JUNE 2007 £3.

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TRAVELS WITH KAPUSCINSKI

Jason Burke on Fifty Years in the Field

John Gray on the Islamist

9 770144 436041

Donald Rayfield on Putin’s Russia

Michael Burleigh on the Atomic Bazaar

Housman’s Letters ★ Einstein’s Curves

Valete Romani!
Leslie Mitchell considers Robert Peel
06

Jane Ridley admires William Wilberforce

Andrew Roberts gets Napoleonic
FROLICS in the Park ★ The JOYS of Essex
FICTION: Murakami ★ Lethem ★ Eggers ★ Tremain ★ Thorpe ★ Maupin and Many More...
 FROM THE PULPIT
A N OBSESSION WITH image and J EREMY L EWIS
cor porate logos long predates
designer labels and the global mar-
ketplace. Back in the 1930s firms
like Shell and Guinness were nim-
COVER STORY
ble practitioners of ‘branding’, as
were go-ahead publishers – so much so that books and
authors sometimes seemed to play second fiddle to the
promotion of their publishers, with the list in general
being exalted at the expense of its particular components.
Victor Gollancz, the most bombastic and self-promoting
publisher of his time, dressed his books in the uniform
typographical jackets designed by Stanley Morison in
memorable if lurid hues of magenta, black and yellow:
and contributors to his hugely influential Left Book Club
were expected to subsume their identities into what was,
in effect, a corporate image.
Much the same applied to those authors published by
Allen Lane at Penguin Books, founded in 1935. After a
secretary had suggested a name for the new firm,
Edward Young was sent off to the penguin house at the
Zoo to draw what was to become the most famous of all
publishing logos. Back in the office, he laid out the
famous horizontal bands (orange for fiction, green for
crime, pale blue for non-fiction Pelicans), and although
the great typographer Jan Tschichold slimmed down
Young’s bulbous bird and refined his layout, while his
successor, Hans Schmoller, substituted vertical for hori-
zontal bands, one Penguin book continued to look like
another, irrespective of the fame or grandeur of its
author. Penguins were instantly identifiable not just from
their jackets, but in terms of layout, title pages and
design, all tailored to the contents of the book yet
recognisably the same; and the same applied to those
publishers – like Wren Howard at Jonathan Cape, or
Richard de la Mare at Faber – who shared Lane’s perfec-
tionism and his desire to create a ‘brand image’.
Nowadays the prevailing orthodoxy has it that book
jackets should be individually designed to reflect the con-
tents and the market for each particular book, and that
although it makes sense to provide authors with a distinc-
tive ‘look’, the publishers themselves are of little interest the most part, unreadable, unread and mercifully short –
to the book-buying public: even within the Penguin
Group, orange spines have long been abandoned, and
only the bird remains as a symbol of corporate identity.
Lane himself was devoted to his austere lettering jackets,
but by the 1960s he had had to give way and allow full-
colour picture jackets. Rival paperback publishers – Pan,
Fontana and the rest – had long espoused picture jackets,
and were outselling Penguin as a result; hardback publish-
ers were setting up paperback lists of their own, and
retaining the rights in authors whom Penguin had long
regarded as part of their birthright; booksellers were
happy to display some papaerbacks face-out, but saw no
point in doing so with a Penguin typographical jacket.
Salesmen, booksellers and the hardback publishers who
1
sub-leased paperback r ights all
agreed that Penguin had to move
with the times: but, as far as I could
discover when researching my biog-
raphy of Allen Lane, the authors
themselves were not consulted,
though Saul Bellow, John Masters, Anthony Powell and
Graham Greene were among those who objected to the
jackets provided for them by Tony Godwin in the 1960s.
Ten years later, Greene was on the warpath once again: in
Penguin by Designers, a fascinating and beautiful collection
of Penguin jackets recently published by the Penguin
Collectors’ Society, the designer Derek Birdsall reveals
how Greene rang to say that he wanted plain typographi-
cal jackets for his paperbacks, equivalent to the marvellous
lettering jackets provided for his hardbacks by John Ryder
and Michael Harvey at The Bodley Head. Penguin
agreed, but sales slumped and Paul Hogarth’s drawings
were hurriedly restored to the covers of Greene’s books.
I suspect that – like Greene – authors often have more
austere and conservative tastes than publishers and book-
sellers, let alone the all-important buyers in chains and
supermarkets, and that they like being published by firms
with a strong visual as well as literary identity: still more
so if, like Penguin in Lane’s era, or Faber in the days of
Berthold Wolpe (his Albertus lettering jackets remain the
most beautiful of all), or Cape in the Sixties and
Seventies, they are thought to be synonymous with both
stylishness and quality. A degree of visual anonymity is
made up for by a sense of being part of a larger enterprise,
of being propped up by one’s fellow authors and enjoying
a reflected glory from the more distinguished names on
the list. And, of course, a uniform look, particularly if
well done, appeals to those who collect books as much
for their looks as their content. Penguins were collected
from the earliest days, as were the green-covered Viragos
and, more recently, Nicola Beauman’s grey-coated
Persephone Books, the elegance and austerity of which
are reminiscent of early Penguins. So too, I suspect, were
Tom Maschler’s marvellous but long-forgotten paperback
series of Cape Editions: the books themselves were, for
Roland Barthes and Eldridge Cleaver are among the
names I remember – but they looked so good that would-
be trend-setters found them hard to resist.
Some publishers – Hodder most obviously comes to
mind – have never shown much interest in producing
distinctive or attractively designed books, but have never
had any problems in attracting best-selling authors to
their list; and yet for many writers the ‘look’ and ‘image’
of a prospective publisher matters almost as much as an
advance or a sympathetic editor when deciding where
to place a book. Balancing the demands of author and
publisher, content and the marketplace is a far more
complicated business than it was back in the 1930s,
when branding and corporate images prevailed.
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

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.
JOHN GRAY’s next book, Black Mass:
Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of
Utopia, is published by Penguin in July.
LESLIE MITCHELL is Emeritus Fellow
of University College, Oxford. His
most recent publications include a life
of Bulwer-Lytton and a study of the
Whig Party entitled The Whig World.
A NDREW R OBERTS ’s most recent
book, A History of the English
Speaking Peoples Since 1900, is pub-
lished by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
BRENDA MADDOX’s Freud’s Wizard:
The Enigma of Ernest Jones will be pub-
lished by John Murray in September.
JANE RIDLEY is writing a biography
of King Edward VII, to be published
by Chatto & Windus.
CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor
of International Relations at the
London School of Economics and
author of several books on interna-
tional security.
D AVID K YNASTON ’s Austerity
Britain:1945–51 is published by
Bloomsbury.
PETER PARSONS’s City of the Sharp-
Nosed Fish, concerning the papyrus
fragments of Oxyrhynchus, is pub-
lished by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
D ONALD R AYFIELD is Emeritus
Professor of Russian and Georgian
at Queen Mary University of
London, and author of Stalin and his
Hangmen (Penguin, 2005).
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 J EREMY L EWIS
BIOGRAPHY 4 L ESLIE M ITCHELL Robert Peel: A Biography Douglas Hurd
6 J A N E R I D L E Y William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great
Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner William Hague
8 A N D R E W R O B E R T S Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769–1799
Philip Dwyer
9 J O N A T H A N M I R S K Y John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His
Politics, His Economics Richard Parker
11 BRENDA MADDOX Einstein: His Life and Universe Walter Isaacson
12 SARAH WISE The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver,
Racketeer and Psychopath Charles van Onselen
FOREIGN PARTS 14 JASON BURKE Travels with Herodotus Ryszard Kapuscinski
15 DONALD RAYFIELD A Russian Diary Anna Politkovskaya
Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1 Timothy Phillips Russia’s
Islamic Threat Gordon M Hahn
18 TOM STACEY Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart
Tim Butcher
MEMOIRS & LETTERS 20 JOHN GRAY The Islamist Ed Husain
21 PAUL JOHNSON The Letters of A E Housman (Ed) Archie Burnett
23 DAVID KYNASTON Clever Girl: A Sentimental Education Brian Thompson
24 LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir A M Homes
FICTION I 26 JOHN DUGDALE You Don’t Love Me Yet Jonathan Lethem
27 HUGH CECIL The Children of Húrin J R R Tolkien
28 CHRISTOPHER ROSS After Dark Haruki Murakami
29 JOHN DE FALBE Between Each Breath Adam Thorpe
30 FRANCIS KING Michael Tolliver Lives Armistead Maupin
31 AMANDA CRAIG The Road Home Rose Tremain
32 P HILIP W OMACK Barnaby Grimes Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
HISTORY 32 C H R I S T O P H E R C O K E R Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That
Changed the World, 1940–1941 Ian Kershaw
34 A LLAN M ASSIE Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 Hanna Diamond
35 PIERS BRENDON Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to
Decolonisation, 1916–1968 Ronald Hyam
36 PETER PARSONS Farewell Britannia: A Family Saga of Roman
Britain Simon Young
38 J OHN J OLLIFFE Return of the King: The Restoration of
Charles II Charles Fitzroy
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Assistant Editor: PHILIP WOMACK
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 344
2
 JUNE 2007

SHORT STORY 39 C LAIRE K EEGAN Surrender JASON BURKE is a foreign correspon-

dent for The Observer. His latest book
is On the Road to Kandahar: Travels
ARCADIA 44 C HARLES E LLIOTT The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the
through Conflict in the Muslim World.
English Landscape Garden Tim Richardson
45 H UGH M ASSINGBERD The Park: The Story of the Open SARAH W ISE is the author of The
Air Theatre, Regent’s Park David Conville Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery
in 1830s London (Pimlico). Her
investigation of late nineteenth-cen-
GENERAL 46 MICHAEL BURLEIGH The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the
tury East London poverty, The
Nuclear Poor William Langewiesche Blackest Streets, will be published
47 GILLIAN TINDALL Full of Soup and Gold: The Life of Henry Jermyn next year.
Anthony Adolph West End Chronicles: Three Hundred Years of
Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London PIERS BRENDON’s The Decline and
Fall of the British Empire is published
48 SIMON HEFFER The Buildings of England: Essex James
by Jonathan Cape.
Bentley and Nikolaus Pevsner
50 J OHN M C E WEN L S Lowry: A Life Shelley Rohde M ICHAEL B URLEIGH is a
51 A C G RAYLING At the Same Time Susan Sontag Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the
52 W ILLIAM P ALMER Anacaona: The Amazing Adventures of Hoover Institution, Stanford
University. He is currently working
Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band Alicia Castro, with
on a history of terrorism.
Ingrid Kummels
G ILLIAN T INDALL ’s The Fields
FICTION II 53 S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE What is the What Dave Eggers Beneath: The History of One London
54 SAM LEITH Darkmans Nicola Barker Village was first published in 1977
and is still in print. Her book about
55 G ILL H ORNBY When We Were Romans Matthew Kneale
the oldest house on Bankside, The
56 S IMON W ILLIS Julius Winsome Gerard Donovan House By the Thames, is published
57 S IMON B AKER ON F IRST N OVELS by Chatto & Windus.
58 L EO B ENEDICTUS The Secrets of the Chess Machine Robert Löhr
AMANDA CRAIG is the author of five
novels, including A Vicious Circle
SILENCED VOICES 59 LUCY POPESCU
and Love in Idleness. Her new novel,
CRIME 60 JESSICA MANN about immigrants in London, will be
POETRY 62 published next year.
AUDIOBOOK 63 SUSAN CROSLAND
LETTERS 19 CHRISTOPHER ROSS’s latest book,
Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a
Samurai Legend, was published in
CLASSIFIEDS 64 paperback by Harper Perennial in
CROSSWORD 25 2006 and in its American edition was
BOOKSHOP 18 selected as a Notable Book of 2007
by the judges of the Kiriyama Prize,
the major Pacific Rim literary award.

CLAIRE KEEGAN is an award-winning

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

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3
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY

L ESLIE M ITCHELL

HIGH POLITICS
ROBERT P EEL : A B IOGRAPHY
★
By Douglas Hurd
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 416pp £20)

POLITICIANS WHO FIND themselves out of office for a

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

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

 BIOGRAPHY

man’s strength lay in an unlimited capacity
for work, a very good mind and a devotion
to statistics as the basis of policy. As he
himself asserted, ‘There is nothing like a
fact. Facts are ten times more valuable than
declamations’, a point which Hurd, having
spent ‘a few days’ among the Home Office
Papers at Kew, fir mly takes on board.
Detailed accounts of Peel’s rationalisation
of the criminal law are alone sufficient to
make this plain. To this example could be
added the intelligent labour that Peel con-
tributed to the bullion question, the mys-
teries of Irish politics and the establishment
of constabularies. Hurd honours all these
initiatives from the perspective of someone
who knows just how often the dutiful
politician can be thwarted. Peel: a cold, odd man
When Peel answered dogma with facts
and figures, he was claiming a privileged role in politics,
because he was asking to be relieved, at crucial
moments, of party responsibilities. Often he talked of
representing a ‘national interest’, which was a greater
priority than any sectional agenda. It is the language of a
senior civil servant who has taken a wrong turning and
found himself in politics. Peel’s first years in office were
those of repeated crises. Napoleon, bankruptcy and
insurrection had all to be defeated. In such times a
‘national interest’ was visible to most people, and it was
reasonable to frame a code of politics around it.
Unfortunately, when threats receded, party considera-
tions reasserted themselves, and Peel’s words came to
look like an excuse for self-indulgence.
Predictably, however, it is the great parliamentary
occasions that are most colourfully described in this
book. On Catholic Emancipation, on Parliamentary
Reform, and on Corn Law Repeal, the Conservatives
sniped and snapped at each other with an intensity that
Peel’s double-first-class mind could barely comprehend.
His claim that, ‘if necessities were so pressing as to
demand it, there was no dishonour in relinquishing
opinions’, could not be accepted by Tory fundamental-
ists, for whom politics was a matter of belief, not admin-
istration. Hurd has met this problem himself, and writes
about it with a nice sense of personal involvement. This
is high politics written by a high politician.
Less successful is Hurd’s attempt to rehabilitate Peel as
a man with warm blood in his veins. Noting that most
contemporaries agreed with Queen Victoria’s descrip-
Peel more human, if only within the nar-
row confines of a family circle. One would
like to know more. Apart from this, the
case is thin. Peel was a connoisseur of
Dutch painting, and put together a
remarkable collection of canvases. He
enjoyed building houses, but showed a
taste that the charitable might call eclectic.
Above all, he shot game. Among his
favourite statistics were precise enumera-
tions of the daily bag.
As the footnotes suggest, this biography
depends heavily on pr inted mater ials.
Inevitably therefore, its conclusions are not
intended to change established views of
Peel. To do that, many manuscript collec-
tions would have had to be consulted. As a
result, this is not a book for the student or
the professional historian. With a good
conscience they can, for the moment, go on wrestling
with Professors Gash and Boyd Hilton. For those, how-
ever, who like their history to be less demanding, and
not too overwhelmed by Victorian theology and eco-
nomics, this book will meet the case splendidly. It is just
the thing for long journeys. It will no doubt find an
honoured place in the Library of the House of Lords.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
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Julie A. Carlson £33.50 hardcover

tion of Peel as ‘a cold, odd man’, he tries hard to evoke

sympathy, if not affection, for his subject. Unusually for THE JOHNS HOPKINS
his time, Peel was the most uxorious of men, devoted to UNIVERSITY PRESS
wife and children and careful in his behaviour. ‘Dipping Distributed by John Wiley
into’ the ‘huge number of letters’ that passed between Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu
husband and wife, Hurd is able, to some extent, to make

5
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
J ANE R IDLEY
THE RIGHTEOUS REFORMER
W ILLIAM W ILBERFORCE : T HE L IFE OF THE
G REAT A NTI -S LAVE T RADE C AMPAIGNER
★ and for the rest of his life he was a martyr to this debilitat-
By William Hague
(HarperPress 592pp £25)
ONCE BARELY NOTICED, the history of the anti-slavery
campaign has gathered such momentum that it has now
become the central narrative of Our Island Story. The
hero of this tale is William Wilberforce, and a new biog-
raphy is overdue. Wilberforce’s struggle to ban slavery
has been dramatised in the biopic
Amazing Grace. Now, nicely timed for
the bicentenary year, William Hague
has written his life.
The story of William Wilberforce
(1759–1833) is an extraordinary one.
The heir to a Hull merchant’s fortune,
he became an MP at the age of twen-
ty-one, was best mates with the
younger Pitt and a rich young man
about town until the age of twenty-six,
when he underwent a classic
Evangelical conversion experience and
vowed to dedicate himself to moral
refor mation. Influenced by John
Newton, the ex-slaver sea captain
turned abolitionist man of God, and
also by Pitt himself , Wilberforce
resolved to work within the world
rather than withdraw into private life.
Encouraged by Pitt, he introduced a
motion for the abolition of the slave Wilberforce: life and soul of the party
trade in 1789, making an epic three-
and-a-half-hour speech: henceforth it became the lead-
ing crusade of his life. He was not yet thirty.
Hague tells this story of youthful success vividly and
with empathy – after all, his own life story is not all that
different: he too is a Yorkshireman who became a star
speaker and political prodigy. Wilberforce’s greatest
political asset was his parliamentary oratory, and Hague
analyses this illuminatingly. He has an innate under-
standing of parliamentary manoeuvres, of the energising
effect of the election campaigns that Wilberforce fought
as a member for the high-prestige county seat of
Yorkshire. He is good, too, on the enduring and rather
touching friendship between Wilberforce, who was a
tiny five foot four, and Pitt, who stood a foot taller.
There are tricks which Hague misses. For example, it’s
surely significant that Wilberforce, along with other anti-
6
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
slavers, came from Hull, which traded with the Baltic,
while pro-slavery MPs such as Bamber Gascoyne were
Liverpudlians, defending their vested interests in the
Atlantic slave-trade triangle. Also, when Wilberforce was
on the brink of launching his abolitionist campaign his
health broke down. He seems to have suffered from a
stress-related illness, usually diagnosed as ulcerative colitis,
ing bowel disease. He treated it with opium, and became
a lifelong opium addict. Hague tells us that this was the
only medication available at the time, which is no doubt
true; but he could have done more to explore the effects
of long-term opium use on Wilberforce’s mind and body.
Wilberforce ate very little and counted his alcohol units
(three glasses of wine daily and never more than six) as
part of his Evangelical regime; but if he was meanwhile
using opium this abstemiousness was
slightly less of a feat.
Wilberforce was a man of great per-
sonal charm. Privately, in his diary, he
agonised about his backsliding, his
time-wasting or his failure to pray, but
with his friends he was always gregari-
ous, a wonderful conversationalist, the
life and soul of the party. Hague tells
endearing stories about Wilberforce’s
chaotic lack of organisation, his
mountains of unanswered correspon-
dence, the sacks full of letters which
he would drag around with him to
answer. His house was filled with
guests all day long, and people queued
to see him in the street. He travelled
with a huge retinue of servants, many
of whom were useless, but he could
never bear to sack anyone. Hague
paints a memorable picture of the vet-
eran campaigner, prematurely stooped,
pockets bulg ing with books and
papers, scribbling feverishly as he sat listening to debates
in the House. But Hague could do more to explain the
contrast between Wilberforce and his acolytes, the Saints
of the Clapham Sect – priggish, earnest killjoys who alas
had far more influence on the moral tone of Victorian
England than their leader.
Being a politician perhaps means that Hague is overly
conscious of the importance of protecting privacy, or per-
haps he’s just too nice – but as a biographer he is strangely
lacking in nosiness. It would be good to know more, for
instance, about the sources of Wilberforce’s almost inex-
haustible income, much of which he gave away to charity,
but none of which he earned. Then there’s his marriage.
His wife Barbara Spooner, the daughter of a Birmingham
merchant, was eighteen years younger than him.
Wilberforce proposed a week after they met and within
 BIOGRAPHY
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research

Introductory Course: Freud-Lacan -

six weeks they were man and wife. He was then thirty- The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis -
seven. This is all a bit rum, but Hague tells us nothing
about Wilberforce’s previous sexual experiences or lack of
them. Barbara disliked entertaining and was not much Sept 2007 – July 2008
liked; Dorothy Wordsworth thought her shy, whiny and
self-righteous. If the marriage worked, as Hague says it The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research
did, this needs a bit more explaining.
The truth is, Hague is not really interested in what
offers a one year introduction to the fundamental
went on in Wilberforce’s bedroom or his medicine concepts of psychoanalysis. It examines Freudian
chest. This is straight political biography, the story of the concepts of psychoanalysis and introduces some of
life and times. Sometimes there’s just too much about Lacan’s central theories. Topics include Female
the times. Hague tells us, for example, that the eigh- Sexuality, Anxiety and Phobia, the Phantasy, and the
teenth century ‘saw the arrival of what has subsequently
been termed the “Age of Enlightenment”’, and he then
Drive. The course consists of a series of lectures,
laboriously explains what this was, going back to Isaac complemented by a reading group and tutorials. It
Newton & co (perhaps Wikipedia hasn’t arrived in can be followed by a clinical training in
Yorkshire?). For Hague the life of Wilberforce is primar- psychoanalysis.
ily the story of the campaign against the slave trade.
Doggedly Wilberforce presented his motion year after
year, but the anti-slavery cause was rendered hopeless by
the French Revolution, and Wilberforce eventually tri-
umphed only in 1807 after a campaign of almost twenty
Annual Conference 2007
years. Hague gives a detailed and informed analysis of Children’s Minds:
the skilled parliamentary manoeuvring and tactics that
allowed Wilberforce to carry his great reform in 1807. New Perspectives on Autism
For Hague, abolition was to a great extent the result of
Wilberforce’s ability to persuade Parliament of the moral
case against slavery. Saturday 7 July 2007
This is classic old-style Whig history – parliamentary-
political, present-minded, handing out marks to those 10.00 am – 5.30 pm (registration 9.30 am)
on the r ight side of prog ress. Never mind that
Wilberforce’s motives were religious not political. Play Entrance fee: £40 (Concessions: £30)
down the fact that Wilberforce sweated blood for slaves
he had never seen, but supported Pitt’s measures sup-
pressing political protest, backed the Combination Laws Venue: Lecture Theatre B01, Clore Management Centre,
banning trade unions and showed little interest in the Birkbeck College,
child factory slaves in his own Yorkshire backyard. 27-29 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL
Guardianistas will trounce Hague for writing patronising
white man’s history which discounts the role of the
Africans themselves, underestimating the impact of the
slave rebellions in Saint-Dominique (Haiti), where the
white men were massacred and the slaves formed their For full details of all CFAR programmes and the
own republic. Abolishing the slave trade was a way of conference please visit our website or contact:
making a virtue out of necessity and recognising the
reality that slavery was a high-risk liability. Tel: 0845 838 0829
But these criticisms are really beside the point. Hague
is a politician, and he writes history in the way that Email: admin@cfar.demon.co.uk
politicians from Macaulay to Winston Churchill have
always written it. This is history with a political pur- CFAR is a registered charity no 1085368
pose: to connect the present with the past. Free-flowing, CFAR is a Member of the United Kingdom Council
authoritative and absorbing, he deserves to be read, part- for Psychotherapy
ly as a counter to those politicians such as Tony Blair
who have no sense of historical process, but above all Website: www.cfar.org.uk
because he tells a good story and tells it well.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18 Public lecture details available on website

LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

 BIOGRAPHY

A NDREW R OBERTS French democracy was

clever, energetic, ambi-

AN EMPEROR APPARENT tious and, as Dwyer

regularly emphasises, a
genius at self-publicity.
N APOLEON : T HE PATH TO P OWER In the era before effi-
1769–1799 cient mass communica-
★ tion, propaganda was
By Philip Dwyer even more vital than in
(Bloomsbury 651pp £20) the days of Dr
Goebbels, or even in
W RITING A BIOGRAPHY of the Emperor Napoleon the present day. Up to
requires an ambition that is, well, Napoleonic. the Brumaire coup and
Fortunately, few people alive know as much about for a decade beyond,
Napoleon Bonaparte as Philip Dwyer, biographer of Napoleon understood
Talleyrand and Senior Lecturer in Modern European how to spin every event
History at the University of Newcastle in Australia. This from his life to create a
life of his hero in two volumes – of which The Path to myth. Nowhere was Napoleon: master of spin
Power is the first – is the work that Dwyer was placed on this more evident than
earth to write. This book ends with its subject barely after his disastrous invasion of Egypt. Relying on the fact
thirty years old, at the time of the Brumaire coup of that little news got back to France through the British-
November 1799, but includes over one hundred pages dominated Mediterranean, he somehow managed to per-
of notes and bibliography that testify to Dwyer’s tremen- suade the French that the Egyptian campaign had been a
dous scholarship. We are thus clearly in the presence of military, cultural and political victory. The truth – that he
what will be a monumental work. had left his stranded and beleaguered forces in the desert
Because Dwyer is so expert in the secondary material to dash back to Paris – did not start percolating through
of the Napoleonic epic as well as the primary, he is able to France until after his successful coup d’état.
to sum up every issue, telling us what historians have The Napoleon who emerges from Dwyer’s pages is psy-
said about each problem as it arises. Usually he judi- chologically a deeply complex person, who if he had not
ciously comes down on one side or the other, although become First Consul of France would have made a fine
occasionally he just leaves it up to the reader to decide. lifetime’s study for a pre-Freudian shrink. The young
Did Napoleon’s mother sleep with Corsica’s governor, Bonaparte seems to have despised his lightweight father
the Comte de Marbeuf (effectively in order to pay the Carlo, who died when Napoleon was fifteen, because he
boy’s school-fees)? Did Napoleon fall into a ditch at the had turned quisling against the Corsican nationalist leader
battle of Arcola? Did he have such a tough time at Paoli. (Carlo must have had some qualities, however, as he
school as he subsequently claimed? Did he lose his vir- had been appointed private secretary to the brilliant and
ginity to a Palais-Royal prostitute? Dwyer lets you know charismatic Paoli, a shrewd judge of men.) Napoleon
what contemporaries believed, then what historians might also have suspected Carlo to have been cuckolded
think, and finally what he himself reckons. by Marbeuf, but Dwyer is rightly reticent on this subject
Of course there is far less reliable evidence of as there is so little evidence at this distance of time. Just as
Napoleon’s earlier life than later on, when the eyes of Napoleon sought to magnify himself throughout his life,
the world were fastened and his supporters carried on
upon him, gazing half in as diligent curators of his leg-
admiration, half in admon- end long after his death, so
ishment, but always in aston- too did Napoleon’s enemies
ishment. Yet what we have find ingenious ways to detract
of the early period, Dwyer – from his myth, and an adul-
who was tutored by the MA Degree in Biography terous mother might simply
Starting January 2007
g reatest living Napoleon Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or have been one of their inven-
scholar, Jean Tulard – has two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first tions. Small wonder therefore
fully mastered. The thirty- postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. that Dwyer steps warily.
year-old who brought off – Course director: Jane Ridley Carlo’s early death from
though not without some Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at stomach cancer made
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
very scary moments – the Tel: 01280 814080
Napoleon – not the eldest
Brumaire coup against child – the effective head of

8
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
the family and its ultimate provider, at a cruelly young
age. If Carlo Bonaparte had had a complicated, tempes-
tuous relationship with Paoli, so too did his son. Finding
himself teased at school for his strong Corsican accent
(one chapter is perceptively entitled ‘A Corsican in
France, a Frenchman in Corsica’), Napoleon did what
any red-blooded schoolboy would do and became yet
prouder and more defensive of his heritage. He did this
by idolising Paoli and romantic Corsican nationalism, a
view he only grew out of after the Revolution.
The fall of the Bastille, and Napoleon’s adoption of
the political views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom he
saw as a misunderstood foreign prophet like himself),
suddenly left the young meteor with both the opportu-
nity to get on in life and a philosophy that seemed to
make sense of it. Under the Ancien Régime a lad with
so tenuous a claim to aristocracy as Napoleon – his
mother had eked the necessary paperwork out of
Marbeuf – might have had to wait decades before attain-
ing any serious military command. With the mass exo-
dus of aristocrats under the shadow of the guillotine
during the Terror, promotion was rapid for anyone with
a hint of promise. As Dwyer shows, Napoleon had more
than just that, as well as the willingness to put in the
long hours necessary to shine in the brave new world of
Revolutionary France. As well as pursuing his military
studies – especially historical biography – Napoleon read
widely in the greats of modern French literature.
One of the problems of Napoleon-biography – and
there is an entire wall of the London Library crammed
with nothing but such books – is that the author needs
simultaneously to be a diplomatic, social, but above all a
military historian, as well as to possess the subtler skills
of a biographer. Fortunately Dwyer’s accounts of the
Italian and Egyptian campaigns are as good as his evoca-
tion of Napoleon’s evolving character and beliefs. On
some issues – such as whether Napoleon was socially
awkward in youth as the Duchess d’Abrantes main-
tained, or was in fact rather jolly as other contempo-
raries averred – Dwyer’s academic objectivity is simply
too strong to allow him to take sides.
‘Women were, in his eyes, fortresses to be stormed
with all the vigour and enthusiasm that could be mus-
tered, and were all the more desirable for being unob-
tainable.’ The story of Napoleon’s love-life – which itself
takes up about a quarter of that wall in St James’s Square
– is dealt with in a wholly scholarly and objective man-
ner. Even after relating Napoleon’s own account of the
loss of his virginity in the autumn of 1787, Dwyer warns
us that ‘it is entirely possible that the account is fictional,
nothing more than a fanciful exercise of the pen’. It is
ver y much unlike, therefore, this meticulously
researched and well-written first volume, which leaves
the reader keenly anticipating the second.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
9
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
A GIANT AMONG PYGMIES
J OHN K ENNETH G ALBRAITH : H IS L IFE , H IS
P OLITICS, H IS E CONOMICS
★
By Richard Parker
(Old Street Publishing 822pp £25)
THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL is an increasingly rare species.
I don’t mean academic celebrities with their television
series and regular op-ed columns. Public intellectuals are
men or women of considerable intellectual attainment,
usually professors at the older universities, who are also
committed to public service where their wisdom and
experience are admired and their judgement sought.
Such figures need not be politically neutral; indeed, they
may fall out with political leaders who come to dislike
their blunt advice, perhaps given in private and public.
In this country, John Maynard Keynes was a public
intellectual, admired at Cambridge as more than an
economist – he made King’s College rich and encour-
aged the arts in many forms. On both sides of the
Atlantic his economic advice was incorporated in the
highest affairs of state, while in academia ‘Keynesianism’
was adopted as a mantra: even Richard Nixon claimed
he was a Keynesian, although he didn’t know what
it meant.
In America there was John Kenneth Galbraith, who
died last year, aged ninety-seven, a year after this stupen-
dous biography was published there. He was Keynes’s
equal in public life, although he was not as creative as an
economist. A Harvard professor, he was additionally an
important official under Roosevelt and Truman, advisor
to Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, ambassador to India,
author of well over forty books – some of them best-
sellers – and thousands of articles, and a friend of the
very rich and famous. A six-foot-eight farm boy from
Canada with a liberal, public-spirited father, Galbraith
conceived his supreme goal which was to drag the poor
into better lives so that they could participate in shaping
the decent society he described in his best writing.
What singled Galbraith out from most other econo-
mists of his and later generations, as Richard Parker says
in his always lucid prose, was his assertion that ‘economic
issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics,
politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultane-
ously, that the work of economics is far messier than the
blackboard models that claim hegemony’. Throughout
his career this conviction often attracted – as was the
case with Keynes, Galbraith’s life-long inspiration – the
contempt of some professional colleagues.
I can’t imagine anyone tackling the life and times of
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY

