people who have tried to live the quiet life. The Andraus
family have done their best to
OUT be decent and respectful of
7 JULY people, whoever they are,
and their efforts at negotiat-
ing on behalf of the Arabs
with the Israeli authorities are
The car-infested city properly honoured by LeBor.
And yet the overwhelming
impression left by this fine
London flowers
book is one of sadness, of
the lost world of Jaffa, gone,
Bethlehem without orchards
and never to be replaced.
To order this book at £15.19,
see LR Bookshop on page 16
32

J OHN M C E WEN
STORMY GENIUS
J OHN C ONSTABLE : A K INGDOM OF
H IS OWN
★ man, both qualities nurtured by a happy childhood in
By Anthony Bailey
(Chatto & Windus 366pp £17.99)
A NTHONY BAILEY HAS written several well-received
biographies of artists, including one of Turner. Now he
completes a notable double, punctuating his text with
compar isons between Constable (1776–1837) and
Turner (1775–1851), who were guarded acquaintances
for forty years – from the critic Robert Hunt’s 1819
opinion that Constable ‘has none of the poetry of
Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of the portrai-
ture’ to Lucian Freud’s in 2002:
For me, Constable is so much
more moving than Turner because
you feel for him, it’s truth-telling
about the land rather than using
the land for compositions which
suited his inventiveness.
Turner biographies abound, but this is
the first of Constable since his friend
the painter Charles Leslie’s, first pub-
lished in 1843. Despite the growth of
Constable scholarship Leslie’s biogra-
phy has remained unchallenged, but it
is too kind and decorous – even ‘cow
dung’ was cut to spare the blushes of
Victorian readers – and he did not
have the benefit of the full correspon-
dence, published and re-edited only
since the 1960s.
In his autobiography of 1860 Leslie
was less reverential. He recalled
Constable’s love of approbation and
insistence on getting his own way;
how he talked incessantly about his
pictures (he even gave lectures), while
Turner never spoke of his own work:
This made him extremely interesting to those who
could feel with him, but either tiresome or repulsive
to those who could not.
The art historian Richard Redgrave wrote at the same
date that Leslie’s Constable appeared ‘all amiability and
goodness’, neglecting to mention the ‘sarcasms which
cut you to the bone’. It is this darker side – the prickliness,
the moodiness, the struggles – which Bailey’s timely
portrait accentuates and his sometimes stormy landscapes
are now seen to reflect.
ART
Constable’s dilemma was that he had an equal need for
professional and domestic fulfilment. ‘My life is a struggle
between my “social affections” and my “love of art”’, he
wrote as a happily married man of forty, bleakly recall-
ing the remark of the philosopher Bacon that ‘single
men are the best servants of the publick’. It did not help
that he was an artistic genius and so much of a family
his spellbinding Suffolk.
Nothing seems to have come easily. He fell in love
with Maria Bicknell, the rich local rector’s granddaughter,
when she was twelve and he was twenty-four. Owing
largely to the rector’s disapproval, it took the couple
sixteen years to marry. A dam-burst of seven children in
ten years caused constant worries about money and
health. Desire for the family hearth and need to work
were irreconcilable:
I am not happy apart from them even for a few days,
or hours, and the summer months separate us too
much, and disturb my quiet habits
at my easil,
he wrote to the cleric John Fisher,
his first patron and closest friend.
Fisher urged him to act swiftly and
rid himself of anxiety – ‘it hurts the
stomach more than arsenic’. On that
occasion Constable despatched
the family from his house in
Charlotte Street for a holiday in
healthier Brighton.
Art too was a ceaseless battle. There
was the initial disappointment, quickly
resolved, of his doting mill-owning
father, who assumed he would take
over the small but profitable family
business. Then there was the long
struggle to be accepted as a profes-
sional, when landscape, his true love,
was academically regarded as an
amateur concern. For most of his
career he had to paint commissioned
portraits to bolster the allowance he
Self-portrait, 1806 received from his father, but the
landscapes which he submitted to the
Royal Academy, membership of which was essential for
professional recognition, were grudgingly admitted
at best.
Tur ner, who combined landscapes with highly
approved mythological scenes, was elected an Associate
Academician in 1799 and an RA three years later.
Constable had to wait until 1819 to be an ARA and
another ten years for full membership, even then gaining
admission by only one vote despite having been officially
acclaimed at the Salon in Paris. It was typical that
Maria’s death deprived him of any pleasure he had in
33
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 ART
attaining this long-frustrated goal.
Set against this was his artistic compulsion and the
happiness he derived from domesticity. He was retiring,
prickly and depressive but also brave (as his heroism in a
fire dramatically proved), a man of few but true friends and
as affectionate to his parents as he was doting to his wife
and children – a gentle chiding was all a child got for acci-
dentally putting a broomstick through his latest painting.
Bailey also usefully updates Leslie on the miseries of
Victorian illnesses. Maria Constable died of tuberculosis,
having borne children against her will to the end. Other
friends died prematurely from diseases and infections
rendered harmless today. Constable suffered agonies
from his teeth. Luckily he did not live to see the prema-
ture deaths of two of his children from scarlet fever, then
the greatest killer of youth. He was buried in Hampstead
parish church alongside Maria, the tomb already carved
with the Latin couplet he had chosen seven years before:
Eheu! Quam tenui e filo pendet
Quid quid in vita maxime arridet.
Alas! From how slender a thread hangs
All that is sweetest in life.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
‘Pompée and Florissant, Hounds of Louis XV’, 1739
by Alexandre-François Desportes.
From ‘Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance
to Today’, published by Yale University Press, £25
34
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
H ENRIETTA G ARNETT
A PALETTE OF PAINTERS
T HE P RIVATE L IVES OF THE I MPRESSIONISTS
★
By Sue Roe
(Chatto & Windus 356pp £18.99)
SUE ROE HAS written an enjoyable and well-informed
account of the private lives of the French Impressionists.
She threads their lives together with dexterity and skill:
Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Bazille, Berthe
Morisot and Degas. They were a group of young, ideal-
istic art students who rebelled against the hidebound
restrictions of the mid-nineteenth-century Salon des
Beaux-Arts. They outraged the public, who viewed
their paintings as childlike daubs of unedifying scenes of
everyday life: washing hanging out to dry; a dish of
apples; steam trains at Saint-Lazare.
This book is primarily the story of how the group met
and worked closely together, supporting and encouraging
each other, occasionally quarrelling. Roe shows how, by
dint of perseverance, they triumphed over the tyranny of
the Salon and established themselves as the great painters
they indisputably were. It is also, to a large extent, the
story of Paris during an era which witnessed a stagger-
ing amount of political reversals: the Second Empire, the
Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, ‘La Semaine
sanglante’. Roe is good on the Siege and its attendant
horrors of inglorious death, of starvation in the coldest
winter within living memory. If you were lucky you ate
cats or rats or other vermin. Hot air balloons were used
to effect the dramatic escape of Parisian politicians,
notably Gambetta’s flight to Tours. But they were
scarcely ‘the height of modern technology’ Roe claims:
the first manned hot air balloon was flown by the
Montgolfier brothers as far back as 1783.
Nor were the painters by any means unscathed by the
misfortunes of war. Renoir only escaped being shot by
the kind of lucky fluke that typified his life: he aroused
the authorities’ suspicions while painting a landscape of
the Seine. He was arrested and taken to be shot for espi-
onage. Fortunately, he recognised the Commune’s Head
of Police as the republican journalist Raoul Rigaud,
whom he had saved from the police in earlier days of
peace by disguising him as a painter in the forest at
Fontainebleau. Rigaud led Renoir to a balcony where
the crowds were gathered to watch his execution.
Rigaud ordered the crowd to sing the Marseillaise and
let Renoir go free. Pissarro, like Monet, spent the war
years in London. But Pissarro returned to discover that
his home at Louveciennes had been turned into a
slaughterhouse and about 1,500 of his canvases destroyed
 ART

by the Prussians. Even more generosity. Berthe Morisot was

tragic was the death of Bazille, smitten by him, but Manet was
who had been killed, as already married. It is clear from
Renoir wrote, ‘not romanti- Manet’s portraits of Berthe
cally, galloping over a with violets, with a fan, again
Delacroix battlefield, but stu- in a dazzling white dress,
pidly, during the retreat, on a staring out of the canvas with
muddy road’. her black eyes and ‘strange,
After the war, Monet moved tantalising reserve’ that he reci-
to Argenteuil, a leafy suburb procated her feelings. Berthe
on the Seine, with his wife and eventually married Manet’s
small son (Giverny came later, brother and I would have liked
with Monet’s subsequent to have known more about this
prosper ity). In the 1870s, melancholy bid for happiness.
Argenteuil was popular with The subject fits neatly into
Parisians who flocked to the the increasingly popular genre
regattas and enjoyed drinking Monet by Manet of g roup biog raphy, and
and dancing in cafés by the indeed it is difficult to see
river. Monet’s house was spacious, with a lovely garden how else it could have been treated. The fascination of
where ‘he could stand on his lawn and watch the boats group biography lies in the interaction between the
coming and going, and all the activity of the riverside. On characters and their influence on each other over a peri-
sunny days, a table was spread with a glistening white od of time. What links the Impressionists together is
cloth beneath the large horse-chestnut tree, and the family their shared passion for painting, and it is that passion
lunched out of doors, little Jean playing on the grass. which makes them interesting collectively as well as
Monet painted the scene, with Camille’s hat hanging in individually. Sue Roe has chosen a compelling subject:
the bough of the chestnut tree, its ribbon trailing from the her book does it justice and it is a pleasure to read.
branches.’ Monet was now rich enough to indulge in a To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 16
boat, which he set up as a small floating studio, in which
Manet painted him. Sisley and Renoir came to stay, and
Manet had family connections in the district. They all
painted hard, often working side by side, depictions of the
pinks and blues of Camille’s dresses evidence of peaceful,
hardworking, thoroughly enjoyable days. Roe is just as
interesting about money as she is describing idyllic after-
noons. She is clear and factual about the visionary art
dealer Durand-Ruel, who made the Impressionists’
fortunes as well as his own. His promotion of the painters
in America as well as France makes fascinating reading.
Roe does not do herself a service, however, by translating
very freely from nineteenth-century French into twenty- FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS
first-century English, the altered idiom detracting from
her otherwise well-evoked sense of period. Grants and Pensions are available to
published authors of several works who
Pissarro is shown as hugely loveable, his prematurely
are in financial difficulties due to
white beard enhancing the view of him as a father figure personal or professional setbacks.
who took particular pains to encourage Cézanne.
Applications are considered in confidence by
Cézanne, conversely, appears as a cur mudgeonly the General Committee every month.
creature, hard to equate with the splendour of his painting. For further details please contact:
Monet was given to squabbling about money, while Eileen Gunn
General Secretary
Renoir was clearly a darling. The Royal Literary Fund
But it is Manet, who was never an Impressionist and 3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA
never exhibited with them, who emerges as the hero of Tel 0207 353 7159
the book. Witty, sophisticated and sexy, he had more Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk
influence on the group as a whole than any one of them. www.rlf.org.uk
It is debatable whether the Impressionists would have Registered Charity no 219952
existed at all without his enthusiasm, charisma and

