JULY 2007 £3.

00

HOW THE WEST WAS WRITTEN

Richard Gray on James Fenimore Cooper
Alan Ryan on Dangerous Utopias
David Cesarani on the Himmlers
9 770144 436041

Gerard Baker on Reagan’s Diaries

The Fourth of July DEBUNKED
Adam Smith DIGESTED
The Story of the Bible ★ The Midwife’s Tale
07

The Birth of the Bomb

LOVE & LUST
Shelley on the Prowl ★ Hazlitt on Heat
Schumann gets Syphilis ★ Mata Hari gets Shot
FICTION: William Trevor ★ Pat Barker ★ Irvine Welsh ★ Susanna Jones...
 FROM THE PULPIT
T IME WAS WHEN wr iters were K ATHRYN H UGHES
expected to write, and not much
else. The particularly confident or
clubbable might appear on the
occasional BBC radio show, but
FESTIVAL FROLICS
mostly it was considered infra dig
to tart yourself around like a travelling salesman offering
a nice line in printer cartridges or ladies’ underwear.
How different it is now. Over the next four months
any market town which can run to a marquee and a
patch of off-street parking will be mounting a ‘literary
festival’ at which you, as a writer with a book just out,
will be expected to do a turn. Your publicist expects it,
your agent says it will do your ‘brand’ the world of
good. You tell anyone who will listen that you happen
to know that Alan Bennett confines himself only to the
major gigs – Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Hay. The looks
you get back tell you that, frankly, Alan Bennett’s
options and yours have little in common.
And while your spirits may sink as you board yet
another slow Saturday train for who-knows-where, you
remind yourself sternly that, actually, it is quite flattering
that a hundred or so strangers are prepared to pay up to
£5.50 to spend an hour under canvas with you. And it’s
not as if you’re alone. At the station, in the cab queue,
hovering at the hotel check-in, you will see the same
faces over and over again, that cohort of novelists, histo-
rians, poets and biographers whose latest book happens
to coincide with yours.
Immediately, though, a dilemma presents itself. Should
you acknowledge your literary fellow-travellers with a
‘here we are again’ shrug and smile, or is it more digni-
fied to pretend you haven’t recognised them? And what
if they happen to be terrifically famous? Would offering
P D James a ‘had a good journey, Phyl?’ or ‘do you
know if we get dinner thrown in?’ count as friendly ice-
breaking or shameless brown-nosing? I was once in the
ghastly situation of coming down late to breakfast and
finding myself directed to the last remaining empty
place, which happened to be directly opposite Salman
Rushdie. Now what’s a girl to do? A. Chew slowly on
your Full English and fix your gaze determinedly several
inches above the Great Man’s left shoulder? B. Ask him
to pass the marmalade and in the process throw in
a clever, knowing reference to Midnight’s Children.
C. Pretend you’ve choked on your kipper and run from
the dining room never to return?
But if eating at literary festivals is difficult, getting dressed things on the backs of their hands. The place is heaving,
is even worse. You like to think, of course, that the audi-
ence has come to hear your words of wisdom but actually
you know that there are plenty of beady-eyed ladies of a
certain age who attend these events simply to decide
whether they like your frock. Since I first started out ten
years ago I’ve been through several changes of image.
There was the ‘minor royal’ phase in which I favoured
linen coats and matching court shoes and looked as if I’d
1
come to unveil a plaque. There was
the ‘bohemian intellectual’ incarna-
tion which resulted in my disappear-
ing whenever I stood next to a beige
wall. And then there was the ‘Sky
weather girl’ phase (personally my
favourite), where I looked colourful but slightly common.
Not that festival dressing is all about visuals – there’s audio
to consider too. Remembering to pick an outfit which will
accommodate a radio mike is something I always overlook.
Devoid of pockets, the only solution is for the brick-like
contraption to be stuffed into the top of your tights, from
where a wire snakes up under your clothes until it reappears
in public, coyly clamped to your lapel. Inevitably there’s a
spasm of embarrassment as the technical person – always
male – attempts to put the radio mike in place without
actually touching your person. Doubtless terrified of getting
slapped with a lawsuit, the poor man stands at arm’s length
and theatrically averts his eyes while fiddling perilously near
your cleavage. You, in turn, stare into the middle distance
and remind yourself that you have endured far worse over
the years at the family planning clinic.
Suitably ‘miked up’, as we like to say in the festival
business, it’s time to get on stage. What you do and say
during the next hour is pretty much up to you. Writers
mostly want to fill the time by reading straight from their
books, which everyone else secretly thinks is a terrible
waste. So, with this in mind, I try to do an apparently
off-the-cuff talk instead. I say ‘apparently’ because I
come from a generation where it wasn’t cool to admit
that you’d done your homework, ever.
The truth is, of course, I practise like mad. I make a
particular point of marking up any difficult words on my
script so that there’s no danger of mis-speaking or, worse
still, dissolving into helpless giggles. You’d be amazed
how easy it is to muff innocent words like ‘sect’ and
‘public’ when you’re under pressure. I once did a whole
hour’s talk on my first book, The Victorian Governess, in
which I managed to use the phrase ‘male member’ half a
dozen times before realising that I should really find a
happier way of describing the men who happened to
live in the same households as my governess-heroines.