Galbraith again after this huge, compre-
hensive, admir ing but fair book.
Richard Parker, a fellow of Harvard’s
Kennedy School (I declare an interest: I
spent a term there a few years ago),
describes how Galbraith always swam
against the current, and not just the
one in his particular field. Asked by
Roosevelt to estimate the efficacy of
the strategic bombing of Germany and
Japan, Galbraith enraged the service
chiefs by showing that war production
in both countr ies rose despite the
bombing, which deliberately slaugh-
tered countless civilians. At Harvard he
defended colleagues who lost their jobs
because of their politics, and during the
Vietnam War he antagonised his fellow
professors by defending student
demonstrations against the university
and some of its guests. At the State Department
Galbraith urged negotiation and cooperation with the
Soviet Union, rather than preparation for war against it.
A close friend of the Kennedys, he bombarded the
President, for whom he had written speeches, with
warnings of where the Vietnam War was heading and
entreated him to abandon any thought of victory.
Always as witty as he was trenchant, he told Kennedy
that if 250,000 American soldiers (that number would
soon double) couldn’t defeat fifteen to eighteen thou-
sand guerrillas, ‘the United States would hardly be safe
against the Sioux’. In 1965, when President Johnson was
floundering ever more deeply into the Vietnam quag-
mire, Galbraith wrote (in words that would be appropri-
ate now, both in Washington and London), ‘People are
tired of the litany of our foreign policy – with its endless
calls for vigilance, the pious assertions of our own
virtue, the continuing assurances that we are tough-
minded and hard-headed and will never allow our better
instincts to prevail.’
But the US saddened Galbraith in the last period of
his life. He was, Parker
were without health insurance while
the thousand richest Americans had
combined incomes which ‘exceeded
the GDP of dozens of poor countries’.
By the Reagan–Bush Sr years, ‘one
out of five American children was
bor n into poverty’. Galbraith,
‘notwithstanding the elegant detach-
ment he still affected, was irate’.
Detachment. That was the hallmark
of Galbraith’s inner self . But in
1952–53 he felt that ‘some cord –
something vitally connecting my past
with the present – had snapped’. For
months he languished in depression
and heavy drinking, afflicted by a
‘sense of permanent darkness’. He
could barely teach. This crisis ended
Galbraith: advisor to Kennedy (it recurred occasionally) with a six-
month, thirty-countr y solo tr ip
around the world. Such constant travelling and writing –
a kind of mania, it seems to me – was life-long, and its
roots remain opaque. This is not a criticism of Parker.
Galbraith was the son of Scotch-Canadian farmers, men
and women who, to put it perhaps too generally, were
unreflective straight-shooters. He lived in and through
his work. That work and his opinions were the man. I
can’t imagine him reading Freud or Proust, and if he did
it would be to see how they operated as writers. One of
his favourite authors was Trollope, in whose wonderful
novels (Galbraith himself wrote unremarkable romans-à-
clef), of course, the characters reveal themselves by their
acts, not by reference to their inner lives.
But compared to the Nobel winners in economics
(brainy pygmies, many of them), Galbraith was a giant.
The economist Amartya Sen, a Nobel non-pygmy, told
a Harvard audience in 2000 that he read Galbraith’s
American Capitalism almost fifty years earlier in a Calcutta
coffeehouse. What Galbraith wrote about power and its
possibilities for social advancement struck Sen as vitally
important, and that sense, he said, never left him. To
Galbraith, Parker says,

NEW AUTHORS
observes, ‘isolated from the ‘Understanding the material
academic mainstream’. The world was, as it was for
mathematicians were firmly PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED Keynes, not the goal but the
in the saddle, despite the Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena means by which to realise a
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time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
dream’. Richard Parker has
Kahneman’s showing that less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing done a great thing: he pre-
most ordinary people reject- houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. sents here a champion of
ed the mainstream econo- We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary principle, political action,
mists’ certainty of ‘rational and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic,
spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others.
and courage, whose deepest
choice’ in their economic spr ings we cannot see. A
behaviour. In the r ichest Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS public intellectual.
country ever, Galbraith con- QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK.
e-mail: info@athenapress.com www.athenapress.com
To order this book at £20, see
tended, 44 million citizens LR Bookshop on page 18

10
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
B RENDA M ADDOX
Maybe He Does
Play Dice
E INSTEIN : H IS L IFE AND U NIVERSE
★ clutch of prestigious offers, including membership of the
By Walter Isaacson
(Simon & Schuster 675pp £25)
W ITH HIS WILD hair, merry eyes, baggy T-shirt and
sockless ankles, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) looked the
way the world wants a scientist to look. ‘Why does
everybody love me when nobody understands me?’ he
puzzled. Some of the explanation for his celebrity may
lie in a gift for aphorism that has been compared to
Oscar Wilde’s.
As Walter Isaacson reminds us in this brilliant biogra-
phy, rich with newly available archival material, Einstein
was unquestionably a genius. His great
discoveries were the result of ‘thought
experiments’. No equipment needed.
Just an empty room and time to think.
What might it be like to ride at the
speed of light beside a light beam?
This contemplative tactic led in 1905
to the special theory of relativity.
Einstein preceded it with four short
papers written between March and
June in which he analysed light as if it
were made up of point-like particles or
bundles of energy – not of continuous
waves. By September he had worked
out the relationship between speed and
mass and set it out in what became the
most famous equation in the history of
science: e=mc2. Energy, it says, equals
mass times the square of the speed of
light. The corollary was that a tiny
amount of matter, converted complete-
ly into energy, had enormous power.
Yet the genius still lacked a doctorate. Sage at home
Everything came late to this displaced
secular Jew. Born in south-western Germany to an
entrepreneurial family who later moved to northern
Italy, Einstein, after schooling in Munich, wangled a
place at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he was a good
but undistinguished student. He fell in love, gave up his
German citizenship and became Swiss. When his lover,
a fellow student and Serb mathematician, Mileva Maric,
became pregnant, he was desperate to find a job but
managed no better than a place at the Bern patent
11
office. The modest post at least left him time to think.
Not until 1909, after his famous equation, did he get a
professorship at all, at the University of Bern. He mar-
ried Maric but never saw the daughter she produced. A
few years and two sons later, having met his beautiful
and sophisticated cousin Elsa Löwenthal in Berlin, he
was seeking a divorce. As a lure, he promised Maric the
Nobel Prize money he knew would be his some day.
By 1913, eager to return to Berlin, he accepted a
Prussian Academy of Sciences. War notwithstanding, he
turned his thoughts to a general theory of gravitation.
This resulted in 1915 in his general theory of relativity,
which proclaimed that space and time are curved and
that the universe curves back on itself. When this theory
was confirmed by observations in a 1919 eclipse of the
sun, Einstein became a world celebrity with world head-
lines such as ‘Lights All Askew in the Heavens’ in the
New York Times. In 1919 also he married the patient Elsa.
By then the celebrity’s lack of a Nobel prize began to
embarrass the Nobel committee. Its trouble was that
Einstein’s genius lay in theorising, while the Stockholm
pundits, funded by the inventor of
dynamite, saw science as the product
of experiment. The solution in 1921
was to award Einstein the Nobel for
his discovery of a ‘law’ for the photo-
electr ic effect – how light was
absorbed and emitted in discrete
quanta. In 1922 the prize money, the
equivalent of $32,250, finally reached
his ex-wife.
The human side of the Einstein
story is sad. Einstein was not devoid
of feeling and had many affairs, but as
he once said, the scientist makes sci-
ence ‘the pivot of his emotional life,
in order to find in this way the peace
and security which he cannot find in
the narrow whirlpool of personal
experience’.
In Germany his relativity theory left
him open to the charge of producing
‘Jewish science’ with no fixed values.
Sensibly he left Ger many for the
United States at the end of 1932,
renouncing his German citizenship, and by October
1933 was settled happily in Princeton at the Institute for
Advanced Studies, where he spent the rest of his life.
His biographer, Walter Isaacson, director of the Aspen
Institute and former head of CNN and managing editor
of Time, has plumbed much fresh material, not least
Einstein’s letters and FBI files.
The most riveting passages concern Einstein’s role in
the development of the atomic bomb. His famous letter
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
of 1939 warned President Franklin D Roosevelt that the
chain reaction of uranium atoms could be harnessed to
make a powerful bomb. ‘This requires action’ Roosevelt
said. The result was that he immediately started the
Manhattan Project in a race to develop the bomb before
the Germans did. Ironically, and happily for Einstein,
essentially a pacifist, he was deemed a security risk and
allowed to remain at Princeton rather than sent to Los
Alamos. His FBI files show that the head of the FBI, J
Edgar Hoover, never trusted him.
In the spring of 1945, with Germany on the brink of
defeat and nowhere near a bomb of their own, Einstein
wrote another letter to Roosevelt, urging him to meet
with concerned scientists. Roosevelt died on 12 April,
never having read it. Nor did his successor, Harry
Truman, who went ahead and dropped the bomb any-
way, not once but twice. Einstein thereafter had to live
with the label, as Newsweek headlined, ‘The Man Who
Started It All’.
Isaacson tells this absorbing story by encompassing the
bits of theoretical physics in clear, short paragraphs just a
few sentences long. It must be admitted, however, that
his impressive skill and succinctness are insufficient to
enable the non-scientific reader to digest what has been
S ARAH W ISE
THE EMPEROR OF VICE
THE FOX AND THE FLIES: THE WORLD OF
JOSEPH SILVER, RACKETEER AND PSYCHOPATH
★ communities as extreme as ten males to one female. In
By Charles van Onselen
(Jonathan Cape 646pp £20)
IN 1978, THE author of this book, an academic based in
South Africa, first glimpsed the name Joseph Lis in a
late-Victorian newspaper cutting. Lis (meaning ‘fox’),
who later adopted the surname Silver, was a Polish-born
pimp and sex-trafficker extraordinaire – a violent,
syphilitic super-criminal, who during his thirty-year
career had the police forces and attorneys of several
cities in his pocket. Charles van Onselen has spent
almost three decades hunting the Fox through the
archives of four continents, and the result of his
researches is a book that is profoundly unsettling, con-
taining virtually no acts of kindness or decency. It cata-
logues crimes of relentless brutality and lifts many stones
to reveal a subculture so squalid that reading The Fox and
the Flies, you feel you want to take your brain out and
scrub it.
‘White-slave trading’ was the melodramatic and inac-
curate fin-de-siècle name for the trafficking of poor
and/or vulnerable women to brothels in Continental
12
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
explained.
Even so, Isaacson is very comprehensible on the later
development of Einstein’s theories. Always a loner,
Einstein did not follow his fellow physicists into the next
theoretical jump, into quantum physics. He simply could
not accept Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
enunciated in 1927. In this, Heisenberg declared that it
was possible to know either the position or the momen-
tum of an electron but not both. Moreover, he said, the
electron had neither property until it was observed. In
other words, there was no objective reality, only observa-
tion. This concept of an either/or universe was too wob-
bly for Einstein. He dismissed the uncertainty principle
with his most famous aphorism, God ‘does not play dice’.
But he did not believe in a personal God. Always loyal
to his Jewish origins, he also remained sceptical of
ardent Zionism. In 1948 he turned down the offer of
the presidency of the new state of Israel. Until his death
at Princeton in 1955 he worked hard against nationalism
and for peace, and kept on searching for a unified theory
that would bring together relativity theory and quantum
mechanics. Would it dismay or satisfy him that we still
do not have it yet?
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18
Europe, the Americas, southern Africa and across Asia.
To its perpetrators, women ranked only just above the
animals – a non-hardy form of livestock to be traded,
controlled, abandoned and even slaughtered if that were
more expedient. The mass migrations of males to the
industrial and mining boom-towns of the late nine-
teenth century led to gender imbalances in these new
such rapidly expanding cities as Pittsburgh,
Johannesburg and Kimberley, policing and the judiciary
failed to evolve quickly enough to deal with their
volatile new populations. Border controls and immigra-
tion policies for the most part did not exist, or were
poorly implemented, and white-slave traders were easily
able to out-run bureaucratic attempts to trace who was
going where, and why.
Silver was born in 1868 in Kielce, halfway between
Warsaw and Krakow, in Tsarist ‘Russian Poland’. His
burglarious family were a source of shame and disgrace
to fellow Jews in the town. He left for England when he
was sixteen, arriving, it is believed, in East London in
1885. For the next thirty years, he founded various small
vice empires across ‘the Atlantic World’, raping, beating
and psychologically torturing as a routine part of his
procurement procedure, and supplying girls for the bur-
geoning brothels of the boom-towns: the Fox’s trail
leads to New York, Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Cape
Town, Bloemfontein, Paris and Antwerp as he and his
cohorts crossed and re-crossed the ocean on the
steamships that had made international travel affordable
 BIOGRAPHY

and unprecedentedly swift. photo identification, by increasing anti-vice agitation in

The white-slave trade was the press, and by immigration policy and international
dominated by French crimi- accords to stamp out sex-trafficking.
nals; but close behind in Van Onselen invokes the latest findings of psychiatry
‘over-representation’ in this to help ‘explain’ the Fox himself, and – more specifically
crime (to use modern soci- – to present the more crowd-pleasing aspect of his book.
ological parlance) were For it is posited that Silver was Jack the Ripper. It’s an
Eastern European Jews, audacious claim, and it hangs by extremely slender
moving westwards in the threads. Van Onselen is unable even to prove that Silver
late nineteenth and early was in Whitechapel in 1888, and constructs the case
twentieth centuries as they against the Fox from his proven violent misogyny and
fled increasingly violent per- psychopathy; his deep involvement in the lives of prosti-
secution. Van Onselen tutes; his later evasions about his movements in 1888
could not have written so (though he lied about many things); and from an inge-
comprehensively about nious reading of five Ripper crime scenes as illustrative
Silver: the pits white-slaving, and probed of the Book of Ezekiel’s advice on how prostitutes
so forensically, if he had should be dealt with. More convincingly, Silver’s appear-
suppressed this aspect of the trade – one made devastating ance largely matched the description given by the only
use of by anti-Semites then and subsequently. But he person to have seen the Ripper full-face (George
explores with sympathy why the centuries-long vilification Hutchinson, who stood at the end of Miller’s Court on
and marginalisation of an entire race could drive some of the night of Mary Kelly’s evisceration, and was glared at
its members into antisocial and criminal activity – barred by a well-dressed man ‘of Jewish appearance’, who
as they were from so many legitimate trades, forms of passed up the Court with Kelly). ‘What then are you,
ownership and rights of settlement. The horror felt by members of history’s jury, to make of this case?’, van
more established, settled Jewish communities in Britain, Onselen asks, rather loftily, in his final chapter. This
France and the Americas about their Eastern European juror would have to plump for the Scottish verdict.
co-religionists’ level of involvement in vice led them to To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
make strenuous efforts to stamp it out – but little credit
would be accorded them, as van Onselen points out.
If Flaubert was correct that writing history is drinking
an ocean and pissing a cupful, van Onselen’s cup runneth
over, and it’s a top-quality brew. The underworlds of
eleven cities at the turn of the century are laid bare, and
not the least feat of this book is its detailed description of
the mechanics of corruption – precisely how criminals and
the authorities fed off each other, and how it was that
organised crime got itself organised. Local-government
structures – rather than parliamentary activity and party
politics – determine the nature of civic life, and van
Onselen has rightly shone his spotlight into these neglect-
ed and unfashionable corners of historical research.
In his appendix, ‘Clio and the Fox’, van Onselen
describes the difficulties of tracing habitual liars through
surviving documentation – people who went by several
aliases, with false birth-dates and invented autobiogra-
phies. And if, among the tumultuous events and variety
of locations related here, the personality of Silver is lost,
it is perhaps churlish to expect a historian to be able to
reconstruct the inner workings of a mind so pathologi-
cally unknowable. All that can be fruitfully undertaken
by a historian – and van Onselen does it well – is to
chart how society accommodated itself around such a
deadly, insatiable creature as Silver. Over his lifetime
(1868–1918), his activities would be increasingly cir-
cumscribed by the development of fingerprinting and

13
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS

J ASON B URKE sets out, with

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

14
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
out into the world – and there are no other self-justifica-
tions.’ Nothing, as any honest correspondent will tell
you, is more true.
Two other themes preoccupy Kapuscinski. The first
is, unsurprisingly, the importance of words and of
language. As a young man, trying to work with little
success and less English in India, he had run headlong
into ‘the wall’ of a language that he did not speak. The
book is full of references to various languages, to identi-
ties based on languages, to differences based in language.
The second is history. Kapuscinski quotes long – per-
haps too long – chunks of Herodotus. Some are reveal-
ing. It is difficult not to read the Greek historian’s
account of how ‘the tight, rigid, monolithic’ Persian
armies – the superpower of the day – were outfought
and outfaced by the ‘loose, mobile, ever-shifting config-
urations of small tactical cells’ favoured by the Scythians
without thinking of an obvious contemporary parallel.
Elsewhere Kapuscinski talks of the ‘chronological
provincialism’ of those who are as limited in their his-
torical perspective as others might be geographically.
Recently there has been a fashion of picking factual
holes in Kapuscinski’s various accounts. There are
indeed mistakes (sometimes glaring), as you would
expect from a reporter working on the ground without
the benefit of decades of academic learning about a sub-
ject. There is always a tension between journalists work-
ing in the field and academic experts, many of whom
rarely visit the more far-flung corners of their supposed
areas of study and often do not themselves speak local
languages. The latter, possibly justifiably, begrudge the
fact that it is the reporters who essentially represent a
given place, nation, problem or question to a mass audi-
ence. But journalists are not academics; they work faster
and under rougher conditions than most university
researchers. Even those of the relative r igour of
Kapuscinski are far from infallible. Picking holes in his
narrative because he is mistaken on the exact practices of
certain Nile tribes seems more than a little churlish.
One criticism that is just is of Kapuscinski’s jarring
tendency to err into the worst sort of Eurocentric gen-
eralisation. In The Shadow of the Sun he wrote that ‘the
European and the African … have an entirely different
concept of time’. In Travels with Herodotus, he talks about
‘the Chinese’ and ‘the Indian’, the former naturally
inscrutable and the latter excitable or child-like. This is a
shame. Yet the simple fact remains that Kapuscinski was
more than a reporter and more than a writer. His spare,
stripped prose is a thing of beauty; like the Herodotus
he so affectionately describes, he was rigorous, curious
and, as he says explicitly in this book, always sought to
go beyond the spectacle and the spectacular to try and
understand the truth about what was happening in his
world. His last book is a fitting testament.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
15
D ONALD R AYFIELD
DISPATCHES FROM RUSSIA
A RUSSIAN D IARY
By Anna Politkovskaya
(Translated by Arch Tait)
(Harvill Secker 323pp £17.99)
B ESLAN : T HE T RAGEDY OF S CHOOL N O.1
By Timothy Phillips
(Granta Books 291pp £10.99)
RUSSIA ’ S I SLAMIC T HREAT
By Gordon M Hahn
(Yale University Press 349pp £25)
ANYONE WHO TAKES these books to heart will wonder
whether we are in a situation ominously similar to that of
1935, when the menace of Hitler’s Germany left the
bulk of Britain’s and America’s politicians completely
unperturbed. In one way we are worse off: at least dur-
ing the Thirties there was Winston Churchill, with the
necessary stature and persistence to go on crying wolf.
Now not one figure in our political establishment dares
utter a word. Even after killing Litvinenko and shame-
lessly leaving a trail of radioactivity across London,
Putin’s men have total impunity: a Russian hospital nurse
might be refused a visa by the British Consulate, lest she
seek work in the NHS, but an FSB killer – never. Our
cowardly politicians’ main mistake is to assume (as does
Gordon Hahn in his book) that we have only one enemy
– Islamic terrorism – and can therefore ignore Russia’s
reversion to brutal and totally corrupt autocracy. In any
case, a demonstration of moral courage might force our
government to look for other sources of gas and oil.
Anna Politkovskaya’s previous book, Putin’s Russia, is
very similar to her A Russian Diary. Like other reviewers, I
was struck by horror when she published that earlier book,
fairly sure that she would pay the highest possible price for
writing it. The posthumous Diary is perhaps even less of a
sustained argument: it is the reaction of a completely hon-
est and fearless journalist to the cynical lies that the
Russian authorities give in response to any questions from
the victims of the disasters and injustices they have visited
on the population, and a record of the evasiveness of other
Russian journalists and the utter depravity of Russia’s
politicians (including once promising young democrats
like Nemtsov) in the face of Putin’s threats. The Diary is
easy reading, in that it comes in short chunks and is very
well translated by Arch Tait, but it is hard to digest, since
Politkovskaya reacts to a number of different issues and
leaps from subject to subject.
Politkovskaya’s first topic is the conquest of Chechnya
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
by making it a fiefdom for Ramzan Kadyrov – as if Bush
and Blair had invaded Iraq and then handed it over to
Qusay and Uday Hussein to run. Chechnya has thus been
destroyed not just physically, but morally; while its ruling
clique is awash with billions of dollars, the ordinary popu-
lation dies of untreated TB, torture by Kadyrov’s thugs,
and the violence of drunken Russian soldiers.
The second, perhaps more hurtful, theme for the
diarist is the desertion of professional journalists and par-
liamentarians to the Putin camp, resulting in the total
disappearance of democracy in Russia: today’s Duma is
the Supreme Soviet, and today’s provincial governors are
just the same as the old Party secretaries. Politkovskaya
trembles for the few free spir its still left: Ir ina
Khakamada, who, like a number of women before her,
mistakenly considers herself less likely to be assassinated
than a man for the offence of garnering the support of 2
per cent of the population; and Garri Kasparov, whose
international status as a chess grandmaster will probably
delay the murder Putin’s men have in mind.
The third theme of Politkovskaya’s diary, perhaps the
most depressing of all, is the reluctance of the population,
except for the Soldiers’ Mothers’ organisation and those
bereaved by the catastrophes in the Nord-Ost theatre and
the Beslan school, to offer any resistance. Putin does not
need, any more than did Stalin, to liquidate his opponents:
the electorate will vote for the strong man. Politics in
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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
Russia is like sewage: the popula-
tion wants it to be taken care of
silently, without its participation.
The Beslan school siege of
2004, as a result of which a
handful of degenerate Ingush and
Chechen terrorists and a mass of
even more degenerate local
Ossetian and Russian federal
authorities must bear responsibil-
ity for the deaths of over 300 Politkovskaya: fearless
children and their parents and
teachers, makes some of the most disturbing pages in
Politkovskaya’s Diary. She herself, however, was prevented
first by poison and then by murder from investigating on
the spot. Timothy Phillips, on the other hand, has done a
heroic and, one might have thought for a foreigner,
impossible job: he has reconstructed from the testimony of
many hundreds of witnesses the hellish events of that
September, and produced a full list of the casualties (except
for the terrorists). His work is a fit memorial to the dead.
What is missing is, however, the crucial element: the wit-
nesses cannot provide a coherent or credible answer to the
questions of why and how the massacre was allowed to
happen. As they are nearly all Ossetians, their traditional
hatred of their Ingush neighbours provides implausible
explanations: Tsalieva, the headmistress, who tried to
maintain order and came out from the carnage with her
hairdo intact, is alleged to have been in cahoots with the
terrorists; General Ruslan Aushev, the head of the Ingush
until Putin replaced him with the FSB idiot Zyazikov, is
alleged to have entered the building not as an unarmed
and fearless negotiator, but as a conniving accomplice. As
for the succession of shootings and explosions that ended
the siege, it is impossible to know who began them – local
fathers with hunting rifles, FSB forces, or desperate (or
careless) terrorists. The essential truth we shall not know
for decades, not until Russia again emerges into a short
period of light when the archives are opened. The terror-
ists were, allegedly, shot, except for one man, who gave
the evidence the authorities asked him to. How the terror-
ists got through all the police checkpoints on the roads of
the North Caucasus, how they brought so many bombs
into the school, and with whose help, remains a mystery.
As with the siege of Nord-Ost, where the ‘rescuers’ man-
aged to kill 129 hostages and all the terrorist witnesses, we
can only be sure that the promised report will either never
be issued or will be a tissue of lies. In the meantime,
Timothy Phillips’s book provides the victims’ story. The
perpetrators have yet to be induced to tell theirs.
Gordon M Hahn’s Russia’s Islamic Threat is as strongly
motivated as Politkovskaya’s book and as well researched
as Phillips’s. Hahn has researched three areas particularly
closely: the republic of Tatarstan 400 miles east of
Moscow; the Kabarda-Balkar republic in the North
 FOREIGN PARTS
Caucasus (where there is antagonism between the aborig-
inal Kabarda Circassians, the Turkic Balkar, who have
lived there less than a millennium, and the Russian
colonists of the last 200 years); and Dagestan in the North
East Caucasus, where some thirty different ethnic units
have lived for centuries in a fractious and fragile society,
once under Persian and for the last two centuries under
Russian suzerainty. Hahn has studied every written source
and website (although there is no evidence of actual work
in the field) to conclude that Islam in these areas is mak-
ing such strides that it is a threat to Putin’s Russia and part
of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism.
It is true that whenever Chechens or Dagestanis have
had to rally their own people and their neighbours against
Russian oppression, they have done so under an Islamic
flag. It is also true that Dagestan has been a centre for
Islamic mysticism, especially Sufism, for generations.
Undoubtedly, individual Chechens have found their way
into Al-Qaeda’s camps. But any Caucasologist with a feel
for the area and its history will be sceptical about Hahn’s
arguments. One can just as easily search Russian websites
and conclude that a Jewish-Freemason conspiracy is taking
over Russia’s banks and universities, or that Nato has infil-
trated the Russian Army. Imams are not the only cranks
on the Internet. In fact, Islam in Tatarstan and the North
Caucasus is about as great a force as Christianity in
Tunbridge Wells. The real tension stems from national,
even clan, feuds and oppression. The Chechen resistance
was only as Islamic as, for example, the Algerian resistance
to French colonialism. Circassians and Chechens, if they
have any deep religion, are pagan animists; just as in the
tenth century they became Christian to gain Byzantine
protection, so now they wave Islamic flags to get Saudi
funding. I shall never forget a night in September 1990,
spent with a hundred or so Circassians, stuck overnight in
their Cadillacs between the Soviet and Turkish frontiers.
They had driven up from Jordan to visit their Circassian
cousins in the now moribund USSR, full of joy at being
reunited after the mass expulsions of Circassians in 1864.
To their horror they found their Caucasian relatives were
now no better than pagans or infidels. While all Jordanian
Circassians were good Muslims, Caucasian Circassians
enjoyed their vodka and wine, danced with the opposite
sex and worshipped ancestral walnut trees. Similarly, secu-
larism is so strong in Tatarstan and the North Caucasus
that Islamic jihad can only be a cover for anti-Russian
guerrilla warfare – which one might argue is at least as jus-
tified as the resistance of the Maquis to the Nazis – and
only the isolated psychopathic youth from Nalchik (or
Bradford for that matter) is likely to pose a genuine Islamic
terrorist threat. Hahn proposes we encourage and help
Putin deal decisive blows to Islamic jihad on his own terri-
tory and make Bush’s war a truly global one. If that goes
ahead, far worse tragedies than Beslan are in the offing.
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 FOREIGN PARTS
Literary Review Bookshop
T OM S TACEY

THE TERRIFIED TRAVELLER

B LOOD R IVER : A J OURNEY TO A FRICA ’ S
B ROKEN H EART
★
By Tim Butcher
(Chatto & Windus 363pp £12.99)

TIM BUTCHER WAS for a while the Daily Telegraph’s man

in Africa. In 2002, he chose a lull in the conflict that has
riven the Democratic Republic of Congo since the fall of
Mobutu in 1994 to follow the route of H M Stanley’s
epic journey between October 1876 and September 1877
from the western shore of Lake Tanganyika to the mouth
of the Congo River. Stanley thus charted the greater part
of the course of that mighty river, then unknown.
Butcher’s was a plucky intention, since the Congo
(which we had to call Zaire under Mobutu) has been