35
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS
A LLAN M ASSIE
PLUS PARIS CHANGE…
PARIS : T HE S ECRET H ISTORY
By Andrew Hussey
(Viking 485pp £25)
PARIS IS NOT what it was. But then it never has been.
We may all have our own ‘real Paris’, the delight of our
imagination. Admirers of Richard Cobb (among whom
I count myself) will know his essay ‘The Assassination of
Paris’ and may share his dismay at the disappearance of
so many familiar and loved landmarks, and at the trans-
formation of the Marais into a tourist’s paradise, as a
result of which, he wrote, ‘the quarter has lost all
warmth and originality’. Perhaps so. We all have our
moments of deploring embourgeoisement or gentrification,
no matter where it takes place – Paris,
London, Rome, Edinburgh; but really
of course what it means is that
more people are well off and
the middle class is becom-
ing larger. The warm life
of the streets was a
product of poverty.
A hundred years ago
it was the fashion to
deplore Baron Hauss-
mann, who destroyed so
much of medieval Paris
and created the grands boule-
vards (Cobb, however, con-
fessed himself to be a boulevardier).
Andrew Hussey writes of Haussmann
implementing his project ‘with a notorious
ruthlessness and contempt for the intimate La Cour des Miracles
and intricate world of Old Paris’. Fair com-
ment, no doubt, and we may regret the destruction of the
medieval houses and network of lanes that clustered
round Notre-Dame, ‘the inspiration of Hugo’s novel …
and the source of countless myths, stories … hence a
defining part of Paris folklore’.
Yet the Paris we know and love is in so great a part
Haussmann’s creation that it seems perverse to criticise
what he did. In any case, as I have often thought, grate-
fully, what far worse horrors the twentieth century
would have inflicted on Paris if Haussmann had not put
his stamp on the centre of the city. Suppose, for
instance, Le Corbusier or the man whom Cobb called
‘the awful Eugène Hénard, working at the turn of the
century at the municipal office in charge of public
works’ had been permitted to have his way. The former
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
would have destroyed most of the old streets between
the rue de Richelieu and the rue Saint-Martin, erecting
monstrous tower blocks in their place, and the latter
would have cut through the Palais-Royal and, on the
Left Bank, have wiped out the rue Mouffetard. So thank
God for Haussmann. Hussey is right to emphasise that
‘so much of our present-day idea of the physical nature
of Paris – the arcades, the hidden passages, the great
boulevards, the flat, grey façades of apartment buildings,
the elegant squares, the ornate and delicate street furni-
ture of fountains, cobbles and street lamps, the bridges
and sometimes strange and secret gardens – dates from
the nineteenth century’.
His history is more concerned, however, with people
than buildings and street-planning (though he pays fair
attention to these). He is entranced by the city’s turbu-
lent history: the riots, assassinations, famines, criminal
activities, etc. He is alert to oddities, especially those that
are sinister. ‘The early years of the nineteenth century
… were marked by the night-time manoeuvres of
corpse-carriers, shifting the bones of the
dead from one end of the city to
another, trailed by a retinue of
priests intoning prayers for
the dead. A journalist who
protested that this was a
desecration of the city’s
deceased ended up
in prison…’
The most str iking
feature of this rich and
enjoyable book is
Hussey’s certainty that
plus Paris change, plus c’est la
même chose. So, for example,
he concludes his account of the
life of the first great poet of Paris,
François Villon, with this reflection:
In his life and work Villon announced
the birth of a long Parisian tradition of
poets, writers and singers who played the role of a
suicidal clown, the ‘bon folastre’ – the most recent of
these being Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1991
from cigarettes and booze, and whose slurred, self-
knowing precision and antinomianism were all
entirely ‘Villonesque’ … Villon’s city of drunks,
vagabonds and misfits is still there. It is on the city’s
wastelands, on the banks of the river and in the
despised and neglected outer suburbs. Most of all it is
to be found in the metro, where the Par isian
clochard … has in recent years been replaced by an
army of SDF (Sans Domicile Fixe) … The violence
and desperation in this micro-society are an authentic
echo of Villon’s Paris.’
There are surprising omissions: no mention of Proust’s
36
 FOREIGN PARTS
Paris – surely an author as intelligent as Hussey does not
share the perverse notion that the bourgeoisie and
aristocracy are somehow less ‘authentic’ than the poor?
Simenon is also absent, though his novels – not only the
Maigret ones – offer the most vivid evocation of several
Parises. It is strange, too, to find a section on French
cinema that ignores René Clair.
Andrew Hussey’s book is essentially a celebration: a
celebration of the diversity of Paris, of its ability to
change and remain itself. It is written, he says in his
introduction, in opposition to Louis Chevalier’s book
J USTIN M AROZZI
EASTERN ENLIGHTENMENT
T EMPTATIONS OF THE W EST: H OW TO B E
M ODERN IN I NDIA , PAKISTAN AND B EYOND
★ Putting Kashmir to one side for a moment, Pakistan is
By Pankaj Mishra
(Picador 438pp £16.99)
LITERARY HYPE IS a commonplace. Reviewers skimming
press releases quickly learn to discount, better still simply
ignore, all adjectives on offer: take your pick from
spectacular, spellbinding, masterful, evocative, explosive,
engrossing, haunting, provocative, and so on.
Yet some clichés are so mesmerisingly awful you
wonder whether the book can ever be worth reading.
Or whether it can really be that dreadful. ‘India is a
country of contrasts,’ Picador’s release begins, the Ultima
Thule of travel-writing commonplaces, an introduction
so heinously lazy I had written off Pankaj Mishra before
reading a single word of his book.
That was premature. A man who contributes regularly
to the New York Review of Books and dabbles in award-
winning fiction should not be so easily dismissed.
Fortunately, after the nadir of the press release, every-
thing was uphill as Mishra sashayed forth into the sunlit
pastures of subcontinental travel writing. This volume is
a collection of essays on his travels around India,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet and Nepal.
His style is deceptively simple. He writes like a percep-
tive foreign correspondent unleashed from the confines
of 800-word newspaper features, revelling in this freer
medium. You could call it travel writing, you might
describe it as reportage. Either way, Mishra is a good read
and an enjoyable, insightful companion and guide.
His intellectual honesty commends itself to his readers.
A Hindu Brahmin, he arrives in Pakistan and confesses
to experiencing ‘an unease about Islam and Muslims I
had so far seen in others’. It comes as a surprise to him,
having already travelled to Kashmir, where his reporting
had come to the attention of Indian intelligence and
37
L’Assassinat de Paris (same title as Cobb’s essay), which
had as its argument ‘that Old Paris was dead and buried
for ever’. ‘Even from a café table in the rue de Seine,’ he
writes, ‘you could see it was not true.’ Paris is changing,
yes, ‘in a way that no one could predict’. Yet it ‘still
offers all the delicious and exhausting extremes of
modern life. But then, of course, it always did.’ It
remains a living city, not a museum; and if some of us
are nostalgic for what has disappeared, that nostalgia
becomes in a strange way part of the city’s rich tapestry.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
been dismissed by the Indian media as unpatriotic.
Pakistani spies following him everywhere probably don’t
lessen the unease. He discovers ‘people whose frustra-
tion and rage over their many deprivations could easily
be appropriated into ideological crusades and for whom
hallucinations of great power allayed their crushing sense
of powerlessness’. In a word, jihad.
often described as a villain in the Western media. When
you examine its record in promoting extremist Islam, its
dismal, blood-soaked policies in Afghanistan over several
decades, the failure to provide a decent education system
in place of the network of madrassahs that poison young
men’s minds against the Western infidels, the inability to
lift its millions out of poverty, it is not difficult to see
The Toothpaste of
Immortality
Self-Construction in the Consumer Age
Elemér Hankiss
“The magic of Hankiss’s expo-
sition is found in his capacity
to elevate the small things
into their larger, sometimes
cosmic symbolic meanings.
His style is that of a virtuoso,
often playful, almost always
insightful and convincing.
He is a shrewd observer and
interpreter of life.”
—Neil Smelser, University of
California, Berkeley
£16.50 paperback
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS
why. Mishra meets Hamid Gul, former Pakistan spy
chief and one of the architects of Pakistan’s ruinously
counterproductive foreign policy based on the export
not of goods and services but of jihad.
Gul recalls meeting Osama bin Laden in 1993. ‘Such a
wise and intelligent man,’ he tells Mishra. ‘So much
spirituality on his face. But this is the effect of jihad. It is
a very noble state to be in. That’s why I look so young,
although I am sixty-four years old. Jihad keeps me
young, gives me a great purpose in life.’ Kills innocent
people. Enriches Gul.
Discomfited by radical Islam, Mishra is equally ill at
ease in the American embassy in Islamabad (where all
the talk is of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘good guys’ and ‘bad
guys’), ‘part of a powerful imperial civilisation that, in
this remote vulnerable outpost, was denoted by bowling
alleys, cocktail bars, and the framed photos of suburban
barbecues on office walls’. Mishra is from the East and
of the West, belonging to both and neither. One of his
strengths is the ease with which he roves across cultures,
moving calmly above the hubbub like Yeats’s long-
legged fly ‘upon the stream’.
On to Kashmir and his indictment of Indian state
terrorism. Stories of innocent men rounded up after ter-
rorist atrocities, simply because they are Muslim, executed
and disposed of with the callous casualness endemic to a
long-running, low-intensity conflict; officials and their
calls for a ‘free hand’ to deal with the Kashmir problem,
‘the unthinking preference for violence and terror’ of
those who boast they could solve it in a fortnight.
Mishra has an enviable ability to trace the trajectory of
a country through the intensely personal stories of its
people. He is worth listening to when he meets both
oppressors and oppressed.
Visiting Tibet for the first time in 2004, he acknowl-
edges the limitations of his perspective with characteris-
tic modesty. ‘My own views were as timid and mixed as
those of any traveller to a beautiful country under
a despotic regime,’ he writes. On the one hand the
powerful Chinese polity, pro-development, anti-dissent,
on the other an embattled, romanticised political class of
monks who cling to the belief that ‘You cannot achieve
a good end through the wrong kind of means’.
Mishra writes intelligently about his formative reading
experiences as a student in Benares. There he read with
the ‘furious intensity’ of an anonymous young man
seeking a literary way out of provincial oblivion. Now
that he has found that way, has beaten a path out of
adversity to a home in London, we know what he can
do. We know, through this volume and another travel-
ogue about India, that he is an accomplished voice on
his former back yard. With his privileged perspective on
cultural identity I would love to see him try his hand
next in the West.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
38
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
J OHN C LAY
PRISONERS OF OZ
T HE C OMMONWEALTH OF T HIEVES : T HE
S TORY OF THE F OUNDING OF AUSTRALIA
★
By Thomas Keneally
(Chatto & Windus 509pp £20)
B OUND FOR B OTANY B AY: B RITISH
C ONVICT VOYAGES TO AUSTRALIA
★
By Alan Brooke and David Brandon
(The National Archives 272pp £19.99)
T HE F EVER OF D ISCOVERY: T HE S TORY OF
M ATTHEW F LINDERS
★
By Marion Body
(New European Publications 250pp £15)
THE FIRST FLEET’S arrival in Australia with 750 con-
victs, men, women and children, has been related many
times, notably by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore and
more recently by Inga Clendinnen in Dancing with
Strangers. Thomas Keneally has now given us his version.
The book starts with a grand and sweeping opening
sentence:
If, in the new year of 1788, the eye of God had
strayed from the main games of Europe, the
Americas, Asia and Africa, and idled over the huge
vacancy of sea to the south-east of Africa, it would
have been surprised in this empty zone to see not
one, but all of eleven ships being driven east on the
screaming band of westerlies.
We feel we are in good hands, ready to embark on
a voyage of discovery. But this promise is not always
maintained: the narrative gets weighed down at times by
too much detail clamouring for attention.
Keneally’s book centres on Governor Arthur Phillip’s
attempts to set up his penal colony in what is now
Sydney. Phillip comes across as an astute and, on the
whole, admirable figure, who tried his best to under-
stand the native Aborigines, using more ‘cultural imagi-
nation’, as Keneally puts it, than most of his compatri-
ots. The penal colony had been started to reduce over-
crowding in Britain’s gaols, as full then as they are now,
and to deter crime through fear of transportation.
Had an intending criminal heard about conditions
aboard the first convict ships, he, or she, might well have
been deterred. They were airless, had a constant stench,
and convicts sat confined and huddled below deck for most
of the journey. Scurvy was rife and many died en route.
 FOREIGN PARTS
Keneally makes some interesting
points about contact with the natives
and about attitudes towards land. The
British saw their newly discovered ter-
ritory as terra nullius, nobody’s land.
Yet the Aborigines had lived there for
26,000 years, developing an intricate
culture based on respect for land, with
its own thr iving mythology, the
Dreamtime. Land yielded them suste-
nance, as did the sea. When the newly
arrived British caught fish or game, the
Aborigines simply walked across to
help themselves. For them it was com-
mon property. Many convicts had been
transported for trespass or poaching,
but in Australia it never occurred to ‘The Brine Bath’: disinfection after flogging allowed to accompany their about-to-
them that they were violating the
Aborigines’ own land and game.
As grievances built up, the Aborigines sought to
redress the balance. Hence the famous spearing incident.
Governor Phillip had visited, by invitation, a group of
Aborigines, unarmed. A spear was thrown. Keneally fol-
lows the line taken by Inga Clendinnen, namely that this
was a ritualised levelling of the scores. The spear thrown
was aimed to wound, not kill. The Aborigines were
flexing their muscles and using their own methods for
dealing with infringement – they had watched, horri-
fied, the degrading punishments used by the British,
flogging and execution from the gallows. For them, a
culprit should be given the chance to atone and not just
be a passive recipient of punishment.
When food supplies ran low, Governor Phillip organ-
ised the kidnapping of a particular Abor ig ine,
Bennelong. They became friends and their relationship
developed into one of mutual respect. Bennelong was
meant to act as a go-between for the two communities
and to help locate new food supplies. He is portrayed as
an engaging character, humorous, adaptable, dignified.
Phillip took him back to England with him, but he
didn’t like it and later took to drink.
Keneally sees Phillip as the settlement’s ‘pole of stability
and awesome reasonableness’. It was true, his pragmatic
side enabled the colony to get going, though, as
Keneally concludes, for the Aborigines such develop-
ments brought ‘catastrophe’.
Keneally’s book has no illustrations, other than a well-
designed and informative cover. Bound for Botany Bay, on
the other hand, abounds in illustrations. These are fasci-
nating, well chosen and beautifully reproduced. The
book, the product of a new publishing venture from the
Public Records Office, covers the whole period of trans-
portation from 1787 to 1868, when, in all, some 162,000
convicts, including women and children, were shipped
out. Very few came back. The authors skilfully use
39
contemporary documents to reveal
both the horrors of transportation and
also the upsides, namely that for many
convicts this was their chance to make
a fresh start in new and promising
surroundings. Equally, by using the
journals of convict ships’ surgeons, the
authors show that for many this was the
first time they had proper access to
medicine and education. They illustrate
this with a chart showing reading and
writing abilities before and after sailing.
Other documents make less welcome
reading, such as the letters written by
distraught wives to the Home Secretary
pleading, for fear of destitution, to be
be-transported husbands.
Marion Body’s book on Matthew Flinders describes
his short, action-packed life. He was the first European
to circumnavigate Australia and to survey and chart
much of its coast. This too is a well-researched book,
the idea having arisen from a meeting with Flinders’s
great-granddaughter in her MP husband’s Lincolnshire
constituency; Flinders came from the same county.
All three books highlight the turbulent beginnings of
Australia and demonstrate the still uneasy and ambigu-
ous relationship it has with its convict past.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Oxford University
Continuing Education
English Literature
This part-time two year
course is equivalent to
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Starts in Oct 2006
For details phone 01865 270369
or email: ppcert@conted.ox.ac.uk
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ad/pp11
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS
D ENNIS S EWELL
ON THE ROAD
A LISTAIR C OOKE ’ S A MERICAN J OURNEY:
L IFE ON THE H OME F RONT IN THE
S ECOND WORLD WAR
★ plastic brothers in arms. If there’s ever the slightest clumsi-
By Alistair Cooke
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 327pp £20)
THERE IS SOMETHING intriguing about any lost manu-
script, newly discovered. Will it sparkle like buried
treasure, crack a code, contain a prophecy? Or was there
good reason for its disappearance: second thoughts on
the part of the author, sound judgement on the part of a
publisher? This book spent almost sixty years in Alistair
Cooke’s closet before it was dug out by his secretary,
Patti Yasek, a short while before the writer’s death.
Cooke, who was fastidious to the end, was delighted by
the find and content the book
should be published. This is not,
then, a case of the artist’s discard-
ed canvases or sketchbook doo-
dles being rushed to market by
post-mortem scavengers.
In February 1942 Cooke set out
from Washington in a Lincoln
Zephyr ‘with five re-treaded tyres,
the War department’s compliments
to all public relations officers …
and an insurance policy covering
one life and one colour camera.
The Japanese had attacked Pearl
Harbor in December. America was Cooke: filling her up
now at war and one of the adver-
tisements along the highway read ‘Pay Your Taxes: Beat the
Axis’. His route took him down into the deep South, along
the Gulf Coast, through Louisiana and Texas into the desert
South West. Thence, up through California to Seattle and
back through what’s now termed ‘flyover country’, but
which was and remains the American heartland. A supple-
mentary trip through New England was added later.
Today any such undertaking with publication in mind
would require an argument or, at the very least, an attitude.
But Cooke had steeled himself against both revisionism and
celebration: ‘I was not going out on any debunking expe-
dition, for even though I was born at a time when it was
compulsory to cut your literary teeth on debunking, I
always had uncomfortable misgivings, which later became a
conviction, that debunking was a slightly hysterical form of
disappointed sentimentality. On the other hand … we have
swung to the opposite extreme and in much public speak-
ing and writing we tend to assume that war will endow
40
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
people with a completely different and more elevated set
of emotions to live their lives on.’
Many of the people Cooke meets on the way are famil-
iar enough to us today through film, television and travel:
the Texas cattleman, the Kansas farmer, the New Orleans
businessman, and so on. But generally Cooke’s characters
stand in relation to the stereotypes of modern popular
culture as hand-painted lead soldiers do to their cheap
ness in his brushstrokes, it tends to be among the Negroes
(yes, this was long before the new taxonomy came in).
There is, for instance, more than a hint of Steppen
Fetchit in the nameless peanut farmer Cooke encounters
in the Georgia backcountry with a government agricul-
tural agent who’s telling him: ‘“We need eggs, millions of
them, to dry for the Army and to send overseas. Can you
raise some hens here do you think?” The Negro looks
aghast. “Mr McDowell, if the go’ment wants to pay me
for raisin’ elephants, ah’ll sho’ make a powerful try!”
If you have ever wondered how it was that the
America that the GI left in 1942 on his way to war was
six times richer when he came
home in 1946, then this book
explains it all. Sometimes the
statistics of percentage increases
in the production of ships, air-
craft, peanuts, cattle, dairy and
turpentine production can be
heavy going. But even war eco-
nomics throws up the odd fasci-
nating character like Henr y
Kaiser: ‘Mr Kaiser has undoubt-
edly heard of the “bow” of a
ship. But it’s almost a point of
principle that he should go on
calling it the “front end”. Before
1939, Kaiser had never built a
ship, or an airplane, or handled steel. He merely heard
that it took five months to build a freighter. And he
decided that if you knew nothing about shipbuilding,
and approached the art as a construction job, you might
easily “make” a ship in a month. This is what he did.’
By contrast Henry Ford boasted that he would build a
bomber an hour at his Willow Run plant. But he never
did. Cooke says he tells the story of the abortive Bomber
City ‘because it symbolizes the grandiosity that is to other
nations the most unpleasant of all American traits – the
unbridled promise, the wild freedom of untested assertion’.
It is hard to read this book without trying internally to
mimic Alistair Cooke’s delivery to microphone: the signa-
ture rhythms, the peculiar Cookean cadences. But some-
how the text resists it. We are certainly hearing from a
younger Cooke, though not necessarily a more callow
one. The intelligence is already sceptical, the eye alert for
the important rather than the iconic, ‘the stone of reality
 FOREIGN PARTS
that refuses to be digested into a romantic legend’. The
later parts of the book were used as material for some of
his later Letters from America on the BBC. And in a sense
this journey to see for himself served as the foundation for
all the letters. But in the early 1940s he had not quite
C HRISTOPHER R OSS
MEMOIRS OF A GAIJIN
ATOMIC S USHI
★ this there is nothing to distinguish Tokyo University from
By Simon May
(Alma Books 217pp £12.99)
UNLESS I MISSED it, there is no overt explanation why
Simon May decided to title his year-in-Japan memoir
Atomic Sushi. He likes sushi and gets to eat some top-
notch Tokyo fish, until he spots a rat in the restaurant,
fails to conceal his shock, and causes the master chef to
lose face and ban his gaijin gourmand henceforth. He
visits Hiroshima and its Peace Park and muses about its
monuments to the victims of atomic bombs dropped on
Japan and the theme of peace as a shibboleth. Some
combination of liking fish then and disliking the bomb?
Well, Atomic Sushi is also, I discovered, a typeface, the
one I used to call Chopsticks, which breaks possibly every
rule of Japanese aesthetics and is used on the jacket of this
book. But please don’t let a typeface put you off, for this is
a very entertaining read by an intelligent and personable
author who writes beautifully and tells good jokes. Some
of the jokes turn on Japlish (Japanese mangling English to
yield a, usually sexual, double entendre): ‘I really enjoy
that you eat me out,’ says the wife of a friend May has
taken to lunch; ‘Dear Mr Lay, Thank you for your kind
reservation. We are happily waiting to see you come,’ faxes
another restaurant where he has reserved a table. They
might have been close to the truth, for May really likes his
food and is quite happy to drop $2,000 on a two-day stay
at Tawaraya, a famous ryokan, or traditional inn, in Kyoto
to dine on kaiseki, Japanese haute cuisine, based on so
many subtle layers of balance and seasonal sensitivity it
might be the most sophisticated food in the world. I wish
I had been his guest, not simply for the chance of exquis-
ite food in unparalleled surroundings, but to talk to the
first Englishman since 1882 to serve as Professor of
Philosophy at Todai, Tokyo University, the institution at
the heart of the Japanese governing elite, the alma mater of
the faceless éminences grises who have made Japan rich
while simultaneously entrenching corruption and bulldoz-
ing traditional Japanese aesthetic values.
May had been appointed to a visiting professorship for a
year, and after complying with a mind-boggling series of
near-impossible bureaucratic demands for certified proof of
41
acquired either the assurance or the fluency that would
make him famous and even loved. That’s why the experi-
ence of reading American Journey is an encounter with
both the familiarity and the elusiveness of an echo.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16
this and that – his medical test requires a stool sample, for
which a diagram is provided illustrating that only a vertical
scrape the full length of the turd will do – he sets off. We
hear very little about his day-to-day classes, lectures and
duties. Students sleep or text message each other during
lectures – or just get up and leave if they are bored, and in
any other seat of higher learning in Japan: too much of this
would have been rather dull. Instead, the book recounts a
sequence of the author’s adventures in Tokyo, Kyoto and
Hiroshima, and visits to unnamed parts of the countryside.
On one rural trip he attends the funeral of the only gay
in the village, who has been killed in a car crash. The dead
man’s boyfriend is a yakuza gangster who, accompanied by
heavies in suits and clashing bad-taste shirts, gatecrashes
the ceremony to pay his respects. At a wedding in
Hiroshima, three hundred guests ruthlessly abandon any
idea of clichéd Japanese restraint or decorum and shove
each other aside greedily seeking the choicest morsels on a
buffet table. In one encounter with Japanese life in the
raw, May tries to stare down a train pervert who is shame-
lessly rubbing his leg between the knees of a seated young
woman, but is ignored, by both the pervert and the
victim, and correctly speculates that his protest probably
caused more embarrassment than the blatant frottage. In
many situations in Japan, the ‘if I pretend it does not exist,
then it does not exist’ approach to an intractable problem
is regarded as the best. As in the appearance of the restau-
rant rat. Or the fact that most Japanese banks are bankrupt.
The book has enjoyable cameos: a matchmaking Zen
abbot with a good grasp of German Idealism; a sex club
hostess who can do remarkable things with a goldfish; a
healer whose hands cause May terrible pain and, possibly,
a spastic colon (although travelling on Tokyo’s overcrowd-
ed trains and general stress are enough to do this). As well
as cataloguing the bizarre and comic, May subtly expresses
his mixed feelings about Japan. He admires the national
obsession with cheerfulness: we even get a cheery wave
from a dying man the moment before he breathes his last
in a ghastly hospital room. But finally he sort of gives up
on his attempt to nail such a mutable culture, one where
form is reality, surface is substance. There are some minor
language mistakes – gaigin for gaijin; hoto dogo for hotto
dogu and a quoted proverb is incorrect. The correct ver-
sion is: sanjaku sagatte shi no kage o fumazu, hold back three
feet and don’t step on your teacher’s shadow. Although
Dr May is worthy of our respect, I doubt if his students at
Birkbeck will play ball.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 GENERAL
A C G RAYLING
LECTURES ON LIBERTY
I SAIAH B ERLIN : P OLITICAL I DEAS IN THE
ROMANTIC AGE
★ these as heroism, integrity, will, martyrdom, dedication
Edited by Henry Hardy; introduction by Joshua L Cherniss
(Chatto & Windus 292pp £25)
ISAIAH BERLIN BEGAN his academic career as a philoso-
pher, became an historian of ideas, and was elected to a
professorship in social and political theory at Oxford.
But none of these labels quite succeeds in categorising
him, because the particular character of his interests and
methods escapes easy definition.
The label most often applied to Berlin is ‘historian of
ideas’, and it is certainly true that much of his work is
devoted to the discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century social and political thinkers in Europe, including
Russia, with the Enlightenment and its critics a recurring
theme. But his interest in these subjects was not merely
historical; indeed he is not regarded as a reliable documen-
tary historian in the standard sense at all. Instead he was
interested in his chosen thinkers for the light their views
shed on the preoccupations of his own day, because he was
vitally concerned to resist certain assumptions, and to
defend certain others, in the hope of making a persuasive
case for an open-textured, pluralistic, anti-essentialist form
of liberalism which he saw as the best hope for mankind.
This book, impressively edited as always by the precise
and encyclopaedic Henry Hardy, and with an illuminating
introduction by Joshua Cherniss, is the largest single piece
of work Berlin produced. He was an essayist by instinct,
and never again came as close as this to writing a big book.
It began life as the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr
in 1952, and Berlin intended to turn the material into a
book thereafter. At one stage he worked on the manu-
script so intensively that his annotations doubled the
length of parts of it. But its destiny proved different. Berlin
came to use it as a mother lode from which he mined his
later essays, in the process developing the ideas that here
appear in nascent form.
Berlin’s aim in the Flexner Lectures is to probe the
Romantic conception, devised in opposition to
Enlightenment objectivism about values (the view that
values are constituents of reality that can be discovered
and described independently of subjective preferences
and interests), that values are invented, that they are ‘cre-
ated by men like works of art’. For Berlin this change of
perspective was the most significant since the Middle
Ages, perhaps even since the rise of Christianity; for it
involved a complete revolution in moral consciousness.
He makes a persuasive case for claiming that this
42
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
revolution is the greatest in modern intellectual history.
Where the preceding outlook had assumed that there are
objectively correct answers to such questions as ‘How
should I live?’, ‘What is good?’, ‘Why should I obey?’,
and had correlatively admired knowledge, skill, truth,
virtue, happiness, and natural gifts of mind and character,
the Romantics valued quite different things. Berlin lists
to one’s personal inner vision whatever it might be, and
preparedness to struggle against all odds ‘no matter how
strange and desperate’ the cause in question.
Temperamental differences will doubtless prompt dif-
ferent reactions to these contrasting outlooks as Berlin
describes them, but he himself was eager to find the
good in both, and to accept that if they cannot be
brought into harmony, the resulting irreconcilability of
goods is something we must treat as creative and
inevitable, and must accordingly live with as the lesson
of pluralism. This idea, which identifies open texture as
the heart of a true liberal dispensation, is among Berlin’s
most distinctive and enduring theses. In the Flexner
Lectures his focus is the present-day consequences of the
Romantic reassessment of values, which in his view
continued to resonate because not yet either fully
understood or assimilated, and still in difficult conflict
with the Enlightenment outlook it opposed.
After a prologue setting out this aim, Berlin discusses
the idea of politics as a descriptive science, the concept
of freedom including the contrast between what he here
calls ‘Romantic’ and ‘Liberal’ versions of it, and the idea
– which he contests – of the ‘unity of science’, arguing
for the sui generis character of historical enquiry. The
original manuscript had two further chapters, now lost,
but the book as it stands is a rich document, in which
there is much fascinating anticipation of Berlin’s distinc-
tive later views. His key distinction between negative
and positive liberty, the former being freedom from
interference by others, the latter freedom to act in ways
of one’s own choosing, is adumbrated here, and so is an
early form of his pluralism, which in its later, developed
form became a full-blooded value-pluralism which in
effect states that an open society has to accept and some-
how accommodate competing and often irreconcilable
goods in order to flourish, or even just survive.
And Berlin here gives utterance to his view that the
central question of politics is ‘why should any man obey
any other man or body of men?’ – a question which can
be pointedly rephrased as ‘What entitles anyone to inter-
fere with anyone else?’, the question that touches on the
primary notion of negative liberty, and reprises John
Stuart Mill’s central liberal principle.
As an Ur-text for Berlin’s later writings this book will
have special fascination for scholars and students. But
its interest is far wider. As the closest thing to a single
conspectus of the project Berlin set himself, it is an
 GENERAL
illuminating document, not least because the excellent
help given by Hardy and Cherniss, in the apparatus and
introduction respectively, situates the ideas Berlin here
expounds in relation to his later, more finished expres-
D ES S PENCE
Looking for the
Magic Bullet
O NE IN T HREE
★ lives of children with leukaemia, previously a rapidly fatal
By Adam Wishart
(Profile 320pp £15)
I HAVE SEEN a lot of people die. This isn’t some machismo
strutting but merely reflects the nature of being a doctor
and of dealing with cancer. Emotional Americana has
spawned countless tear-stained books in which celebrities
share their experience of cancer; likewise, daytime TV
constantly churns out real-life stories. One in Three is a
different type of cancer book. It is calm, factual, beautifully
written, intelligent and moving.
‘My dad is going to die but I’ve never told him that I
love him.’ This sentiment is the key theme of Adam
Wishart’s story of his father’s illness and eventual death,
and will resonate with a generation of men. Father and
son are bound by the expectations of their gender – it’s
not easy being a man.
After the diagnosis, the family’s hopes are high, as
surgery and radiotherapy relieve his father’s pain and
allow him to live normally – but only for a short time.
Both father and son have a need to understand this ill-
ness, so they begin to investigate the history of cancer.
The historical narrative begins with the Greeks and
then moves on through the millennia. The ancients
believed cancer was an illness of melancholy and a dis-
turbance of the four body humours. It wasn’t until the
seventeenth century that these views were swept aside
by the advent of medical dissection and the birth of
pathology. It became a grizzly time for doctors who,
short of cadavers, employed the services of body-snatchers,
thus sparking riots and attacks on medical schools. The
poor of the workhouses solved this problem, the
‘Anatomy Acts’ of 1832 compelling their dead to be
given over to medical science. Then came the micro-
scope, and the uncontrolled replication of cancer cells
was seen for the first time.
Joseph Lister, influenced by Pasteur’s germ theory,
developed his antiseptic system in 1867 and so ended
the scourge of Victorian surgery, infection. Combined
with the new technique of anaesthesia, effective cancer
43
sion of them. The result is that between text and apparatus
the book constitutes a fine introduction to Berlin’s
thought, and a major addition to the corpus of his work.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
surgery became a reality for the first time and put an end
to the literal butchery of the past.
With the chance discovery of X-Rays, and then Marie
Curie’s radium, the start of the twentieth century opened
a new door into both the diagnosis and treatment of can-
cer. A ‘cure’ seemed to be a real possibility at the time,
but it turned out to be a false dawn. It wasn’t until after
the Second World War that optimism began to rise
again. Drugs in the form of chemotherapy prolonged the
illness. So terrible were the side effects of these early
regimes that some junior doctors refused to administer
the treatments. But in time therapies improved, and
drugs not only prolonged life but for the first time in
history offered a cure.
So came the Sixties, with the love-ins and the lunar
landing, humanity (and especially America) seemingly
able to conquer all. Nixon, seeking his place in history
(he needn’t have worried), declared a ‘war on cancer’,
and the search for the magic bullet began in earnest.
Resources poured in, but by the end of the Seventies
death rates from cancer remained unchanged.
Many began to question conventional cancer treatments.
The mutilating surgery, the poisonous chemotherapy and
the scorching radiotherapy had traumatised families and
patients alike, with little apparent benefit. A medical pro-
fession that was cold and aloof saw patients turn to ‘alter-
native’ medicine. It was dismissed as a hippie hangover, but
twenty-five years later holistic care and complementary
therapists are now in the mainstream.
Today our energy has been redirected towards preven-
tion. Richard Doll and his colleagues showed conclusive-
ly that smoking kills, their findings saving more lives than
all the drugs, surgeons and hospitals a thousand times
over. As for the modern love affair with ‘screening’, the
book explains that, paradoxically, patients are not likely
to benefit directly from it; worse still is the real risk of
over-diagnosis and unnecessary intervention. Finally to
gene therapy, and the concept of treatments which
specifically target individual faulty genes. Is this the
magic bullet? Time will tell.
His father’s cancer returns. There is no anger and no
resentment from his father, just acceptance. The desire
to read to his granddaughter shortly before his death is
an expression of love implied but never needing to be
spoken. Adam Wishart does have that conversation with
his dad. Cancer will continue to kill many of us, but this
book brings understanding, and most of all it also brings
some hope.
To order this book at £12, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 GENERAL
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
INTELLECTUAL LIVES
T HE M ORAL I MAGINATION : F ROM
E DMUND B URKE TO L IONEL T RILLING
★ A healthy dose of Burke’s constraining ‘superstition’ for
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
(Ivan R Dee 259pp £16.99)
T HE A MERICAN HISTORIAN and public intellectual
Gertrude Himmelfarb is almost as well known for her
trenchant criticisms of the modern Western academy as
for her major writings on morality in Victorian Britain.
These writings were almost guaranteed to outrage the
easily provoked academic Left, since they coincided with
Margaret Thatcher’s all-too tentative efforts to re-
moralise what, in the interim, has degenerated into a
uniquely unappetising British underclass, whose equiva-
lent the Victorians controlled with deportation, the
lash and the noose, rather than ‘Asbos’ and electronic
tagging. Some regard this as progress.
In her latest collection of essays, Himmelfarb reveals a
gentler side, since the subjects of these biographical
sketches are people she admires. The intention is
straightforward:
My only purpose has been to do justice to the ideas
of men and women who have enriched my life, the
lives of generations before me, and, I hope, of those
after me.
Only one portrait is of an American (Lionel Trilling,
who was a mentor to Himmelfarb in her youth),
although Winston Churchill, described as ‘quite simply
a great man’, had an American mother. The rest include
novelists (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot
and John Buchan) and political philosophers (Edmund
Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Michael Oakeshott),
with the inimitable Benjamin Disraeli straddling all
three categories as a ‘great man’, novelist, and Tory
political philosopher.
Himmelfarb’s title is taken from a famous passage
where Burke described the light of the Enlightenment
not as a warming candle or sun, but something akin to
the awful iridescent wash in a modern supermarket or
the halogen glare in a clothes-store changing room:
All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle,
and obedience liberal … are to be dissolved by this
new conquering empire of light and reason. All the
decent drapery of life is rudely torn off. All the
super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a
moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the
understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the
defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it
to dignity in our estimation, are to be exploded as a
44
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
The enthusiasm for Burke felt by one of Himmelfarb’s
Orthodox Jewish students is the starting point for
sophisticated reflections on the social utility as well as
the spirituality of religion, a theme that Himmelfarb
reverts to in an equally brilliant discussion of the shifting
(or maturing) views on that theme of John Stuart Mill.
what he called ‘weak minds’ has much to recommend
it over the doctrines of empowerment that have con-
tributed so much to the frustrated rage of the underclass
with which we began.
Of the essays, those on Disraeli and Churchill are the
most hagiographic (the latter little more than a critique
of the subtle distortions of Roy Jenkins’s over-praised
biography). Himmelfarb is at her finest when writing
about George Eliot, Dickens, and John Buchan, demon-
strating a detailed familiarity with the novels and the
social and intellectual context they appeared in. What a
remarkable tribute to Dickens’s stature was contained in
the 1853 sermon of a Nonconformist minister, who
said: ‘There have been at work among us three great
social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of
Mr Dickens; the cholera.’
Although John Buchan had what nowadays seem to be
controversial opinions about blacks and Jews,
Himmelfarb goes beneath the superficial philistinism and
prejudice to recover a complex and enormously able
man, who combined writing with work in the South
African colonial administration, and who interestingly
coined the phrase about the ‘thin crust of civilisation’ on
which twentieth-century man found he was standing.
The evocation of the Knox family indicates the frailty of
all historical generalisation; this and the essay on Mill
(who seems to have tailored his views to appease his
mistress and wife) are by far the best pieces in the collec-
tion. Taking Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1977 The Knox
Brothers as her starting point, Himmelfarb paints a
delightfully complex picture of the religious idiosyn-
crasies of a Victorian clerical dynasty, whose male prog-
eny then ranged from militant atheists to Anglo- and
Roman Catholic clergy. The only essay in the collection
that might have been dropped (and not through any fail-
ure on Himmelfarb’s part) is the appreciation of Michael
Oakeshott. Why bother with this elliptical, diffident and
underpowered figure (the object of a cult at the LSE)
rather than with the altogether more significant Maurice
Cowling or Edward Norman, if one wants to appreciate
conservatives who did exert considerable influence on
the most successful period in the Conservative Party’s
recent history? But this is to nitpick with a beautifully
written series of appreciations of major figures by a
great historian whose powers are undiminished in her
eighth decade.
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 GENERAL
M ARCUS B ERKMANN
Thompson and Thomson…
and Derrida
T INTIN AND THE S ECRET OF L ITERATURE
★ Barthes until page twelve, he fearlessly deconstructs
By Tom McCarthy
(Granta Books 211pp £14.99)
TINTIN, WONDERFULLY, SURVIVES and thrives. The cen-
tenary of Hergé’s birth approaches, the books are still in
print in countless languages, and soon Steven Spielberg’s
Tintin film will be out, a slightly worrying prospect to
many fans, although it probably shouldn’t be. After all,
those cack-handed 1960s TV cartoons didn’t kill the
original, so it should be immune to the sickly slurp of
Mr ET. Fingers crossed, anyway.
The books endure, though, because they remain so
thoroughly readable. Between 1930
and 1976 Hergé published twenty-
three ‘albums’ of Tintin adventures,
at least half of which might be
among the best children’s books
published by anyone, ever. Myself, I
think the series really takes off with
Captain Haddock’s entrance in The
Crab with the Golden Claws (first
published in magazine for m in
1940), and thereafter only his last
book, the tired Tintin and the
Picaros, fell below his highest stan-
dards. In between he followed his
muse into ever more remarkable
places. Destination Moon and
Explorers on the Moon were so well
researched that when man actually
landed on the moon fifteen years
later it was almost exactly the same
as Tintin had said it would be. Castafiore: hits the spot
Tintin in Tibet was inspired by
dreams of whiteness: the only way Hergé could exorcise
them was to write this bizarre other-worldly story of
lost friendship and yetis. The Castafiore Emerald was a
masterly exercise in sleight of hand: you don’t realise
until the end of the story that nothing has happened at
all. The kindness, optimism, remarkable boldness and
the perfectly pitched humour of these books, not to
mention their increasingly mystical leanings, resonated
strongly with me when I was eight, and still do now that
I am forty-five. And that is more than I can say for most
of the books I read as a child and as a teenager.
45
Because Hergé’s later books are so bold and so personal,
so full of ideas and apparent mysteries if you look hard
enough for them, they have attracted a particularly mori-
bund sort of academic attention. There are literally
dozens of unreadable French tracts on the series, but until
Tom McCarthy’s book, none had been written in
English. McCarthy has spotted a gap in the market, and
headed straight for the intellectual high ground. Showing
uncharacteristic restraint in not mentioning Roland
Hergé’s work with forceps, scythe and sledgehammer, in a
way that will send Tintin fans back to the original books
(because they are much more interesting to read) and will
frighten off non-Tintin fans for life. His purpose is to ask:
is Tintin literature? I would say yes, but McCarthy can’t
quite make up his mind, and instead rambles on, quoting
Joyce and Derrida, for another 200 pages.
Here’s a good example. There is a famous sequence in
The Land of Black Gold when Thompson and Thomson,
the daft detective pair, drive around in the desert until
they find another set of tracks and then join those. Then
they find that set of tracks joined by a third, and a fourth,
and so on. They are obviously dri-
ving round in circles. ‘This brilliantly
allegorical scene is endlessly regres-
sive,’ says McCarthy. Then a sand-
storm blows away all the tracks and
the Thom(p)sons really are lost. ‘An
orgy of marking, reading and mis-
reading, followed by total erasure,
total inscrutability,’ says McCarthy.
At no point does he acknowledge,
or maybe even notice, that the scene
is supposed to be funny. Later on he
spends ages analysing why Bianca
Castafiore only ever sings ‘The Jewel
Song’ from Gounod’s Faust, without
seeming to realise that it is a joke –
indeed, a running joke. How can
you write about Tintin if you do
not have a sense of humour? Still,
McCarthy does think that the
Castafiore emerald is actually her
clitoris, so at least he is not inca-
pable of original thought.
We probably shouldn’t be too hard on a presumably
young writer making his way and trying to make a criti-
cal splash. McCarthy does have some interesting things
to say: he is particularly good on Hergé’s gradual politi-
cal drift from right to left. But too often he writes the
most unbelievable twaddle, repeatedly missing the point
and wandering up critical cul-de-sacs in a way that
makes you want to scream. There’s a really good book
to be written about Tintin; this just isn’t it.
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 GENERAL
A LICE P ITMAN
SHOPPING’S BEHEMOTH
T HE WAL -M ART E FFECT
★ interviewing hundreds of people who have had dealings
By Charles Fishman
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 294pp £12.99)
E VERY WEEK , MORE than one hundred million
Americans shop at Wal-Mart (93 per cent of the popula-
tion every year), and 138 million visit its stores world-
wide each week. Since their takeover of Asda, they have
become, worryingly, the second largest retailer over here.
Not bad going for a business that started life as a small
bargain store in a remote corner of Arkansas in 1962.
This powerful, pr ivately controlled institution
inevitably lays itself open to criticism, partly because of
its sheer size and power – which affects suppliers, cus-
tomers and employees alike – but also because of its
Victorian attitude towards unions, the low wages it pays
its workers, the exploitation of overseas sweatshops, and
the sexual discrimination against more than a million
female employees. It is no wonder these, and other
grudges, should excite such a frenzy of Wal-Mart bash-
ing from journalists and left-wing film-makers alike.
The Wal-Mart Effect also puts the boot into this
consumer monolith, but Charles Fishman’s criticism is
underpinned by a sneaking admiration, which sets him
apart from the Dave Spart-like tendency of his peers to
look at the company’s success in purely black-and-white
terms. He shines his investigative torch on the corpora-
tion’s good points as well as its faults, producing a more
balanced, intelligent and commendable attempt at
analysing of this fascinating retail phenomenon.
The main thrust of The Wal-Mart Effect is that there is a
high cost both in human and environmental terms to be
paid as a result of the low prices that Wal-Mart manically
strives to achieve.
Not only does Wal-Mart have an impact on the US
economy, it has put thousands of retailers out of business
by luring customers into the delusion that low prices do
not have an irreversibly damaging effect on their commu-
nities. Fishman, a confessed Wal-Mart customer himself
(although his wife refuses to go there), admits to being
both amazed and appalled by the place.
The only thing likely to make you smile at Wal-Mart
is the price. In fact, it isn’t really a place to shop, it’s a
place to buy things – bring a list, check the items off,
get out.
His description of a typical US Wal-Mart store sounds
like something out of a J G Ballard novel:
You do not pass a Wal-Mart store without noticing
it. The stores have a gravitational force, bending the
46
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
land, the circulation, the rhythms of the communi-
ties where they are planted.
It seems that Wal-Mart is not just unavoidable; it has
become a national landmark, albeit of a most chilling kind.
The author has researched his subject extensively, visit-
ing dozens of Wal-Mart stores in twenty-three states, and
with the supermarket. The result provides an alarming
exposé of the extent of Wal-Mart’s power over what peo-
ple buy and how they live their lives. The book is replete
with accounts of their shoddy treatment of former
employees and suppliers, although these become repetitive,
as one bad experience pretty much mirrors another. The
author generously throws in the odd success story too,
such as the small-time inventor who struck a lucrative deal
with Wal-Mart over his nifty Makin Bacon dish and is now
a millionaire (‘An example of how, when things go well
with Wal-Mart, it’s good for everyone’). Fishman’s noble
efforts to dig the dirt were constantly hampered by suppli-
ers’ unwillingness to say anything bad about the company
(for obvious reasons). ‘Why in the world would we talk
about Wal-Mart?’ asks one of their largest suppliers. ‘Ask
me anything else, we’ll talk. But not about Wal-Mart!’
But it is Wal-Mart’s refusal to co-operate with the
author that ultimately renders any attempt at a thorough
analysis of the Wal-Mart effect impossible. The ‘unprece-
dented access’ referred to in the blurb on the back of the
book therefore seems somewhat disingenuous, for it
suggests that the author was given permission to enter
the mysterious inner sanctum at Bentonville and given
carte blanche to rifle through their files, or perhaps even
sit in on a board meeting. The reality is that Wal-Mart
consistently declined to speak with the author, or provide
him with any inside information on how they operate.
This wall of silence means that important questions
regarding the supermarket’s impact on American society,
and indeed the rest of the world, remain unanswered.
‘We aren’t even close to answers,’ admits Fishman rather
dejectedly, ‘because Wal-Mart’s secrecy snuffs out most
serious academic and economic enquiry’.
Fishman concludes that not only do Wal-Mart now
have a responsibility towards the environment, and the
economy, but so do we as customers: for what is Wal-
Mart other than a creation of us, and our money? It is
consumers who created the monster with their willing-
ness to open their wallets, even if only for just a few
dollars at a time. Yet consumers vote yes with imperfect
information, without the ability to understand what
they are voting for when they opt for these low prices.
Charles Fishman’s very good book has given us an
important insight into the morally and ethically dubious
way that Wal-Mart operates. But as in The Wizard of
Oz, we want more than just a peep: someone needs to
pull back the curtain.
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 GENERAL
N EVER HAVE I felt more C HRISTOPHER B RAY IS C HEERED U P B Y
justified in my misery. A
while back, you see, I had F OUR B OOKS ON H APPINESS
lunch with my agent. ‘So
what’s your next book?’ asked he.
‘How about a socio-cultural history of the ways
people have sought happiness? It’s so zeitgeisty it could
make me a fortune.’
‘No way, Chris. We won’t be able to sell it.’
Oh yeah? Because here we are, a couple of years on,
and what do I have in front of me? Four books being
published almost simultaneously on the subject of happi-
ness. Something tells me my take on the spiritless spirit of
the age would have found an audience. I mean, everyone
else has. Chemists, life coaches, therapists, happy hour bar
staff – all of them are bidding for the opportunity to cheer
you up. As I wr ite, that try-anything Tory David
Cameron is muscling in
on the act by affecting
to believe that there is
more to life than work.
Verily, these are the days
of the second Great
Depression.
It wasn’t meant to be
like this. Indeed, some
people would argue it
isn’t like this. Only
recall the swollen claims
of Cameron’s predeces-
sors and you’ll be for-
given for thinking we
were long ago ushered
in to Shangri-La. And
yet, as Richard Layard is Happiness is a warm sponge
at pains to point out in
his bravely boosterish Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
(Penguin 310pp £8.99), despite the vast increases in the
wealth of Western societies over the past half-century, no
concomitant rise in happiness levels has taken place.
The reason, says Layard, is simple. While people who
have the money to live a decent material life are more
content than those on skid row, there is no evidence to
suggest that further riches lead to deeper contentment. In
fact, the opposite obtains. For it is never enough to have
enough. As with cocaine or heroin, the more money you
have, the more you want. Accordingly, you find yourself
on ‘the hedonic treadmill’ – running just to stand still.
Startlingly, such jealousies apply all the way up the
ladder. The winners of Olympic silver medals, one learns
from Layard, come home less satisfied than those who
took bronze. Apparently the former compare themselves
with those who won gold, while the latter compare them-
selves with the majority who won nothing. All very
unhappy-making, but what to do about it? It’s not as if we
47
could legislate competitive-
ness away, any more than
we could rid ourselves of
envy. Right enough, says
Layard, but we could increase marginal tax rates, redistrib-
ute wealth, and discourage people from working too hard.
‘If tax cutters think people should work still harder,’ he
argues in his conclusion, ‘they need to explain why.’
A sceptic might reply that the tax-cutters believe people
should work harder because they don’t believe everyone
has the right to be happy. The democratisation of
contentment is, after all, a comparatively recent phenom-
enon. As Darrin McMahon points out in his over-foot-
noted but otherwise felicitous The Pursuit of Happiness: A
History from the Greeks to the Present By Darrin McMahon
(Allen Lane / Penguin Press 544pp £25), happiness has
for most of human history been regarded as a transcen-
dent state to which
only a few can aspire
and which even fewer
will attain. That’s
because happiness, as
most of the great reli-
gions have argued one
way or another, con-
sists not in feeling
good but in being
good. The bad guys
might seem to be hav-
ing all the fun, but if
you can steel yourself
to forgoing pleasure
today, a greater plea-
sure awaits you in the
future. Such teleologi-
cal trickery worked a
treat until the Enlightenment, when happiness became
not some numinous abstraction but the right and proper
aim of government. God might have died, but everyone
else was about to start feeling a whole lot better.
You don’t have to be a full-blown follower of Rousseau
(or Freud, who borrowed heavily from him) to see that
civilisation, by urging us to gratify our workaday needs,
only inflames our worldly complaints. Nor do you have
to share the depths of Schopenhauer’s despair to accept
that the motors of desire power us only part of the way
along the road to contentment. An Epicurean in the strict
sense (and I have never come across a stricter sense than
that put forward in Richard Schoch’s instructive and
amusing The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of
Searching for the Good Life, Profile 243pp £15.99),
Schopenhauer thought happiness wasn’t about getting
what you crave. It was about getting rid of your cravings.
Certainly, Darrin McMahon more than once points out,
the more you crave happiness the less likely it is to happen
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 GENERAL