20% discount on all notoriously chaotic and virtually lawless for decades
across most of its territory, equal in size to Western
Europe. He was ‘driven’ to make the trip by an obses-
sion partly stoked by his mother, who, before he was
titles under review born, had travelled by train across the country in its lat-
ter days as a Belgian colony. He describes setting forth:
The eastern sky was slowly growing more pale, but I
turned to face west. Out there between me and the
Call our Order Hotline Atlantic Ocean lay a primeval riot of jungle, river,
plain and mountain stretching for thousands of kilo-
0870 429 6608 metres. For years I had stared at maps dominated by
the Congo River, a silver-bladed sickle, its handle
All major credit and debit cards anchored on the coast, its tip buried deep in the
equatorial forest, but now I could feel its looming
sense of vastness. It scared me … Feeling as if my legs
By email: were about to collapse, I croaked a faint curse against
send your order to the obsession that had drawn me to the most daunt-
literaryreview@bertrams.com ing, backward country on earth.
Phew!
By post:
Stanley would not have admitted to collapsing knees
on such a departure. But times have changed. The
send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to Butcher style of writing, with its emotional vulnerabili-
‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to: ty, is the fashion in the genre just now. By his own
Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams, account, Butcher scares easily. In the event, he did the
1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF whole trip in six weeks, the first part by motorbike
(which makes his backside numb) as far as the river port
By fax: of Kindu, with a companion; then in a UN patrol boat
send your order, quoting Literary Review, to and a four-day lazy-river ride in a jumbo dugout; then
0870 429 6709 back on the bike – to bypass the rapids – for Kisangani
(Stanleyville of yore), where he has his ‘first proper
shower for three weeks’. Next, aboard another UN ves-
sel, he journeys 1000 km to Mbandaka (formerly
£2.45 P & P Coquilhatville) where, feeling queasy, he hitches a lift in
a UN helicopter that takes him the 700 km to Kinshasa
No matter how many books
you order!
 FOREIGN PARTS
(Leopoldville). The final stretch, 300 km to the river’s
estuary, again dodging the rapids which all but did for
Stanley, took him a couple of days by jeep.
Butcher lodged on the way with aid workers, mostly
belonging to the Christian organisation CARE, with
priests, a Bishop, and various UN personnel. He fre-
quently recalls how afraid he was, especially in the dark;
but, thank goodness, he was never hurt or even menaced.
He was afraid of malaria, indeed of a single mosquito that
stung him in the cabin of his UN riverboat. (Had he for-
gotten to take his prophylactic?) These days, it seems, to
be counted brave one’s first got to be sick with fear.
Yet it was tough. Evidently never learning how to
sterilise water, with water all around him Butcher got
dreadfully thirsty. His mum’s railway lines had entirely
vanished (except, in patches, as a route for well-sprung
motorbikes), as had virtually all the roads (which were
reduced to tracks at best) and as had all but a tiny rem-
nant of the hundreds of former river-steamers. It was no
joyride. He lost weight. Luckily he had the cash for the
bribes necessary for local passes.
A product of Johannesburg and presumably of part-
settler inheritance, the author claims to abominate all
empire everywhere – the entire colonial endeavour.
Though alarmed by native Africans left to themselves,
he throws in passages expressing disgust at European
intrusion upon Rousseau-esque primality. He claims
that all forms of colonial governance in Africa have been
similarly exploitative and cruel in style and aim –
British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Spanish. In an
erstwhile Africa correspondent for a serious newspaper,
LETTERS
PULPIT OR CESSPIT?
Sir,
Alas, the ‘tide of rubbish’ advances… A deplorable
neglect of your editorial role led you to print Mr
Taylor’s unwelcome quotation (LR, May). Not all your
readers will share his sense of humour, as you could
surely have judged. Pulpit – or cesspit?
Are you able to assure us that, after this lapse, the LR
will recover as an ‘oasis of sanity and high-mindedness’?
Yours faithfully,
Andrew Hooper
Sidmouth, Devon
NARROW INTERESTS?
Sir,
I take issue with D J Taylor’s defence of literary editors
(From the Pulpit, LR, May). The literary editors of
Britain’s broadsheets all choose the same books to
review. I estimate that, as a result, only about 1 per cent
of new titles are reviewed in their pages. The problem is
19
such ignorance astonishes. To justify his ‘obsessive’ call
to journey through the Congo – a shambles from the
fourth day after its independence on 1 July 1960, and
descending into comprehensive dereliction thereafter –
Butcher has it typifying the entire post-colonial sub-
Saharan continent.
Here is a lazy writer who uses words without preci-
sion and has no will to clean his prose or reconcile his
own conflicting views. He checks few facts, and is
wrong about so much. Conrad never rose to be a ‘skip-
per’. The Congo was ‘at war’ with no one, not even
itself, ‘within a year of 1958’. As for Livingstone travel-
ling with ‘barely more than a change of clothes and a
bible’, he moved off on his last exploration (in the
course of which Stanley ‘found’ him) with a party of
thirty-nine and a train of oxen. And so on.
Least forgivably, Tim Butcher is factually wrong on
Stanley, whose definitive biography by Tim Jeal published
earlier this year exposed once and for all (one might have
hoped) the misinformation clinging to him, which
Butcher now repeats – such as that he was adopted by a
rich American called Stanley (he simply took the name),
or that he championed King Leopold’s exploitation of the
Congo (Leopold deceived him), or that his sobriquet
‘Breaker of Rocks’ derived from ruthlessness (it came
from his engineer’s clearance of obstacles in building the
road from the estuary to Stanley Pool). Jeal’s biography
was surely available before this book went to press. Chatto
should have delayed publication until their author had
read it, saving them both lasting embarrassment.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18
not lack of space. Rather, it is the narrowness of literary
editors’ interests and imagination.
Yours faithfully,
Anthony Haynes
Newmarket, Suffolk
TARQUIN & LUCRETIA
Sir,
In Peter Jones’ enjoyable round-up of ancient frolics (LR,
May), he neglected to mention the greatest store of Bad
Sex in ancient – if not modern – literature: Petronius
Arbiter’s scurrilous Satyricon. Here is one of the more
tasteful parts, in which the young Giton relates how he
was assaulted by Ascyltos: ‘Cum ego proclamarem, gladi-
um strinxit et “Si Lucretia es”, inquit, “Tarquinium
invenisti.”’ ‘When I screamed, he pulled out his sword and
said, “If you’re a Lucretia, you’ve found your Tarquin.”’
Yours faithfully,
William Goodman
Bath
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS
J OHN G RAY
THE PATHOLOGY OF FAITH
T HE I SLAMIST: W HY I J OINED R ADICAL
I SLAM IN B RITAIN, W HAT I S AW I NSIDE , AND
W HY I L EFT
★ type of chosen death from
By Ed Husain
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 288pp £8.99)
ED HUSAIN BEGINS one of the chapters of The Islamist with
a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder
of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb’s most influen-
tial book: ‘I have written Milestones for this vanguard of
Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to
be realised.’ Qutb’s use of the concept of the vanguard
reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement
that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-
Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern
Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary
elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect
society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather
than anything derived from Islamic theology, and – though
the fact is rarely noted – the type of terrorism with which
Islamist movements are most often identified originates
not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day
Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was
pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-
Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had commit-
ted more such attacks than any other single group. For all
its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes
large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and
despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical
Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism.
Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face
value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of
the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the
penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is
the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic
state, he writes, is ‘not the continuation of a political
entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs
down the ages (however debatable)’. Rather, it is a
response to secular modernity. It is striking how much
Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected
traditional religions in order to promote surrogate politi-
cal faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member
of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more
radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain
joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel
and Marx, while Nabhani’s contempt for liberal democ-
racy echoed that of Rousseau. ‘Nabhani’s ideas’, Husain
concludes, ‘were not innovatory Muslim thinking but
wholly derived from European political thought.’ He
20
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
might have examined other,
more contemporary examples:
for example, Ali Sharati, the
predecessor of Ayatollah
Khomeini as leader of Iranian
Islamists in exile during the
reign of the Shah, took his
conception of martyrdom as a
Martin Heidegger, who for a Husain: candour
time saw himself as the
philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering
Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by
the Western ideologues who – whether they realised it
or not – supplied the intellectual armoury of twentieth-
century totalitarianism.
A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of
British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities
with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that
wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century. All the
telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the
Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist
agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College
where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning
his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim
boys’ school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there
was talk of a ‘gay-Jewish conspiracy’ to undermine
Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of
secrecy – familiar to anyone who knows the workings of
communist and Trotskyist parties – which aimed at pene-
trating other organisations (including George Galloway’s
Respect party) and using them as front organisations.
Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists
were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes
of the world they struggled to maintain a united front,
and as Husain observes they did have one thing in com-
mon: ‘we all despised traditional Islam’. Far from being
an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is
a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the
dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal
identity based on rejection of the past.
For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled
vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudi-
ating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of
personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a
new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a
pious Muslim appalled by his son’s attachment to radical
Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of
Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence
first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam’s incom-
patibility with secular politics and then of a friend with
links with the radical East London mosque, he began to
view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent over-
throw of Western governments. It was as much the cruel-
ty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain’s
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS
disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian
fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tra-
dition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and
orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably
more humane version of his religion than that promoted
by Islamists. From his confusion – which he recounts
with fearless candour – he achieved a sense of spiritual
purpose, which rather than alienating him from British
society enabled him to appreciate its virtues.
The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal nar-
rative, but it also carries a powerful and – for some –
unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army
of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his
story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of
religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his
P AUL J OHNSON
From Bromsgrove
to Trinity
T HE L ETTERS OF A E H OUSMAN
★ whom nothing is known
Edited by Archie Burnett
(Oxford University Press 2 vols 960pp £180)
HOUSMAN, ONE OF the egregious eccentrics of English
poetry, was the son of a busy solicitor who practised in
Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He had two sisters and four
brothers, one of whom, Laurence, wrote a West End
smash, Victoria Regina. He had a passion for Latin and
Greek but not much interest in classical history and phi-
losophy. Hence, at St John’s, Oxford, he took a first in
Mods but flopped in Greats and had to seek employment
in the Patent Office (like Einstein). However, his power-
ful pieces on classical philology in learned journals even-
tually led to recognition as a scholar and in 1892, when
he was thirty-three, he was appointed professor of Latin
at University College, London. Nearly twenty years later,
his career was crowned by his election, against a strong
field, to the chair of Latin at Cambridge. Thus he
exchanged a dim house in Pinner for a splendid set of
rooms in Trinity, where he lived till his death in 1936.
In the vain attempt to solve the mystery of Housman,
who, despite many efforts – including a superb play by
Tom Stoppard – remains elusive, it must be grasped that
virtually all his working life was spent on teaching, lectur-
ing on and publishing the work of obscure Latin authors,
devoting to them bone-grinding industry which to us is
inexplicable and was pretty odd even a century ago. There
is an eye-witness description of him, on a hot Saturday
21
links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and
converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity – as
secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering
what he describes as ‘classical, traditional Islam’, which
includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected
the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he
returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by
Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to
peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim
countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has
in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it
largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical
causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathol-
ogy of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of
the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors.
To order this book at £7.19, see LR Bookshop on page 18
afternoon in August, sitting
at his table with a huge
Latin dictionary before
him, writing furiously, dip-
ping his pen into a jam-jar
full of ink. His chief object
of study was the gruesome
Manilius, a writer from the
time of Tiber ius about
Housman: pedant and poet
but who left behind him
five books of verse about astrology and the signs of the
zodiac. Housman admitted that Manilius was ‘a very poor
poet’ and that his subject matter is repellent. Yet he attract-
ed the attention of Bentley, greatest of all classical scholars
and, in our own time, of the weird Shackleton Bailey
(whose chief claim to fame, however, is his brief marriage
to the fascinating Hilly, first wife of Kingsley Amis). To
Manilius Housman effectively devoted his professional life,
and the five volumes he published on him between 1903
and 1930 are his abiding monument.
However, in 1896 Housman astonished even those
who knew him best by publishing a volume of sixty-
three poems, A Shropshire Lad, which achieved success
even at the time and assured him immortality. He was
not a professional poet, could not write to order or at
will, and needed a powerful personal stimulus to versify
at all. He said he composed most of the poems in 1895
under ‘continuous excitement’. Thereafter he wrote lit-
tle, though a further volume was reluctantly published in
1922 and a few more poems after his death.
What are we to make of this strange man? His letters
provide a few clues. This is by far the best and fullest
edition, printing every letter that has been found, some
2327 complete and four fragments. In my view
Housman was one of the great letter-writers of the
nineteenth and twentieth centur ies. But he is an
acquired taste. The word which applies best to him is
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS
laconic, the pithy brevity of Sparta. A high proportion
of the letters are to his publisher Grant Richards, and
most are a single sentence, acknowledging proofs or giv-
ing a direction. Very occasionally he lets himself go, as
when describing the political relationship between A J
Balfour and his own bête noire, Joe Chamberlain. There
is a tiny masterpiece on the subject of understanding
poetry which characteristically has been cut to the bare
bone and is worth quoting in full:
When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to
one of three causes. Either the author through lack
of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has
concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning
either to conceal or express. In none of these cases
does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it
makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes
him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel
found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it
means to the reader.
Many letters deal with classical problems. This, for
instance, is typical:
In Mart. XI 99 5-6 I quite agree with you about
nimias, and I think Minyas absurd as well as ungram-
matical, but I have never been able to stomach magni,
because culus is proktos, not puge, and there seems to
be no point in accusing the lady of euruproktia.
22
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
Always laconic, Housman was also diffident, though far
from humble. He loved saying No: to universities offer-
ing him honorary degrees, to government honours (he
turned down the OM), above all to publishers who
wanted to include his poems in anthologies. He referred
to Latin as his ‘trade’, called himself a ‘pedant’ rather
than a scholar and wrote: ‘I am only a connoisseur and
not a critic.’ Declining to join the Cambridge governing
body, he explained he was ‘an egotistical hedonist. It
would find me quite useless, and it can very well dis-
pense with any lustre which might be shed upon it by
my exiguous (though eximious) output.’
He could be sharp. He refused to be included in an
anthology with Meredith ‘as I am a respectable character
and do not care to be seen in the company of galvanised
corpses. By this time [1903] he stinketh for he has been
dead twenty years.’ He wrote: ‘I do not want to write
letters to a woman whose name is Birdie.’ He wrote:
‘Mr Thomas thanks me for “a poem”, and prints two:
which is the one he doesn’t thank me for?’ Here is a let-
ter received by another anthologist called Moore of
Burton-upon-Trent:
Permission to quote is one thing, permission to mis-
quote is another. First you take certain verses of
mine and disfigure them with illiterate alterations,
then you ask me to let you attribute them publicly to
me, and now, because I do not abet you in injuring
my reputation, you think it rather hard. Why was
Burton built on Trent?
But though he often refused permission to quote, he
also declined fees and royalties. He wrote:
Vanity, not avarice, is my ruling passion; and so long
as young men write to me from America saying that
they would rather part with their hair than with their
copy of my book, I do not feel the need of food and
drink.
This brings us to his other ruling passion. Housman was
in love for most of his life with a man called Jackson.
But this was never consummated. Jackson married, had
children, went out of reach in Canada. When he died in
1923, Housman marked the event with a laconic cry:
‘Now I can die myself: I could not have borne to leave
him behind me in a world where anything might hap-
pen to him.’ Whether Housman ever had affairs is
unknowable. On one of his constant trips to France, he
reports that he was accompanied by ‘a young
Frenchman’. In another letter he says he always keeps
enough in his current account to enable him to ‘flee the
country’. He lived through the Wilde scandal and
another involving Norman Douglas, who jumped his
bail and fled into exile in Capri after an incident with a
young man in the V&A. Of course Housman may have
been joking. He found a few things in life funny. But for
the most part existence appalled him. His last written
word was ‘Ugh!’
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS

D AVID K YNASTON her, much to her amuse-

ment – whereupon Birgit,

LOOK BACK IN AMUSEMENT the Ger man nurse in

C LEVER G IRL : A S ENTIMENTAL E DUCATION
★ dent,” Birgit promised. “I
By Brian Thompson
(Atlantic Books 247pp £14.99)
E VEN IN THIS golden age of autobiography, Brian
Thompson’s Keeping Mum made a deservedly huge
impact when it appeared last year. The catastrophic mar-
riage between his manic-depressive mother (Peggy, aka
Squibs) and ruthlessly unfeeling, upwardly mobile father
(Bert), the irrational decision to send him during the war
from safe Cambridge to his uncle and aunt off the
Kingston bypass (where the house was duly blitzed), the
disastrously ill-conceived family holiday in Hastings, the
tragicomic death of his grandmother (Queenie) in
Lambeth Walk, the painfully clumsy early fumblings with
girls – the whole had an irresistibly picaresque flavour,
full of pungent dialogue and sharply observed scenes,
unclouded by sentimentality. The book ended in 1951,
with Thompson’s headmaster realising that the sixteen-
year-old had academic potential and successfully insisting
to Bert that he stay on at school after his O levels.
We now, in gratifyingly quick order, have the follow-
up. Clever Girl takes the story on another seven years, dur-
ing which Thompson secures a place at Cambridge, does
his National Service (mainly in Kenya, where he fights
the Mau-Mau and spends time at close quarters with Idi
Amin), reads English at Trinity College, and marries the
clever girl of the title almost as soon as he comes down.
We leave him in Shrewsbury, where he has started teach-
ing at a grammar school. ‘After only a few months of
marriage and the marking of exercise books,’ he reflects in
the final, bittersweet sentence, ‘it never occurred to me
that I could be anyone other than who I was.’
If less obviously extraordinary than its predecessor, Clever
Girl is still just as much a page-turner and in some ways
more involving (especially his
torturous relationship with his
father), and not quite such a
freak-show. It is also impossi-
ble not to be impressed anew
– indeed at times bowled over
– by the sheer economy of
style and sure-footedness of
pacing. Take the scene where,
temporar ily working in a
nursing home, Thompson
gives a bath to an oversize,
elderly female patient and
accidentally falls in on top of
charge, rushes in and disen-
tangles them. ‘“Now I shall
make report about this inci-
have to do. It is the law.”
“Fuck the law.” the old
woman retorted. “This is
England, girl. You ain’t in
Germany now. You leave Thompson: pitch-perfect
well alone.”’ It is all, as
almost throughout, pitch-perfect.
The 1950s have, of course, an almost immovably
entrenched mythology – family, domesticity, security,
conformity – and on the whole Clever Girl adds detail
and nuance to the accepted picture rather than funda-
mentally subverting it. The mastertext for the doggedly
long courtship followed by the early marriage is Love Is a
Many-Splendored Thing, which Thompson and his wife-
to-be go to see at the Embassy in Waltham Cross (where
Bert has whisked his family to live at the start of the
book). A classic romantic weepie, it inspires thoughts of
marital bliss in a Cotswold cottage with roses over the
door. ‘Owlish, immature, yet willing ourselves into mid-
dle age, we were two innocents – and, for all our book-
ish aspirations, Hollywood knew where we lived.’
So too with other evoked aspects of Britain before the
cultural revolution. The neighbours in Waltham Cross
invest their hopes for the future not in politics or ‘the
future of Europe’, but in the day when their young
‘Tony or Phil, Angie or June left school and started
bringing in the dosh’; simultaneously, there is the new,
unending, utterly secular battle of home improvement,
with ‘on most Sundays the yelp and rasp of saws as men
fashioned occasional furniture from marine plywood and
lengths of woolly battening’. Naturally, dress remained
largely monochrome and staid (Thompson’s green
thornproof suit and Hush Puppies getting dirty looks on
the Central Line), while generally ‘the trick was to act
modestly, at work and in the
home’. The teenager was
just being invented as a dis-
tinctive socio-economic
force, but for the most part
the streets were still ‘peopled
with trainee adults’.
Most of those trainees
went to secondary moderns,
dead-end jobs and perma-
nent obscurity. By contrast,
there has been a surfeit of
memoirs from the beneficia-
r ies of Butler’s 1944