along. As John Lewis, the would-be stoical narrator of
Kingsley Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling puts it, the answer
to life’s dissatisfactions isn’t so much doing what you want
as wanting to do what you do.
The psychologist Daniel Gilbert is even more pragmatic
than that. In Stumbling on Happiness (HarperPress 277pp
£14.99), by some measure the most practical of the cur-
rent crop of feel-good field guides, he argues that desire is
a symptom of our sickness rather than the sickness itself.
And the sickness, it turns out, is imagination; like
Hamlet, Gilbert believes there is nothing either good or
bad but thinking makes it so. ‘The human being’, he
writes, ‘is the only animal that thinks about the future.’
Alas, we animals are no good at predicting what we will
feel like when ‘now’ has become ‘then’. ‘When we imag-
ine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what
we are feeling now and impossible to recognise how we
will think about the things that happen later.’
Accordingly, things rarely pan out as predicted. We
‘expect the next car, the next house or the next promo-
tion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t
and even though others keep telling us that the next ones
won’t.’ That fortnight on a Greek island you’d so looked
forward to only made you dread returning home. That
burglary (or worse – and Gilbert has chapter and verse
from victims of war and rape and other traumas) you
thought you’d never recover from is now no more than a
smudge on the horizon. But herein lies our liberation.
By dwelling not on all the bad things that have happened
to us but on the fact that we have overcome them we
should begin to realise that our future won’t be as lousy
as we imagine it either.
For what it’s worth, my own definition of happiness
would be, ‘hard work that you enjoy’. Whatever content-
ment I’ve had has always been accidental – the by-product
of having lost myself in a task. Alas, not only can you not
order such moments along, but you can’t remain in them
once conscious of their existence. Only tell yourself
you’re happy and misery comes crashing in. All of which
said, I finished researching this piece more content than
when I started it. That projected best-selling book of
mine was going to be subtitled ‘I can’t make you happy
and nor can anyone else’. But as Darrin McMahon points
out, ‘books that promise “authentic happiness” will
invariably sell more copies than those that emphasise the
futility of striving for too much’. In other words, mine
would have sold squat. ‘The best way to cheer yourself
up’, Twain once said, ‘is to try to cheer somebody else
up.’ My agent was right. I owe him a drink.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16

K ATHY WATSON describes herself as ‘sloth-like’ and ‘resistant to move-

ment’ and has never been able to see the point of walks.
NAVEL-GAZING Unadventurous, cranky, and made miserable by physical
discomfort, she nonetheless manages three journeys in
this book. One is to the coast of Coromandel in New
O N T RYING TO K EEP S TILL Zealand, another a two-month stay in a cottage in
★ Somerset, where her happiest days are spent reading
By Jenny Diski (mainly books about silence and solitude), sleeping,
(Little, Brown 305pp £15.99) eating toast and watching afternoon television. There is
a final trip to Lapland, where she stays with a reindeer-
‘TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY is a better thing than to arrive.’ herding community. She descr ibes, with chilling
So runs Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-known dictum. precision, the experience of peeing in the snow.
He might have said something different if he’d had a She avoids as many adventures as she takes up. She
travelling companion like Jenny Diski. ‘One of the things refuses to bungee jump in New Zealand, is too ill to visit
about being a believer’, she writes of an encounter with the glow-worm caves, and cannot ride a camel in
an evangelical Christian, ‘is Somerset because of the
that you don’t give up hope.
One of the things about me
W.B.YEATS SUMMER SCHOOL foot-and-mouth epidemic.
These non-tr ips don’t
is that I do.’ Sligo, Ireland 29 July - 11 August bother her in the slightest
Diski doesn’t travel hope- because she finds imaginary
fully: in fact she’d much LECTURES, SEMINARS, WORKSHOPS trips just as satisfactory, often
rather be at home, preferably more so. A brochure can
under the bedclothes. ‘All Patrick Crotty, Maureen Murphy, make her heart ache: on a
the places I imagine myself real journey her feet might
in are solitary, silent and
Michael Longley, Sam McCready, get wet.
visually appealing,’ she says Edna Longley, James Pethica, Similar to Diski’s previous
before going on to say that Tetsuro Sano, Tim Webb travel writing, Stranger on a
the descr iption fits her Train and Skating to
workroom perfectly. She Tel: +353 (0) 71 9142693 E-mail: info@yeats-sligo.com Antarctica, this book is as

48
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 GENERAL
much about the internal as the external landscape. It’s a
journey into Diski’s own psyche and a return visit to her
childhood. Both her mind and her past are extraordinary.
Just for starters, Diski is terrified of spiders, dislikes inter-
ruptions, becomes frantic over any upcoming appoint-
ments, even ones as mundane as a haircut. She can’t read
maps, suffers frequently from insomnia and feels generally
alienated from other people. She’s had at least one mental
breakdown, and depression is never far away.
A psychologist would no doubt connect these fears
with her painful, unsettled childhood. Her father was a
con man who walked out on his family and her mother
was mentally unstable. The young Diski witnessed terri-
ble fights between the two. In a particularly powerful
piece of writing, she describes her father hitting her
mother so hard she was left concussed and vomiting but
nobody took her to Casualty. Diski’s adolescence and
young adulthood included expulsions from school, periods
in care and in mental hospitals, a series of useless jobs
from which she was sacked, and drug use. She still some-
times takes the tranquilliser Temazepam in order to sleep.
It is we who make the link between the ill-treated
child and the difficult adult: Diski never does. This is no
survivalist memoir, although her frightening past and
present success would be perfect material for one. There
is painful recall, but there is no redemption unless her
clever analytical mind and elegant prose style are the
reward for all that suffering.
LETTERS
FIRST SIGHTINGS
Dear Sir,
Henry Hudson, the first white man to see Manhattan?
(Review of The Big Oyster, LR, May) When eighty-five
years earlier Giovanni da Verrazzano’s small boat party
entered the Upper Bay and the locals in great numbers
put out to greet the visitors, surely it is not impossible
that the Italians saw Manhattan in the distance.
Yours faithfully,
Neil Ritchie
Hout Bay, South Africa
PORTUGUESE GREATS
Dear Sir,
According to Amanda Craig in her review of Monica
Ali’s Alentejo Blue, Portugal ‘has no significant literature’
(LR, June). What on earth can she possibly mean? Is she
really suggesting that Camoens, Fernando Pessoa, Eca de
Queiroz, and Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago are all
insignificant nonentities? As for contemporary women
writers, Lidia Jorge, who I reviewed in LR in 2002, is an
outstanding Portuguese novelist, and it’s hardly her fault
only one of her eight novels has been published in
49
Again, she probably
wouldn’t think so. For
when Diski looks deep
into herself – and she does
that all the time – she
finds nothing much there:
‘nothing more monstrous,
chimerical, interesting, or
elaborate than solipsism,
certainly nothing substan-
tial, just the echoing Diski: extended riffs
vacancy of a shallow ves-
sel, an empty container, with nothing evident in it at all’.
After all that navel-gazing, all that determined self-
observation, she is no wiser than she was before. She is a
detached onlooker, even at herself. And her writing
mirrors this. Her prose is layered with extended riffs in
which she phrases and re-phrases her ideas and thoughts.
At best it reveals her obsessive thought processes, at
worst it is repetitive and irritating. She tells us too many
times that she doesn’t see the point of walking, and she
is so self-dismissive that sometimes you begin to wonder
why you should bother with somebody so empty of
meaning. Except, of course, there is always the feeling
that she is not being entirely sincere and that Jenny
Diski knows that she is very interesting, very clever and
a very good writer.
To order this book at £12.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
English – though given the sunny ignorance of insular
British critics like Amanda Craig, it’s not that surprising.
Yours faithfully,
John Murray
Brampton, Cumbria
ALENTEJO BLUES
Dear Sir,
As a British farmer’s wife who has lived in the Alentejo
for thirty five years, I should like to correct a misconcep-
tion in Amanda Craig’s interesting review of Monica Ali’s
Alentejo Blue (LR, June). The ‘blue’ in the title probably
refers to the vibrant blue borders painted round windows
and doors of the white cottages and stables in this part of
Portugal – the blue paint is said to keep away summer
flies. Although many blue and white tiles are still pro-
duced, Alentejo pottery tends to be either polychrome
or plain red earthenware. And as a point of interest,
‘Mamarrosa’ is a very non-Portuguese name for a village.
Yours faithfully,
Carole Edlmann
Estremoz, Alentejo,
Portugal
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
MICRO-SOCIETIES
T HE B RIEF AND F RIGHTENING R EIGN OF
P HIL , INCLUDES I N P ERSUASION N ATION
C OLLECTION
★ can fit inside’ – the remainder
By George Saunders
(Bloomsbury 368pp £10.99)
GEORGE SAUNDERS’S MOST impressive story remains
‘Pastoralia’, which lent its title to his second collection. Its
protagonist is the male half of a Stone Age couple in a
Disney-style theme park; finding this full-time role
frustrating, he jeopardises his livelihood by increasingly
reckless breaches of the park management’s code for
actors. This establishes the template for much of the
American author’s subsequent output: an imagined
micro-society with inscrutably perverse laws which are
nevertheless docilely obeyed by the overwhelming major-
ity, and an individual or group daring not to conform.
Also characteristic is a teasing technique of withhold-
ing basic information about the (often fantastic or futur-
istic) world in which a story takes place, forcing the
reader to make deductions from information fragments
divulged offhandedly.
Several of the works gathered in his latest collection,
which brings together the titular novella and twelve
short stories, follow this formula. ‘Jon’ is a sci-fi fable set
in a compound where a select group of teenagers is
undergoing a psychological experiment, apparently
involving the replacement of real experiences and mem-
ories by artificial ones which are often adverts; the hero
and his girlfriend opt to forfeit their elite status and
return to the despised outside world. ‘My Flamboyant
Grandson’ imagines a future where urban walking trig-
gers personalised advertising displays on nearby build-
ings, including ‘celebrity holograms’ flogging products.
Anxious to get to a musical on time, the narrator is
penalised for avoiding the sidewalk triggers.
‘Brad Carrigan, American’ is a mock-sitcom in which
the hero is cuckolded and isolated because he is unable to
share the fatuous sunniness of his wife and her lover, and
further sets himself apart by displaying a social conscience.
‘In Persuasion Nation’ features victim figures in commer-
cials, ranging from an orange to an elderly woman,
rebelling against their prescribed roles. In ‘Commcomm’,
set at an Air Force base, only one man opposes keeping
silent about the chance unearthing of corpses (a mass
grave?), a discovery which if revealed would halt work on
a mysterious planned Center for Terror.
Although the novella modifies the model slightly, it simi-
larly offers an opposition between an oppressive dominant
50
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
culture and a likeable group
who fail to fit in. ‘The Brief
and Frightening Reign of
Phil’ posits a nation called
Inner Horner, which is entire-
ly sur rounded by Outer
Horner and so small that ‘only
one Inner Hornerite at a time
stand ‘very timidly’ in the bor-
dering Short-Term Residency
Zone of Outer Horner.
Phil, an irascible Outer
Hornerite still bitter after Saunders: comic creativity
being rejected by an Inner
Hornerite woman, denounces these temporary visitors as
spongers and gets taxes imposed on them, humiliating
them with penalties such as nakedness once they are
unable to pay. Increasingly megalomaniac, he then stages a
coup and replaces Outer Horner’s senile president, backed
by a personal militia and flatterers from the media.
With their ‘mechanical or botanical parts’, the charac-
ters here are toys or toy-like: Phil’s madness is due to his
brain falling off after slipping from its rack, and the story
ends with the intervention of a Creator, who could be a
toy-maker or a child playing a game. The novella hence
establishes the norm of a collection often set in man-
made or excessively synthetic worlds – television in ‘Brad
Carrigan, American’ and ‘In Persuasion Nation’, the
advert-swamped future in ‘My Flamboyant Grandson’ –
or in the cordoned-off and controlled environment of a
lab (‘Jon’ and ‘93990’, about an experiment on monkeys).
Monotony is avoided by the inclusion of works that
break with the pattern, which by chance or design fall into
pairs: two comic letters, two apparently autobiographical
pieces recalling youthful experiences, two stories depicting
an escalation of fear, hatred and violence – one about a
feud between neighbours, the other about a community
killing possibly infected dogs after a child’s death. With the
partial exception of ‘Commcomm’, this last pair are the
collection’s only stories set in the everyday present. All the
other narrative works portray the past, the future, and/or
an artificial or hermetic reality.
The overwhelming majority of Saunders’s output is
satirical, with discernible debts to Huxley, Orwell and
Swift. These stories use microcosms and extended
metaphors to ridicule America’s foreign policy, military-
industrial complex and popular culture. Any doubt as to
the collection’s underlying political preoccupations is
removed by epigraphs supposedly taken from a book
called Taskbook for the New Nation – a typical sentiment:
‘we are going forward with joy and hope; [our enemies]
are being left behind, mired in fear’.
Once each story’s real point is identified, however, it’s
questionable whether anything very new is being said:
 FICTION
the targets – predatory imperialism, exploitative science
and business, corporate conformism, moronic mass
media – and implicit attitudes are those of the Sixties
counterculture. There is, too, a fatiguing repetitiveness
in the way the collection invites you to equate each
micro-society to America, and in the recurrence of two
familiar satirical templates: the coercive community vs
nonconformist set-up identified above, and the ‘escalat-
ing paranoia’ model of the two stories about aggression.
George Saunders’s true strength is comic creativity, the
wit and ingenuity that go into designing his pseudo-
C HRISTOPHER H ART
FLOODING THE VALLEY
G ATHERING THE WATER
★ ing world.’ Although at least the flood will eliminate
By Robert Edric
(Doubleday 369pp £14.99)
THIS IS THE sixteenth novel from the critically acclaimed
Robert Edric, a novelist who has never quite made it
into the lists of prize-winners and big names. Gathering
the Water marks a return to the type of novel for which
he is best known: the literary-historical type. Set in the
last months of 1848, it concerns the grandiose plan to
flood the Forge Valley in Yorkshire, creating a new dam
and reservoir. Along with this creation will go, necessar-
ily, the destruction of an ancient village and the eviction
of its sullen, almost medieval inhabitants. It is a place of
‘thirty smoking chimneys – signifying what? A hundred,
two hundred people.’
This laconic, apparently passionless narrator is Charles
Weightman, surveyor and overseer of the new dam,
stationed in the Forge Valley in its last, bleak, dying days,
and gradually coming to know its inhabitants. Or not, as
the case may be. The most mysterious, and in some ways
most attractive and most communicative resident, at least
superficially, is Mary Latimer. Here Edric shows an
authorial grittiness to match the grittiness of his chosen
subject – Victorian engineering – and of his chosen
landscape. A more easygoing writer would have given us
in Mary Latimer some wild, raven-haired nymphette of
the moors, gadding about in her nightie in all weathers,
with whom the tragically lonely Weightman falls
passionately in love. Edric is made of sterner stuff. His
heroine here is ‘between fifty-five and sixty. Her grey
hair was held back from her forehead in a tortoiseshell
comb,’ though her teeth at least are ‘even and white’. Just
as Weightman’s life has been blighted by the early death
of his fiancée, so Mary’s has been blighted by having to
care for her intermittently mad sister, held in great suspi-
cion by the locals. When Weightman and Mary walk out
51
worlds rather than what they signify. In the most riotously
entertaining passages here – the battle of alliances of adver-
tising icons in ‘In Persuasion Nation’, say, or the zanier
parts of the novella – the banality of satire-as-message is
left far behind as his imagination is given its head. As in
the novels of Thomas Pynchon (who praises Saunders on
the cover) and David Foster Wallace, there is an exhilarating
sense of a writer taking on a culture of deranged fictions –
purveyed by government, business, Hollywood – by
playing it at its own game and out-inventing it.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
together over the hills, she observes sardonically that they
must represent ‘the twin serpents of madness and
destruction entwined’ to any onlookers. Weightman
freely acknowledges that he is hardly destined to be a
popular figure. ‘I am here to drown your homes, flood
your childhood haunts and drive you out into an uncar-
poverty from the valley for ever. Between these two
marginal and unhappy people, an intense if largely
unspoken intimacy grows up. This is a landscape of harsh
fates rather than happy outcomes. The very names of the
people here are harsh, all Riggs and Cloughs, Lumbs and
Cleggs and Scales. ‘There was no superfluity here, no
exotic flowering amid the grasses and reeds.’ These sur-
names might just as well, Weightman sharply observes,
be the names of features of the landscape itself – a land-
scape that is destined to disappear, as day by day the dark
waters are rising, and everywhere there is the ominous
sense of things coming to an end.
Edric writes with an absolute flinty purity and brevity,
allowing barely any colour or comfort into this stark,
almost fabular tale. There is hardly a proper summer in
the Forge Valley, ‘no more than a brief and unreliable
reprieve’. For some relief there is a touch of the freakish
imagination of the Brontës. One villager visits him to
show him his webbed feet: some genetic accident of
inbreeding. He will carry on here, even after the flood,
he insists, swimming from place to place, and living off
the fish.
Edric breaks one cardinal rule of novel-writing by
ignoring Henry James’s cautionary ‘Tell a dream, lose a
reader’. Edric in fact tells us several of Weightman’s
dreams, and even ends the entire novel with one, full of
vagueness, ambiguity and ill omen. And with that end-
ing, Edric only confirms the nature of his writing: bold
and uncompromising, making few concessions to the
reader, and certainly compelling admiration, although
this is not the kind of novel which in the end will quite
draw you in, or carry you away. You admire it as you
would the bare, bleak, chiselled landscape of North
Yorkshire. But you don’t want to spend too long there,
and you don’t always feel as welcome as you might wish.
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FICTION
S USANNA J ONES
A BOX OF TREATS
B LIND W ILLOW, S LEEPING WOMAN
★ find it all too familiar now, the
By Haruki Murakami
(Translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin)
(Harvill Secker 334pp £16.99)
MURAKAMI’S THIRD COLLECTION of short stories, Blind
Willow, Sleeping Woman, is billed as his ‘most eclectic and
eccentric’ to date. He admits, in the introduction, that
he has not been able to fit into the Japanese literary
establishment. It’s easy to see why he’s a misfit. A quick
skim through the titles suggests that the author’s preoc-
cupations are as vivid and particular as ever: ‘A Perfect
Day for Kangaroos’, ‘The 1963/1982 Girl from
Ipanema’, ‘The Kidney-shaped Stone That Moves Every
Day’, ‘The Year of Spaghetti’. The twenty-six stories in
this collection were written between 1981 and 2005 and
include previously published and unpublished works.
Translated by two of his three long-standing translators,
Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, it’s a classic box of
Murakami treats. It is also an intr iguing map of
Murakami’s imaginative journeys over twenty-five years.
In ‘The Elephant Vanishes’ and ‘After the Quake’,
Murakami proved that his wild storytelling skills are as
comfortable and uninhibited in the short-story form as in
the novel. This collection, though, is of particular interest
because it illuminates paths between the two forms.
Readers of Murakami’s novels will recognise ‘Firefly’ as
part of Norwegian Wood. ‘Man-eating Cats’ was incorporat-
ed into Sputnik Sweetheart. ‘A “Poor Aunt” Story’ evokes
the burden and strangeness of carrying around an idea, not
knowing where it comes from or where it should go.
‘Beginnings are like this. One minute everything exists,
then the next minute everything is lost.’
The stories work as improvisations, like the jazz he
loves and which plays through the collection. He takes an
unremarkable narrator (usually male, first person), an
image or a thought, and off he goes. The poor aunt, hav-
ing appeared as a subject that needs to be written about,
attaches herself to the narrator’s back and has a profound
effect on his friends, reminding them of ‘poor aunts’ they
have known. It’s very funny, but, as with all the stories,
humour comes with sadness and horror. In ‘The Seventh
Man’, a young boy swept to sea in a typhoon returns,
dead, to his friend in the crest of a wave:
as if enclosed in some kind of transparent capsule,
floated K’s body, reclining on its side. But that is not all.
K was looking straight at me.
There are suicides, vomiting attacks, bereaved parents.
Imagery is evocative and simple, often hinting at out-of-
52
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
reach worlds. Soft-drink cans
shine through the water of a
pond like ‘the ruins of an
ancient lost city’.
Those who have read
Murakami’s other work may
missing people, visits to the zoo,
freak accidents, talking animals.
In the title story, we learn of a Murakami: misfit
sleeping woman who has
pollen-covered flies crawling inside her ear. Do we need
another expression of Murakami’s fascination with ears? But
if the motif is old, the tale is new. In a characteristically
relaxed yet diffident introduction, Murakami states that he
wants his stories to be ‘the faint footprints I’ve left behind’,
and he leaves them deftly. The blind willow and the sleep-
ing woman appear in a story about a partially deaf teenage
boy on his way to an ear appointment at a hospital. The
footprint left behind by this story is not the sleeping woman
but the beauty of the very ordinary bus journey, of the
narrator and the boy and their quiet but warm relationship.
The final stories, ‘Five Strange Tales of Tokyo’, are the
most recent and were my favour ites. Filled with
Murakami mind-benders, they are about the search for
what is missing – physical, metaphysical, or both – and are
suspenseful and exciting. In ‘Where I’m Likely To Find It’,
we are caught on the stairway between two apartments,
the space where a woman’s husband disappeared. In
‘Hanalei Bay’, the mother of a dead surfer plays jazz piano
near the spot where her son died. Other surfers see his
ghost but she never does. Yes, we feel we’ve been in these
situations before with Murakami and, yes, we know that
the answer to the mystery will not be straightforward. It
doesn’t matter. Each story is uniquely compulsive reading.
English translations of Japanese prose are often difficult
to negotiate. The languages are so far apart that, however
skilled the translator, the reader must sometimes strain to
catch a sense of the original prose. Not only does
Murakami have some of the best Japanese–English trans-
lators around, but his jazzy, international style slips with
remarkable ease from one language to the other, as if he
has simply transposed his thoughts to another key.
Saved for last in this collection is the most eccentric story
of all, ‘A Shinagawa Monkey’. A woman with an identity
crisis seeks psychiatric help and is eventually led to a mon-
key with a penchant for stealing name tags. By the time the
monkey starts to speak, the reader is beginning to wonder
if this really isn’t too much, but Murakami brings the story
and the entire collection to rest with a conclusion of sim-
plicity, cool as a gust of wind. In the human ache for iden-
tity, for being here and not being missing, we are left think-
ing, if we can’t see the answers for ourselves, we might as
well pay attention to the words of a talking monkey.
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 FICTION