23
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS
Education Act, which made grammar schools free to
everyone (if they could pass the eleven-plus), with a
good chance of university afterwards. Thompson’s is
another, but he treats the familiar trajectory with typical
freshness and lack of self-importance. The snobbishness
at Hertford Grammar School (reading The Times’s first
leader a particular affectation), the inspiring English
teacher, the prevailing oppressive public-school tone at
Cambridge, the sheer apartness of gown and town – all
are deftly covered, together with the almost statutory
motif of parental bewilderment, as liable to shade into
contempt as pride.
Indeed, in keeping with his lifelong view that ‘going
to university was the postponement of something far
more serious, something he liked to describe as the real
world’, Bert takes pleasure in sending young Brian to a
different job each vacation. The first, as a relief porter at
Liverpool Street station in the run-up to Christmas
1955, is the subject of a virtuoso description of a small
but perhaps representative corner of the dirty, Victorian,
over-manned, under-incentivised railway industry.
Another holiday job is humping bricks and knocking up
cement for a new building just opposite Cheshunt
Public Library, where later, in his last Easter vacation,
Thompson sits writing a long essay on D H Lawrence
and sex, having managed for once to get a paternal
exemption. There he has an exchange with one of the
labourers he used to know and suggests a drink or a
smoke, but is firmly rebuffed. ‘We ain’t mates, Brizo,’
L UCY L ETHBRIDGE
A FAMILY AFFAIR
T HE M ISTRESS ’ S DAUGHTER : A M EMOIR
★ the Oyster Bar of the New
By A M Homes
(Granta Books 256pp £12.99)
A M HOMES, NOVELIST AND New Yorker, was in her
thirties when her adoptive mother received a telephone
call from a lawyer saying that Homes’s biological mother
wanted to get in touch with her. In 1961, Ellen
Bellman, a young shop assistant having an affair with her
married boss, had given up her newborn daughter for
adoption; an agency for finding Jewish adopters found
the baby a home with a family who had, six months
before, lost their nine-year-old son. Now Ellen, still
unmarried and living a cranky, lonely and financially
precarious life, wrote Homes a letter in which she set
out the story of that first, sad affair, and described herself
to her daughter in the terms of one tentatively offering
the gift of her genetic inheritance: ‘Damp weather is not
for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other
24
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
the labourer says. ‘We never was.’ And he goes on:
‘Know what your problem is? You want everybody to
like you, not just a bit here and there but all the bleed-
ing time. Can’t happen. Won’t never happen. Even the
dopiest kids can work that out. Look after yourself,
m’older.’ Having said which he leaves, crossing the road
with ‘one hand held up to stop the oncoming traffic, the
other hitching his trousers’.
It is a moment of epiphany in a marvellous book that
is arguably as much about class as anything else. It was
class that ran like a fault-line through almost every activ-
ity in Britain in the 1950s, and so it is here. The fact
that Thompson plays many of his scenes for laughs –
typified by the knockabout of his fruitless interview
with the snooty man at the University Appointments
Board – does not make them any less charged as social
documents. The first night of Look Back in Anger, at the
Royal Court in May 1956, is almost absurdly iconic, but
Thompson here adds a delicious sidelight, as he suffers
the wrath of a middle-aged, middle-class theatregoer
who could have passed as Jimmy Porter’s father-in-law.
‘Bloody man’s in our seats,’ he complains to the front-
of-house manager. ‘Won’t budge, impudent little shit.’
The dispute is settled only when it turns out that the
complainant’s ticket is for the following evening.
Change was in the air, a meritocracy was starting to
emerge centre stage, and I am not alone in looking for-
ward impatiently to Brian Thompson’s next tranche.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18
than that, I am fine. I am
nearsighted and do have
soft teeth. Both inherited,
my eyes from my father,
my teeth from my mother.’
When they did meet, in
York Plaza, Ellen, with big
hair and dressed up in
shabby fur, had a Baileys
Irish Cream and a lobster Homes: acute eye
salad. Homes sipped a
Coke and made mental notes of what she would tell her
friends about the encounter. A relationship of sorts
began: Ellen was needy and rang often and demanding-
ly; Homes began to dread her calls. She met her father,
Norman Hecht, a country-club suburban type who was
still married to his wife and whose other children knew
nothing of that unwanted baby. He agreed to a DNA
test (positive) and filled Homes in on the names in his
own background. They made occasional contact – she
could call him on his car phone, he told her, because his
wife was not usually with him when he was driving.
The years passed and Ellen died; Homes made a trip to
her melancholy apartment, with its hoards of lipsticks
 MEMOIRS & LETTERS
and knick-knacks, and photographed every corner of it,
taking away some boxes of papers and scraps which she
stacked in her own home in New York. Seven years
later, she opened them up, sifted through these sad
remains of her mother’s life, and began an obsessive
search for her own lineage. She became an addict of
Internet genealogy, an ‘electronic anthropologist’ track-
ing down marriage certificates and divorce records.
When she discovered that, on her father’s side, she had
the right to be a Daughter of the Revolution, she
applied to him for a copy of that DNA test. But he
stonewalled her and continues to do so to this day.
And this in a sense is both the end and the beginning
of this curious, sometimes gripping, beautifully written
book. It begins with Homes’s anger at her mother – ‘I
feared that there was something about me, some defect
of birth that made me repulsive, unloveable’ – and it
ends in a tirade against Norman Hecht, put in an imagi-
nary dock to explain himself: ‘Are you proud of your
daughter, Mr Hecht? Have you read her work? Did you
ask your daughter to meet you in hotels? Why not cof-
fee shops? What is the nature of your thoughts about
your daughter?’ Well, almost ends: the coda consists of
the birth of Homes’s own daughter and the death of her
beloved, much-admired adoptive grandmother – both of
P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D
1 2 3 4
Sponsored by
HarperPress 8
9 (5)
10
11
12 13
15
15 16
19
20
23
24 25
HarperPress have generously agreed to sponsor the prizes for this month’s cross-
word. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles received by noon on
15 May 2007. Each will receive a copy of the long-awaited William Wilberforce:
The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, by William Hague, published
by HarperPress.
The winners of our March competition are Roy Bland of Cornwall, Donald Murchie of Ayrshire, Nigel
Sutton of London NW3, C J Lyon of Northampton, and D H Lewis of Devizes. Each will receive a copy of
RItes of Peace by Adam Zamoyski, published by HarperPress.
Solution to the May puzzle:
ACROSS: 1 Rowling, 5 Cabin, 8 Ngaio, 9 Amiss, 10 Nonet, 14 Macedon, 16 Rheum, 17 Bacon, 18
Tadpole, 22 Sloop, 25 Drama, 26 Races, 27 Rabbi, 28 Lowdown.
DOWN: 1 Ransom, 2 Wear, 3 Iron, 4 Grand National, 5 Chat, 6 Bail, 7 Nash, 11 Aesop, 12 Chaps, 13
Hull, 15 Alas, 19 Edison, 20 Oder, 21 Lamb, 22 Saki, 23 Prow, 24 Echo.
which events, she acknowledges, put her own search for
herself into perspective.
Homes writes so well, has such an acute eye and ear
for pathos, that the undertow of mercilessness in this
book is disturbing. There are too many unanswered
questions and there is too little critical distance. When,
for example, she tells us that Norman has refused to
speak to her, she does not tell us until much later that
she had earlier written a piece in the New Yorker about
Ellen and Norman of which he had known nothing
until he got a call from the magazine’s fact-checkers. For
someone so ruthlessly keen-eyed about other people,
Homes often betrays a startling lack of self-awareness.
For most parents who had long ago been forced to give
up their children, it would be discombobulating to dis-
cover that that child had become an acclaimed novelist.
Imagine then how it would feel to find yourself written
into a book, your awkward, inarticulate letters laid bare
and the sad snatches of your life picked over as part of
your child’s own quest for identity. This book makes
abundantly, terrifyingly, clear how important it is for peo-
ple to know where they come from, what root-stock has
fed them; but if you are looking for a lost parent or child,
you should hope that they won’t turn out to be a writer.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18
ACROSS
1 Iron man, or woman (6)
5 6 7 4 One could not choose a subject for Gay’s opera? (6)
9 Composer frequently listening to another (9)
10 Street urchin makes profit pocketing large amount
11 Presently denoting authorship unknown (4)
12 Lowest point of drain perhaps (5)
14 Rider turning out with less liquid (5)
15 Stylish ball attended by Marx (5)
14
17 Imitating a short ringing sound (5)
19 Iota found in first half of the alphabet? (4)
21 Gold part of bridle seen on circuit (5)
17 18
23 Song with snare backing ministerial address? (6,3)
24 Fish doctor consumed on treeless plain (6)
21 22
25 Bird’s large quarry (6)
DOWN
1 Try to take pastry dish around with drink container
(6)
2 Imam set out to cause injury (4)
3 Painter seen on a road with sign providing cover (8)
5 Stake raised by one likely to erupt? (4)
6 Vandalism identified as American on the big screen?
(8)
7 Try again smuggling ambassador into the back (6)
8 A metrical unit in the air (5)
13 Large number turning up with an employee in
milking establishment (8)
14 Suit forever seen in Fleming’s work? (8)
15 Small seal, we hear, or a young bird (6)
16 Missouri, say (5)
18 Guns provided by Fitzgerald’s hero (6)
20 Tragic king who wrote nonsense? (4)
22 Coffin stand in cowshed reportedly (4)
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION I
J OHN D UGDALE
LA STORY
YOU D ON ’ T L OVE M E Y ET
★ passed on phrases from his zany
By Jonathan Lethem
(Faber & Faber 224pp £10.99)
F AMOUSLY, MOST OF the defining novels about
California have not been produced by Californians. The
Postman Always Rings Twice, The Day of the Locust, The
Last Tycoon, The Big Sleep, The Loved One, The Crying of
Lot 49, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tales of the
City – all written by authors for whom the West Coast
was the exotic antithesis of the (East Coast, Midwestern,
European) worlds that for them represented normality.
Jonathan Lethem grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and
so belongs to this tradition of outsider observers. In fact
he lived in California in the Eighties and Nineties, and
much of the heavily sci-fi-influenced fiction he wrote
before the New York-based novels for which he is best
known, the dazzling Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and the
over-ambitious The Fortress of Solitude (2003), is set there;
his new, seventh novel, about part-time rock musicians in
Los Angeles, is hence a reprise in which he returns to the
same territory but as a different kind of writer.
It’s no accident that Gertrude Stein’s much-quoted
remark about Oakland, ‘there is no there there’, is usually
assumed to be about California as a whole. Novelists have
often exploited this blank canvas to impose their own
vision. Lethem, however, leaves the canvas blank, making
no attempt at a definition of his own. The phenomena
that dominate earlier literary and cinematic representa-
tions of Los Angeles – Hollywood, murder, the LAPD,
gangs, freeways, smog, Silicon Valley, media overload,
Latinos – are simply absent in a clearing-away of clichés.
LA in You Don’t Love Me Yet is above all strangely
empty (the opening depicts downtown in mid-afternoon
as a ‘canyon of vacated plazas’) and devoid of menace or
madness. True, there is a pervasive nuttiness, but it’s
innocuous and is never ascribed to interracial tension, liv-
ing in a centreless city or being at a continent’s edge.
The novel’s likeable protagonist, Lucinda, is the bass player
in an unnamed, recently formed band whose other mem-
bers are her ex-boyfriend Matthew, weird, film-obsessed
Bedwin, and sensible Denise. All except the reclusive
Bedwin have day-jobs. Denise works in a sex shop.
Matthew is a zoo vet, but has just quit. Lucinda is employed
in an art gallery by another ex-boyfriend, Falmouth.
Her role there, as part of a peculiar conceptual project,
is to listen to callers responding to ads inviting them to
complain about anything they choose. Through this she
meets an older man initially known as ‘the Complainer’
26
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
(later Carl), whose eloquent, can-
did confessions captivate her. She
arranges a meeting, and – despite
his age and a face twice described
as penis-shaped – starts sleeping
with him; but meanwhile she has
monologues to Bedwin, without
indicating their origin, to complete Lethem: dashing
unfinished songs and inspire new
ones. One of the names they eventually adopt, ‘Monster
Eyes’, comes from a song unwittingly derived from Carl.
Having doubled their repertoire, the band go down a
storm at a party held by Jules, a pretentious friend of
Falmouth’s. A celebrated veteran DJ, Fancher
Autumnbreast, is there and invites them to go on his show.
Carl, though, also attends the party gig, recognises his for-
mative role, and asks to join as keyboard player. When the
original band members turn up for Autumnbreast’s show,
their hopes are wrecked by the horn-locking of their two
eccentric would-be patrons: the gnomic radio host and
their inconveniently garrulous new recruit.
Technically accomplished and stylistically dashing,
Lethem is always a joy to read. And never before has he
aimed so simply to please. The disastrous radio gig is the
novel’s brilliant comic centrepiece, but it’s preceded by
plenty of other scenes almost as strong, ranging from
Jules’s ridiculous ‘A-party’ (where guests dance to their
own iPods) to Lucinda and Denise’s discovery that a
depressed kangaroo is living in Matthew’s bathroom.
Alongside straightforward humour such as this, sly games
are being played, mostly involving self-mockery. Lethem
evinced a penchant for kangaroos in an early novel, and has
recalled in an essay being as movie-fixated as Bedwin. In the
case of Carl, the self-parody works on more than one level:
as a middle-aged man hanging out with youngsters (pre-
sumably how the 43-year-old writer gathered material), in
his initial role as someone making lengthy, verbally inventive
complaints about life to an invisible stranger (isn’t that what
novelists do?), and in his relationship with the band.
Carl is a fantasy version of Lethem, in that the novelist
openly hopes to inspire rock musicians, as other writers
have without intending to. But he’s like Lucinda in
knowingly feeding off someone else’s words: Pynchon’s
LA novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the prime candidate,
featuring as it does an adorable heroine, a rock band, a
DJ with a daft name, and an elaborate comic sex scene.
He may also be like the band’s songwriter Bedwin,
unconsciously ‘sampling’.
It would be mistaken, however, to extract from this a
serious exploration of creativity and originality. You Don’t
Love Me Yet is a slight, diverting comedy, and some read-
ers will find it insubstantial. Clearly aware that that’s like-
ly, Lethem ends with a last line that is a wry plea for the
merits of lightness (‘you can’t be deep without a surface,’
 FICTION I
says Lucinda, on being told she’s ‘superficial’). He tried
to make us love him with The Fortress of Solitude, but got
rebuffed for lacking the weightiness needed for a Great
H UGH C ECIL
A MYTH REBORN
T HE C HILDREN OF H URIN
★ sources. As Tolkien himself pointed out, Túrin’s story mir-
By J R R Tolkien
(Edited by Christopher Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee)
(HarperCollins 320pp £18.99)
THE APPEARANCE OF a new work by J R R Tolkien is a
major literary event. It is true that the same dark story,
of the ill-starred Túrin Turambar, has appeared before,
in different fragments, as part of the corpus of Tolkien’s
posthumously published writings, edited by his son
Christopher over the past thirty years; but this does not
diminish the significance of the new book, which offers,
to a larger readership, a free-standing and uninterrupted
narrative, pruned of footnotes and commentaries.
Christopher Tolkien rightly believes that many enthu-
siasts of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, deterred by
the plethora of scholarly textual editions in recent years,
have missed out on work at the heart of his father’s imag-
ination. By reinstating passages excised from earlier pub-
lished versions, by the (minimal) addition of linking sen-
tences and by limiting commentary to brief introductions
and appendices, he has achieved a book likely to be more
popular than any of his father’s other posthumous works
– at least until the story of Beren and Lúthien, of similar
length and vintage, receives the same treatment.
The Children of Húrin opens slowly but soon develops
into a compelling tale of doom and tragic climax, with an
eerie dreamlike beauty. Though lacking the three-dimen-
sional characters and vivid descriptions of scenery and
nature which are the strength of the Hobbit books, it is
nonetheless powerful and intense. Tolkien was a true
poet, more successfully so in his prose than in his verse,
which seldom achieved its intended effect. Here, one can
see his written style at an early stage, with cadences echo-
ing, most frequently, the Bible, as well as nineteenth-cen-
tury translations of Norse sagas and Celtic legends.
The Túrin story was among his first works. Twenty years
would pass before his most memorable characters, Gandalf,
Gollum and the Hobbits, made their appearance. The First
World War, during which he lost some of his closest
friends, was profoundly important in forming his spiritual
landscape. As an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers he saw
action during the Battle of the Somme, which left him
with a vision of desolation that recurs in his works – in this
book it appears as Anfauglith, the plain of ‘gasping dust’ to
27
American Novel. So, bouncing back, he’s content for the
moment for us just to be amused by him.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 18
which the Battle of Sudden Flame has reduced a once fair
and green countryside. While recovering from recurrent
trench fever, he started work on the first of many versions
of Túrin’s sorrowful life, the violent and vengeful spirit of
which partly reflects those hate-filled years.
Inspiration of course came from numerous other
rors in many respects that of the mixed-up young wizard-
hero Kullervo in the Finnish Kallevala, who, following a
miserable childhood, seduces a girl (unaware she is his sis-
ter), butchers his uncle’s family and eventually falls on his
own sword after consulting it on whether it would like to
shed his blood. However the spirit of The Children of Húrin
seems very different. Reflecting Tolkien’s refined, late-
nineteenth-century English upbringing, it lacks the
colourful earthiness of Finnish folk-legend, where sex and
drinking-bouts are treated much more as parts of daily life.
It is a moot point whether illustrations are desirable in
a work of this kind. With its scenes of brutality, cursing,
incestuous marriage and suicide, The Children of Húrin is
not a children’s book. The shadowy half-tone decora-
tions to its text do indeed capture something of its grim
spirit and are greatly preferable to the book’s dramatic
full-page colour pictures, which interfere with the read-
er’s imagination; but really the only illustrations that
have enhanced Tolkien’s books have been his own draw-
ings and designs, as in The Hobbit and on the original
cover of The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps H J Ford, the
inspired illustrator of many of the Andrew Lang Fairy
Books, with his magnificently evil sorcerers, demons and
trolls, and his enchanting princesses, might have done
justice to Tolkien’s prose; but he, alas, is long gone.
There is still a school of criticism which refuses to take
Tolkien’s work seriously as literature and condemns it as
escapist, mere childish ‘fantasy’. But his extraordinary pop-
ular success, against the odds, arises not just from a desire
to escape into a make-believe world. It rests in his power
to awake in us a sense of our links with our own remote
past and of the vital myths that underlie our existence,
which go back thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of
years and from which – we are only too aware – the cata-
clysmic changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have alienated us. More than any other author of ‘imagi-
native fiction’, J R R Tolkien has created a world convinc-
ingly based on a structure of past myth, because his preoc-
cupation has been with language, the thread that connects
us with unbelievably ancient times. His folklore is his own,
but it embodies an imaginative vision of folk mythology –
especially Northern European folk mythology – which the
reader immediately recognises.
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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION I
C HRISTOPHER R OSS
THE BIG SLEEP
A FTER DARK
★ bone, like Tony Takitani’s
By Haruki Murakami
(Translated by Jay Rubin)
(Harvill Secker 201pp £14.99)
Yukio Mishima lived in a Spanish baroque house that he
designed himself and stuffed with European antiques. A
visiting French TV documentary crew asked him,
inevitably, where all the Japanese art was and why he
lived like a Westerner. He replied, ‘here only what you
cannot see is Japanese’.
Haruki Murakami now occupies the position formerly
taken by Mishima as Japan’s most translated writer and
its best-selling novelist, but in one important sense does
not resemble Mishima: his novels and stories, although
nominally set in Japan, could take place anywhere – or
possibly nowhere. Any large alienating city will do as a
canvas on which to play games with apparently ordinary
protagonists and their reality-blurring, extraordinary
adventures: and only what you cannot see is Japanese.
For Murakami, like Mishima, has only one topic – his
own alienation from the land of his birth. It echoes
throughout the endlessly repeating themes of his writ-
ing. Alienation, identity crisis, and loss of meaning are
so widespread in the postmodern flux of contemporary
life that by considering these subjects Murakami reaches
around the world.
If Mishima was desperately trying to hold on to the
past, Murakami ignores it, other than acknowledging
recent history as a trauma you can’t do anything about –
like a once lost child who can never recover from the
terror of abandonment, but must simply learn to live
with it. Murakami’s assessment of contemporary Japan is
bleak, a hollowed-out ghostscape where no one con-
nects or can work out what is real and what to feel.
In After Dark, the latest Murakami novel – or perhaps
novella or even long short story – to be translated into
English, the action (although not that much happens,
and what does take place is just a frame for a number of
searching conversations) is set between 11.56pm and
6.52am one night, somewhere in an area of Tokyo
replete with 24/7 eateries and love hotels. Over a time
frame of just under seven hours we learn a number of
interlocking stories turning around a bookish, sensitive
nineteen-year-old student of Chinese called Mari Asai
and her inability to sleep – and her beautiful elder sister
Eri’s inability to wake up.
Mari sits reading in a branch of Denny’s, ‘Go Away
Little Girl’ by Percy Faith and His Orchestra playing in
28
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
the background; it is just before
midnight when she encounters
Takahashi, a student like her,
who needs food to fuel his all-
night jazz practice in a room
near by. He plays the trom-
father in Blind Willow, Sleeping
Woman, eats chicken salad (not
a strand of spaghetti to be seen Murakami: disquieting
in this book), and once went
on a sort-of date with Mari and her sister, the enigmatic
but emotionally troubled, Snow White-like Eri. They
talk, he leaves promising to return later in the night, and
shortly afterwards Kaoru, a friend of Takahashi’s and a
former female wrestler turned love-hotel manager, bursts
in on Mari to plead urgently for her help. She explains
that a Chinese prostitute has been beaten up at her hotel,
and that she needs Mari’s Chinese-language skills to get
to the bottom of what happened. Mari moves from
restaurant to love hotel to park bench to bar and back
again in a series of conversations.
So far, so real. Intercut with the night-time tales and
dialogue, however, is a surreal, voyeuristic vision of Eri
deeply asleep in bed, soon seeming to pass into another
dimension (possibly through the screen of an unplugged
television) into a room which might be the office of the
prostitute-assaulting computer nerd Shirakawa and which
is now empty and locked up. Before this takes place Eri
seems to be watched by a man we can see on the televi-
sion who has neither a face nor a name. This surreal
thread is oddly affecting and leaves one speculating on
who stands for what. Is Eri Japan’s beautiful traditional cul-
ture, now asleep? Is the man with no face representative of
a bland, corporate, personality-challenged drone in a mad
modern society cut off from its roots? Is muscle-bound
Shirakawa, who inexplicably beat the Chinese prostitute, a
personification of Murakami’s belief that Japanese culture
is rooted in violence?
As with Murakami’s most successful fiction, After Dark is
both oddly cosy and deeply disquieting. It is easy to read,
you feel you know the main characters within seconds of
first encountering them, and it is stylishly written, tending
to express profound points simply – possibly leaving the
book open to the criticisms that Murakami is stating the
obvious or is mired in banality, although neither is true. Jay
Rubin’s translation is excellent, the only flaw being his
attempt to render zokugo, or Japanese slang, into an
English idiom of truncated words and zippy chat.
The issues raised in After Dark are serious and invite
careful reflection: the unbridgeable distance between
individuals and the thirst for intimacy in large cities; the
function of memory and the dangers of forgetting; the
relationship of thought and action; that your life is more
precarious than you ever imagine. It is a book to read
 FICTION I
closely and would have you re-read it to unlock its
secrets. Despite the boy-(probably)-gets-girl ending, the
coming of dawn heralds a pessimistic realism: ‘The night
has begun to open up at last. There will be time until
the next darkness arrives.’ I read this book when it was
first published in Japanese in 2004 and since that time
J OHN DE FALBE
NOT SO ORDINARY
B ETWEEN E ACH B REATH
★ to London to meet his father. The
By Adam Thorpe
(Jonathan Cape 419pp £16.99)
I LIKED THIS book very much. Quoting from Dombey
and Son in his epigraph – ‘“We are dreadfully real, Mr
Carker”, said Mrs Skewton; “are we not?”’ – Adam
Thorpe announces that he has set out to write a story
about the particular intensities of ordinary people.
Jack Middleton, a composer, visits Estonia hoping to
find inspiration for a piece he has been commissioned to
write for the opening of the Millennium Dome. To his
astonishment, instead of inspiring music, the freedom he
finds there causes him to have an affair with Kaja, a
beautiful waitress. Convinced that this is a closed
episode, he returns to London and his wife Milly and
resumes his usual existence.
His own origins are poor: he was a prodigy, born on a
housing estate in Hayes, near Heathrow, where his par-
ents still live; his mother is blind. But he married an
heiress who now, at last, is expecting their first child. In
anticipation of this longed-for event, they move from a
large house in Richmond to a larger one beside
Hampstead Heath. While the material benefits of his life
sometimes disgust Jack, he is too comfortable to want to
rebel. His wife’s wealth provides him with the leisure to
compose. She is a desirable, kind woman with a robust
social conscience. When she miscarries, she is distraught:
her grief is persistent and moving, and she channels her
energies into numerous projects for saving the planet.
Jack often says that he ‘loves her to bits’ and this cliché
is revealing because, in Thorpe’s hands, it signifies an
unchallenged assumption: Jack hides behind the ready
phrase, vaguely aware that his life would be very difficult
if it were not true. But as their hopes for a baby fade, it
becomes plainer that something is very wrong. It might
not matter that his career is flagging if it weren’t that he
knows, deep down, that the music he writes is not as
good as it could be, and he minds this, and it makes him
irritable about many aspects of his life.
Into the sultry summer of 2005, just after the London
Tube bombings, Kaja reappears. Jack becomes aware of
29
Murakami, like Mishima before him, has become politi-
cally more and more outspoken. With the political shift
to the right, following the appointment of Shinzo Abe
as Prime Minister, Murakami reasonably fears for the
future, sensing a risk of the next darkness descending.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18
her through his friend Howard, a
viola teacher who tells him that he
has a new pupil, a five-year-old
prodigy from Estonia called Jaan.
It soon transpires that Jaan’s moth-
er is Kaja, who has brought him
situation unsettles Jack. He would
like to see his son and support
Kaja financially, but even though
she might still love him he doesn’t
want to resume their affair. For
while Milly might conceivably Thorpe: sensitive
forgive him for his affair six years
ago, he knows that Jaan’s existence would be unbearable
to her.
Every aspect of this tale is described with startling
technical virtuosity and sensitivity, but it is fundamentally
ordinary. Jack is complacent, lazy, foolish; the life he and
Milly lead in Hampstead is far from heroic and Thorpe
satirises it mercilessly. The spectacle of Jack sliding into
chaos would be excruciating in the hands of a less able
writer. But Thorpe makes it thrilling because he imag-
ines every step of the slide with Dickensian care and ani-
mates each one with vivid personal detail. Milly’s richly
portrayed kindness to others, and her conversational and
sexual intimacy with Jack, generate enough sense of her
integrity to make the reader sympathise acutely with her,
in spite of all the Hampstead flim-flam. But the most
strikingly imagined details concern Jack’s music.
It is fitting that Thorpe should write a novel with a
composer as the main character because, as he demon-
strated in his first novel, Ulverton, and in each of his sub-
sequent books, he has a supremely good ear. Between
Each Breath is shot through with what Jack hears:
whether it’s the neighbour’s strimmer driving him mad,
or his blind mother’s washing line, or the tonalities of a
stream, Jack always notices sound, which Thorpe
descr ibes with a precision that is comparable to
Nabokov’s descriptions of colour. Sound animates Jack,
so that when he messes up his personal life and fails to
measure up in grimly, humanly predictable ways, his
unusualness emerges with a profundity and vitality that
make Milly’s and then Kaja’s love for him convincing.
Thorpe has not made him heroic, he has made him
unique, and this gives a touching quality to the love
story at the centre of the novel.
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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION I
F RANCIS K ING
GRRRL ON THE LOOSE
M ICHAEL TOLLIVER L IVES
★ ‘The Lusty Lady’. Divided from them by a Perspex
By Armistead Maupin
(Doubleday 282pp £17.99)
THE LAST OF the six volumes of Armistead Maupin’s
hugely successful Tales of the City appeared in 1989.
Now he has produced what is, he insists, not an addition
but a pendant to it. To allay any possible disappoint-
ment, the jacket declares that ‘a reassuring number of
familiar faces appear along the way’. But these faces are
more likely to bewilder than reassure anyone either
unfamiliar with the series or, after so many years, pos-
sessing no more than wisps of recollection of it.
Michael Tolliver, protagonist of Tales, once more occu-
pies the central role. Witty, kindly and tolerant, he remains
both loveable and believable. Having survived, thanks to
the new anti-retroviral drugs, what appeared to be a
death-sentence when he was first found to be HIV posi-
tive twenty years back, he is healthy enough to continue
to work as an upmarket San Francisco gardener and to
maintain a hectic social and sexual life – even if his youth-
ful lover, a joiner called Ben, has to inject him with testos-
terone to ginger him up as a prelude to their love-making.
The other major revenant from the series is the transsex-
ual earth mother Anna (formerly Andy). Michael is much
closer to her than to his own mother, a fundamentalist
who, until she meets and is charmed by Ben, strongly dis-
approves of her son’s references to ‘my husband’. When
Michael is on his way to his real mother’s deathbed, he is
deflected by the news that the surrogate one is also dying
and so rushes to her instead – needlessly, since the tough
old bird yet again survives a near-fatal illness.
Michael’s assistant, Joe, is another transsexual, with a
stocky physique and a beard. Unfortunately he still also
possesses a vagina, which excites his new gay lover.
When Joe refuses to allow the lover to use this channel of
communication, the relationship reaches a dead end. On
a visit to his brother and his family, Michael decides that,
because his eight-year-old nephew prefers puppets to
baseball, he must be gay. Since almost all the characters in
this novel are gay, one accepts this surely premature diag-
nosis with a resigned shrug. Even Michael’s mother’s
black male nurse is gay, with the result that he, Michael
and Ben are soon enjoying a toothsome threesome.
Before her sex change, Anna/Andy, brought up in her
mother’s brothel, produced a daughter. This daughter,
having married an impoverished gay English peer so that
he could procure his green card, then took up residence in
his dilapidated English country mansion, succumbed to
30
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
sapphism and drink, and died of cancer in her early forties.
She is here accorded a skimpy résumé of her life that will
leave both new and old readers feeling short-changed.
The only heterosexual encounters on offer are
between the daughter of Michael’s closest straight chum
and the clients whom she services in a brothel called
screen, she gives satisfaction by no more than talk and
display. Subsequently she details each such encounter in
her increasingly popular blog ‘Grrrl [sic] on the Loose’.
It may seem odd that a writer whose novels constantly
seethe with gay sexual activity should have so many
enthusiastic straight readers. The answer to this is, I
should guess, a paradoxical one. Precisely because so
much of this sexual activity is weird and extreme, it
seems to belong not to life as most of us, whether homo-
sexual or heterosexual, know it but to a world of erotic
fantasy. As a result, like the brazen innuendoes of our
own Graham Norton, it does not disconcert or repel.
If Dickens had been a gay writer of talent, rather than
a straight one of genius, living in the San Francisco of
today, he might well have written the Tales and this
novel. In common with Dickens, Maupin first produced
the Tales for serialisation. Like him, he can create a host
of characters who, though often grotesquely exaggerated,
somehow triumphantly overcome the reader’s disbelief.
But sadly what Maupin lacks is Dickens’s masterly con-
trol of narrative. This book zigzags from one entertaining
episode to another, without any sense of a purposeful,
planned itinerary.
From a gay hotel’s welcome offering of orchids placed
not on the dressing or bedside table but floating in the
‘toilet’ bowl, to a telephone nestling at the heart of a
funeral wreath as an indication that the dear departed
and the bereaved are still in touch, to Michael ‘wanking
off with scant satisfaction to a porn video in which all
the Texan Rangers have Czechoslovakian accents’, there
is a lot to savour in Maupin’s depiction of life in a coun-
try with customs and attitudes so piquantly different
from our own. There is also a lot to smile at in a confes-
sion like ‘I went to orgies as though they were brunch-
es’, a description like ‘He has the watery eye thing, so
that the slightest nip in the air can make him leak like a
colander’, and a snatch of dialogue like ‘Have you seen
my cock ring?’ followed by ‘In the soap dish’.
Through all the mockery and the constant recording of
disasters and deaths, Maupin maintains a romantic, benev-
olent, even sentimental attitude to the world. This must, I
suspect, be the major reason for an international populari-
ty that has sold more than a million copies of his previous
books and will no doubt sell many copies of this one.
Unfortunately, old grouch that I am, I found myself
becoming increasingly resistant to the Little Miss Sunshine
side of an indisputably impressive talent to amuse.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18
 FICTION I
A MANDA C RAIG
POLES APART
T HE ROAD H OME
★ So much of him is rooted in his past that he seems nothing
By Rose Tremain
(Chatto & Windus 320pp £16.99)
IT IS STRANGE to think that Rose Tremain is always more
concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar
only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like
Restoration, Music & Silence and most recently The Colour,
she has acquired a lustrous Establishment sheen as the
respectable face of historical fiction. Yet just as impressive,
and interesting, are the fictions set in modern times.
Tremain has explored the minds of batty old Marxists,
property developers in France, transsexuals in America and
a teenaged boy in love with a very much older woman. It
is these works that have pushed her to develop most,
although they are probably less commercially successful.
Lev, in The Road Home, is not therefore such a big
change of direction, though he embodies what is surely
one of the pressing problems of our time. Marina
Lewycka has written two splendidly funny novels about
immigrants. The story of the Eastern Europeans has
overtaken that of Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Afro-
Caribbeans as the latest arrivals on our shores.
We first meet Lev on the bus journey from Poland to
London, when he gets talking to Lydia, a pleasant, plain,
well-educated translator who shares her boiled eggs with
him. Lev is a widower, his beloved wife Marina having
died. He has left a daughter behind, having no option,
once the mill where he worked closed, but to come to
Europe. He knows almost nothing about Britain, though
he has a little English, some useful advice from his classes,
and the idea that all English people are like those in The
Bridge On the River Kwai. Lev is a good man. Everybody
likes him, even the bullying restaurateur G K Ashe (who
seems to be modelled on Gordon Ramsay) for whom he
works as washer-up, then sous-chef. Lev learns how to
cook – skills that come in useful when he helps sexy
Sophie on Christmas Day in an old people’s home.
Distinguished by his good looks and honest heart, Lev
has problems because both Lydia and Sophie fancy him,
and the novel is partly about which woman he is going
to choose. Poor, intellectual, speckled Lydia (cruelly
nicknamed ‘Muesli’ by the children in Highgate whom
she au pairs) gives Lev a copy of Hamlet and invites him
to hear one of Rostropovich’s last concerts. To Lev’s
horror his newly acquired mobile goes off, just as the
conductor is about to start the final movement, and he
flees in mortification.
It is a wonderful moment, typically Tremainian in its
31
depiction of the way music can both damage a relationship
and deepen it, and there is another pivotal scene at the
Royal Court Theatre when it becomes clear that his new
love, Sophie, is in thrall to fashion rather than genuine
feeling. More of this would have been a bonus because
there are problems with Lev for the first half of the novel.
more than one long memory about his wife, his daredevil
friend Rudi and the Poland he has left behind; what one
wants as a reader is to see our world through alien eyes.
He encounters odd people – like a fashionable hatter who
makes miniature top-hats for celebrities – and becomes
friendly with his drunken Irish landlord from whom he
rents a child’s room, and with Ruby, a rich old lady.
Lev’s love for English Sophie destroys his ‘beautiful life’
of friendship and possibilities in London, and he ends up
picking asparagus in Suffolk with other immigrants. It is
in this last part that the novel really takes off. Back home,
his village is scheduled to be flooded by a new dam, and
despair almost overwhelms him. Yet, like the Chinese
vegetable-seller in The Colour, his life comes good when
he least expects it. He has a Big Idea (which readers will
spot a mile off) and then he has some Big Luck too.
It is Rose Tremain’s ability to pluck triumph from dis-
aster which makes her such an engaging writer, if also a
little too consolatory in The Road Home. Lev’s story is all
too common, but what is uncommon is the way
Tremain, away from the fairytale tropes she is drawn to,
makes us understand him.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18
The British Academy
Spring Lectures
2007
Br itish Academy lectures are free and open to the general public and
ever yone is welcome. The lectures take place at 10 Carlton House
Ter race, London SW1 and beg in at 5.30pm and will be
followed by a reception at 6.30pm.
5.30pm, Thursday 31 May 2007
Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Culture
Artists and Craftsmen in the Late Bronze Age of China (eighth third
centur ies B.C.): Art in Transition
Professor Alain Thote, École Pratique Des Hautes Études, Par is
Further infor mation and abstracts are available at
www.br itac.ac.uk/events/2007
The Br itish Academ Tel: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228
Email: lectures@br itac.ac.uk
Email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION I
P HILIP W OMACK
STREETS AHEAD
BARNABY GRIMES: CURSE OF THE NIGHT WOLF
★ C HANGED THE WORLD, 1940–1941
By Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
(Doubleday 211pp £8.99)
IN THE SMOKY, tumbledown north of a sprawling city,
where governesses duel with umbrellas and the gap
between poor and rich is vast, lives a young lad called
Barnaby Grimes. Dapper, self-assured, and handy with a
sword-stick, he races around the roofs of the city – ‘high-
stacking’, as it is called – running errands as a ‘tick-tock’
lad. He is messenger, courier, assistant and researcher,
always ahead of the clock. He knows the quickest routes
across town, which puts him (literally) streets ahead of
the rest. If only London produced such ‘clerks errant’…
Barnaby narrates the story with a winning and cheeky
charm – he has an eye for pretty shop assistants, and has
a genuine concern for his fellow man: he loves his city,
from the gleaming spires of the financial district to the
brawl-filled gloaming of ‘the Wasps’ Nest’, and would
do anything to protect it. The ‘terrible dark evil’ of this
story begins with the ‘seemingly innocent fashion for
fur collars and cuffs, known as the Westphalian trim’.
On the same night that his friend Old Benjamin the
coachman disappears, Barnaby is attacked by a vicious
‘night wolf ’. He survives, barely, and kills the wolf, and
is led to a certain Doctor Cadwallader, a man ‘as cool
and collected as a fishmonger’s cat’.
Cadwallader is engaged in what seems like an altruistic
exercise: giving the poor and needy a tonic that cures
them of their ailments – but, as Barnaby soon finds out,
it has much more serious side effects, not so much phil-
anthropic as lycanthropic. He is thrown into a desperate
race, where he needs all his skills to survive.
The writing is enlivened by Chris Riddell’s spindly, spi-
dery illustrations, which show in lustrous detail the night-
wolves’ fur, or depict in diagrammatical form a particularly
inventive jump that Grimes performs down a chimney.
One shows two ‘river-toughs’ with ‘intricate chin tattoos’
emerging menacingly from a run-down sail yard, wearing
cravats and embroidered waistcoats: they capture perfectly
the eccentric, ebullient nature of the book, with the gleam
of menace in their eyes hinting at darker terrors.
This is the first of the Barnaby Grimes adventures, and
our young hero casually drops hints to others, involving
temple demons, a mine-owner’s daughter and blue-
faced baboons, promising more quirky, riotous escapades
for this engaging young man. Quite graphic in its vio-
lence, this one will be relished by boys of nine and up.
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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
HISTORY
C HRISTOPHER C OKER
TIPPING POINTS
FATEFUL C HOICES : T EN D ECISIONS THAT
★
By Ian Kershaw
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 623pp £30)
GIVEN THE ENDLESS stream of books on the Second
World War that appear on the bookshelves every year, I
must confess that I think it might be time for historians
to call an armistice. Indeed the story is so familiar that I
must confess also to a sneaking sympathy for Don
DeLillo’s Morehouse Professor of Latent History, a won-
derful, if bizarre, character who appears in DeLillo’s
1973 novel Great Jones Street. It is axiomatic, the
Professor reminds his readers, that history is the record
of events. ‘But what of Latent History? We all think we
know what happened. But did it really happen? Or did
something else happen?’ DeLillo’s professor studies
events that almost took place, events that definitely took
place but went unseen, as well as events that probably
took place but were not chronicled at the time. Like
many of the author’s characters the Morehouse Professor
is a marvellous creation of the postmodern sensibility,
especially our fascination with counterfactual history.
Ian Kershaw is not a postmodern writer. His book, he
tells us from the beginning, is not counterfactual or
Virtual History, of the type which makes an intellectual
guessing game of some distant future and projects what
might have happened had some event not taken place.
Kershaw is one of our most distinguished contemporary
historians, with a much-praised two-volume biography
of Hitler to his name. And the stories he tells (there are
ten in all) relay the critical decisions of the Second
World War taken by its principal actors. They are all
decisions which determined the shape of the second half
of the century, and whose influence can still be seen in
the landscape of the world in which we live. In many
respects Kershaw tells a familiar story, but he is eager to
stress that 1940–1 really was the fulcrum of world histo-
ry. Despite the odds against them, the Axis powers could
have won the war, and almost did. History viewed ‘from
the front’ rather than ‘from the back’, he insists, some-
times reveals surprises.
There is nothing that is really surprising in this book,
but that in no way detracts from its overall merits. For a
start, the story bears retelling. As the twentieth century
drew to a close it became even more evident that the
Second World War was the defining moment, both in
Europe and in Asia. National bankruptcy and resurgent
anti-colonialism put paid to Great Britain’s world empire.
 HISTORY
The war lifted the United States out of the Great
Depression and launched it on the road to becoming a
superpower (something that had been in the offing as
early as the 1880s). If ever a country was reluctant to
mobilise its resources in pursuit of power, the United
States was it. It was only towards the end of the war that
Henry Luce, the founding editor of Time, coined the
phrase ‘The American Century’. The war also gave rise
to the Cold War and that brief moment in which Soviet
Communism commanded the moral high ground in the
eyes of many people. Looking back from our vantage
point, perhaps the most important outcome of all was
the rise of China. Mao’s republic was a prime legatee of
the demise of Japan as a Great Power. Finally, the Second
World War left humanity with a new and horrible word
– genocide. The last of the decisions Kershaw looks at is
the most horrendous of all: the one to press ahead with
the Final Solution. Of all the fateful decisions he consid-
ers, that to kill the Jews is the one he feels was the most
inevitable. If the invasion of the Soviet Union had pro-
ceeded as the German leadership hoped, the Final
Solution would not have taken its particular form. The
killing fields, in all probability, would have mainly been
in the Soviet Union, not Poland. But as long as the Nazi
regime was in power and engaged in the war, the Jews
would have perished in one way or another. Only the
method and timing would have differed.
The chapters that form the bulk of the book are a
model of scholarship. Kershaw captures the three days
when the British Cabinet seriously debated the possibili-
ty of a negotiated peace with Berlin (a very different
story from the account given by Churchill in his mem-
oirs, who told his readers that the supreme question of
whether to fight on had never found a place on the
Cabinet agenda). The story, of course, is now well
known, and is captured especially vividly in John Lukas’s
Five Days in May (Yale University Press, 1999).
Britain’s defiance forced Hitler to invade Russia.
Kershaw is particularly good at reminding us that in the
real world, rather than the counterfactual world of fanta-
sy and imagination, no other choice was possible in
1940. Hitler’s only option was to gamble further, to
take, as always, the bold, forward move, one that would
sweep over the Russians ‘like a hailstorm’ and make the
world ‘hold its breath’. It was madness, for there was lit-
tle chance of success. Even the blitzkrieg of the early
months of the invasion cost the Wehrmacht 830,000
casualties – more than Germany had incurred in the bat-
tles of Verdun and the Somme com-
bined, although the size of the
killing ground and the glamour of visit Literary
the manoeuvres still persuade some
of us that it was the German army’s
‘finest hour’.
www.literaryreview.co.uk
By then, Japan had made its own
33
gamble, which, as Kershaw reminds us, also looks
inevitable from a historian’s perspective. Japan was not a
world power and didn’t think in geopolitical terms. It
would have been wiser, perhaps, in the circumstances, to
have waited until the very end of December 1941 to see
whether the German army would take Moscow or not.
But the war was foreshadowed long before then. Better
relations with the United States would have meant
capitulating over China. In the eyes of the country’s
leaders this would have entailed a colossal loss of pres-
tige, with incalculable internal consequences, as well as
leaving the country even more dependent on the United
States for its long-term future.
America’s entry into the war was also inevitable long
before Pearl Harbor. At no time did Roosevelt ever
consider taking the country to war. Just as Wilson had
promised the Democratic Convention in 1916 that the
United States was ‘too proud to fight’, so Roosevelt had
assured the American people in Boston in October
1940, during his own re-election campaign, that he
would never send Amer ican troops to fight in a
European war. But by supporting the United Kingdom
as far as he could and toughing it out with Japan he
forced both Axis powers into a strategic endgame. By
early 1941 Germany and Japan faced the prospect that if
they didn’t end the war soon and on their own terms
their tactical successes, impressive though they were,
would merely end in strategic ruin. The United States
was essentially at war with both powers long before
most Amer ican troops were sent into battle. As
Roosevelt told the British ambassador, Lord Halifax,
‘declarations of war were going out of fashion’. In a
sense, Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United
States four days after Pearl Harbor can be seen as neither
grandiloquent nor puzzling. From his perspective he was
only anticipating the inevitable.
All the same, Kershaw adds, it’s possible that he knew
that with the German army stalled in front of Moscow,
the war was lost, or at the very least that the prospect of
total victory was beyond his grasp. It was a momentary
flickering but a significant one, and it was revealed in a
remark (a point he was to return to in the face of cata-
strophe in the last months of his life) that if in the end
the German people should not prove strong enough
then they deserved to go under.
And so it transpired. When the terrible war was over
both Germany and Japan found themselves more depen-
dent economically upon the United States than had been
foreseeable when the conflict
broke out. Both were deprived of
Review online their Great Power status. Europe
was left in ruins. Fortunately
endings are also beginnings.
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LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 HISTORY
A LLAN M ASSIE
PANIC IN PARIS
F LEEING H ITLER : F RANCE 1940
★ advance caught everyone by surprise, and the civilian
By Hanna Diamond
(Oxford University Press 253pp £16.99)
WARS DISPLACE PEOPLE. The ‘exodus’ – the flight south
in May and June 1940 of a good part of the population
of northern France, including Paris – was remarkable.
But it was not unique. Less than five years later there
would be a comparable exodus in eastern Europe, as
Germans – many belonging to families settled for gener-
ations in the Baltic States, Poland, and the territories
that were once part of the Habsburg empire – fled
before the conquering Red Army. When the Hitler war
ended there were millions of unfortunates officially
labelled DPs – Displaced Persons (refugees, as we would
now say) – to be reset-
tled. Those old enough
to remember newsreels
of the Korean War will
recall pictures of South
Korean peasants and the
citizens of Seoul in flight
from the Communist
armies of North Korea
and China. This should
be remembered. The
French exodus in 1940
was not exceptional.
Hanna Diamond, a
Senior Lecturer in
French History at the
University of Bath, tells
the stor y vividly and
even-handedly. Panic unquestionably set in. It was all
the greater because for seven months after war was
declared in September 1939, nothing happened in the
West. This was what we called the Phoney War and the
French ‘le drôle de guerre’. It was possible to believe
that nothing would happen, that it would all be
arranged. Certainly there were politicians in office in
both France and the United Kingdom who hoped and
even supposed this might be possible. So the shock of
the German attack was all the greater. Moreover, the
French government had made great efforts to instil a
mood of confidence. Why not? They were confident
enough themselves. French and British strategists were
planning for a long war. An economic blockade would
sap Germany’s strength (as it had done in 1917–18).
Meanwhile, if the Germans were rash enough to attack
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
they would be stopped by the fortifications of the
Maginot Line. An Allied attack was planned for 1941 or
1942. All this looked good on paper, and was reassuring
for the civilian population. ‘Nous gagnerons parce que
nous sommes plus forts.’ But the unexpected German
attack through the Ardennes and the rapidity of their
population fled. Panic is contagious, and soon the roads
were full of families in flight. Something like three-
quarters of Parisians left the city. It seemed like the col-
lapse of a civilisation. Diamond quotes one Parisian
writer, Camille Bourniquel, as saying it was as if the
Middle Ages had been reinvented. The mayor of one
village in the north urged people to flee saying ‘it’s
going to be like what it was in 1914, they rape the
women and they cut the young girls’ hands off ’. No
wonder morale cracked. No wonder they fled. No won-
der there was utter confusion, a situation which also
hampered the efforts of the army to bring up reinforce-
ments and organise a new defensive line.
The Government and the ministries also abandoned
the capital. There were
precedents: in 1870
and 1914 the
Government had been
transfer red to
Bordeaux. They head-
ed that way again,
though for a couple of
weeks the various min-
isters were housed in
various chateaux of the
Loire – which added to
the chaos and the sense
that all was lost. There
had been government
plans for an orderly
Exodus evacuation of civilians,
but the suddenness of
the German breakthrough made it impossible to imple-
ment these. It was a matter of each for himself or herself
or their family. Many families were separated. In some
cases, ‘mothers, exhausted by carrying children or strug-
gling to keep up, welcomed the offer of a lift for the
children from an unknown quarter and subsequently
could not track them down’. To make matters worse,
the Germans – for good military reasons – ‘set about an
extensive bombing campaign and gunned down the
columns of refugees’. Later some would present the
exodus as the first act of Resistance. ‘Escaping the
enemy became a duty’ depriving the conquerors of
‘human supplies’ – factory workers.
It is not surprising that for the majority the change of
government which brought Marshal Pétain to power came
as a relief; he was already convinced that the war was lost
34
 HISTORY
and committed to an Armistice. It was humiliating. It was
the best they could hope for. Very few people heard
General de Gaulle’s famous broadcast of 18 June. In any
case ‘no propaganda had prepared people for the possible
continuation of the battle outside France. To join de
Gaulle they were obliged to leave their social or family
milieu.’ One young woman remembered that ‘painful dis-
cussions divided families. Relieved that their sons had
escaped the rounding up of prisoners, parents forbade the
slightest gesture of revolt’, which, in the first years of the
Occupation, would have been futile anyway. Many also
believed that ‘the Germans will go home as soon as they
have beaten the English, it’s only a question of months’.
This was not an unreasonable expectation.
P IERS B RENDON
THE SUN DOES SET
B RITAIN ’ S D ECLINING E MPIRE : T HE ROAD
TO D ECOLONISATION, 1918–1968
★ hairdressers’. By contrast Twining’s more progressive
By Ronald Hyam
(Cambridge University Press 464pp £17.99)
THIS MAGISTERIAL VOLUME, a sequel to Britain’s Imperial
Century, 1815–1914 (1976), is the distillation of a life-
time’s learning and teaching about the British Empire.
The earlier work, Ronald Hyam explains, was a kind of
‘user’s handbook’. The present study, based on moun-
tains of documentary evidence, concentrates more
specifically on the politics of decolonisation. Such a rig-
orous scholarly enterprise would have every excuse to
be dr y. But as became instantly apparent to his
Cambridge pupils (of whom, to declare an interest, I
was one), Hyam is entertaining, incisive and sardonic to
the point of ribaldry.
Witness his verdict on characters who played impor-
tant parts during the last days of the Empire. Arthur
Creech Jones, Labour’s Colonial Secretary, was an
‘uncharismatic blatherer’. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith,
Governor of Burma, was the aloof embodiment of ‘a
certain type of ineffably awful Old Harrovian’. The
Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison was ignorant of
foreign affairs and unwilling to learn – Hyam endorses
Attlee’s view that Morrison was ‘a terrible flop’. He also
seems to agree that Anthony Eden was ‘the worst Prime
Minister since Lord North’.
Hyam is equally acerbic about the disasters that presaged
Britain’s imperial demise. He quotes a soldier in the Allied
forces at Singapore, which vastly outnumbered the
Japanese to whom they surrendered in 1942: ‘Never have
so many been fucked about by so few.’ As for the Suez
invasion of 1956, it was ‘a counter-productive, catastrophic
35
Hanna Diamond’s account of these terrible months is
admirable. It can’t compare with their fictional recon-
struction in Irène Némirovsky’s marvellous Suite
Française (she disapprovingly remarks that the novel is
‘cur iously lacking in ideology’ – one of its many
strengths to my mind). But her own book benefits
greatly from the vast number of eyewitness memoirs
from which she quotes appositely. There is – she insists –
no one simple truthful story of the exodus, just as there
is none either of Vichy or the Resistance. She writes
with sympathy but also with the detachment proper to a
historian, trying to tell it as it was in its confusion,
uncertainties and contradictions.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18
fiasco, marked by deception, hypocrisy, myopia and confu-
sion, and ending in humiliating failure’.
Hyam is mordant about the quirks as well as the
calamities of the dying Empire. He notes that one latter-
day Governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining, com-
plained of not being able to attract as settlers decent
British farmers, only ‘BBC violinists, bar-tenders and
successor, Sir Richard Turnbull, was a rowing fanatic
who taught his beloved parrot to swear roundly before
reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
As befits the author of that seminal work, Empire and
Sexuality (1990), Hyam is especially perceptive about
what went on underneath the imperialists. He observes
that Europeans could sleep with the natives of Sarawak
and the Solomon Islands but not with Indians in Simla
or Africans in Salisbury. He takes the view that Ewart
‘Grogs’ Grogan, the first man to walk from the Cape to
Cairo, was ‘sexually over-engined’. He quotes the wife
of the third White Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Charles Vyner
Brooke, who said that her husband ‘made love just as he
played golf – in a nervous unimaginative flurry’.
Hyam also recounts how the Daughters of the
American Revolution took the British government to
task during the 1950s for its failure to prevent a 102-
year-old king in the Cameroons from keeping a hundred
wives. The monarch could not understand the fuss but
eventually complied with the United Nations demand
to sack his wives – which gave him the opportunity to
marry a number of younger women. Somehow, Hyam
remarks dr yly, the Daughters of the Amer ican
Revolution managed not to catch up with King
Sobhuza of Swaziland, who had 120 wives.
Using a cricketing metaphor, Hyam says that there are
four main explanations for the ending of empire. The
British were bowled out, by colonial nationalists and free-
dom fighters; or they were run out, by overstretching their
resources at a time of economic constraint; or they retired
hurt as a result of declining morale and a failure of will; or
they were booed off the pitch by anti-colonial critics
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 HISTORY
around the world and especially in the
United Nations.
Hyam principally favours the fourth
explanation, though he attaches due
weight to the others. This appears in his
luminous opening account of the British
Empire, which had been a world-shap-
ing force during the Victorian age but
was overwhelmed by its responsibilities
by 1918 and lacked the strength to meet
new challenges. Hyam examines key
dysfunctional factors: the inadequacy of
the system of indirect rule through local
‘chiefs’; the fantasy that Kenya could be
a ‘white man’s country’; the absurdity of
building a vice-regal palace for a collaps-
ing Raj; the vacuity of the Anglo- King Sobhuza: much married
American special relationship.
Such matters are set in the context of the danger posed
by totalitarian aggression throughout most of the twenti-
eth century. The fate of the Empire was always less
important than the survival of the United Kingdom. Thus
Chamberlain was willing to appease Hitler by sacrificing
colonies and, indeed, by redrawing the whole map of
Africa. Attlee, whose moral and political judgement
Hyam rightly extols, said that any attempt to maintain the
old form of colonialism would aid Communists during
the Cold War. He opposed a Palmerstonian assault on
Persia in 1951 because ‘we are working under an entirely
different code’ determined by the United Nations – a
code not understood by Tony Blair.
Macmillan and Harold Wilson, though they some-
times wobbled, essentially took Attlee’s line. It was
P ETER P ARSONS
VALETE ROMANI!
FAREWELL B RITANNIA : A FAMILY S AGA OF
ROMAN B RITAIN
★ generations which have witnessed the rise and decline of
By Simon Young
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 286pp £16.99)
AD 410, AND the lamps were going out all over Europe.
German tribes had finally broken through the Rhine fron-
tier; Alaric and his Goths were about to sack Rome itself,
1,163 years after its foundation. The Roman Emperor
Honorius, in his safe retreat among the marshes of
Ravenna, had enough to do to guarantee his own safety.
When, therefore, the cities of his most northerly province
appealed for help against the raiding Saxons, he replied in
a letter that his Greek historian summarises in two words:
‘Defend yourselves’. And so, for a time, they did, quite
36
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
summed up in a 1967 Cabinet paper
which declared that Britain had long
been committed to decolonisation and
that its pace was ‘strongly influenced by
the increasing insistence of world opin-
ion on the right of peoples to govern
themselves’. At least as early as 1959 it
had become clear that holding on to
overseas possessions was more damaging
to British prestige than letting them go.
Of course, there must be no appear-
ance of what Churchill had called ‘scut-
tle’. But a controlled withdrawal, it was
hoped, would enable Britain to turn
imperial liabilities into Commonwealth
assets, to exchange evanescent power
for per manent influence. So, with
notable exceptions such as Kenya,
Cyprus and Aden, the Br itish Empire underwent
euthanasia. Thanks to pragmatic and reactive policies
developed in London, it suffered what Hyam calls ‘a
quiet and easy death’.
His book is so well informed by archival research that
it gives a uniquely clear reflection of Whitehall’s ‘official
mind’. This was itself often clouded by confusion; yet to
see its ideas translated into practice comes as something
of a revelation. One can niggle about the nuances. In
the unhealthy neo-imperialist climate of today, for
example, I take a somewhat more jaundiced view of the
Empire and its liquidation than does Hyam. But he is a
consummate historian with a transcendent literary style
and he has crowned his career with a tour de force.
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successfully. But twenty years later war and diplomacy had
only confirmed their isolation from the Empire: Roman
Britannia was mutating into Anglo-Saxon England.
It’s from this point that Simon Young’s ‘family saga’
begins. The narrator attends his father’s funeral. There
(in accordance with Roman custom) the funeral masks of
his ancestors are paraded, and he looks back over twelve
‘Roman Britain’, starting from the first reconnaissance
that the Gaulish chieftain Commius conducts on behalf
of Julius Caesar (Commius later rebelled, escaped to
Britain, and settled as ruler of the Atrebates from the
Thames southward to the sea). Two generations later, in
AD 43, the Roman army arrives in force, despatched by
the Emperor Claudius, a stammering pedant much in
need of military glamour. And so (as the Romans saw it)
a third-world patch of tall, tattooed, beer-drinking
trouser-wearers joins civilisation. King Togidubnus, him-
self a Roman citizen, proclaims himself, in Latin, ‘Great
King of Britain’; Chichester sports a Temple of Neptune
and Minerva, and imported craftsmen create mosaic
 HISTORY