M ARTYN B EDFORD of communication. Hence the title.

Released from jail, Dana walks out on her job and,

IDENTITY THEFT with a lead from a private investigator, she and her hear-
ing boyfriend, Bridger, set off on the trail of the false
Dana Halter, aka Frank Calabrese, aka Peck Wilson.
TALK TALK There are hints of the Kafkaesque in Talk Talk: not just in
★ its hero’s arrest and subsequent entanglement in an
By T C Boyle unfathomable bureaucracy, but also in the accretion of
(Bloomsbury 352pp £10.99) incidents and episodes, each of which makes sense in itself
but which, cumulatively, draw the protagonists into
I T ’ S NO BIG deal: you’re running late for a dental increasingly irrational predicaments. Indeed, the narrative
appointment, you jump a ‘stop’ sign and, as bad luck twice contains the reference ‘like something out of
would have it, a police car pulls you over. You apologise, Kafka’. What results, though, is closer to an all-American
show your ID. At worst, he’ll issue a ticket; at best, adventure, a quest-narrative cum road-movie of a tale that
you’ll be let off with a caution. But no, what the cop shuttles heroes and villain from West Coast to East, the
does is draw his gun, cuff you and run you in to the sta- narration switching between Dana’s and Bridger’s pursuit
tion, where you’re charged with a whole crop of crimes and Peck’s flight, as his counterfeit world of assumed
and banged up in a cell with assorted urban no-goods. identities and money-making scams threatens to collapse.
This is the grab-you-by-the-throat opening to a new Peck, though, is a violent man, and even as we exhort his
novel by one of America’s finest storytellers, T C Boyle pursuers to catch him, we fear for what will happen when
(when did the Coraghessan get reduced to a ‘C’? I liked they do. It’s a scintillating model of sustained suspense.
Coraghessan). His heroine, Dana Halter, can only However, the endgame – a double climax (the first,
believe it’s a case of mistaken identity which will soon brilliant; the second, less so) rounded off by an epilogue –
be cleared up. Unfortunately for her, she’s the victim of struggles to satisfy the weight of expectation the story-
something far more complicated and disturbing: identity telling brio has built up. This sense of anticlimax is due in
theft. She may be innocent of the charges, but the crime part to a regret that the novel has to end at all.
was perpetrated by someone who has skimmed, indeed To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
assumed, her ID as a front for his criminal scams. It
doesn’t help that Dana is profoundly deaf, which adds
layers of confusion to an already befuddled police inter-
rogation. After a couple of days in jail and a court
appearance, she is finally set free, her innocence estab-
lished. But Dana is degraded, humiliated, furious; with
no help forthcoming from the police, she is determined
to track down the ‘thief ’ herself and reclaim that most
intangible of properties: her identity.
It’s a compelling set-up that draws you right into her
plight, and once Boyle has you there he seldom loosens
hold. This method has long been his forte. But what
makes him interesting as well as enjoyable to read is that
his stories are invariably informed by contemporary
sociopolitical issues (in The Tortilla Curtain, for instance, it
was illegal immigration and social or racial division, as
symbolised by the gated community). Talk Talk tackles
another topical phenomenon, although identity theft
–where criminal and victim never meet, and in which the
‘action’ is mostly virtual – doesn’t have obvious dramatic
potential. Boyle clearly recognises this. While he does
delve convincingly into the geeky technological world of
ID skimming, his main focus is the human, the personal,
using typically impressive depth of characterisation to drive
the plot. If notions of identity itself are underdeveloped
after some promising early explorations, Dana’s deafness
compensates as the novel’s main thematic preoccupation in
what turns out to be a fascinating meditation on concepts

53
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FICTION
P AUL B INDING
A CARGO OF LONGINGS
T HE S UNLIGHT ON THE G ARDEN
★ faction from finding evidence of
By Francis King
(Arcadia Books 202pp £11.99)
BRIAN AND LOIS are suffering an appalling loss. Their
small daughter Suzie has drowned, possibly as a result of
two teachers’ negligence; at any rate the pair have been
temporarily suspended. At first the tragedy arouses
strong reactions in the community:
Strangers had left flowers not merely at the house but,
so it was reported, on the bank of that wide, calm,
implacable river. By that river someone had even
propped against a tree a Barbie doll, oppressively still
in its box.
But it doesn’t take long for this fervid interest to die
down; now neighbours tend to avoid rather than seek
out the bereaved parents, while the police, who at first,
as Brian says, ‘were all soft voices and concern’, seem to
have forgotten all about them. Even Suzie’s school
chooses to press ahead with crowd-drawing centenary
celebrations at an unseemly short interval after her
death. Bitterly Lois, standing in the cemetery where her
daughter is buried, reflects: ‘Everybody is somebody.
But to everyone else everybody is nobody.’
These last three words make up the title of this short
story, and they are of Francis King’s very essence. His fic-
tion – his first novel, To the Dark Tower, came out in 1946
– has always concentrated on the unique individuality of
the unobtrusive, the externally unremarkable person, to
show the cargo of longings, affections, hopes, disappoint-
ments, miseries that each of us, perforce, carries. He is
aware of how often pressures from without, from particu-
lar social groups and from society as a whole, make the
carrying of that cargo difficult. Frequently the difficulties
can be attributed to the strength of received opinions, of
conventions concerning which of our emotions are suit-
able for public airing and which not. In one of his most
powerful and successful books, A Domestic Animal (1970),
the narrator’s obsessive condition, expressed now in bursts
of near-uncontrollable pleasure, now in cancerous jealousy,
is aroused by Antonio, an attractive Italian academic who
does not, and simply cannot, return his homosexual
emotions. But to whom can he, while retaining his dignity,
unburden himself? In the title story of this collection of
new and consummately realised short fictions, the protag-
onist has camouflaged his increasing reliance on the girl
lodging in his house by insisting she is his daughter – in
company ‘my adopted daughter’ – though nobody knows
better than he that she is no relation of his at all. In the
54
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
fascinating, incisive ‘Death by
Water’, the central character,
Luke, gets enmeshed in our
contemporary inverted morality,
which in its justifiable horror at
child-abuse derives perverse satis-
inclinations towards this just
about everywhere, inflicting
unwarranted and draconian
punishments in the process.
Luke in this story has in truth King: unflinching
no such prurient concerns what-
soever; indeed when he meets a man who does have them,
a decadent, smiling, emotionally ingrown figure, he is
repelled to the point of righteous, physical indignation. A
keen amateur photographer, he, for the first time in his life
and for a very personal reason, becomes enamoured of a
picture, Millais’s Ophelia. Finding out where it was painted,
he takes himself down to the Hogsmill River near Ewell to
photograph the exact spot, armed with two
cameras, a new digital Canon and an ancient Leica. It is
thought by others however that he must be taking photos
for pornographic purposes; his cherished cameras are seized,
and he himself grilled, a disturbing, mean-minded business.
Floral tributes to the dramatically dead, suspicions of
child-porn – add to these the hard-hearted legal treatment
of asylum seekers (‘The Appeal’), a determined upward
mobility that sets its sights on a renovated East End (‘The
Sitting Tenant’), sex-tourism (‘Now You See It’) and a
constant awareness of such features of our quotidian life as
Budgen’s and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and there’s no
doubt where we are in both space and time. The author
has always enjoyed intense rapport with his times and their
manifestation in places and material objects; The Widow
(1957) takes readers through changing English society in
the mid twentieth century, The Nick of Time (2003) to the
London of now, as illuminated with troubling clarity by a
mysterious displaced Albanian. Throughout this most
recent book Francis King uses the prism of old age to look
both at English mores and at existence itself – which has, so
inescapably, decline and dissolution built into it. His regard
here is unflinching, the prose conveying it characteristically
limpid and exact. ‘I lean my head back and close my eyes. I
long for silence, for my air-conditioned room, for my bed,
and for that blissful state when, suspended in a fragile ham-
mock between retreating life and approaching death, all
remembrance and even all thinking cease.’ These honest
admissions come from the last tale in the collection,
‘Causes’, which, like the sharp yet subtle title story, seems
to me a miniature masterpiece, a wonderful distillation of
lives stretching over many years, and now approaching
termination, but still pulsating with feeling, complexity of
thought, and the need to make sense of things.
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 FICTION