floors for a seaside palace at Fishbourne. ‘interpreter of dreams’ on a religious mosaic from Lydney,
With time the Roman army advances into Wales and and Lucius Artorius Castus (whom we know from a
Scotland, undeterred by the rebellion of Boudicca (AD memorial plaque far away in Croatia), general of cavalry
60/1). The Scottish Highlands defeat them, and in the end in Britain and thought by some to be the original King
(towards AD 200) they pull back to Hadrian’s wall, where Arthur. We see them in the landscape they inhabited,
they maintain the frontier for two hundred years. Two with its wolves and bears, its farms transformed by such
centuries, by and large, of peace, assimilation and increas- Roman imports as apples and plums, carrots and cab-
ing prosperity ensue. All the inhabitants have Roman citi- bages; and in the society of their time, with its abandoned
zenship. Celtic gods merge with Roman ones in temples babies and its secret police, its veteran soldiers whose
built in Celtic style, even as Christianity establishes a calloused necks showed twenty years of wearing the chin-
foothold. Oxfordshire potters export to France; the studios strap, its imported slaves whose chalk-whitened feet iden-
of Cirencester supply their own style of mosaics for hand- tified them for customs-duty.
some villas. Yet there are external enemies in waiting, and Young’s chronicle, a fictional history more than a histor-
in AD 367, ominously, those enemies combine forces, the ical fiction, vividly recreates the four centuries of Roman
Picts from the north and the Scots from Ireland (‘peoples Britain, a short episode long to be remembered. Rome
partly different in habits’, wrote Gildas later, ‘but agreeing remained a name to conjure with, and Roman buildings
in one and the same greed for shedding blood, their vil- littered the landscape like dinosaur bones. In the Anglo-
lainous faces more concealed by hair than their private Saxon epoch, a poet meditated on the ruins of a Roman
parts by clothing’) – and, finally and decisively, the Saxons bath, ‘works of giants’. Not long after the Norman con-
from across the North Sea. The Roman garrison, once a quest, William of Malmesbury noted in York the signs of
full tenth of the imperial forces, drains away: in 383 and ‘Roman elegance’. Over centuries, we have clawed back
again in 407 an ambitious commander proclaims himself some Roman comforts: roads and concrete, piped water
Emperor, and takes his troops across the Channel to fight and central heating. We still stop short of the common
for the supreme prize. By AD 410 Roman Britain stands currency. And we are working hard to reform away the
empty of Roman authority. most central and continuous of all our links with
Simon Young is an expert in things Celtic and Anglo- Britannia, the knowledge of the Latin language.
Saxon, who commands the sparse ancient sources and To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18
the extensive modern literature with ease and insight.
His ‘family saga’ unites real people, or at least real
names, in a family which is (except in the first two gen-
erations) fictional. The fiction proceeds by vignettes,
with an afterword and notes to reveal the facts, historical
and archaeological, behind each one. Some picture the
major events of local history. Others sketch scenes of
peace: dinner at the villa, bathing at Bath, Claudia
Severa’s birthday party near Hadrian’s wall, for which we
still have the invitation – written on a postcard-sized
slice of wood, since papyrus was not to be had out here
on the periphery.
Enthusiasts of Roman Britain will admire the virtuosity
with which Young conjures new life into old bones.
Other readers will simply enjoy the infancy of the island
race, presented with such verve and immediacy. The past
is another country, but it’s one whose realities Young
reinvents with a rare combination of scholarship and
imagination. The stage fills with figures who now survive
only through passing references in literature or chance
archaeological finds. We meet Paul, inquisitor to the para-
noid Emperor Constantius II, nicknamed ‘the Chain’
from his ability to weave complex webs of calumny; and
cloudgatedance
Silvius Bonus (‘Good Silvius’) the critic, who incautiously
attacked the arriviste poet Ausonius of Bordeaux (‘No
theatreoftaiwan
Wild Cursive - The final chapter of Cursive: A Trilogy
Brit is a Good Brit’, replied Ausonius). We meet Iamcilla, Sponsored by
Tuesday 19 - Friday 22 June • Sadler’s Wells
whose name is engraved on the Christian silverware 0844 412 4300 • www.sadlerswells.com
buried at Water Newton, and Victorinus, who appears as

37
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 HISTORY
J OHN J OLLIFFE
A KING, NOT A DOGE
R ETURN OF THE K ING : T HE R ESTORATION
OF C HARLES II
★ and instructed them rigorously, but also having carefully
By Charles Fitzroy
(Sutton Publishing 252pp £20)
Throughout the enforced idleness of his exile, Charles II
lived on credit, which became increasingly difficult for
him, and harder still for his companions and suppliers, to
obtain. All the time, however, he showed a patient
determination to regain the throne, rejecting various
plans to return to an England which was not yet ready
for him. His steadiness prevailed, in spite of his liking for
frivolous and dissolute company. His first serious mis-
tress, Lucy Walters, bore him a son whom he later creat-
ed Duke of Monmouth, but she behaved so scandalously
that the King prevented her from bringing him up.
The first message of this well-researched book is that it
was the disagreements and rivalries between Cromwell’s
followers after his death, rather than any success on the
part of Charles’s own supporters, that were to bring the
monarch back to the throne. The first four-fifths of the
book are almost entirely concerned with these disputes
among the would-be political and military heirs of the
Protector, rather than with Charles himself. It is in them
that the Restoration had its roots, and thanks to them
that it succeeded.
How was the Army to be paid, and kept quiet? Didn’t
most Englishmen regard it as the destroyer, rather than
the preserver, of liberty? What about the wounded sur-
vivors of the Civil Wars, and the 4,000 widows and
orphans of those who had fallen? What was to become
of the Navy when the Admiralty Commissioners
resigned en masse? On the resignation, after a few
months, of Richard Cromwell, the heir apparent who
came to be known as Tumbledown Dick, the Rump
Parliament and the Army formed a so-called Council of
State, whose members were much ridiculed in pam-
phlets. It included a Colonel Thompson, ‘as wooden a
head as leg’; Mr Wallop, ‘a silent Hampshire gentleman
much in debt’, and the Protector’s brother-in-law
Desborough, ‘a country clown without fear or wit’.
Throughout the summer of 1659, Charles’s supporters
were rightly afraid to make a move for fear of reuniting
the Rump and the Army. Piecemeal royalist risings were
put down, though without severity. What followed
briefly was a ‘Sword Government’ by Lambert’s half of
the New Model Army, which included many political
and Nonconformist dissidents. In London John Evelyn
bravely published An Apology for the Royal Party, pitching
38
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
into the Scots for having betrayed Charles I, and calling
Cromwell, who was still a hero to many, ‘the most infa-
mous hypocrite and profligate Atheist of all Usurpers
that any age produced’. Significantly, he was not even
arrested. Then in December Monck led his half of the
army from Coldstream, on the Tweed (giving its name
to what became the Coldstream Guards), having trained
consulted with them about their preferences.
His first object was to overcome Lambert’s half of the
army, which he did without a battle; and then to get rid
of the tyrannical Rump, by reinstating the members
who had been excluded from it earlier in Pride’s Purge
and holding an election in April 1660. All this time he
was giving cautious undertakings not to support a return
to the Monarchy; while over in Brussels Charles and his
mentor Hyde were not at all optimistic about their
chances. The ever taciturn Monck was now all-power-
ful, and ‘paraded through London with four silver trum-
pets before him, and twenty troopers in black velvet
coats’. He was also awarded a gift of £20,000 by
Parliament. By the end of March he was able to declare
publicly for the King, who had published the
Declaration of Breda, drafted for him brilliantly by
Hyde. It contained the offer of a general pardon, a
‘desire for a liberty to tender consciences’, and proposals
for the ownership of land. Milton, that ardent republi-
can, had made the mistake of publishing a Readie and
Easie Way to establish a free Commonwealth, showing that
his political gifts were about on a par with those of
Michael Foot three centuries later. At the ensuing gen-
eral election, virtually no republicans were elected.
Charles had shrewdly followed Hyde’s advice and waited
for an invitation from Parliament, which now included a
restored House of Lords. In Macaulay’s words, the legacy
of Cromwell’s dictatorship had displayed ‘the restlessness
and irresolution of aspiring mediocrity’, not a bad epi-
taph for Blair’s decaying government today. Parliament’s
subsequent invitation was unconditional, and Charles
was able to exclaim: ‘I can now say I am a King, not a
Doge.’ After his triumphant return (on his thirtieth
birthday), Charles remained wary of his subjects’ ‘sud-
den over-enthusiastic response’, realising that the con-
version of many was superficial, and skilfully fending off
most of the swarm of petitioners for rewards for real or
imaginary services rendered.
The author is of course directly descended from the
King, and Barbara Villiers. But he has also shown him-
self a real scholar in his treatment of the many various
sources which he lists. From his useful summary of
Cromwell’s career at the outset, to his analysis of the
complex events of the interregnum, he displays an
admirable mastery of the whole story, brief in months
but incalculably important for posterity.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
 SHORT STORY
For five days the sergeant C LAIRE K EEGAN
kept the letter in the inside
pocket of his uniform. There
was something hard in the
letter but his desire to open it Surrender
was matched by his fear of
what it might contain. Her
letters, in recent times, with-
(after McGahern)
out ever changing course,
had taken on a different tone and he had heard that
another man, a schoolteacher, was grazing a pony on
her father’s land. Her father’s fields were on the moun-
tain. What grazing would be there was poor and daubed
with rushes. If the sergeant was to do as he had intend-
ed, there was but little time. Life, he felt, was pushing
him into a corner.
All that day, he went about his duties. If Doherty, the
guard in the dayroom, found him short, he did not pass
any remarks, for the length of the sergeant’s fuse was
never disputed. It was a wet December day and there
was nothing to be done. Doherty kept his head down
and went over the minute particulars of the permit once
again. Turning a page, he felt the paper cold against his
skin. He looked up and stared, with a degree of longing,
at the hearth. The fire was so low it was almost out. The
sergeant insisted always on a fire but never a fire that
would throw out any decent heat. The guard rose from
the desk and went slowly out into the rain.
The sergeant watched him as he came back and posi-
tioned two lumps of timber at either side of the flame.
‘Is it cold you are?’ said the sergeant, smiling.
‘No more than usual,’ answered Doherty.
‘Pull up tight to her there, why don’t you?’
‘It’s December,’ said the guard, reasonably.
‘It’s December,’ mimicked the Sergeant. ‘Don’t you
know there’s a war on?’
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘The people of this country love sitting in at the fire.
At the rate we’re going, we may go back to Westminster
to warm our hands.’
Doherty sighed. ‘Should I go out and see what’s hap-
pening on the roads?’
‘You’ll go nowhere.’
The sergeant stood up and put his cap on. It was a
new cap, stiff, with a shining peak. When he reached
out for the big black cape at the back of the door, he
threw it dramatically over his shoulders. Never once had
the guard seen him rush. Every move he made was
deliberate and enhanced by his good looks. It was hard
not to look at him but he was not, in any case, the type
of man you’d turn your back on. If his moods often
changed, the expression in his eyes was always the same,
intemperate blue. The men who had fought with him
said they couldn’t ever predict his moves. They said also
that his own were always the last to know. He had taken
39
risks but had shown a strange
gift for reading the enemy.
The timber spluttered into
flame and its light momen-
tarily struck the steel buttons
of the sergeant’s tunic. He
bent over, folded the trouser
legs and secured the bicycle
clips. When he opened the
door, the wind blew a hard, dappled rain over the flag-
stones. The sergeant went out and stood for a moment,
looking at the day. Always, he liked to stand for a
moment. When he turned back to Doherty, the guard
felt sure he could read his mind.
‘Don’t scorch the tail of your skirt,’ he said, and went
off without bothering to close the door.
Doherty got up and watched him cycling down the
barracks road. There was something half comical about
the sergeant and his bike going off down the road but
the remark lingered.
It was the easiest thing in the world to humiliate some-
body. He had said this aloud at his wife’s side in bed one
night, in the darkness, thinking she was asleep, but she
had answered back, saying it was sometimes harder not to
humiliate someone, that it was a weakness people had a
Christian duty to resist. He had stayed awake pondering
the statement long after her breathing changed. What did
it mean? Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and
yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy
thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract
a man and frighten him all at once.
The barracks was quiet but there was no peace; never
was there any peace in this place. Winter was here, with
the rain belting down and the wind scratching the bare
hills. Doherty felt the child’s urge to go out for more
timber, to build up the fire and make it blaze but at any
moment the sergeant could come back and as little as
that could mean the end. His post was nothing more
than a fiction and could easily be dissolved. All it would
take was the stroke of a pen. He pulled the chair up to
the fire and thought of his wife and child. Another was
on the way. He thought about his life and little else until
he realised his thoughts were unlikely to reach any con-
clusion; then he looked at his hands, stretched out to the
flame. What the sergeant wouldn’t say if he came back
and saw the firelight on his palms.
Down the road, the sergeant had dismounted and was
standing still under the yews. The yews were planted in
different times, and it gave him pleasure to stand and
take their shelter. The same dark smoke was still batter-
ing down on the barracks roof. He’d stood there for
close to an hour, on watch, but the quality of the smoke
hadn’t changed; neither was there any sign of Doherty
going back out to the shed. The way you rear your little
pup, you’ll have your little dog. As soon as the rain
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 SHORT STORY
eased, he moved out from the patch of sheltered ground
and pushed on for town.
Further along the road, a couple had stopped and was
talking. The youth, a MacManus off the hill, was leaning
over the saddle of his bike with his cap pushed well back
off his face. The girl was laughing but as soon as she laid
eyes on the sergeant, she went still. ‘A fine day it is for
doing nothing,’ said the sergeant expansively. ‘Wouldn’t I
love to be out in the broad daylight sweet-talking girls?’
The girl blushed and turned her head away.
‘I better be going on, Francie,’ she said.
The youth held his ground.
‘Don’t you know it’s the wrong side of the road you’re
on?’ demanded the sergeant. ‘Does the youth of this
country not even know which end of ye is up?’
The young man turned his bicycle in the opposite
direction.
‘Does this suit you any better?’ He was saying it for
the girl’s benefit but the girl had gone on.
‘What would suit me is to see the youth of this country
rolling up their sleeves,’ the sergeant said. ‘Men didn’t risk
their lives so the likes of ye could stand around idle.’
If we can’t be idle, what can we be? the young man
wanted to say but his courage had gone, with the girl.
He threw his leg over the crossbar and rode on, calling
after her. The girl did not look back and kept her head
down when the sergeant passed. The sergeant knew her
mother, a widow who gave him butter and rhubarb in
the summertime but all she had was a rough acre behind
the house. As it turned out, there was hardly a woman
in the entire district with land.
He rode on into the town and leant his bicycle against
Duignan’s wall. The back door was on the latch. He
pushed it open and entered a smoky kitchen whose
walls were painted brown. Nobody was within but there
was the smell of bread baking and someone had recently
fried onions. A pang of hunger struck him; he’d gone
without since morning. He went to the hearth and
stared at the cast-iron pan on its heavy iron hook, the lid
covered in embers. Close by, a cat was washing herself
with a sput paw. Talk was filtering in from the front
room that served as a shop. The sergeant could hear
every word. ‘But isn’t he some man to cock his hat?’
‘What do they see in him at all?’ ‘It’s not as though he
hasn’t the looks,’ said another.
‘Sure hasn’t he the uniform?’
‘A cold bloody thing it would be to lie up against in
the middle of the night,’ and there was a cackle that was
a woman’s laughter.
The sergeant grew still. It was the old, still feeling of
the upper hand that made lesser men freeze but the
sergeant came alive. He felt himself back under the gorse
with a Tommy in the sight of his gun; the old thrill of
conspiracy, the raw nerve. He was about to stand closer
to the shop door when suddenly it opened and the
40
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
woman came in. She hardly paused when she saw him.
‘Hello, Sergeant!’ she called out, same as he was far
away. The banter in the shop drew to a sharp halt. There
was a rough whisper and the clink of porter bottles. The
woman came towards the pan with a cloth and swung
the hook away from the fire. She removed the iron lid
without letting an ember fall and took up the loaf. It
was a white loaf with a cross cut deep into the surface of
the dough. The sergeant had not seen a white loaf in
months. Three times the woman rapped it with her
knuckles and the sound it made was a hollow sound.
The sergeant had to hand it to her: her head was cool.
There were few women in the country like her left. She
went to the shop door and without looking beyond, shut it.
‘I don’t suppose those pigeons came in to roost?’
‘They came in last night,’ she said.
‘They didn’t all come?’ ‘They’re all there. The even
dozen, fresh from the barrow.’
‘A fine price they must be.’
When she told him what price they were, a fresh thrill
ran down the entire length of his body. It was almost twice
what he had anticipated and the extravagance was, in his
experience, without comparison but he hid his pleasure.
‘I suppose I’ll have to take them now,’ he grunted.
‘It’s as you please,’ the woman said.
The shop door flew open and a small boy, one of her
troops, ran in from the shop.
‘Slide the bolt there, Sean, good boy,’ the woman said.
The boy leant against the door until the latch caught
then slid the bolt across. He drew up close to the
woman and stared at the loaf.
‘Is there bread?’ the boy asked, tilting his head back.
The boy’s face was pale and there were dark circles
under his eyes.
‘You can have it when it cools,’ said the woman, prop-
ping the loaf against the window. She threw the bolt on
the back door and opened the lower part of the dresser.
The light, wooden crate was covered by a cloth. When
she pulled the cloth away, the sergeant got their scent.
They lay on a bed of wood chippings, each wrapped in
fine, pink tissue.
The boy leaned in over the table and stared.
‘What are they, Mammy?’
‘They’re onions,’ she said.
‘They’re not!’ he cried.
‘They are,’ she said.
The boy reached out to stroke the tissue and stared up at
the sergeant. The sergeant felt the boy’s hungry gaze. He
took the tissue off each one and lifted it to his nose before
he pushed back his cape and reached into his pocket for
the money. As he was reaching in, his fingers lingered
unnecessarily over the envelope and he realised his hand
was half covetous of the letter. The woman wrapped the
crate in a flour sack while the sergeant stood waiting.
‘Is it for Christmas you be wanting them, Sergeant?’
 SHORT STORY

‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Ay.’

She counted out the money on the kitchen table, and
when he offered her something extra for the loaf, she
looked at the boy. The boy’s face was paler now. His
skin was chalky. When he saw his mother wrapping the
loaf in the brown paper, he began to cry. 27 April – 09 June
‘Mammy,’ he wailed. ‘My bread!’
‘Hush, a leanbh. I’ll make you another,’ she said. ‘I’ll
do it just as soon as the sergeant leaves.’ Rufus Norris directs the first major
The sergeant took the parcel out the back and tied it staging of DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize
carefully on to the carrier of his bike. He was ready now
for the bar racks but he walked back through the winning, superbly fast-talking adventure.
kitchen, unlocked the door and entered the shop. The
talk that had seized up when his presence was made
known had risen back to neutral speech. This, too, ‘Bold, brash and fabulous. It's the
seized up on his entry. Walking in through the silence, most fun I've had at the theatre’
he felt the same old distance and superiority he always The Times (on Rufus Norris’ Market Boy)
felt. He was reared near here, they knew his people but
he would never be one of them. He stood at the
counter and looked at the stains on the dark wood. ‘Rufus Norris’ superbly dark, edgy
‘Isn’t it a harsh day?’ production succeeds brilliantly’
Always, there was someone who could not stand the
silence. This was the type of man who, in other circum- FT (on Cabaret)
stances, could get another killed. ‘It’s a day for the fire,’
said another.
The sergeant hoped one of them would open his gob
Book now! 020 7922 2929
and make an open strike but not one of them had the www.youngvic.org
courage. To his face, their talk would stay in the shallow,
furtive waters of idle banter; anything of significance Young Vic
they had to say would be said just after he was gone. He 66 The Cut
paused at the front door where a calendar was hanging London