COMMUNISM WOULD APPEAR R ICHARD G ODWIN setting, The End of Innocence

to have been kind to Anatoly by Moni Mohsin (Fig Tree
Sukhanov, hero of The Dream S AVOURS F IVE F IRST N OVELS 353pp £16.99) is immediately
Life of Sukhanov by Olga identifiable as the sort of book
Grushin (Viking 354pp £14.99). The editor of an art that gets taken up by reading groups and short-listed for
journal that toes the party line, he has a handsome worthy prizes. I would hazard that the Nirpal Singh
Moscow flat, a beautiful wife, two bright teenage chil- Dhaliwals of this world would turn up their noses at it,
dren, a dacha and a chauffeur whose name he can never but those with a lower sentimentality threshold will find
remember. He is full of the sort of complacent pride much to admire in Moni Mohsin’s debut, an absorbing
that comes before a most ignominious fall. take on The Go-Between set in rural Pakistan in 1971.
In 1985, as the Soviet Union stands on the cusp of Nine-year-old Laila, the privileged daughter of progres-
glasnost and perestroika, his life begins to fall apart. The sive, Oxford-educated landowner Tariq, looks on uncom-
narrative takes on another layer as his suppressed past begins prehendingly as her spirited fifteen-year-old friend Rani
to rise before him and his present becomes increasingly sur- embarks on a risky affair with a local boy. Rani, born to
real. We learn that his father was driven to insanity by the servants at the haveli of Laila’s formidable grandmother
state; and we see Sukhanov’s youthful spark flare briefly – Sardar Begum, soon becomes pregnant; the naive Laila
he was once a gifted surrealist painter in the line of Marc finds she has a lot to learn about love, class and family ties
Chagall. Now he denigrates the very art he was inspired by, as her friend’s situation becomes increasingly desperate.
in articles peppered with quotes from Lenin; somewhere Mohsin balances an enjoyable polyphony of characters
along the way ideals had to be traded for material comfort. – the wizened old servant, the jolly ex-pat, the flustered
Writing in her third language, Grushin has crafted a nun – as she depicts an idyllic milieu under threat. This is
brilliant debut, a subtle morality play about memory, an assured, emotionally engaging novel – and it ultimately
beauty and repression. Her descriptions of remembered proves a little less frilly than appearances would suggest.
sensations and intrusions from other planes of reality occa- ‘All first novels are autobiographical is perhaps the most
sionally recall Nabokov, though her tendency to overwrite boring thing you could ever say in the world.’ So begins
– her stockpiles of adjectives and frustrating ellipses – risks Saatchi-endorsed painter Jasper Joffe’s curious ‘illuminated’
spoiling the effect. Still, so compelling is Sukhanov’s novel, Water (Telegram Books 286pp £8.99), which Joffe
tumble from grace and favour, that come the novel’s final
third, it become’s eminently possible to overlook its faults.
Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal will be known to many as ‘The
Husband’ that Liz Jones so frequently despairs of in her
popular Mail on Sunday columns. ‘The Husband’, a kept
man some years Jones’s junior, was often seen at work on
his novel; Tourism (Vintage 256pp £7.99) is the strange
fruit of those labours – and it will scarcely help to
improve Dhaliwal’s standing among his wife’s supporters.
It follows Bupinder ‘Puppy’ Singh Johal – like
Dhaliwal an upwardly mobile young Sikh – as he nego-
tiates his way through the West London social circus. He
beds a gorgeous skinny redhead, Sophie; but he lusts
after the fuller-figured Sarupa, daughter of a rich Indian
businessman. (Dhaliwal’s own Evening Standard column
is full of such praise for the fuller figure.)
An enjoyably bumptious coming-of-age tale ensues,
peppered with sex tips picked up from Michel
Houellebecq and racial comments of Dhaliwal’s own
peculiar devising: ‘When the spades, the Pakis and the
rest of them got off the boat with their big dicks and
their beautiful faces, the white boys shit themselves.’
It’s not always pretty – Dhaliwal has compared the
writing process to emptying his bowels in public – but
it’s rarely less than entertaining. And, when Dhaliwal
ceases the macho posing, he can be unexpectedly
moving. I reckon, like Liz, he just wants to be loved.
With its frilly pink design and colourful post-colonial

55
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 FICTION
launched with an exhibition in which his artist friends
(people like Stella Vine) displayed their responses to his
protagonist, Nathaniel Water.
Water is a superior young painter with a successful
career and an enviable lifestyle. First he becomes
engaged to volatile Slovakian stick-insect Jelena; then to
grounded German curator Harriet; then he ditches
Harriet and perversely marries Jelena. Seemingly more
concerned with what is for dinner, Water adopts an
attitude of flippant detachment towards his relationships
and refuses to learn any lessons from his experiences,
making this less the love saga the blurb pretends it to be
than a sort of absurdist, amoral fable.
Often, reading the coolly self-conscious prose feels
like strolling round the Saatchi Gallery – one wonders
whether one is supposed to feel anything more than wry
amusement: ‘Boring people say that only boring people
say that things are boring’, quips Water. However, over
time, I grew rather fond of the conceited young rogue.
There is something exquisitely tragic about Water’s life,
a repetitive parade of posh restaurants, press views and
disinterested flings. Ultimately, he’s a tad boring – not
something you could say about the novel he stars in.
In What Happens Now by Jeremy Dyson (Abacus
320pp £10.99) it is 1981, and Alistair Black is a fifteen-
year-old Jewish introvert who spends his time making
tapes documenting the daily life of Travulia, an imagi-
nary town loosely based on his own Leeds suburb. His
world improbably opens up when he is prompted by a
sympathetic teacher to audition for the BBC’s acclaimed
children’s drama Then and Now. His instinctive talents
land him the part of Marcel Vinteuil, a Romanian Jew
hiding out from the Nazis.
Jeremy Dyson intercuts scenes from the shoot in
London – Alistair brushing up with professional actors,
including a love interest, his sophisticated sixteen-year-
old co-star Alice Zealand – with two present-day narra-
tives (Then and Now, as it were). In one strand, adult
Alice revisits the painter boyfriend she fled a year
previously; in the other, Alistair, more awkward than
ever, embarks on a fateful train journey to retrace the
real-life Vinteuil family in Romania. Both bear the scars
of the traumatic event that concluded the BBC session.
Dyson – one quarter of macabre comedy troupe The
League of Gentlemen – paces his debut well and creates
memorable characters, like the jaded actor Jack (a cousin of
Ricky Gervais’s character in Extras) and the obnoxious,
ominous drama brat, Steve (‘I am, it is fair to say, a cunt
man’). Yet What Happens Now never fully convinces.
Intriguing ideas, like Travulia (a nascent Royston Vasey?)
and a theological sub-theme, are underdeveloped, and
period details seem shoehorned in. More pressingly, Alice
and Alistair lacked credibility as adults; some explanation of
what happened between then and now would have helped.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
56
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
W ILLIAM B RETT
INTOXICATING AFRICA
W HITEMAN
★
By Tony D’Souza
(Portobello 278pp £10.99)
TONY D’SOUZA SPENT several years working for the
Peace Corps in Ivory Coast, and Whiteman is a book
based on his time there. Billed as a novel, it reads more
like a collection of autobiographical short stories closely
based on the author’s experience. The narrator, Jack
Diaz, is a young American working for the fictional
Potable Water Institute. Jack, prevented from establishing
a water supply by lack of funding, instead teaches the
villagers about Aids, which was D’Souza’s principal duty
as a Peace Corps volunteer.
He has an elegant descriptive style, which he uses
deftly to paint a complete and authentic picture of Ivory
Coast. The stories jump in time, taking in everything
from the squalor of the cities to the brutal romanticism
of rural life, from too-young soldiers to flirtatious
tr ibeswomen. The book’s var iegated, scatter-gun
approach is a sensual assault, mirroring the disorientating
and intoxicating effect of Africa.
Whiteman is also about being an alien, about trying to
understand a country’s complexities from the outside.
Jack quickly loses any vestiges of missionary zeal, and
becomes immersed instead in the strange minutiae of
rural life with the tiny Worodougu tribe. As Ivory Coast
descends into civil war, Jack struggles to understand
what he is trying to do. His goals, of cultural empathy or
some form of positive action, occasionally come close to
attainment but ultimately elude him. Like every other
non-African in the book, Jack is seduced by Africa but
has no hope of understanding it. The continent is like
Mariam, the married Worodougu with whom Jack has
an affair: ‘Unconquerable, unknowable, as beautiful and
resolute as always.’
D’Souza has an uneasy relationship with his protago-
nist, as if he does not know how much of the narrator’s
inner life he should reveal. At times Jack practically
disappears. Although there are hints of a complex and
intriguing psychology, we are given no indication of the
thoughts that followed, for example, his decision to
emulate the tribal tradition of whipping schoolchildren.
Whiteman is an accomplished portrait of life in Ivory
Coast, written with a descriptive control that is reminis-
cent of Hemingway. But it fails to work properly as a
novel about a white man in Africa – D’Souza never
seems sure who this man really is.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 FICTION
M ARCELLA E DWARDS
DUBLIN IN STASIS
T HE F REE AND E ASY
★ munity. This, he believes, is the embodiment of the
By Anne Haverty
(Chatto & Windus 288pp £11.99)
ANNE HAVERTY BURST onto the literary scene in 1997
with One Day as a Tiger, her brilliant dissection of rural
life in Ireland. In The Free and Easy, she looks at the
effects of the Celtic Tiger on Dublin. Tom is sent there
from the States by his great-uncle Pender, to appease the
dreams of the old country that have been disturbing the
old man’s sleep. He finds a city in thrall to American
money and harking back to an ersatz Irishness based on
suffering and penury. Dublin is in stasis – simultaneously
embracing the cliché of the American Dream and cling-
ing to an illusory, romanticised and ‘authentic’ past. Tom
gets enmeshed with the Kinane family and Gibbon
Fitzgibbon’s murky political past. He shares a meal with
the Kinanes, during which they cling to their mobile
phones, presenting the semblance of a contented family
while reaching towards some imaginary message from
outside that will propel them to something better. Each
night, Mrs Kinane charges her children’s phones, brooding
over them as her last maternal ministration. There is no
here-and-now, only an atrophied past of famine and
P HILIP W OMACK
A LACK OF FULFILMENT
A DVERBS
★ and Lila, a pseudo-lesbian couple. Lila is dying, and
By Daniel Handler
(Fourth Estate 272pp £16.99)
EVERYTHING IN THIS witty, perplexing yet rewarding book
is precarious. It is set in an alternate present, where San
Francisco perches uncomfortably on a volcano and is under
attack from terrorists. The characters meld into each other,
and Handler’s voice interrupts sometimes; he even steps
into the text in the chapter labelled ‘Truly’. The lives of his
characters, who lope around diners, get into taxis and go to
the movies, are infused with tension, menace, magic and
controlled hilarity as they struggle to drag themselves into
certainty, with a sense of fulfilment being dangled just out
of reach, as if each person were a modern-day Tantalus.
Handler, whose alter ego is Lemony Snicket, author
of the childrens’ books A Series of Unfortunate Events,
wr ites char mingly, but suffers from the cur rent
57
poets, and an idealised future of glistening theme parks
and Irish artistic talent sanctioned by American buyers.
Tom moves around the city and the outlying countryside,
initiated into the privileged world of country-house par-
ties and people jostling for social position, while toying
with setting up a foundation to help the travelling com-
ancient spirit of the Irish. Across the city flits Eileen
Kinane, a beautiful, elusive and ethereal creature with a
tendency to self-harm. She’s the modern Cathleen ni
Houlihan, but with pink hair. Tom is in love.
Haverty bangs the drum too hard. The plot is subjugated
constantly to the Point, which is hammered home at every
available opportunity. Each character embodies some or
other aspect of the post-colonial bind. Thrown together
they present less the complex melting-pot of nationalism
and capitalism in Ireland than a series of antithetical yet
interlinked postures. There is little breathing space in the
environment she describes, and, ironically, little for the
reader, as they hurtle between a denuded concept of
Ireland and the crass invasion of American consumerism.
Neither comes out well, and that’s the Point. But it’s an
undoubtedly more complicated interaction in reality.
Still, this is at times a virtuoso performance. Haverty is
in turns hilarious, tender and acerbic. Her portrayal of
Tom is beautifully nuanced, and his painful vacillations
between nostalgia for his ex-wife and fascination with
Eileen strike the overwhelmingly clear note in an atmos-
phere of subterfuge and dissembling.
To order this book at £9.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
American habit of writing long sentences with little
punctuation; he redeems himself by saving punch lines
or deliciously incongruous statements for the end.
We are given snapshots of moments when the charac-
ters’ lives intersect. One stands out: Gladys, who is,
when we first meet her, a reassuring presence for Allison
Gladys tries to cheer them up with cocktails. It soon
becomes clear that she is some sort of goddess, or witch,
for she saves Lila’s life simply by touching her. When she
next appears, she is being hunted by detectives in a bar
who are looking for ‘The Snow Queen’ – ‘an agent of
the netherworld of Kata’. It seems as if the gumshoes
have been hired by a crazy client, but we then see Gladys
freezing one of them with a ‘Cone of Frost’. The barri-
ers between reality and the supernatural seem to be
weakening, but later another character watches the scene
in a film, and we learn that Gladys is an actress.
Overall, the book does not quite work as more than
the sum of its parts, and no succeeding chapter is as
witty or vivid as the first one; but this is an interesting
and intelligent work, of which I think Lemony Snicket
would be proud.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006

TABATHA ’ S C ODE
★ trade by doing it, she also learns
By Matthew d’Ancona
(Alma Books 400pp £18.99)
TABATHA’S Code works as a story of
ideas. It works as a portrait of a partic-
ular type of twenty-first-century man,
a well-meaning, liberal-minded but
(or perhaps therefore) ineffectual
teacher; it works as a memoir of life
on the American hippy trail in the old
days; but it does not work as a con-
vincing thriller. It is impossible to
believe, or to suppose that the author
believed, in violence described in such
phrases as ‘she slid to the floor, reveal-
ing a new sanguinary poppy spreading
thickly on the headrest’. Descriptions
of carnage brought about by remorse-
less bombers alternate with scenes
from domestic life where our hero
changes nappies as expertly as he
recites the poems of Yeats and Emily
Dickinson. When high-powered
political journalists knock off a quick
novel, the result is (of course) readable,
relevant and instructive, but there is
often a credibility gap.
CRITIQUE OF CRIMINAL REASON
★ the characters memorable, but I shall
By Michael Gregorio
(Faber & Faber 400pp £12.99)
NAPOLEON is poised on Prussia’s bor-
ders, waiting to invade, and the inhab-
itants of Königsberg are being terrorised
by a spate of murders. A magistrate
from a neighbouring town is ordered
to investigate. So far so good; the set-
ting is brilliantly portrayed and the
harsh, superstitious, masculine world
springs to life, making one very glad
not to be there and then. But the
point of the book is that the most
famous inhabitant of Königsberg is
Immanuel Kant, who had been the
mentor of the investigating magistrate.
A previous quarrel between the two
men, and the complication in their
personal relationship forms the human
side of this well-written and intellec-
tually demanding novel. Lots of clues
only recognisable by philosophers.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
T HE A RT OF D ROWNING
★ Mina among its leaders.
By Frances Fyfield
(Little, Brown 384pp £18.99)
I DON ’ T know whether Francis
Fyfield intended a corrective to the
townie’s sentimental view of rural life,
but her new book certainly bears out
Sherlock Holmes’s dictum about
worse crimes happening in the ‘smil-
ing countryside’ than in the meanest
of mean streets. This clever psycho-
logical thriller about revenge and ret-
ribution concerns a judge who has a
sly son and a police protector, a lonely
accountant with a limited social and
emotional life, and a family who at
first seems to be from Warm Comfort
Farm. When the charismatic Ivy takes
Rachel home to meet her folks, their
seductively generous welcome masks a
sinister sub-text. Lethal booby traps
lurk in beautiful rural corners and
venom underlies the façade of benev-
olence. Skilful writing makes some of
try to forget what happens to them.
The nastier moments are enough to
put one off the countryside for life.
T HE D EAD H OUR
★ By Jeffrey Deaver
By Denise Mina
(Bantam Press 352pp £12.99)
T HIS unusual and unusually well-
written novel is set in 1984 – the date
seems without Orwellian significance
– and is the second book featuring
Paddy Meehan: a young reporter
with boundless ambition but restricted
freedom – she is the only earner in
her loved, loving but needy family. A
crisp, taut thriller is combined with a
memorable portrait of Glasgow’s
tr ibes and their old enmities
(Catholic/ Protestant, Irish/Scottish,
feminist/male chauvinist pig). Paddy
is a sympathetic heroine, being gutsy,
58
idealistic and clever. As she learns her
about its ethics from bitter experience
and her own mistakes. The tartan
army is on the march through crime
fiction as well as politics, with Denise
A FTER THE M OURNING
★
By Barbara Nadel
(Headline 320pp £19.99)
REMINDERS of Allingham: in 1940,
many of those newly dispossessed by
air-raids come to live in the unclaimed
countryside of Epping Forest; fugi-
tives, homeless people, spies and gyp-
sies. Then they begin to die: the first
victim is a Romany girl, but mass
slaughter ensues. Events are described
in the reserved, passionless voice of
Francis Hancock, an undertaker who
has seen the worst that can happen to
the human body – not only at work,
but also during the traumatising expe-
riences of the First World War. The
period detail seems exact, and the plot
credible. A series is promised with
Hancock as hero. He seems rather too
subdued for such a role but may yet
develop the charm that (as writers like
Allingham or Sayers proved) a popular
running hero must have.
T HE C OLD M OON
★
(Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £14.99)
C RIME fiction used to be full of
criminals who left capricious clues
and detectives character ised by
disabilities that forced them to rely
on brainpower alone. Jeffrey Deaver’s
books are set in contemporary New
York and use uninhibited language to
describe uncensored violence but all
the same this set-up seems quite old-
fashioned, featuring a criminal who
leaves a ticking clock beside every
random victim as his calling card,
and a quadriplegic detective with a
pretty woman as his runner. A silly
story though a readable one.

D RIVE
★ his own city and intimacy with its
By James Sallis
(No Exit Press 160pp £12)
A ‘NOIR’ little novella narrated by a
man called Drive who drives: by day,
respectably for movie stunts; by night
as a criminal getaway driver. Time
shifts and allusive, spare writing mean
that if attention wavers the point is lost.
Deadpan dialogue and vivid descrip-
tions add up to a short, sharp, shocking
story of violence and treachery.
T HE H IDDEN A SSASSINS
★ (Serpent’s Tail 256pp £8.99)
By Robert Wilson
(HarperCollins 464pp £14.99)
IF you only read one thriller this year,
make it this one. Seville’s homicide
detective, Javier Falcon, is featured in
two of Wilson’s previous books, but
this time it’s not just murder he must
investigate, but a terrorism outrage in
which a bomb goes off underneath a
kindergarten. The ramifications take
in most of Europe and much of North
Africa, but the detection is local,
CRIME
depending on Falcon’s knowledge of
inhabitants, as well as his persuasive
psychological insights. It is hard to
believe that a detective would be con-
nected closely to two women involved
in two apparently separate crimes and
still be permitted to investigate both.
But that is my only quibble about this
very complicated novel. It makes
demands on the reader’s stamina, but is
a thrilling and memorable read.
T HE T WILIGHT H OUR
★ (Allison & Busby 288pp £18.99)
By Elizabeth Wilson
A VIVID portrait of bohemian life in
‘Fitzrovia’ during the austerity of
1947 and the coldest winter of the
twentieth century. Everyone is
exhausted, food and fuel are strictly
rationed, London is nowhere near
back to normal but ambitious young
‘creatives’ struggle to get going on
their wr iting or painting, with
Hollywood beckoning tantalisingly.
But none of them can escape the
shadow of the last war, the cold war
or the class war. The writing is good
and the scene-setting fascinating, but
the plot depends on the irritatingly
silly behaviour of a heroine who
should (with apologies to Ogden
Nash) have ‘told the dix/how she got
in that fix’. How odd that it is histor-
ically plausible for her to be, at twenty-
one, already married and matronly.
The past is a foreign country indeed.
D READ M URDER
★
By Gwendoline Butler
WELCOME back to Gwendoline Butler
and her pair of ex-soldier detectives
stationed at Windsor Castle in George
IV’s reign. Whether the setting is bang
up-to-date or historical, all Butler’s
books share a unique combination of
attributes, being at once sinister,
inventive and charming. Her most
improbable plots remain just within
the bounds of historical possibility for
she herself was a professional historian,
and draws on her knowledge of the
period to recreate its sounds, smell and
atmosphere.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
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 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

THE INTAKE THIS month, on the subject R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING poet Matsuo Basho used fifteen differ-
of ‘Network’, was largely disappointing. ent haiga (pennames) before becoming
The judges decided that no single poem so attached to a banana plant given to
deserved first prize, so there are two joint second prizes. him by one of his students that he chose that name
Next month’s subject is ‘Reflections’: entries, which should (basho). And the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa pub-
rhyme, scan and make sense, should arrive by 26 July. lished very little under his own name, instead using several
Last month I wondered out loud whether any famous ‘heteronyms’, alter egos with distinct temperaments and
poets had ever used pseudonyms. A few people kindly writing styles. Bizarrely, they sometimes interacted in his
wrote in with answers: the Brontës published a volume of everyday life: one ‘heteronym’ actually tried to break up
poetry under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; Paul Pessoa’s only known relationship with a woman, even
Eluard’s real name was Eugène Grindel; the Japanese haiku penning a letter to her on Pessoa’s behalf.

SECOND PRIZE CONNECTIONS by D A Prince

NO-BRAINER A perfect mapping of the hidden tracks
by Noel Petty that, when untangled, brought you to this Now
The structure of the human brain would take another lifetime. First, the stacks
Is rather tricky to explain. of family photos, letters – books on how
Ten billion neurons, more or less to navigate your bloodlines tell you all
Send signals through this spongy mess, the tricks. The facts. A skeleton. A tree
Each one of them transmitting through minus the ripple of its leaves, the fall
Ten thousand synapses. Well, you of sunlight, shadows, how it came to be
Can do the sums: all those connections the shape it’s grown into. But not enough.
Cascading off in all directions, There’s childhood, all the playground push and shove,
And all at once, both to and fro … the bus–stop jostlings, the other stuff
It’s never going to work, you know. you learn from library books, the crease that love
makes in the clean sheet of your mind. And friends.
JOINT SECOND PRIZE Of course, your friends. Not just the ones who write
NETWORKING staying in conscientious touch but ends
by Bill Greenwell left loose, unravelled threads, the ones who might
If you’re employed in be heard of, one day, in another sphere.
Public Relations, The web of friends of friends, inhabiting
all you require are slow conversations, glass in hand; the clear
thick skin, impatience, print of a boy who once did gardening,
thin conversation like Proustian connections of a cup of tea
calcified chatter – and all the faces gathered round, the view
and no fear of subjects which of nets of other lives, invisibly
do not much matter. tied with fine silk. And at the centre: you.

All P R gurus have POSTAL NETWORK by Frank Mc Donald

warm, greasy manners, Do you remember when, at Christmas time,
with giant address-books they took on students to deliver mail?
and leather-bound planners: Three times a day or more the letters came;
who is to say if they’re their motto was: the post must never fail.
trained up, or not – Across the land our postmen Pats trudged round
even their spellings need early as birdsong, true as summer rain;
not be so hot. we read our mail at breakfast, and could find
a second batch when we came home again.
Yes, doing publicity’s
just phoning through Those were the times the GPO felt shame
to people whose people know at damaged letters and apologised
people like you; for late arrivals. Then that witty scheme
you don’t even need an of first and second class was not devised.
O level Fretwork Today I’m waiting in the afternoon
to be the great nabob wondering if the post will come by three,
who knits up a network. but who can say where Postman Pete has gone.

62
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

Perhaps I’ll have my mail in time for tea. Who surfs the net now with her user name.

Who knows what cures a billion pounds will bring? THE SCOTTISH WIDOW by Sharon Wigley
A service half as good as in the past? The tinker tends his pots and pans
No heaps of first-class stolen parcels flung The carpenter his fretwork
under a postman’s bed? Will we at last But Morag sits upon the sand
read letters with our breakfast cereal? A doing of her network
Somehow, one feels, the days of patient care
by all those hands that hold our precious mail Wi’ fingers raw and bleeding
are gone for good. We’ll still rely on prayer. She views the raging foam
Where Neptune plucked her bonny Jock
THE WORLD WIDE WEB: A NETWORK OF And never bore him home
BLIND PROMISE by Aileen Hopkins
The web, that network set in cyberspace Wi’ seven hungry bairns to feed
Imposed a challenge for my elder mind, She looked upon her plight
When in my youth computers you’d not find To mend the nets for fishermen
In many homes, yet in this modern place Or sell hersel’ at night?
The townships are awash with bytes, and I
Felt left behind until with courage braced But Morag was no beauty
I resolved to learn all, and then embraced No customers came calling
This phenomenon of which I first fought shy. One look at her and they all said
They’d rather be out trawling
A whole new world was opened up to me,
Full of exciting prospects, things to learn And so she does her networking
Or buy, the information was in turn Upon the windy shore
Staggering in potential, and would be A dour Scottish widow
So awe inspiring for a senior dame, Who’s nae provided for!

AUDIOBOOK
(Smith/Doorstop Books and The North magazine)
B ROTHER G RIMM
★
Book & Pamphlet Competition
By Craig Russell Winners receive publication of their poetry collection
(Abridged. Read by Anton Lesser) plus cash prizes. Closing date: October 31, 2006
(Random House Audio, 5 CDs. £16.99) Full conditions and entry form are on our website:

HOWEVER REMARKABLE THIS audiobook, I suspect it www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

could be given a miss by the squeamish. Before Craig or contact The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade,
Russell began writing his insightful fiction twelve years Huddersfield HD1 1ND tel 01484 434840
ago, he served as a police officer. This experience informs email anita.fenton@poetrybusiness.co.uk
his second novel featuring Inspector Jan Fabel of the
Hamburg murder squad, who is hunting down a massive- ‘An enterprising
publisher talent-
ly-built killer. Occasionally the author lets us discover facts spotting marvellous
as yet unknown to Fabel – such as that the gigantic man, new poets’
when a child, was savagely beaten by his step-mother into – The Independent
memorising the only books in the house – the Bible and
Grimm’s Fairy Tales (all two hundred of them). Instead of
dumping his victims’ bodies, the killer poses each to recall
one of the tales. A beautiful 21-year-old woman lies
peacefully, holding a rose and a scrap of paper on which is Some previous winners
written in obsessively neat small letters: ‘Sleeping Beauty’.
Most of the murders are hauntingly disturbing. Anton ‘Poetry fresh as rain after a heatwave’
Lesser gives a controlled reading which complements the – Sphinx
horror and non-stop suspense Susan Crosland

63
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
 SILENCED VOICES
We lay scattered, everywhere L UCY P OPESCU
blood, blood. Some had their
legs broken, some had their M AMADALI M AKHMUDOV
skulls fractured, some were just
outright killed. A constant wailing surrounded us. I
was hit with a steel pipe and lost consciousness.
(From a letter written by Mamadali Makhmudov and
smuggled out of prison.)
In May, Uzbekistan was back in the news as reports
around the world marked the first anniversary of the
massacre in the eastern city of Andijan. The Uzbek
authorities claimed that the demonstrations were instigated
by Islamic extremists, and refused to allow an indepen-
dent press to verify reports of the hundreds killed.
For human rights organisations, however, Uzbekistan
continues to be a top priority for their campaigning work.
In October 2005 I wrote about the young journalist
Sobirjon Yakubov in these pages. He was freed on 4 April,
one year after his arrest, when a district court in Tashkent
ruled that there was insufficient evidence to convict him.
Considering he had spent a year in detention without
trial, this hardly heralded a sudden improvement for those
detained in denial of their right to freedom of expression
or persecuted for their religious beliefs.
Uzbekistan has long been of great concern to the writ-
ers’ organisation PEN, which has documented its appalling
human rights record for many years. Muslims who do not
follow the government line find themselves accused of
extremism and imprisoned. Similarly, members of the
banned opposition party have been arrested and given
heavy prison sentences on dubious charges of terrorism.
Erk (Freedom) was Uzbekistan’s first official opposition
party, registered just months after the collapse of the Soviet surgery. His poor health was a result of his extreme
Union. Its leader, Muhamed Salih, was forced to flee the
country in the mid 1990s. Several members of the party
were subsequently arrested and remain in prison.
After a harrowing trip to Uzbekistan, where I had wit-
nessed at first hand the fear and isolation experienced by
the friends and families of those suffering persecution, I
wrote my first piece for LR in June 2004, focusing on
the journalist Muhammad Bekjanov.
Imprisoned at the same time, on the same trumped-up
charges, was Bekjanov’s colleague Mamadali Makhmudov.
An eminent author and opposition activist,
Makhmudov was arrested on 19 February 1999, after a
series of explosions in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, in
which a dozen people were killed. He was initially held
incommunicado for three months, before being formally
charged and sentenced to fourteen years in prison for
‘threatening the president’ and ‘threatening the constitu-
tional order’. There was no evidence to connect the
writer with these events and, according to PEN, some
commentators go as far as to suggest that the bombings
were carried out by government agents provocateurs.
Many believe Makhmudov’s arrest was linked to his
64
LITERARY REVIEW July 2006
association with the exiled opposition
leader Salih, as well as to his writings
and distribution of Erk, the opposi-
tion newspaper banned in Uzbekistan
since 1994. During his trial, access to key documents was
denied and Makhmudov claimed to have been tortured
under interrogation, which included beatings, electric
shock, and the threatened rape of female family members.
Makhmudov is a writer of the traditional dastan form
of epic verse, commonly used in Central Asia, which
typically features a hero with magical qualities. The das-
tan often commemorates the Turkic people’s struggles
for freedom. Under the Soviet Union, the dastan was
said to be ‘impregnated with the poison of feudalism’
and Makhmudov, who in his youth lived in Russia for
several years, was forced to repudiate his work. After the
Soviet Union collapsed, his most famous book, These
High Mountains, also known as Immortal Cliffs, published
in 1981, was retroactively awarded the Cholpan Prize.
The writer was previously imprisoned between 1994
and 1996. He was first arrested in 1994, when his house
was raided and police produced a firearm as evidence that
he was guilty of terrorism. The charges were dropped
after being met with widespread disbelief. He was then
accused of embezzlement and of the abuse of his position
as chairman of the Cultural Foundation of Uzbekistan
and sentenced to four years in prison. PEN and Amnesty
International considered the charges to have been fabri-
cated. An international campaign was mounted and when
no evidence was produced Makhmudov was given a pres-
idential amnesty and released.
He was hospitalised in July 2000 for facial and throat
ill-treatment and neglect in the camp where he was pre-
viously held – a notorious prison in the northern city of
Jaslyk, known among Uzbek human rights activists as
‘the place from which no one returns’.
Makhmudov has survived so far, but fears remain that
he will not live to see his freedom. Only in his fifties, he
has had three heart attacks, and tuberculosis is rife in
Uzbek prisons. He was moved to a medical centre in May
2001, but was returned to prison camp a month later.
PEN and other human rights organisations believe
Makhmudov was convicted in violation of his right to
freedom of expression and association as guaranteed by
Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, which Uzbekistan has ratified. Readers
may like to write appeals calling for the immediate and
unconditional release of Makhmudov to:
President Islam Karimov and
HE Mr Tukhtapulat Tursunovich Riskiev
Embassy of the Republic of Uzbekistan
41 Holland Park
London W11 3RP
Fax: 020 7229 7029