Photograph by John Ross

from a nail. He studied it closely though he well knew
the date. Standing there, looking at the month of SE1 8LZ
December, a blade of conviction passed through him.
He opened the front door and went out into the rain
without having uttered a word.
‘Well!’ said Duignan, watching the sergeant pushing
his bike eagerly up the road.
‘Whoever would have thought it?’
‘If you want to know me, come live with me!’
The porter bottles came back out. Duignan took a
draught, straightened himself and put his hands behind
his back. In a perfect imitation, he slowly marched over
to the wall and put his nose against the calendar.
‘It isn’t December?’
‘Ay, Sergeant.’
‘Do you think oranges would be ripe at this time of
the year?’
As soon as he mentioned the word, there was a ripple
of laughter. Each man, in his own mind, had a vision of
the sergeant, the big IRA man, sitting into the feed of
oranges. Duignan went to the counter and sniffed the
wood. Stiffly, he swung back towards the men.
‘It isn’t porter I smell?’
‘It’s on the stage you should be!’
 SHORT STORY
‘No, Sergeant!’ cried another. ‘‘Tis oranges!’
Duignan carried on. There were fresh waves of laughter
but it did not come to a head until the woman, her hands
covered in flour, came in from the kitchen asking what,
in the name of God, it was that had them so entertained?
The sergeant saw all this in his mind as he pushed his
bicycle back to the barracks in the rain. Let them laugh.
The last laugh would be his. The rain was coming down,
hopping off the handlebars, his cape, the mudguard. It
was down for the evening. There had not been a dry day
for over a week and the roads were rough and sloppy.
When he reached the dayroom, he softly pushed the
door open and there was Doherty, fast asleep, in the chair.
The sergeant stole over to the desk, lifted the box of
papers, and let it fall. Doherty woke in a splash of fear.
‘I think it’s nearly time that you were gone out of
this!’ the sergeant cried.
‘I didn’t –’
‘You didn’t! You didn’t what?’
‘I didn’t –’
‘You didn’t! You didn’t! Get up off your arse and go
home!’ the sergeant cried. He looked at the ledger. ‘Did
you not even bother your arse to record the rain?’
The guard stumbled out, half asleep, into the rain and
read the gauge. All this was new to him. He came back
and wrote a figure in the book and signed it.
‘I hope you’ll be in better form tomorrow,’ Doherty
said, blotting the page.
‘I’ll be as I am,’ said the sergeant. ‘And don’t think just
because you’re getting off early that you’ll not have to
make up for it some other day.’
‘Amn’t I always here,’ sighed Doherty.
“This is a book to
animate both our
reading and our
theater-going.”
Kenneth Gross,
author of Shylock
Is Shakespeare
This Wide and Universal Theater
Shakespeare in Perfor mance, Then and Now
David Bevington
The University of Chicago Press 256 pp. £15.00
ISBN: 978-0-226-04478-1
42
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
‘Do you think I haven’t noticed? Amn’t I tripping
over you?’
‘I do whatever –’
‘But are you ever useful? That’s the question. If you’re
of no use, then mightn’t you be as well off elsewhere?’
Doherty looked at him and put his coat on. ‘Is there
anything more?’
‘That’ll be all,’ the sergeant clipped. ‘It’s clearly as
much if not more than you’re able for. God help us, but
I can’t help but think sometimes that the force mightn’t
be better off with a clatter of women.’
The guard put on his coat, went out, and softly closed
the door. The sergeant went to the window and
watched him, how eagerly he pedalled on home.
Doherty could ill afford to lose his post, the sergeant
knew. He watched him until he had turned the corner
then he went out for the coal.
The coal was a turn from a Protestant for whom he’d
done a favour. He pushed the poker deep into the fire
and raked over all the old timber. He placed lumps of
coal on the embers knowing, before long, that it would
blaze. He wheeled the bike up close to the hearth and
untied the parcel. Then he took off the clips and hung
his cape on the back of the door and sat down. There
was relief in sitting down, in being alone, finally.
He looked at the marks of the tyres, of his feet, of the
rain dripping off his cape onto the flagstones. He looked at
these marks that he had made until the fire had warmed
the room and the floor was dry. Then he took his tunic off
and opened the letter. As soon as he opened the letter, the
ring fell into his hand but his hand was expecting this. He
looked at it briefly and went on to read:
December 9th
Dear Michael,
I have decided it is impossible for us to go on. I have waited
long enough and this ring, which I took as a token of your
affection, is now an ornament. Nothing is as I had expected.
I had thought that we would be married by now and getting
on with our lives. I don’t know what it is you are doing up
there or why you stay away. It must not be convenient for you
to continue on with this engagement and it no longer suits me.
The time has come for us to be together or remain apart.
I see no cause for any further delay. I hear you are throwing
your hat at other women. You were seen outside McGuire’s
last week and the week before. If your heart has changed, it
is your duty to let me know. I enclose your ring and pray
God this finds you in good health as we are all down here.
Yours,
Susan
It was as he suspected: she was calling him in. He felt
solace in the knowledge that he was right and yet it
struck him sore that he had hoped it might be otherwise.
 SHORT STORY
Hope always was the last thing to die; he had learned this
as a child and seen it, first hand, as a soldier. He held the
ring up to the fire and looked at it. The stone was small-
er than he had realised and the thin gold band was bat-
tered as though she hadn’t bothered to take it off while
labouring. He did not read over the letter again; the
message was clear. He folded it back as it was, placed it in
the heavy metal box and locked it. He placed the key
and the ring on the desk and rolled up his sleeves.
The room was warm and the chain, at this stage,
would be dry. The firelight was striking the rims, the
handlebars, the spokes. He turned the bicycle upside-
down and, with one hand slowly turning the pedal, he
placed the nozzle of the oil-can against the chain. Oiling
it, watching the chain going round, it struck him how
perfectly the links engaged the sprocket, how the cogs
were made for the chain. Somewhere, a man believed he
could propel himself using his own weight. He had seen
it in his mind and went on to make it happen. Oiling
the bike stoked up the old pleasure he had felt in clean-
ing the guns: forcing the cloth down the length of the
barrel, dull gleam of the metal, how snugly the bullet
slid into the chamber. Everything was made for some-
thing else in whose presence things ran smoothly.
He had once, as a child, knocked the sugar bowl off
the table. The sugar had spilled and was wasted, for it
could not be sieved out from the glass. He could see it
still, the bright shock of it on the flagstones. His mother
had taken him out to the bicycle and spun the wheel,
holding his fingers at an angle, tight to the spokes. It
went on for an age and the pain he felt could not have
been worse had she actually dismembered him. It was
one of the first lessons he had learned and he would
carry it all through life.
Now, he felt a childish pride in owning the bike. He
turned it right side up and pumped the tyres until he felt
hot and satisfied. When he was sure the tyres could take
his weight for the distance, he propped the bike against
the desk. Then he took the crate from the sack and
positioned himself at the hearth.
In reaching out, he hesitated but the fruit he chose felt
heavy. The rind did not come away easily and his
thumbnail left an oily track over the flesh. When he
tasted it, it tasted sweet and bitter all at once. There
were a great many seeds. He took each seed from his
mouth and threw it on the fire. Juice was staining his
uniform but he would leave a note for Doherty to take
it down to the Duignan woman and have it pressed.
Before he had swallowed the last segment of the first
orange his hand was reaching out for the next. This time
he kept his thumbnail tight to the skin so as not to break
to the flesh. The peelings singed for while on the open
coals but shrank and in time became part of the fire.
His knowledge of women swept across his mind. He
tried to think of each one separately – of what she said or
43
how, exactly, she was dressed – but they were not so
much mixed up in his mind as all the one: the same bulge
at the top of the stocking, the shallow gasp, the smell of
malt vinegar in their hair. How quickly all of that was
over. He ate the oranges and thought about these women,
concluding that there was little difference between them.
By the time the last seed was on the coals, he was glutted.
‘Another casualty,’ he said aloud in the empty room.
The clock on the wall ticked on and the rain was
beating strong and hard against the barracks door. He
burned the crate and threw the coal dust on the embers.
When he was sure no evidence of how he had spent the
night remained, he lit the candle and climbed the stairs,
feeling a shake in himself that made the light tremble.
He did not take off his clothes. He got into the bed as
he was and reached out for the clock. As he wound it
and felt the spring tighten, the old desire to wind it until
it seized came over him but he fought against it, as
always, and blew the candle out. Then he rolled over
into the middle of the cold bed. When he closed his
eyes, the same old anxiety was there shining like dark
water at the back of his mind but he soon fell asleep.
Before first light, he groped his way blindly to the out-
house and felt the oranges passing through his body. There
was a satisfaction in this that renewed and deepened the
extravagance, all at once. When he came inside, he lit the
lamp, made tea and buttered some of the white bread. He
took the razor off the shelf, sharpened it on the leather
strap, and shaved. There were unaccountable shadows in
the mirror but they did not distract him. He washed,
changed into his good brown suit, gathered up the ring and
key and went outside to look at the day. No rain was falling
but there were clouds stacked up on one side of the sky.
He wrote the note for Doherty, put on the clips and
threw the cape over his shoulders. When he got up on
the saddle, he felt the springs give under his weight. He
reassured himself that he had the ring, the key, and stood
on the pedals, to get started. Soon he was labouring over
the hills, knowing full well that the days of idling and
making women blush were coming to a close. A cold
feeling surged through him. It was new to him and like all
new feelings it made him anxious, but he rode on, com-
posing the speech. By the time he was pushing on for her
part of the country, he grew conscious of the rain and the
noise it made, the rattle of it like beads on the handlebars.
When he entered her townsland he saw the rushes and
knew the clay beneath them was shallow clay. With a
bitter taste in his mouth, he faced up the mountain but
before he was halfway up, his breath gave out and he had
to dismount. Marching on, he could feel his future: the
woman’s bony hand striking a hollow sound in the loaf
and the boy with the hungry gaze asking for bread.
Taken from ‘Walk the Blue Fields’, Claire Keegan’s second collection of
short stories, published by Faber & Faber, £10.99
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 ARCADIA
C HARLES E LLIOTT
POLITICS AND PARTERRES
T HE A RCADIAN F RIENDS : I NVENTING THE
E NGLISH L ANDSCAPE G ARDEN
★ Temple and Sir William Bentinck, both closely associated
By Tim Richardson
(Bantam Press 359pp £25)
IN 1733 A disgruntled but extremely rich Whig minister
and one-time military man named Richard Temple, First
Viscount Cobham, lost his political position and retired
to his country estate in Buckinghamshire. What he chose
to do then gives a whole new meaning to the expression
‘gardening leave’, for in his exile from power Cobham
completed Stowe, the most celebrated and influential of
all English landscape gardens. Representing the efforts of
at least three of the premier designers of the era (Charles
Bridgeman, William Kent and
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown),
who worked on the garden over
the course of forty years, Stowe
still survives – in rather dimin-
ished form, it has to be said – as a
testament to the heights achieved
by this most British of art forms.
For Tim Richardson, the fact
that Cobham was a Whig, and a
particular brand of anti-Walpolian
Whig, is a matter of some signifi-
cance. Though The Arcadian Friends
is a history of the ‘invention’ of the Stourhead, in Wiltshire
English landscape garden during
the closing years of the seventeenth century and the first
half of the eighteenth, it is hardly a bucolic tale of trees and
earthworks. On the contrary, if we are to take Richardson’s
word for it, the whole phenomenon appears to have had as
much to do with politics as with parterres.
Admittedly, from the time of the Glorious Revolution
in 1688 the British political scene was in extraordinary
ferment. Among the tastemakers, the poets, the aristo-
crats and the newly rich, politics touched virtually
everything. Party affiliations took shape around religion,
around attitudes towards the royal succession, around
historical differences, around public policy on such mat-
ters as war and finance. Under these circumstances, it
may not be surprising that gardening – large-scale land-
scape gardening, anyway – was influenced too. One key
reason for this, in Richardson’s view, is that gardens
could and did function as a means of personal expres-
sion. Using symbolism and allusions (say a statue of
Hercules, referring to William III and the original Whig
ideals), an estate owner might make a statement about
44
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
his private beliefs – and possibly his political leanings.
The progress of the landscape garden was anything but
straightforward. The early Whig supporters of William of
Orange brought Dutch canals and topiary into their gar-
dens (still to be seen in such restorations as Westbury
Park in Gloucestershire), but designers also continued to
draw on French and Italian styles, while Sir William
with the new monarch, introduced ‘wiggles’ – serpentine
paths wandering through loosely planted woodland.
Then there was Charles Howard, Duke of Carlisle,
whose enormous Castle Howard and its gardens decisive-
ly domesticated landscape design as a British art form.
In a laudable if not entirely successful attempt to bring
order to his history, Richardson’s title implies that a
group of like-minded designers, builders and estate own-
ers was responsible for the creation of the landscape gar-
den. That makes it sound simple. True enough, there
were groupings like the famous Kit-Cat Club, a body of
powerful Whigs (Carlisle was a key member) intent on
seeing George I onto the throne,
which also cared about gardening
along with political intr igue,
dr inking, and business deals.
Alexander Pope was certainly
widely acquainted, with fellow
gardeners among others, but his
own famous garden by the
Thames in Twickenham was
absolutely idiosyncratic. Similarly
Cobham, creator of Stowe, or
Henry Hoare, whose later
Stourhead remains an exquisite
example of landscape art at its
finest, achieved what they did
mainly with the help of money and expert advice. This is
not to minimise what they accomplished; it is just that it
may be impossible in a single volume, even one as long
and detailed and replete with first-rate scholarship as this,
to make the narrative track. There were too many gar-
deners, too many gardens, too many disparate influences.
Even so, there are many delights here. Richardson’s
description of Pope’s garden-making is excellent. I liked
hearing about Jonathan Tyers, the owner of the London
pleasure ground Vauxhall Gardens, who went to the
other extreme at his country estate by building a thor-
oughly morbid garden centred on a Temple of Death.
And it is hard to forget the aristocratic landscape archi-
tect and proto-vegan Henry Herbert, Ninth Earl of
Pembroke, who decided to live on watercress and beet-
root, nearly dying in the attempt. In fact, Arcadian
Friends is enjoyable in most respects except for certain of
the chapter titles, whose clumsy wit suggests that the
author could not have been responsible for them.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 18
 ARCADIA
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
THIS GREEN PLOT
T HE PARK : T HE S TORY OF THE O PEN A IR
T HEATRE , R EGENT ’ S PARK
★ Bottom jokes,
By David Conville
(Oberon Books 144pp £15)
AT A LOW ebb last summer between chemotherapy ses-
sions, I was dozing underneath a mulberry tree in
Regent’s Park when, as if in a dream, I heard the magi-
cal sound of a fruity voice warbling ‘It’s Never Too Late
to Fall in Love’, with orchestral accompaniment, wafting
towards my deck-chair. On investigation through the
undergrowth, I discovered that the voice belonged to
Ian Talbot, artistic director of the New Shakespeare
Company (which runs the Open Air Theatre), rehears-
ing the role of Lord Brockhurst for his own production
of Sandy Wilson’s musical comedy The Boy Friend.
Happily it was not too late for me to fall in love all
over again with ‘The Park’ (as the Open Air Theatre is
always known) and regular visits to this delightful show,
performed with an exuberant innocence that eschewed
tongue-in-cheek campery, proved more efficacious a
tonic than any cancer drug. I was lucky enough to be
there on the first night when the octogenarian Sandy
Wilson mounted the stage to say that he had feared The
Boy Friend (first produced in 1953) had become an old
man, but that tonight it had become young again. We
stood and cheered him in the gloaming.
How right Dame Judi Dench is to claim in her foreword
to this book, which marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the Open Air Theatre, that The Park ‘has become an inte-
gral part of summer life in London’. As she says, David
Conville is the ideal person to write its history, as he took
over from the legendary Shakespearean Robert Atkins in
1962 and formed the New Shakespeare Company, of
which he is now the Honorary President. He is too genial
and modest a man to blow his own trumpet, but Dame
Judi pays proper tribute to his having been the driving
force in building the present auditorium in the 1970s, ‘and
banishing the old deck-chair era’. She has seen The Park
grow and evolve under Conville’s guidance.
A host of young actors have started their careers here
(including Ralph Fiennes, Jim Broadbent, Hugh
Bonneville, Benedict Cumberbatch), and numerous vet-
eran actors have returned – such as the lamented
Ronnie Fraser, splendidly depicted with Falstaffian
antlers; the eccentric Peter Bayliss, whose ashes, in
accordance with his wishes, were flushed down a lavato-
ry on the stage; and Roy Hudd, joyfully still with us,
whose great Bottom in the ever popular A Midsummer
45
Night’s Dream
will never be
forgotten.
Incidentally, if,
like me and my
g randson, you
are fond of
you will not be
disappointed
here: var ious Every sod was from Surrey
actors are com-
plimented on their ‘well-rounded’ Bottoms. I particular-
ly liked the passage: ‘Ian gave us his Bottom again (an
onion was added in the “play scene” to induce dramatic
tears)’. I should think it did.
Conville makes the point that theatre was born in the
open air, and even in supposedly inclement Britain
(though, as he says, ‘the vast majority of performances
are acted in good weather’), pastoral playing has a rich
ancestral line going back to medieval ‘mystery’ plays.
And Shakespeare, of course, is ‘especially close to
nature’. The present theatre in The Park opened in 1932
under the management of Atkins and the Australian
impresario Sydney Carroll, who was very proud of the
specially imported Surrey greensward. ‘And I wish you
to know’, he proclaimed, ‘that every sod on this stage
comes from Richmond’.
Atkins, who took over full management from Carroll
in 1940, conducted all his business at The Volunteer
public house near by, where the landlady’s parrot would
attack auditioning actors. Conville writes with an enjoy-
ably light touch and delivers some delicious anecdotes.
My favourites included the occasion when he and
Timothy West laid on a scrumptious tea for the then
Arts Minister Norman St John-Stevas’s ‘godchildren’,
only to find that the godchildren were ‘hefty young
men’ who all asked for whisky. Then there was the time
the veteran actor-manager Ben Greet spotted ‘a fur-
coated interloper’ at the back of a Canadian open-air
theatre. He sent the young Sybil Thorndike to get rid of
the intruder. She reported that it was a bear. Greet
replied: ‘Pity we’re not doing The Winter’s Tale.’
In the best Park tradition, so evocatively captured in
this excellent volume, a fox came and sat beside me last
year and watched attentively for several scenes before the
high kicks of Madcap Maisie (the spectacular Miss
Summer Strallen) encouraged him to slope off into the
bushes. Doubtless he’ll be back this season (alas, Ian
Talbot’s last), which features not only Macbeth and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and the musicals Lady Be Good
and (hurrah!) The Boy Friend, but also the children’s
show Fantastic Mr Fox, adapted from Roald Dahl’s story
by David Ward. Book now for the best fun, and indeed
the best sausages, in London – on 08700 601811.
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 GENERAL
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
LOOSE NUKES
T HE ATOMIC B AZAAR : T HE R ISE OF THE
N UCLEAR P OOR
★ materials. A new culture of computerised bar codes has
By William Langewiesche
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 179pp £20)
CHANNEL-HOPPERS MAY RECALL the 1994 Hollywood
action comedy True Lies, in which Islamist jihadists pur-
loined nuclear warheads stolen in Kazakhstan (a state
which has actually decommissioned its nuclear arsenal)
and used them to menace America. Capably assisted by
wife Jamie Lee Curtis, agent Arnold Schwarzenegger
saved the day, using a missile fired from a Harrier jump
jet to despatch the lead malefactor to fiery oblivion.
After soberly reminding readers of how a nuclear
bomb works and what it can do, William Langewiesche
concludes that this is not something that can be knocked
up in a suburban garage. Theoretically, all one needs is a
stepladder and two 75-pound bricks of 90 per cent
heavily enriched uranium. You put one brick on the
ground, climb the ladder, and drop the other brick on
it. If all goes well the two bricks will collide, setting off a
chain reaction and a ten-kiloton explosion that is two
thirds of the way to a Hiroshima; most probably, you’ll
cause more fizzle than fusion, as the neutrons fire pre-
maturely before the bricks meet, although the blast from
that may demolish a building or two. In reality, however,
even in a garage or workshop in a noisy and densely
populated Third World city, would-be terrorist atomic
bombers need a nuclear physicist or engineer, skilled
machinists and a lot of precision equipment to shape
uranium, an explosives expert, and an electronics whizz
to make a trigger. Given these complications, and the
lack of an industrial capacity to make the fissile materials
in the first place, it is more likely that terrorists would
seek to make a ‘dirty bomb’, wrapping radioactive waste
materials around a conventional explosive – or, the sce-
nario explored in this book, purchase a ready-made
bomb in the ‘bazaar’ that Langewiesche chronicles.
Unlike Europeans, for whom the threat from terror-
ism comes from within our midst, Americans think of it
as something which has to be kept ‘out there’.
Reasonably enough, they have spent billions, not only
on subsidies to their allies in the ‘war on terror’ but in
trying to prevent nuclear weapons either falling into the
hands of terrorists or, failing that, being smuggled with
impunity. Langewiesche describes the ten ‘closed cities’
around Ekaterinburg in the former Soviet Union, huge
places that until recently did not figure on any maps and
were identified only by post-box numbers. They include
46
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
Ozersk, of whose 85,000 inhabitants, 14,000 were
employed in a factory complex at Mayak, one of the
USSR’s former facilities for processing materials for
nuclear warheads. For some years now Mayak has been a
US dependency, since the US has ploughed US$350
million into building a ‘Plutonium Palace’, a vast ware-
house to store and monitor 40 per cent of Russia’s fissile
stopped the locals fiddling the books or filching whatev-
er they fancy. Other American agencies have installed
elaborate radiation detectors at the gates in and out of
this complex, their efficiency somewhat vitiated by the
fact that they are not switched on, since every fish from
a local lake wrapped in a newspaper on the lap of a bus
passenger would set the alarms off, so total is the
radioactive pollution the surrounding area has suffered.
Although it might be possible to buy or steal bomb-
making materials, such places as Ozersk are so remote,
and the locals so suspicious of strangers, that one would
be unlikely to get them out of the country. Russia, like
any rational state actor, does not want to be blamed for
the first terrorist nuclear strike, and its FSB would go to
great lengths to stop you, using cruder methods than an
overdose of radioactive poison.
Just in case they failed, the US has spent further billions
beefing up customs operations on key smuggling routes,
creating facilities like the so-called ‘Red Bridge’, a deluxe
complex where Georgia meets Azerbaijan. This also has
elaborate computer systems, closed circuit TV and radia-
tion detectors, although no technology will solve the cor-
ruptibility of Georgian officialdom. The trouble, according
to Langewiesche, is that such facilities may interdict lorries
and the like, but what if the smugglers decide to use horses
and mules and ply the back routes favoured by drug traf-
fickers? After all, a couple of bricks of HEU can easily fit
into a pair of saddle bags. Using knowledge gleaned from
Kurdish tribal leaders, Langewiesche asks why the US per-
sists in dealing with corrupt governments when the real
power, and knowledge of every movement, resides in the
hands of such sub-statal potentates. The short answer to
that, which the author does not provide, is that the US
government has massively cut back on field agents with
the cultural and linguistic skills for such assignments, ready
to work for federal salaries equivalent to that of a doorman
at Microsoft. Like a lot of Amer ican journalists,
Langewiesche doesn’t trace his criticisms of US policy far
back enough into US values.
Confirming the impression that Langewiesche has
woven together discrete journalistic essays, the conclud-
ing two thirds of the book are a study of Dr Abdul
Qadeer Khan, one of the fathers of Pakistan’s nuclear
bomb, and the criminal mastermind who sold this tech-
nology to everyone with a large enough bank account.
These are the best parts of the book, much of it indebted
to the dogged researches of freelance investigator Mark
 GENERAL
Hibbs for such publications as Nucleonics Week or
NuclearFuel – stablemates of the delightfully named
Megawatt Daily and Dirty Tankerwire. An egomaniacal
monster given to referring to Indians as ‘Hindu bastards’,
Khan illicitly purloined key technologies from the dozy
and greedy Dutch firms he worked for, thus enabling
Pakistan to make nuclear bombs. On 27 May 1998, India
and Pakistan came within hours of a nuclear exchange
when the Saudis unhelpfully told Islamabad that Israeli
planes were en route to destroy their nuclear facilities on
behalf of India. With or without government con-
nivance, and using a front company in Dubai, Khan went
on to sell his expertise to all and sundry, including Iraq,
Iran, Libya and North Korea, who gave Pakistan long-
range missile know-how in return. Thanks to the work
of Hibbs and others, the US has eventually forced
Pakistan to curb Khan’s activities, although he appears to
G ILLIAN T INDALL
WEST END WONDERS
F ULL OF S OUP AND G OLD : T HE L IFE OF
H ENRY J ERMYN
★ tionaries, nouveau riche building projects and Tyburn exe-
By Anthony Adolph
(anthonyadolph.co.uk 324pp £17.95)
W EST E ND C HRONICLES : T HREE H UNDRED
Y EARS OF G LAMOUR AND E XCESS IN THE
H EART OF L ONDON
★ look this remark, produced apparently without irony:
By Ed Glinert
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 289pp £25)
THESE TWO BOOKS both describe, in passing, the origins
of the West End of London that grew up in the late sev-
enteenth century around St James’s Square, but in every
other respect they are in contrast to one another.
Anthony Adolph’s is a passionately committed and
scholarly study of one of the Stuarts’ more illustrious
henchmen, complete with detailed notes on sources that
have never previously been brought together. He aims to
rescue Henry Jermyn, Lord St Albans, begetter of
Jermyn Street and possibly of Charles II too, from
obscurity and obloquy, and very nearly succeeds.
Ed Glinert, however, races round a much larger tract of
the West End with boundless zeal, enthusiasm and many
nuggets of real information, but with such a slapdash dis-
regard for strict accuracy or for a well-balanced phrase
that one begins to feel tired and cross. To be fair, this
book is probably better read in short bursts. Glinert
guides tourists in real life, and he may be very popular
with them. When he is not trumpeting Glamour and
47
have suffered few financial penalties as opposed to blows
to his ego. But what Khan did is ‘out there’ all right, as
President Ahmadinejad reminds us every time we see
grainy footage of his multiplying gas centrifuges. In other
words, proliferation is an unstoppable process. All coun-
tries are entitled to develop nuclear energy capacities;
some will use the technology to manufacture nuclear
weapons. William Langewiesche concludes that a limited
nuclear war between some of these poorer states is highly
probable, given the erratic bellicosity of their govern-
ments and poor communications or command and con-
trol systems. He doesn’t think such wars will result in a
nuclear apocalypse. I wouldn’t be so sanguine if terrorists
ever got their hands on a nuclear weapon, since such a
prospect has had even Jacques Chirac talking darkly
about the briefcase his attaché goes around with.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 18
Excess (that is, sexual tales about the rich) but discussing
a more unusual subject he really knows about, he is good
value: he has some excellent pages on the wartime SOE,
on Orwell’s original locations for Nineteen Eighty-Four
and on the gay dialect ‘Polari’, and he is generally infor-
mative about Soho gangs and turf wars. Historically, he is
better on such encapsulated fun-subjects as cults, revolu-
cutions than he is on the wider picture of why and how
his district has developed and changed over three cen-
turies. His idea that Centrepoint and several other
1960ish skyscrapers were built to conceal a network of
Secret Service Cold War bunkers is ingenious but (I am
reliably informed) bunkum. And I find it hard to over-
‘The West End was central to the growth of one of the
most exciting developments in twentieth-century living
– the notion of shopping for shopping’s sake.’ Exciting?
Among other words he misuses are infamous, decimated,
antebellum, classic, emasculated, homily, wheedled, wax
(as a verb) and, rather oddly, Anglo-Catholic. And yet
this book has been published by a great publishing house,
who one might hope would have copy-editors.
In contrast, Anthony Adolph’s book has not been
through the usual publishing mill because he has had to
publish it himself, and he has made a very good job of it.
The title phrase (a quotation) is produced rather too often,
and I began to feel sorry for another lord when reminded
for the fifth time that he had a large nose, but these are
minor blemishes in a fascinating tale. Henry Jermyn was
the son of a landed country family related to the
Killigrews and to Francis Bacon and with other useful
contacts, in a world which ran almost entirely on recom-
mendation and patronage. A natural survivor in this world,
astute, pliable but determined, he rose from being an
unimportant boy around the Court of James I to the sec-
retary, intimate adviser, Lord Chamberlain and probably
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 GENERAL
lover of Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, Charles I’s queen.
He was with her throughout her lonely and chaotic exile
in France after her husband’s execution and the years of
the Commonwealth – and I had not realised, until I read
this book, what a catalogue of dangerous escapes, perilous
sea-voyages, real hardship, money worries and constant
scheming with other parties this exile involved. He was a
loyal adviser to Charles II, and returned with him in tri-
umph to England in 1660 as the Earl of St Albans.
Was he really, as was widely rumoured in his lifetime,
Charles II’s father? The King was physically and mentally
more like Jermyn than he was like Charles I. Henrietta
Maria as a young queen in a strange land had more in
common with the French-speaking Jermyn than with
anyone else, and their attachment to one another through
the decades is evident – though their letters, sadly, are
lost. It is generally accepted that Louis XIV, Henrietta
Maria’s nephew, was really the son of Cardinal Mazarin
rather than of Louis XIII: Adolph makes out a good case
for a similar situation in the Stuart family tree, though
without insisting upon it. Charles himself, no fool or
innocent, must have been aware of the rumour.
After the Restoration Jermyn maintained a position of
S IMON H EFFER
Ignore the Girls,
Look at the Gables
T HE B UILDINGS OF E NGLAND : E SSEX
★ the County Council sensibly laid down requirements
By James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner
(Yale University Press 939pp £29.95)
THE VOLUME OF Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of
England series that covers Essex has long been one of
the more inadequate titles in the series. Though famed
for its atrociousness, Essex actually has more listed build-
ings than any but six other counties. Once one gets
away from the hideous dormitory towns, and especially
from the sprawl along the north bank of the Thames
estuary, the wealth of architectural heritage should be
plain to all but the most ignorant, or bigoted, observer.
When Pevsner wrote his original volume in 1954
Essex was notably rich in two sorts of building: medieval
parish churches and timber-framed houses from the late
medieval period. In this magnificent, and long overdue,
revision of that volume (itself revised in a somewhat
pawky way by Enid Radcliffe in 1965), James Bettley
fully exploits those two treasure chests. He is able to add
to it something that has occurred, for better or worse, in
Essex since Pevsner and his wife pottered round it in
48
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
power and influence into old age, despite the enmity of
Lord Chancellor Hyde. Adolph claims that Hyde’s writ-
ten version of events has prevailed down the centuries,
unfairly blackening Jermyn’s character. I would suggest
that nineteenth-century censoriousness about a worldly,
loose-living Royalist (Jermyn was a great gambler) has had
a hand in forming his reputation too, and also perhaps the
twentieth-century Marx-influenced version of history
with its belief in the moral superiority of the Roundhead
cause. Another question mark hangs over the subject of
Jermyn’s Freemasonry. Was Masonry, as Adolph is
inclined to think, a powerful element in the world in
which Jermyn moved, linking him with figures such as
Francis Bacon, Inigo Jones, Wren, the poets D’Avenant
and Cowley and the carver Grinling Gibbons? Or did it
barely exist before the eighteenth century? Certainly the
plans Jermyn himself nurtured both for Greenwich and
for the St James’s Square area can be related to Masonic
concepts. How many of those who, today, buy expensive
shirts and shaving brushes in Jermyn Street know to
whose taste and indomitable enterprise we owe the street
itself? Let’s hope this book is on sale there too.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 18
their little car more than half a century ago. Essex has a
wealth of modern architecture and, as Bettley says, no
serious student of that school can afford to neglect the
county. That much modern building in Essex is so com-
paratively inoffensive goes back to the Essex Design
Guide of 1973, in which, to prevent the county from
being victim to anonymous mass-produced develop-
ments of the sort that were blighting and homogenising
the landscape around the Home Counties at the time,
of style and materials to attempt to ensure that the
new blended in with
the old.
It is little wonder that
the first edition was so
wanting. Pevsner was,
at the time, engaged on
the intimidating project
of cataloguing the
buildings of the whole
country, and there was
no time for lengthy
investigations or much
rumination. He ‘did’
Essex in something
under eight weeks, a
remarkable achieve-
ment when one con-
siders that this included
all that is now in the
easter n boroughs of Layer Marney Tower, c 1520
 GENERAL
Greater London (his writings on which can be found in
London 5: East, which Yale published in 2005). Bettley,
who took five years (albeit working part time), has
inevitably produced a work that is far more compen-
dious, far more scholarly, and far more representative
and indicative of the architectural riches of the county.
He also writes in an era alert to the importance of con-
servation: in the 1950s, after Pevsner had written, cer-
tain notable country houses in Essex were pulled down,
and only their ghosts are present in this revision.
Churches have fared better: although many have gone
into redundancy, they have been converted to other
uses, in several cases to private housing. Bettley laments,
as many Essex people do, the demolition as late as 1995
of St Erkenwald’s Church in suburban Southend, a
design of Sir Walter Tapper begun in 1905 in the Early
English Gothic style, and still unfinished at the time of
its destruction. The main enemy of Essex’s architectural
heritage now is the threat of the second runway at
Stansted airport, which Bettley (in a sound judgement
that might be considered by some – though not by this
reviewer – to be unduly political for a work of this
nature) deplores, not least because it would remove
more than a score of listed buildings from the parish of
Takeley, and destroy some of the best countryside left in
the county.
Almost the best thing about the original volume was
the superbly vitriolic opening of Pevsner’s introduction,
remarkable for a man widely regarded as having a truly
German sense of humour. ‘Essex is not as popular a
touring and sight-seeing county as it deserves to be,’ he
wrote. ‘People say that is due to the squalor of Liverpool
Street Station. Looking round the suicidal waiting room
on platform 9 and the cavernous left luggage counters
behind platforms 9 and 10, I am inclined to agree.’ To
his credit, Bettley reproduces this at the start of his own
volume, and infers that ‘Pevsner did not altogether enjoy
Essex’. Bettley lives in the county, so his own feelings
might be taken to be more positive. What lifts his own
superb scholarship out of the swamps of dry academia is
his own shar p tongue, invar iably well directed.
Introducing his entry on Chelmsford (a living embodi-
ment of the assertion that affluence and good taste sel-
dom go well together), he quotes a bon mot of Dickens’s
that Essex’s county town was ‘the dullest and most stu-
pid spot on the face of the earth’ and adds that this is ‘a
judgement with which many would still agree’. Bettley’s
reference to the preposterous Freeport Designer Village
outside Braintree describes it as a place ‘where the Essex
Design Guide and shopping come together in
a grotesque parody of a “village” that epitomises the
triumph of commerce over culture at the end of the
twentieth century’.
Yet in dealing with much that has happened in Essex
in the last half-century Bettley is surprisingly generous.
49
The government decreed two new towns in Essex
immediately after the war – Harlow and Basildon – and
the County Council set up a third, much smaller one in
South Woodham Ferrers after 1973, which was to be
the manifestation of the Design Guide. Harlow had,
according to Bettley, the benefit of the consistent vision
of Sir Fred Gibberd, who was the chief architect to the
development corporation there for the entire span of its
existence, from 1947 to 1980. Gibberd, whose buildings
are often remarkably horrible and unfit for purpose (he
was, most famously, responsible for the Roman Catholic
Cathedral in Liverpool, the leaking, crumbling absurdity
now universally derided as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’), was at
least a true believer in Harlow: he built himself a house
there. And, certainly, for the people who moved there in
the 1950s from bombed-out London, it was undeniably
a satisfactory exercise in social amelioration. Bettley is
right to stress that the infrastructures of the villages upon
and around which Harlow was built were allowed to
remain in place, lanes and footpaths giving a sense of
anchorage to the new communities: he is also right to
point out that the predominantly two-storeyed terraced
housing that was built was well laid out, of a variety of
styles, and of strong Scandinavian influence rather than
of the singularly hideous Modernist school of Le
Corbusier. This does give Harlow a human aspect, but
there remains a uniformity that is drab and soulless. This
may well be due to the cheapness of most of the build-
ing materials, which in turn have ensured that the town
has not aged well. There is an interesting point of com-
parison with the relative success of Welwyn Garden
City, a few miles to the west in Hertfordshire, which
was built after the Great War to higher specifications.
That Bettley can see some merit in Harlow is a tribute
to the objectivity he brings to bear throughout his schol-
arship. Basildon is much more of a mess, not least because
so much has been bolted on to it since its original con-
ception; it suffered especially during architecture’s worst
decade, the 1970s, presenting an image to the world of
windswept, damp-stained concrete. It is certainly an
essential destination for architectural students, in the cause
of seeing what not to do.
Bettley’s real achievement, though, comes when he
gets out into the villages, many of which are remarkable
survivals considering how close they are to London. He
maintains the current high standards of these guides in
detailed descriptions of churches, and includes many
more vernacular houses than did Pevsner himself, who
took them somewhat for granted. He is no slave to any
particular ideology of building in the way that his prede-
cessor was and, with the benefit of having witnessed the
predations progress has made on our stock of fine old
buildings, is careful in his assessments of what Pevsner
would have considered mundane, or condemned as pas-
tiche. Essex is Quinlan Terry country, and Bettley’s
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 GENERAL
judgements on two of his most notable buildings, the
Roman Catholic cathedral at Brentwood and Merks
Hall near Dunmow, are especially well turned.
Pevsner has always been best as a book to be thrown
on the back seat of the car (it is now far too big for the
glovebox) and taken on an idle tour around the country-
side: and at last, after decades of making do, the traveller
in Essex has a worthy companion to enlighten him or
her about the church that is coming into view, or the
stately pile on the horizon. The gazetteer entries are
preceded by Bettley’s judicious introduction, and
learned articles by other contributors on (among other
things) the county’s prehistory, its geology, and its tim-
J OHN M C E WEN
More than Just
Matchstick Men
L S L OWRY: A L IFE
★ should have so far lost their connoisseurship that they
By Shelley Rohde
(Haus Books 260pp £25)
SHELLEY ROHDE MADE an award-winning TV docu-
mentary with L S Lowry (1887–1976) and in the
process became ‘an intemperate admirer of both the
man and the artist’. Now, with the benefit of subse-
quently released private papers, she adds this compact
picture-book tribute to the canon.
Lowry, an only child, had a reasonably privileged
upbringing in suburban Manchester. Then his father, an
estate agent, fell on hard times and the family moved
downmarket to the industrial hinterland. Young Lowry
avoided First World War conscription because of flat
feet, and after his father died
looked after his mother until
her death. She was bedfast for
eight years. He was fifty-two
when she died and that he
remained equally bound by her
memory is an insistent theme.
‘Marry and make a life of your
own,’ he once advised a simi-
larly tied young man. His
mother disparaged his artistic
achievements and yet persuaded
him to persevere. ‘She under-
stood me and that was enough,’
he said.
Professional opinions as to
Lowry’s artistic merit differ but Lowry: peripatetic painter
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
ber-framed buildings. There are more than 130 superb
colour photographs illustrating the best examples from a
rich field of architecture. Essex may have no proper
cathedral (Chelmsford’s is a late entrant into the stakes,
promoted from a parish church in 1913 and, despite a
horrible and destructive reordering in 1983, still looking
like one), it may have few great houses, and all the best
churches might be just across the border in Suffolk. But
it has enough to detain a serious architectural historian
like Bettley for five years, even in the morass of the new
towns. A book of this quality – which does not merely
confirm the standards of the series, but sets new ones –
should make people rediscover Essex.
his reputation today appears bomb-proof against fashion,
with his pictures fetching a million plus at auction and
Salford’s Lowry Centre museum and arts complex
booming. The prosecution is led by the peerless Brian
Sewell: ‘I don’t care about his profound provincialism –
many a backwater has produced great artists. I don’t
even care that his work is inept, tedious, repetitive, lack-
lustre and stuck in a rut. I care only that the English,
who for centuries were the best collectors in Europe,
take to their bosoms this half-baked amateur and turn
him into a folk hero.’
The defence is encapsulated by John Betjeman, who,
late in Lowry’s life, was the first to call for a museum of
the artist’s work. ‘He is associated in the public mind
with simplified Gothic against a wide sky under which
hurry crowds of factory workers, children and parents.
But, gathered into one room, his paintings range much
further – onto a grey North Sea with nothing on it at all,
down into Cornwall and a remote stone circle, up onto
the Brontë-haunted moors and out into the prosperous
Manchester suburbs which are his birthplace. His work is
best appreciated, its colour, its variety, humour and lone-
liness, when assembled in a single gallery.’ It is typically
against the grain that Lowry
was a regular exhibitor at the
Paris Salon des Indépendants
and Salon d’Automne long
before he gained academic
acceptance in London.
Andras Kalman has champi-
oned Lowry since the artist
first encouraged him as a pio-
neer ing contemporar y art
gallery owner in Manchester
sixty years ago. ‘From the
beginning there was a strong
integrity about him – you had
to be an insensitive moron not
to see it in the man. From his
repression came his strength,
50
 GENERAL
from his insularity came the power to concentrate upon
his direction.’
Lowry himself made light of artistic theory. When
asked why he collected the pictures of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, ‘the only man I have ever wanted to possess’,
he said he did not know. As for his own work: ‘I have
no message at all – it’s simply my way of looking at
things.’ It is a pity Rohde did not question the distin-
guished likes of Craigie Aitchison and Paula Rego, who
came into contact with Lowry as students at the Slade
when he was a visiting artist. Aitchison for one remains
indebted to him for saying he did not put in shadows
because he did not know how to do them – although it
must be said, there was never any need. ‘I never do a
jolly picture. You’ll never see the sun in one of my pic-
tures.’ His Slade students enjoyed Lowry’s self-deprecat-
ing encouragement, at benign odds with the hostility of
crabby highbrows like John Piper.
The sedentary simpleton was one of several personae
that Lowry adopted. Playing the simpleton for the bene-
fit of journalists and others amused him. ‘Not brainy
enough to do anything else but art’ was his refrain. In
fact he attended art school and nothing irritated him
more in later life than to be described as self-taught. It
was for this reason that he was so anxious that no one in
the art world should know that until he was sixty-five he
worked for a Manchester property company as a rent-
collector and clerk. It was an ideal job as it enabled him
to do what he liked doing best, wandering about the
city observing people. He insisted his pictures were all
about people ‘despite what others might say’.
After his mother died he continued to live in the house,
looked after by a daily housekeeper, painting late into the
night to quell loneliness, meeting each new day with a
necktie and detachable collar. He filled the vacuum his
mother left by having a series of paternal friendships with
younger women. To the last of them, also called Lowry
but no relation, he left his entire estate – typically, with-
out telling her.
The book dispels any notion of Lowry as a creepy
character. He compartmentalised his friends but there
was no shortage of them and, often in their company, he
travelled extensively in Britain and Ireland. One of his
favourite towns was the thoroughly rural Berwick-on-
Tweed, where today a ‘Lowry Walk’ takes in the places
he chose to paint or draw. In friendship he could be a
convivial companion or a thoughtful connoisseur.
Shelley Rohde includes two interviews as a postscript.
The one with Lowry is a delight, the other is with an
Irish psychiatrist. The psychiatrist solemnly declares
Lowry a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of
autism, characterised by number-crunching, social isola-
tion and a total lack of humour. Lowry would surely
have been much amused by such conclusions.
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51
A C G RAYLING
THE COUNTRY OF THE WORD
AT THE S AME T IME
★
By Susan Sontag
(Hamish Hamilton 256pp £18.99)
SUSAN SONTAG’S REPUTATION stands high in both her
homelands – the United States of America and the repub-
lic of letters. She was a writer of choice skills, she was
absolutely sincere in her commitment to ideals of justice
and right in politics and international affairs, and all her
work is animated by a strong controlling intelligence that
was forthright, clear, and committed. Every one of these
qualities is fully present in her last collection of essays,
even though – as her editors, and her son David Rieff in
his personal preface, tell us – it is likely that if she had
lived she would have wished to polish them further.
Sontag saw herself as a literary figure, and this expres-
sion embraces and explains the variety of her work: four
novels, a play, books about photography and illness, and
collections of essays. As a commentator on politics and
human rights she saw herself as a representative of the
country of the word, the place where (to adapt Lionel
Trilling’s phrase) the chief responsibility is ‘to be intelli-
gent’. She often iterated her belief that literature is a
‘passport to enter a larger life, that is, the zone of free-
dom’; as a maker of literature, the correlative responsi-
bility was to export the privileges of that freedom to the
general debate, in the hope of making the world a better
place. Her essays are the chief vehicle of her endeavour
to do so.
Sontag sets out her view of literature and its role in
society in her essay on Nadine Gordimer. ‘By literature’,
she writes, ‘I mean literature in the normative sense, the
sense in which [it] incarnates and defends high stan-
dards.’ And the role of the writer, correlatively, is to
evoke ‘the better standards of justice and truthfulness
that we have the right (some would say the duty) to mil-
itate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which
we live’. This means that she sees the writer as a moral
agent, not in the sense of a moraliser – one who seeks to
legislate how others should think and behave – but in
the sense of one who, through stories, narratives, and
imaginative portrayals of lived practicalities, explores the
variety and diversity of human experience, and thus
educates our moral sense.
The first group of essays examines this indirectly by
discussion of (among others) Rilke, Dostoevsky, Victor
Serge and Halldór Laxness. Sontag’s perceptive com-
mentaries make them all deeply attractive writers, not
least because what she finds in them are the attractive
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 GENERAL
qualities she aims for in her own work. Commitment
and its difficult sincerities are exemplified in her essays
reacting to the 9/11 atrocities; she was quick to grasp all
the negative implications of those events and to antici-
pate the reaction of President George W Bush and those
in his administration who saw in them not just a tragedy
and a crime but an opportunity – of the wrong sort, as
her subsequent lacerating essay on Abu Ghraib shows.
It is in Sontag’s own spirit of truthfulness and keenness
for high standards that one notes, in the essay that gives
the collection its title, a mistake of an interesting kind.
The essay, which is about Nadine Gordimer, has as its
subtitle ‘the Novelist and Moral Reasoning’, and one of
its organising ideas is that a novel is ‘a vehicle both of
space and time’, in the sense that it shows that not every-
thing happens at the same time, and not everything hap-
pens to just one person – this being an application of a
philosophical joke explaining what time and space are
for. Sontag introduces the trope by recalling her own
struggles as a graduate student in philosophy with Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason and in particular his account of
‘the barely comprehensible categories of space and time’.
It happens that space and time are expressly and very
importantly not ‘categories’ in Kant’s great theory. The
W ILLIAM P ALMER
MUSIC & RUM
A NACAONA : T HE A MAZING A DVENTURES OF
C UBA ’ S F IRST A LL -G IRL DANCE B AND
★
By Alicia Castro, with Ingrid Kummels
Translated by Steven Murray
(Atlantic Books 394pp £19.99)
BEFORE READING THIS book I knew of only two other
all-women bands. One was The Inter national
Sweethearts of Rhythm, a swing ing big band in
America during the Second World War; the other was
the immortal, if fictional, Sweet Sue’s Syncopators in the
film Some Like It Hot. The Cuban band Anacaona is a
worthy addition to this short and exclusive list, more
remarkable in that it was made up of eleven sisters.
Alicia Castro, who tells their story, was born in 1920.
Her parents, ten sisters and two brothers lived in Lawton,
the old tobacco workers’ district in Havana. Her father
was Chinese, the son of one of thousands of workers
recruited to work on the sugar plantations in the nine-
teenth century. He took his surname from his employer
and married the daughter of a Cuban musician in 1904.
He opened a grocery store and prospered, but remained
always a staunch Communist, even calling one of his sons
Lenin, a name which came in handy years later.
52
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
categories are general concepts of the understanding,
derivable from the forms of judgement in logic; space
and time are ‘forms of sensibility’ and are discussed in
detail in the opening part of the Critique of Pure Reason,
dauntingly but thrillingly entitled ‘The Transcendental
Aesthetic’, as a propaedeutic for a discussion of the cate-
gories themselves. For anyone bred up in philosophy the
mistake is far from a trivial one, and here Sontag makes
it in arranging the backbone of an essay.
The point is not that this is uncharacteristic of a mind
so clever and well furnished as Sontag’s, but that it is
characteristic (and here all who walk the same woods
must hold up their hands and confess lapses) of our
intellectual culture, where the effort to say things afresh
among such a Babel of commentary makes writers reach
for materials from all quarters, inaccurately at times.
The two great desiderata of any collection of essays –
pleasure and instruction – are here in abundance. The
editors might be right that she would have wished, had
she lived, to work on them further, but they have all the
elegance of her best work, and add to the already lustrous
reputation for fine prose and acute thought that places
her in the first rank of contemporary American writers.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 18
The original spice girls
The many children grew up in an atmosphere of music,
poetry, and politics. And as they grew their father was
able to put up a notice in his store advertising their vari-
ous abilities to give ‘instruction in music theory, song and
piano; embroidery, seamstress, and hairdresser services’.
Cuchito, the eldest daughter, was a firm feminist and
champion of traditional Cuban culture. She came up with
the idea for an all-woman band to play son, the Cuban
music that is a mixture of African and Spanish rhythms.
Even in the overwhelmingly macho culture of their day,
they were a great success from the start. Avoiding the
cheap dance ‘academies’ that were little more than vertical
brothels, they played expensive hotels and white-only
country clubs, although their music was reckoned wild
and the lyrics of their songs sexually suggestive.
 GENERAL
Anacaona flourished in the early Thirties, the first years
of the dictator Batista, a man who came to power on a
reform ticket, but ruled with American government and
Mafia support. Havana was a wide-open city, full of places
in which musicians could make a good living. Alicia
joined the band at the age of fourteen, playing clarinet,
saxophone and sometimes double bass. They toured
South and Central America: Alicia calls the Mexico City
of 1936 the ‘Paris of the New World’, which shows how
drastically things have changed. In 1937 they played in
New York, on the same bill as Duke Ellington. The same
year they sailed to Europe on the Ile-de-France, and
jammed in Paris with Django Reinhardt.
The band was locked in Cuba for most of the war; the
good times came back with American tourism, fuelled by a
massive building programme of hotels and casinos funded
by Mafia money. Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano,
banned from the States, ran their US businesses from
Havana: Frank Sinatra’s first appearance in the city coincid-
ed with a major Mafia conference in 1946. The Anacaona
band was inspected by Mafia representatives because they
did not believe that a bunch of women could play in a
band, but must be ‘hookers in disguise’. They passed the
test and played on in the new Americanised entertainment
industry, although it operated an apartheid policy in this
ostensibly racially-mixed society, so that, while her sisters
were admitted, one of the Castro sisters was refused admit-
tance to a club because of her slightly darker skin.
The book is full of love affairs, with poets, seedy man-
agers and handsome millionaires, and one sometimes
loses track of the romantic complications of ten women.
Alicia glosses over what look like rougher patches in their
lives. Inevitably, as the years passed, the women aged and
married and divorced and had children, but somehow
the band hung together even after los barbudos (the beard-
ed ones) overthrew Batista’s government in 1959.
The name Castro suddenly came in handy. The sisters
were in Brazil when they heard that the old regime had
fallen; Fidel Castro sent a plane to bring them home.
But the old world was almost immediately destroyed:
the casinos, cabarets and brothels were closed, the
American record companies shut down their branches in
Havana. Music changed: son, the rumba and mambo
were passé; the new songs were socially relevant and
consequently dull. Slowly the band disintegrated, until
only Alicia and her sister were left playing as a duo,
booked by the state agency for ‘traditional music’.
This is a superbly entertaining book, full of stories
recalled by the three sisters left alive, all in their eighties,
still playing music and drinking a little rum. Perhaps
better than the words of their reminiscences are the
photographs on almost every page, which show, over a
period of almost fifty years, the beautiful and vivacious
Castro sisters having a whale of a time.
To order this book at £15.99, see LR Bookshop on page 18
FICTION II
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
ARDUOUS ASYLUM
W HAT IS THE W HAT
★
By Dave Eggers
(Hamish Hamilton 480pp £17.99)
AT FIRST GLANCE this book looks like a heartbreaking
work of staggering worthiness. A prefacing note explains
that all the author’s proceeds are going to Sudanese
refugees, and the novel comes garlanded with a quote
from a human rights organisation. When did you last
read a novel endorsed by the International Crisis Group?
Whatever you think of What is the What, you cannot
fault Eggers for his noble intentions.
The book is inspired by the true story of Valentino
Achak Deng, who fled his Dinka homeland in Sudan
and became one of the displaced refugees seeking asy-
lum in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Eggers’s novel there are
in fact two stories, that of Valentino the Lost Boy grow-
ing up in Africa and that of Valentino the Lost Man
eking out a living in America. The story opens five years
after he emigrates to Atlanta, when Valentino opens his
door to a pair of gun-toting African-Americans. They
beat him, truss him and gag him. The promised land of
America turns out to be anything but. Robbed of his
voice, Valentino addresses his life story to his assailants in
silence. Like the Ancient Mariner, he has a ghastly tale
to tell – one as harrowing as it is brutal.
The author’s unadorned prose style allows the reader
to focus on the bare bones of the story. Valentino’s first
memory is as a six-year-old in Marial Bai, when he sees
his mother’s yellow dress. Shortly afterwards, his village
is razed to the ground by the Arab militias. Believing his
parents to be dead, he and his fellow survivors walk
through the desert to seek sanctuary in Ethiopia. En
route they are mauled by lions, shot at by soldiers,
bombed by planes, and under the constant threat of
being attacked by the murahaleen, the Arab militias who
terrorise the country on horseback.
The biblical overtones are not exactly subtle. There is a
boy called Moses and there are endless quasi-prophets
whom Valentino encounters in the wilderness (the title
refers to a Dinka creation myth). But it is a powerful read.
At times it resembles a phantasmagoria. Valentino talks of
‘disconnected and miscolored images, as in fitful dream’.
A blue dog flits in and out of the narrative; he meets a
man with no face; and boys who he long thought had
been killed keep reappearing as if they have come back
from the dead. Eggers captures well the maelstrom of war.
Everyone is a potential enemy, even those supposedly on
your side. The boys discover they are utterly dispensable.
 FICTION II
Valentino has to avoid enemy soldiers of the
Khartoum regime, deadly Muslim militias who act by
proxy for Khartoum, and liberation rebels who might
draft him into the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
Anyone who tries to leave the SPLA is killed as a desert-
er. He witnesses death on an unimaginable scale and also
on a petty scale – he sees a twelve-year-old boy kick
another to death whilst fighting over rations. There are
many such haunting set-pieces. When Valentino flees
Ethiopia chased by hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers, a
woman beckons him and a group of boys forward with
the words ‘Come to me, children! I am your mother!’
and then shoots two of them dead; another time 10,000
boys have to witness the public execution of seven men.
In the end Eggers’s desire to bear witness rather dissi-
pates the tension of the novel. It is far too long. The ten
years Valentino spends in a Kenyan refugee camp are
telescoped into the last quarter of the book, and the
pacing here inevitably flags, the tone becoming slightly
more preachy. Valentino, for example, takes issue with
S AM L EITH
Spirit of
the Jester
DARKMANS
★ own tongue and is morbidly
By Nicola Barker
(Fourth Estate 838pp £17.99)
DARKMANS IS A very strange novel; and, I should admit
upfront, a very hard one to review. I began this book in a
state of contemptuous irritation, and ended it with a
sneaking feeling that the author might be a genius. I read
the first 100 pages thinking that the author was as lazy
and ill-disciplined as hell; and the final 100 suspecting
that the laziness and lack of discipline was all my own.
Darkmans is (as it emerges) deeply and cunningly preoc-
cupied with medieval allegory, and yet told in a rushingly
vatic style that’s closer to the William Blake / Christopher
Smart visionary mode than its medieval predecessors. It
slips between ecstatic illumination and drug-induced hal-
lucination. And even if you didn’t know about Barker’s
love of trashy telly, you’d probably notice that the novel’s
rhetoric and plot owe a lot to soap-operas like EastEnders
or Shameless, and – in the closing pages – Scooby Doo.
Darkmans tells the story of an interrelated handful of
characters in the transitional urban tangle of present-day
Ashford. There’s Kane, charming purveyor of prescription
drugs; Kelly, his potty-mouthed teenage ex-girlfriend,
scion of the notorious Broad clan; Kane’s dad Beede –
54
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
placing refugee camps in inhospitable areas (‘I do not
judge the UNHCR or any nation that takes in the
nationless, but I do pose the question’).
When Valentino departs for America from Kenya, his
flight is delayed because it coincides with 9/11. This
might have happened in real life but here it seems con-
trived. This book is emblematic enough without having
to add 9/11 into the mix. We are told Princess Diana’s
death also occasioned mass weeping in the streets of
Nairobi, which I find hard to believe. In the book’s pref-
ace we learn that some of the book’s events are fictional,
others are invented. Throughout the novel, as a result,
you keep wondering not what is the what, but what is
the truth.
Nevertheless Dave Eggers should be commended for
tackling the troubles of Sudan. At a time when most
Anglophone fiction is so insular and navel-gazing this is
a bold and spirited attempt to focus on a corner of a for-
eign field that is resolutely unAmerican.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18
pillar of the community, big
man of the hospital laundry
and dedicated conservation
campaigner; Kelly’s cowboy-
builder uncle Harvey; Kelly’s
horrendous old mum; an exas-
perated Kurdish chancer called
Gaffer, who lapses into Gothic
type when fulminating in his
terrified of salad; Dory, a trou-
bled friend of Beede prone to Barker: ebullient
zone out and come to hours
later having, for example, stolen a horse; Dory’s wife
Elen, the sexually magnetic chiropodist; and their creepily
prodigious son Fleet, who is building a cathedral out of
matchsticks...
To be fair (to myself), the first 100 pages are the least
good. Nicola Barker pours out prose, pours out voice.
Does she dictate this stuff, you think? It seems to
emerge like water from a burst fire-hydrant: formless,
without discipline, without the faintest sense the author
has even reread the manuscript before sending it to the
publisher. She makes Lucy Ellmann (a writer with a
similar attraction to shouty typefaces and gratuitous
parentheses and demotic babble) look like Basho.
Take a few consecutive sentences from the early pages
(describing a mysterious horseman – Dory, as it turns
out – appearing at the window of a pub):
He was handsome – vital, even – but with a distinctly
delinquent air. He was wearing something strangely
unfeasible in a bright yellow (a colour of such phenom-
enal intensity it’d cheerfully take the shine off a prize
canary). The window was horse-high, only; its torso
 FICTION II
banged across the glass, steaming it over – so the man
leaned down low to peek in, as if peering into the tank
of an aquarium (or a display cabinet in a museum).
Kane couldn’t tell – at first – what exactly it was that he
was looking for, but he seemed absolutely enthralled by
what he saw (seemed to delight in things – like a child
– quite readily). He was smiling (although not in an
entirely child-like way), and when his eyes alighted on
Kane, the smile expanded, exponentially (small, neat,
yellowed teeth, a touch of tongue). He reached out a
hand and beckoned towards him…
Just look at it: the ugly and indecisive asides; the lazy
intensifiers – ‘phenomenal’; ‘exponentially’; the redun-
dancies – is it an aquarium, or a display cabinet?; the
meaningless expressions – ‘strangely unfeasible’ or
‘cheerfully take the shine off a prize canary’. Really, it’s
a small masterclass in how not to write. There are pas-
sages like this everywhere. In this one about a church
bell, descriptors fall like cluster-bombs: ‘But it had a
fantastic bell. When it rang it produced an astonishingly
pure, clear, old-fashioned sound; an elevated, almost
ecstatic “peal”, a rousing, piercing, senergising clamour.’
But, oddly, such is the force and persistence of Barker’s
linguistic gusher – not to mention the generosity and
intensity of her imagination – that you start to be lifted
and carried away by it. I suspect that the author does too;
those tics, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps forced, start to
thin out as the forward motion of the plot increases. Out
of the babble there emerge some raucous comic set
pieces, characters who start to really live on the page, and
riddling hints of something altogether weirder.
The babble, indeed, ends up making the case for itself.
For Darkmans is all about the ebullience of language, the
irruption of the past into the present, the seriousness and
darkness of jokes. It defies moderation because it cele-
brates misrule. Its presiding spirit – not metaphorically:
he seems to possess several of the characters at different
times – is the medieval jester John Scoggin. Scoggin’s
jests are not, incidentally, what we all might recognise as
a good laugh: one of his finest involved locking a collec-
tion of vagrants into a barn and burning them alive.
I can’t finally say for sure exactly what, if anything,
this book is trying to tell us, or what even in more than
the broadest outline is going on. I’m not even 100 per
cent sure if it’s any good. But I know it’s doing some-
thing highly original and interesting, and doing it with
conviction and sharp humour. I know I whipped
through its more than 800 pages with attention unbro-
ken. And I know that the very night I finished it, it
showed up in my dreams. Seriously.
I think that image of a broken fire-hydrant holds. Often,
it does nothing but ruin the well-cut suits of passers-by
and provide something for dogs to snap at. But when it
catches the light in the right way, it makes rainbows.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 18
55
G ILL H ORNBY
LITTLE LAWRENCE
W HEN W E W ERE ROMANS
★
By Matthew Kneale
(Picador 296pp £16.99)
LAWRENCE, THE PROTAGONIST of Matthew Kneale’s new
novel, is a charming seven-year-old. He is alert and
interested in the sort of things we like little boys to be
interested in – ancient Romans, soldiers, astronomy. He
natters on, in his perky, off-beat first-person voice,
about everything from his own domestic details to the
biography of Caligula and the unpredictable behaviour
of black holes – while his own little world is falling
spectacularly apart. He is the literary first cousin of
Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke.
Lawrence thinks that his story is the account of his
journey to Rome with his mother, Hannah, and little
sister, Jemima. Although he has been happy living in
their cottage, likes his school and is taking his SATS
ser iously, Lawrence is excited when his mother
announces that they are going to pack up the car and go
to Rome for a while. His mum has been tense lately,
what with his dad following them down from Scotland,
spying on them and turning the neighbours against
them. It will be good to get away, to a place where his
mum had once been so happy and which she talks so
much about.
And it is good, for a bit. There are numerous logistical
disasters – the car breaks down, a passport gets stolen,
the money runs out – but there is Rome. ‘I had never
been to a town with a wall round it, especially a wall
that was thousands of years old, so I thought “that’s
intresting”’. And his mum’s friends are very nice at first.
But then it becomes obvious – to his mum at least – that
their dad has turned up and is poisoning everyone’s
minds again. And when he starts breaking in and poi-
soning their food as well, it is time to move on.
When We Were Romans is in fact an exploration of
mental illness – how the psychological troubles of a
parental mind are understood by, and then affect, the
mind of a child. Lawrence alone has to bear the brunt of
his mother’s paranoid manic depression. He has to
develop unnatural self-control – ‘so though I was really
angry I didn’t say anything, it was like I put all my anger
in a little bag and did a knot’ – and learn to predict her
moods and try to manipulate them: ‘This was bad, mum
was scratching her arm now, so I thought “I must help
her or she will fall down into a big hole.”’ He becomes
adept and resourceful at thinking up diversions and plans
to keep his mother on track and the family on the rails.
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION II
While his family unit remains tight and it is the three
of them against the world, Lawrence remains strong. But
when his mother starts to meet up with past friends and
past lovers – ‘mum was sitting next to him on the sofa
and looking right at him like he was really interesting, it
was like he was her favourite programme on telly’ – he
becomes more complicated. The scenes of his own
angry, violent, bad behaviour are narrated with a cool,
almost scientific detachment: ‘and suddenly something
happened. I felt so cross. I could feel it in my stomack
and arms, it was in my teeth, it was like it might lift me
right up, and I thought “I wonder what will happen
now” I thought “I wonder what I will do?”’
It is a fact of life that children never produce quite the
S IMON W ILLIS
TRAGEDY OF LONELINESS
J ULIUS W INSOME
★ takes his Lee-Enfield rifle, brought back from France by
By Gerard Donovan
(Faber & Faber 215pp £10.99)
VEINS OF HOSTILITY and menace run through Gerard
Donovan’s fiction. Whether one thinks of the baker dig-
g ing his own g rave in the Booker long-listed
Schopenhauer’s Telescope, a novel animated by dialogue
that reads like a litany of human barbarism, or the para-
noid Sunless in the author’s second outing, Dr Salt, the
lives of Donovan’s characters might easily be called
‘Hobbesian’. Now the name of the philosopher so
famously associated with the solitude, brutality and
brevity of life in the state of nature ricochets around the
forests of Norther n Maine at the beg inning of
Donovan’s third novel, the starkly beautiful and com-
pelling Julius Winsome, as Julius shouts the name of his
doomed dog, deliberately shot in the woods.
Julius lives in the cabin built by his long-dead grandfa-
ther. In summer he works as a mechanic and part-time
gardener for out-of-towners. In winter he retreats to the
cabin, surrounded by his late father’s books – all 3,282 of
them. Aside from occasional visits to Fort Kent for sup-
plies, he sits and reads in the quietness that he once
enjoyed with his father, when he would read Shakespeare
and learn lists of exotic Elizabethan words – ‘besmoiled’,
‘geck’, ‘gallowglass’ – which now pepper his sentences.
These words render him incomprehensible and suspi-
cious to those whose paths he occasionally crosses.
Julius measures the winters in books. This one is worth
fifty and ‘fixes you to silence like a pinned insect’. The
quietness of Julius’s existence intensifies the twin menaces
of the season: the sound of rifles firing their rounds as
hunters sit in their perches ‘harvesting’ deer, elk and
56
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
quantity of poetic wisdom that one might like. And the
often unconvincing aspect of fictional children is that
they come out with slightly too much of it. After all,
why go to the trouble of inventing a child for it to have
all the limitations and irritations of the real thing? This
child, though, is both captivating and credible. Caught
up in his mother’s gothic psycho-drama, he remains
bravely, prosaically matter-of-fact: ‘I felt so sad. I
thought “sorry mum” because it was a real shame, we
came all this way and it didn’t work. I wasn’t a hero after
all, that was dreadfull.’
The heartbreak and the triumph of When We Were
Romans is that little Lawrence is the real thing.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18
bear; and the November wind as it hammers against the
windows. Here the wind has knives and the sky has fists.
The shot that kills his terrier, Hobbes, pitches Julius
into the state of war diagnosed by the dog’s illustrious
namesake. Stunned by the cruelty of the act and search-
ing for the culprit in a quest laced with paranoia, Julius
his grandfather after the First World War, into the
woods. The men he finds there, those who are guilty by
proximity alone, are dispatched with the equilibrium of
the trained sniper; he shoots one through the teeth from
four hundred yards, preparing a range card with the
meticulous skill taught to him by his father. What was
passed on with paternal affection in order to prepare a
son for hard necessities is used with unnerving dispas-
sion. These are killings that are left, for the reader, unas-
suaged by the palliative of revenge and which are greet-
ed by Julius, in the moments of desolate lucidity that
prick his narration, with little more than gentle regret.
The violence may be shocking in its illogicality, but it is
never savage. What lies at the heart of the novel, evidence
of Donovan’s consummate skill and humanity, is an expo-
sure of the tragedy of violence and the brutality of loneli-
ness. Julius must feel both with their full force, for he has
seen just enough affection to miss it when it has gone but
not enough to enjoy it comfortably when it is there. He is
‘awkward up close, best at a distance’. It is a trait which
puts paid to his only significant relationship with a
woman. Claire leaves just as quickly as she came, not
because of an absence of affection on his part (there is
plenty), but because she cannot interpret his silence. But
it is a trait that comes, literally, with the territory and it
lends him an innocence and a sympathy which, while not
absolving him, at least mediate his murderous culpability.
Julius Winsome is written in the spare prose we have
come to expect from Gerard Donovan. Here it is per-
fectly matched not only to the landscape, which is beau-
tifully rendered, but also to Julius’s narration in all its
prickly poetry.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 18
 FICTION II
THE CLICHÉ ‘EAGERLY awaited’ S IMON B AKER
seems appropr iate for The
Welsh Girl (Sceptre 344pp
£11.99), by Peter Ho Davies, a ON F OUR F IRST N OVELS
debut which finally appears four
years after its author’s inclusion
on the Granta ‘Best of Young
British Novelists’ roster. It is set in 1944, in a North
Wales village so quietly traditional that many locals speak
English only haltingly. The novel contains three strands,
the main one about Esther, a young barmaid who
becomes pregnant after being raped by a British soldier,
the second about a bright German PoW held in a camp
in the village, who falls for Esther, and the third about a
German Jewish refugee working for British intelligence,
who arrives to interrogate Rudolf Hess, who is impris-
oned nearby.
The Welsh Girl, as readers of Davies’s acclaimed short
stories would expect, is written with unostentatious
skill. Setting and characters are built patiently and with
care, and as a result are always convincing. Dramatically,
however, there is a problem. This is a wilfully small
novel, one that takes its place unassumingly in the liter-
ary tradition; it therefore contains none of the naive self- have been different. However, Sheers makes this an even
importance or nervous knowingness of much debut
work, but its maturity is bought at the cost of narrative
energy. The scenes possess verisimilitude, but that in
itself does not make them interesting. In scrupulously
avoiding the sensational, Davies occasionally goes too far
in the other direction, creating a competent, readable
novel but one that is muted in comparison with his
excellent shorter work.
When James, the narrator of Ivo Stourton’s The Night
Climbers (Doubleday 320pp £10), is visited by an old
friend, he learns that a past crime may be about to send
him to pr ison. He is now a wealthy, emotionally
detached corporate solicitor, but a decade earlier he had
drifted towards the other side of the law. At a fictional
Cambridge college, he fell in with a glamorous group
whose excesses were funded by its unofficial leader,
Francis, the enchanting son of a Tory peer. After buying
all their coursework from former graduates, the group’s
members would eat lavishly each night, take drugs and
indulge in their favourite pastime of scaling the universi-
ty’s most treacherous buildings. Eventually, their money
ran out following a public row between the increasingly
drunken Francis and his father, and so to maintain their
lifestyle they embarked on a scam involving one of the
university’s Picassos, which had been hanging in
Francis’s room on indefinite, authorised loan. Years later,
it seems as though they are about to be found out.
There are a few overlong scenes, and the scam is
founded on an unlikely premise, but this debut has
enough to comfortably transcend flaws that will
doubtlessly slip away over the author’s career. Stourton’s
57
prose is elegant, and the narra-
tive voice he uses is engaging
for being both outwardly
brusque and inwardly wound-
ed. His grasp of the allure and
the emptiness of excess leads to
some genuinely penetrating
observations, but best of all are the climbing scenes,
which are tightly sprung and compulsively readable.
Wales, 1944 again – but with a difference. In
Resistance (Faber & Faber 287pp £12.99), by Owen
Sheers, the women residents of a border village in the
black mountains wake one morning to discover that
their husbands have gone, leaving no clue as to their
location. This is odd, of course, but then, this is not
1944 as we know it. Germany is winning the war. Its
troops have invaded Britain, and (in a nod to the famous
toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue) have pulled down
Nelson’s Column. Churchill has run away to Canada,
where he can ‘better continue the fight against the evil
of fascism’ from a safe distance.
WW2 lends itself to this type of alternative-history
novel because we know that the outcome could so easily
more convincing spectacle by discarding the usual moral
index of bully and victim. German soldiers soon arrive
in the village, led by Albrecht Wolfram, a scholarly,
unsoldierly officer determined to keep his men in
check. Albrecht is hardly a stereotypical marauder; in
fact, he and his group merely want a quiet life in the
black mountains, and to that end decide not to remind
their superiors of their existence. They help the women
with the farming tasks that were until recently per-
formed by their husbands, and start to become, in a
sense, replacements. Sheers presents this curious yet
compelling scenario with conviction and style.
The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review 376pp
£12.99), by Anita Amirrezvani, provoked great interest
at last year’s London Book Fair. Set in seventeenth-cen-
tury Iran, it describes the growth to maturity of an
unnamed girl whose father dies leaving her and her
mother in poverty in their village. They travel to the
city of Isfahan to live with the girl’s uncle Gostaham, a
master rug-maker, and aunt Gordiyeh, a status-obsessed
woman who installs them as servants rather than equals.
The girl is entranced by the city and obsessed with rug-
making (a pursuit for which she has considerable talent);
these must sustain her against false friends and hardship,
both of which soon arrive.
Amirrezvani spent almost a decade writing this novel,
and her efforts are repaid in the impressive period
detail. The novel also describes without pathos the lam-
entable status of women in that era – unable to work,
they had to rely on men, but without money in the first
place, they were not considered good prospects for
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 FICTION II
marriage. (When the girl finally receives an offer, it is
for a three-month ‘trial marriage’ only, after which she
could be returned.) Stylistically, though, the novel
begins with promises of a spiky narrative voice but then
veers towards a pastiche of traditional fairytale modes of
storytelling, with a deterministic plot and somewhat
L EO B ENEDICTUS
See You in Hell,
Chess Player
T HE S ECRETS OF THE C HESS M ACHINE
★ improbable behaviour.
By Robert Löhr
(Translated by Anthea Bell)
(Fig Tree 344pp £16.99)
I N 1770, THE court of Empress Mar ia Theresa of
Austria-Hungary was held spellbound by the first
demonstration of the Turk, a revolutionary automaton
which could not only play chess against a human oppo-
nent, but usually won. Soon afterwards, however, the
machine’s creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, became
strangely reluctant to exhibit it, and the Turk was not
seen again until it returned for a triumphal tour of
Europe in 1783. Only many years after Kempelen’s
death was the machine’s secret revealed: it had been a
dwarf in a box all along.
And now it is around these threads of history that the
journalist and screenwriter Robert Löhr has chosen to
weave his first novel, which was published in German
last year and now appears in a translation by Anthea
Bell. In Löhr’s imagined version of events, the tale
begins when Tibor, an itinerant dwarf and chess genius,
is thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge. He is
visited in his cell by the mysterious Kempelen, who
offers him a job as the brains inside the Turk.
Initially horrified by the planned deception, Tibor
changes his mind the next day when he accidentally kills
a Venetian merchant and needs Kempelen’s help to skip
town. After some teething problems, Tibor and
Kempelen successfully present the Turk at court, before
jealous onlookers and tensions among the fraudsters
finally bring the scheme to its dramatic conclusion. ‘I
have taken the liberty of making up my own story,’ says
Löhr in an author’s note, ‘which I hope fits seamlessly
into all that is known from that period.’
It doesn’t. For a start, Löhr is prone to dropping
anachronistic clangers in almost every chapter. His
depiction of 1770s Bratislava contains, for instance, such
modern conveniences as a post office (maybe), public
58
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
predictable, magic-realist descriptions: ‘My breasts,
which had been so small, were now like two ripe
apples, and my hips curved like a melon.’ This novel
will undoubtedly have book-club appeal, but its lack of
originality and depth disappoints.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 18
street lighting (unlikely) and a Jewish Cultural Institute
(surely not?). These might be overlooked in a book with
other merits. But not in this one. The prose is he-did-
this-then-he-did-that flat, the characters are less human
than the mechanical Turk himself, and the story, though
packed with incident, is devoid of anything to believe
in, care about or be surprised by. Löhr suspects as much,
I fancy, as a good portion of the book is taken up with
scurrying justifications for his characters’ increasingly
No, what The Secrets of the Chess Machine fits seam-
lessly in with is the story of a screenwriter steeped in
Hollywood convention hastily bashing out a novel. All
the principal women, for instance, are beautiful and
lascivious, and never more than twenty pages away
from an irrelevant sex scene. Dialogue, meanwhile,
consists either of action-hero platitudes (‘See you in
Hell’) or of clunky exposition like: ‘You’ll never, not
in a hundred years, get to be that towering figure in
the world of chess, a grandmaster.’ (True enough, this
one, as the rank of grandmaster was not even created
until 1914.)
We get the bit where the courtesan takes a job as a
maid to seduce her way to Kempelen’s secret, the bit
where the captive hero rubs through the rope binding
his wrists to get free, and the bit where the gloating vil-
lain fails to kill the hero when he has the chance. And,
in order to make even this preposterous story hang
together, we need to believe that a dwarf in platform
shoes no longer looks like a dwarf, and that not one of
the three men having an affair with one female character
notices that she is at least seven months pregnant at the
time. Page 167, to top it all, describes arguably the least
believable scene I have ever read in a piece of prose fic-
tion – a moment of masturbation and sudden death that
the reviewer’s code regrettably forbids me from ‘spoiling’
by describing it in detail.
Short of staging a horse-and-carriage chase that
demolishes a fruit market, in short, Löhr could scarcely
have written a better parody of a pulpy erotic thriller, or
a worse imitation of a decent literary novel, which I fear
was the original plan. If The Secrets of the Chess Machine
were a movie then at least generations of students could
giggle drunkenly over such climactic lines as ‘It won’t
end in a draw this time, chess player.’ But as a book, it is
implausible, inaccurate, derivative, dull and not even
particularly short.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 18
 SILENCED VOICES
I N THE RUN - UP to the Beijing L UCY P OPESCU
Olympics, campaign groups are
preparing to increase the pressure on Z HANG J IANHONG
the host country to release prisoners
of conscience and clean up its human rights record. As
China’s international political and economic strength
intensifies, freedom of expression continues to suffer, with
the authorities restricting the work of the media and non-
governmental organisations, while implementing even
stricter controls on the Internet. According to Human
Rights Watch (HRW), conditions deteriorated signifi-
cantly in 2006: ‘Several high-profile, politically-motivated
prosecutions of lawyers and journalists in 2006 put an end
to any hopes that President Hu Jintao would be a pro-
gressive reformer and sent an unambiguous warning to
individuals and groups pressing for greater respect for the
fundamental rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens.’
Over here we can write freely about the merits of Britain’s Zhang was previously imprisoned from 1989 to 1991 for
hosting the 2012 Games, but prominent Chinese writer
Zhang Jianhong (aka Li Hong) has recently been jailed for
referring to Beijing’s intention to host the Olympics as ‘a
scandal’, whilst criticising China’s human rights record.
On 19 March 2007, 48-year-old Zhang was sentenced to
six years in prison on subversion charges for articles calling Chinese sites Boxun (http://www.boxun.com) and the
for political reform in China that he posted online between
May and September 2006. According to PEN, he has been
detained since his arrest on 6 September 2006, when more
than twenty police officers searched his home. His com-
puters were confiscated and his wife was interrogated.
Zhang was formally charged on 12 October 2006 and was
finally convicted of subversion by a court in Ningbo,
Zhejiang Province, eastern China in March, for ‘defaming
the Chinese government’ and ‘inciting subversion’.
‘This verdict is sadly yet another example of the judicial
system being used by the political authorities,’ Reporters
without Borders said. ‘It is outrageous that cyber-dissi-
dents get severe prison sentences just for the views they
express. Yet again, they are being made to pay a heavy
price for their commitment.’ Although Zhang intends to
appeal his sentence, it is unlikely that he will be acquitted. a pattern of harassment of dissidents routinely observed by
Apparently, after handing down the six-year prison sen-
tence, the court claimed that it was showing clemency
because the defendant expressed remorse during the trial.
HRW refers to China’s Internet restrictions as the
‘Great Firewall of China’ and points to a recent crack-
down that is justified by Premier Wen Jiabao as ‘neces-
sary’ in order ‘to safeguard national, social and collective
interests’. Similar restrictions apply to books, newspapers,
magazines, television, radio and film. In the last year the
Chinese government has stepped up its campaign against
freedom of expression on the Internet and ‘moved aggres-
sively to plug the wall’s holes and to punish transgressors’.
The authorities employ a vast police and state security
apparatus that enables them to enforce multiple layers of
control on critics, protesters and civil society activists.
59
HRW condemns the system, which
includes ‘tapping and surveillance of
phone and Internet communications,
visits and summons by the police,
close surveillance by plainclothes agents, unofficial house-
arrests, incommunicado confinement in distant police-
run guest houses, and custody in police stations’.
The organisation documents cases similar to that of
Zhang, involving journalists, bloggers, webmasters, writ-
ers, and editors, who risk prison sentences every time
they send news out of China or merely debate politically
sensitive ideas among themselves: ‘Censors use sophisti-
cated filters, blocking, and Internet police to limit incom-
ing information ... Many cases come to trial charged with
vaguely defined crimes such as “disrupting social order”,
“leaking state secrets”, or “inciting subversion”.’
A member of the independent Chinese PEN centre,
his pro-democracy activities. In August 2005 he found-
ed the literary and news website Aiqinhai (or ‘Aegean
Sea’ – http://www.aiqinhai.org), serving as editor-in-
chief until it was banned by the authorities in March
2006. He was also a regular contributor to the overseas
Epoch Times (http://www.dajiyuan.com).
It is also reported that his six-year term is to be fol-
lowed by one year’s deprivation of political rights. Zhang’s
lawyer believes his severe sentence is partly in retribution
for being mentioned in the US State Department’s
Country Report on Human Rights Practices released just
before Zhang’s sentencing. Meanwhile, the Committee to
Protect Journalists speculate that the editor may be suffer-
ing repercussions from another posting where he reported
on allegations that the Chinese government illegally pro-
cured organs from living prisoners. Whatever the real rea-
sons behind his lengthy prison sentence, Zhang is known
for his fearless journalism, having often published articles
depicting fraud and corruption and criticising the
Chinese Communist Party, and his imprisonment follows
human rights organisations.
Readers may like to send appeals protesting against the
detention of Zhang Jianhong (aka Li Hong), and calling
for his immediate and unconditional release in accordance
with Article 19 of the United Nations International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which China
is a signatory. Seek assurances that he is treated humanely
and urge the authorities to grant him full access to his
family, lawyers and any necessary medical care:
His Excellency Hu Jintao
President of the People’s Republic of China
c/o Her Excellency Madam Fu Ying
Chinese Embassy
49-51 Portland Place, London W1B 1JL
Fax: 0207 636 2981
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007

T HE B ETHLEHEM M URDERS
★ cover cop, and is getting herself
By Matt Rees
(Atlantic Books 272pp £12.99)
OMAR Yussef is a weary old teacher
who tries to keep politics out of his
home and classroom. But in
Bethlehem conflict is inescapable;
and though the Israelis are a fact of
life, the real enemies are home-
grown terrorists. When a Christian is
accused of killing a ‘freedom fighter’
by leading the Israelis to him, Yussef
knows the man is innocent and goes
to dangerous lengths to prove it.
‘“What an old fool you are,” he told
himself, “scrambling around in a bat-
tle zone in your nice shoes.
Sometimes you can have a gun to
your head and you still don’t know
where your brains are.”’ The murder
mystery is intricate and clever, but
what makes this book so outstanding
is its evocation of daily life in
hideous circumstances, and the sur-
vival of human decency in an utterly
indecent situation. This unlikely
hero, burdened by fear for himself,
his family and his pupils, fighting
against the urge to feel that ‘all his
life’s work was just so much
destroyed hope and goodness
befouled’, finds in himself strength
and courage he never knew he had.
It is an unusual adjective for a crime
novel, but I’d call this one inspiring.
T HE D EATH L IST
★ have returned alive from ‘compulsory
By Paul Johnston
(Mira Books 336pp £6.99)
IN his previous series, one featuring a
future sleuth in a dystopian
Edinburgh, the other a half-Greek
half-Scots private eye in modern
Greece, Paul Johnston produced some
of the best crime fiction of recent
years. He writes as well as ever here,
though the acknowledgements pre-
ceding this book refer to ‘the ups and
downs of my recent life’ and there
seems to be a considerable autobio-
graphical element in the portrait of a
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
once successful crime novelist, now
‘blocked good and proper’, dropped
by his publishers, agent and wife, and
overtaken by his professional rivals.
That bitter state, familiar in fact and
not unknown in fiction, leads on to a
horror story, in which the author
meets his last, greatest fan and is drawn
into a sinister game with increasingly
vicious revenge taken on everyone
who ever slighted him. This is a night-
marish tale, but a very clever one.
T HE C ORONER ’ S L UNCH
★ by numbers: underdogs – grooms,
By Colin Cotterill
(Quercus 288pp £12.99)
IN 1976, a year after the Communist
takeover in Laos, 72-year-old Dr Siri
Paiboun is the state coroner; in fact,
the country’s only coroner since his
predecessor fled to Thailand. This
unconventional hero was trained as a
doctor in Paris but now has to work
with one outdated medical textbook,
few medical supplies, one devoted
nurse and an orderly with Down’s
syndrome. His work is obstructed by
officialdom and bureaucracy, while
secret enemies are determined to
prevent him from proving that the
wife of an important government
official was murdered. Material help
comes from his friends, a sandwich
maker, a river man and others who
education’, and Siri has dreams in
which he talks to, or even turns into
dead people: these are not ghosts, but
messages from Siri’s own subcon-
scious, which eventually reveal the
truth. The story is good, the charac-
ters interesting, the hero delightful
and the setting fascinating: a find.
T HE A LIBI M AN
★ chippy girl ‘whose eyes regard a tree,
By Tami Hoag
(Orion 368pp £12.99)
ELENA Estes has disowned her rich
60
family, stopped working as an under-
together after a traumatic attack by
working in a fr iend’s stable. But
when she finds the alligator-mauled
body of another groom, Elena starts
investigating, all the more enthusias-
tically when she realises that the chief
suspect is her own one-time-fiancé, a
man who has previously got away
with rape and murder. He is one of
the arrogant Palm Beach playboys
who give each other alibis and buy
themselves out of any trouble. But
now the Russian mob has arrived in
Florida and they play by different
rules. To some extent this is writing
detectives and even a bed-hopping
professional polo player – are rela-
tively decent, whilst politicians,
lawyers, and the filthy rich have no
redeeming features, and a Russian
mobster is simply a cartoon villain;
but the plot hangs together and the
story swings snappily along.
MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH
★
By Ariana Franklin
(Bantam 400pp £12.99)
A RIANA Franklin, aka Diana
Norman, has written many enjoyable
historical novels, and the addition of
a mystery plot makes this one even
more so. It is based on a true story,
the death of eleven-year-old William
of Norwich and the persecution of
English Jews that ensued. Henry II
needs his Jews working and paying
taxes, while in Cambridge, where
several Christian children have been
murdered, the Jews have been
penned up in the castle for their own
safety. All the same, when more
young children go missing, and then
when their murdered bodies are
found, the Jews are inevitably suspects
– or scapegoats. Enter to the rescue a
a patch of grass with interrogation:
what’s your name? What are you
good for? If not, why not?’ This
delightfully original detective heroine

is a Sicilian doctor with forensic
insight, no bedside manner and some
revolutionary medical techniques. I
hope we meet her again.
T HE LYING TONGUE
★ rapid switches of viewpoint between
By Andrew Wilson
(Canongate 320pp £10.99)
ALTHOUGH it’s set in Venice, this is
not one of those travelogue crime
novels worth saving up to read there,
for the narrator, Adam, hardly sets
foot outside the dusty palazzo where
he has taken a job as companion,
nurse and maid of all work to a
famous, reclusive, one-book author.
Andrew Wilson’s previous book was
the biography of Patricia Highsmith,
and this clever first novel shares many
of her qualities: nothing and nobody
is what they seem, the victim and the
villain are men, the atmosphere is
unsettling, the mystery claustropho-
bic and a guilty conscience is surplus
to requirements.
CRIME
D EVIL’ S P EAK
★
By Deon Meyer
(Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £14.99)
ONE needs to become acclimatised to
perpetrators, their victims and the
cops, but as the fog of misunderstand-
ing gradually clears it becomes clear
that this is one of those entertainment
fictions that teaches one more than any
textbook or documentary. This thriller
is a fascinating portrayal of one aspect
of life in post-apartheid South Africa.
The story’s principal actors are a black,
assegai-wielding former freedom fight-
er who turns into a vigilante and goes
on a killing spree; a high-class tart; and
a policeman who drinks to drown the
screaming that’s waiting inside his
head: ‘One day it will come out and I
am scared that I am the one who will
hear it.’ It does come out and he is the
one who hears it, winding up the ten-
sion to a gripping, shocking climax.
Highly recommended.
Also recommended:
Frozen Tracks by Ake Edwardson
(translated by Laurie Thompson)
(Harvill 464pp £11.99) – in the genus
‘Scandinavian police procedural’.
Rattling the Bones by Ann Granger
(Headline 288pp £19.99) – a nice
example of the young-woman-as-
private eye genre – with a heroine
who is sparky, gutsy and undeterred
by danger or disapproval.
Trouble by Jesse Kellerman (Sphere
368pp £10.99) – a nightmarish psy-
chological chiller in which a New
York medical student discovers that
no good deed goes unpunished.
The Chatelet Apprentice by Jean-
François Parot (Gallic Books 344pp
£11.99) – introducing a police
investigator in eighteenth-century
France. An interesting book, and the
first in a series.
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
THE SUBJECT OF ‘umbrella’ elicited R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
some very original poems. I was
disappointed that none of the
judges shared my love of Bill Webster’s ‘Six ways of look-
ing at an umbrella’, which didn’t therefore graduate, but all at 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW by 27 June.
the poems printed are of excellent quality anyway. J R
Gillie wins first prize and £300, and J M Harvey second
FIRST PRIZE
AUDEN’S UMBRELLA by J R Gillie
He’d left it in the lodge, pushed for his train
after a Christchurch lunch; this in the time
of the famously fissured face (did rain,
I wondered, linger in those lines?). The chime
of Oxford bells told me I was too late
to catch him, hand it over; so I stood
testing the ancient frame, feeling the weight,
noting its rusty silk, and polished wood.
I kept it, and I have it still. Since then
a dozen birds have soiled it. One I caught
(a crow) fancied it ‘facile’; while a hen
clucked at ‘pretended wisdom, cheaply bought.’
Each night I plant it in the fields, and dream
some wandering beast will steal it as I sleep;
but dawn reveals it, firm of crook and seam,
making a gloomy shelter for the sheep.
SECOND PRIZE
LOST PROPERTY by J M Harvey
I have your black umbrella –
you left it in the hall –
it’s hanging there, still waiting
collection since your call
asking had I seen it
and saying you’d drop by
your voice as full of promise
as any cloud-free sky.
I’ve kept this one belonging
abandoned in such haste
aware by now it’s certain
we’ll both have been replaced
unclaimed in all the flurry
of your rash deceitful life –
I’m left with your umbrella
and you never left your wife.
ESSENTIALS OF EDUCATION by Noel Petty
You had to have Latin in those distant days
Or you’d not be allowed through the door,
But in that initial bewildering phase
You soon found you needed much more.
62
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
prize and £150. All others printed
receive £10 and the admiration of
their friends and family.
Next month’s topic is ‘the choice’. Entries should arrive
Poems should rhyme, scan and make sense, and be no
more than 24 lines in length.
Compulsory too – it was death to refuse –
A duffel coat then was the drill,
An elegant waistcoat, a pair of suede shoes,
And trousers of cavalry twill.
A well-bred umbrella would crown the display,
Tight-furled, with a smart brass ferrule.
You could hear whole platoons of them tapping their
way
To the Science or History School.
Of trophies and tokens I keep very few,
No oar is displayed on my wall.
A few scraps of learning, a snapshot or two,
And there, keeping faith in the hall,
A greying umbrella, flamboyancy’s ghost,
You might say we share our decline.
I take it for outings – just here to the post –
On days when the weather is fine.
ENTROPY-SUR-MER by Iain Colley
This is a scene of affluence and ease,
of mint-condition sand the shade of wheat,
of blinds and sun-defying canopies,
a scene of sheer uninsulated heat;
not the remotest tremor of a breeze.
A paper bumbershoot slopes in my glass,
its pastel flutes preserving cocktail ice
that crowds the inert flotsam of a sparse,
bedraggled mint sprig and a wilted slice
of lime. A swim? A healthy leg-stretch? Pass.
The brazen stillness of the Midi glare
beats on the deck umbrellas of the yachts.
All motion suffers in the congealed air.
Their frogged attendants sweat while the big shots
hog the cool comforts of the millionaire.
Along the belle époque shore frontage stand
whole regiments of terrace parasols,
essentials shields. The bandstand lacks a band.
Nobody – not one hungry dog – patrols
the sunstruck streets or superheated sand.
UMBRELLA by Ted Giles
Umbrellas men use as a totem or ruse
To establish some sort of mystique:
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
They believe they have charm with one furled on the
arm
And a new gravitas when they speak.
No man carries a gamp to avoid getting damp
At the feel of the first drop of rain;
Nor to cause any fuss when it’s left on a bus
Nor jam doors on an Underground train.
And a man wouldn’t fret if he got a bit wet,
He would sit down and dry by the fire
Thus avoiding the folly of shaking a brolly
Indoors to some good lady’s ire.
So what do we make of a man who would take
An umbrella despite a blue sky?
Is he striking a pose? Is he, worse, one of those
Who’s intending to poison a spy?
To the Nazis we sent, with a brolly, a gent
And they thought he was our paradigm;
But guns, not umbrellas, swayed Munich beer cellars
So we didn’t get ‘Peace in our Time’.
UMBRELLA-WISH by Alison Prince
Umbrellas are not civilised. They fight
against the user’s grasp, fretting to ride
the up-wind, and will commit suicide
if bridled over-hard. Bred from a kite
crossed with a dustbin lid, a trace of bat
lies somewhere in their genes. The folds of skin
stretched thin between the spiky bones are kin
to bat anatomy. Requiescat
in pace, we mutter, with fingers crossed
at the perversity of these unique
creatures that self- invert out of sheer pique.
Folded, they sulk and chafe, get themselves lost –
or possibly they dematerialise
into astral enigmas, their un-souls
identified by physicists as holes
black-hidden in the strangeness of the skies,
which may be right. But on the other hand,
umbrella-wish could fill infinity
with ferruled clusters of divinity
born of a bliss we do not understand.
We should be careful, then, how we deploy
these private shelters from the wind and rain.
Respect their hidden wish, and we may gain
a sudden soaring into fields of joy.
THE UMBRELLA by D Shepherd
They had their home in an elephant’s foot
And spent their time together
Except when one of them went out
63
Depending on the weather.
The stick, with his silvery knob a-shine,
Went out in the sun to flirt;
The umbrella, who had to face the rain,
Came back with a soaking skirt.
Their descendants, much less stylish, live
In a corner by the door
And their state is not what it used to be,
It’s not as it was before.
The stick is collapsible, sprung, and black,
Accustomed to boots and dirt,
The umbrella is coloured in segments
With a Golf Club’s name on her skirt.
Alas, the relationship suffers:
The stick has a friend – they’re both gay
And they go out together on rambles
And lie about losing their way.
The umbrella is very indignant
But does not lament or complain:
With a parasol, also abandoned,
They’re safe from the sun and the rain.
AUDIOBOOK
P OINT OF O RIGIN
★
By Patricia Cornwell
(Abridged. Read by Joan Allen. Hachette Audio. 5 cds. £15.99)
I AM A Patricia Cornwell virgin, so to speak. Narrated by
her celebrated heroine Dr Kay Scarpetta, a Chief
Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist, the story’s
end makes evident how many false clues have been
planted and left dangling. An all-consuming fire devas-
tates media mogul Kenneth Spark’s Virginia farm and
racing stables. The horses’ screams are like human
screams. What little remains of an exquisite young
woman lies in the master bathroom. She was one of
Spark’s girlfriends. He is victim or killer. Initially Kay
assumes the latter, though he loved those horses passion-
ately. Unsurprisingly, her view of mankind throughout is
melancholy. Elsewhere Carrie Grethen, thwarted in her
psychopathic efforts to destroy Kay and those closest to
her, escapes from a psychiatric hospital. Others now at
risk – one of them doomed – are Kay’s dearly loved
companion Benton, and her young niece Lucy, once
Carrie’s lover. The author is most famed, I expect, for
the plentiful pathological information and criminal lore
she imparts. Until the suspenseful end, the reader, Joan
Allen, formerly acclaimed on stage as Mrs Nixon, seems
not to turn a hair as she describes gruesome mutilations
and repulsive acts of violence. Susan Crosland
LITERARY REVIEW June 2007
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