And then it’s back to the Green Room, where you
join your fellow performers. Those who’ve already
done their turn are gulping down warm white wine,
even though it’s still only 11.30 in the morning. Those
waiting to go on look pale and tense and are scribbling
not just with authors but with organisers, journalists
and publicity people from the various publishers. You’re
desperate to sit down, because those mile-high wedge
heels which seemed just the ticket this morning are
now killing you. There’s just one problem. Only one
seat is free in the whole room. And, yes, it’s next to
Salman Rushdie. There’s nothing for it but to totter
over, slump down, and look straight through him.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Kathryn Hughes, Professor of Life
Writing at the University of East
Anglia. Her books include George Eliot:
The Last Victorian, and most recently,
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs
Beeton, both published by 4th Estate.
A LAN R YAN is Warden of New
College, Oxford, and has taught
philosophy for over forty years.
JONATHAN SUMPTION is the author
of a history of the Hundred Years
War, and a practising QC.
DAVID KYNASTON’s Austerity Britain:
1945–51 is published by Bloomsbury.
JOHN GRIBBIN is a Visiting Fellow
in astronomy at the University of
Sussex and author of Science: A
History (Penguin).
ALLISTER HEATH is Editor of The
Business and Associate Editor of The
Spectator.
E LISABETH L UARD , in addition to
scooping the much coveted
Glenfiddich Trophy, was named
Best Cookery Writer for her recipes
in The Oldie.
MARTYN BEDFORD’s latest novel, The
Island of Lost Souls, is published in
paperback this month by Bloomsbury.
D AMIAN T HOMPSON is Editor-in-
Chief of The Catholic Herald.
DAVID CESARANI is research professor
in history at Royal Holloway,
University of London. His most recent
book is Eichman: His Life and Crimes.
DAVID ELLIS is emeritus professor of
English Literature at the University of
Kent at Canterbury and has published
books on Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
D H Lawrence, and the art of biography.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 K ATHRYN H UGHES
HISTORY 4 GERARD BAKER The Reagan Diaries (Ed) Douglas Brinkley
5 D A V I D C E S A R A N I The Himmler Brothers: A German Family
History Katrin Himmler
7 D A V I D K Y N A S T O N Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East
End in the 1950s Jennifer Worth Family and Kinship in East
London Michael Young and Peter Willmott
8 J O N A T H A N M I R S K Y The Fourth of July and the Founding of
America Peter de Bolla
10 PETER JONES The Day of the Barbarians: The First Battle in the
Fall of the Roman Empire Alessandro Barbero
BIOGRAPHY 11 JONATHAN SUMPTION The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of
England’s Self-Made King Ian Mortimer
13 JULIA KEAY Femme Fatale: A Biography of Mata Hari Pat Shipman
14 RALEIGH TREVELYAN The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John
Pendlebury Imogen Grundon
16 BRENDA MADDOX Max Perutz and the Secret of Life Georgina Ferry
18 CHRISTOPHER COKER George Kennan: A Study of Character
John Lukacs
20 SIMON HEFFER Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician
John Worthen
22 HUGH MASSINGBERD Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates
Donald Spoto
23 DAVID ELLIS Biography: A Brief History Nigel Hamilton
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 24 EDWARD NORMAN The Bible: A Biography Karen Armstrong
25 D AMIAN T HOMPSON God is Not Great: The Case Against
Religion Christopher Hitchens
LITERARY LIVES 27 RICHARD GRAY James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years
Wayne Franklin
28 F RANCES W ILSON Death and the Maidens: Fanny
Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle Janet Todd Being Shelley:
The Poet’s Search for Himself Anne Wroe
30 CHARLES ELLIOTT The Way it Wasn’t: From the Files of James
Laughlin (Ed) Barbara Epler and Daniel Javitch Counterpoint:
25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts (Ed)
Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer
31 J E S S I C A M A N N Paper Houses: A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond
Michèle Roberts
32 EVELYN TOYNTON Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment Jon Cook
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Assistant Editor: PHILIP WOMACK
General Assistant: CASSIE BROWNE
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 345
2
 JULY 2007

33 THOMAS HODGKINSON Alfred Douglas: A Poet’s Life and His ALEXANDER MASTERS is the author
Finest Work Caspar Wintermans of the acclaimed Stuart: A Life
Backwards (HarperPerennial).
34 WILLIAM PALMER The Boy Who Loved Books John Sutherland
CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor
GENERAL 36 A LAN R YAN Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the of International Relations at the
Death of Utopia John Gray London School of Economics and
37 G RAHAM S TEWART Globalisation, Democracy and author of several books on interna-
tional security.
Terrorism Eric Hobsbawm
38 J O H N G R I B B I N Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the RALEIGH TREVELYAN’s The Fortress
Soul of Physics Gino Segrè Doomsday Men: The Real Dr is the classic account of the Anzio
Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon P D Smith offensive; he also described his
40 ALEXANDER MASTERS Unknown Quantity: A Real and wartime experiences in Rome ’44
and A Clear Premonition. His most
Imagined History of Algebra John Derbyshire
recent book is a biography of Sir
41 ALLISTER HEATH On the Wealth of Nations P J O’Rourke Walter Raleigh.
42 C HARLOTTE A PPLEYARD Stealing the Scream: The Hunt
for a Missing Masterpiece Edward Dolnick GERARD BAKER is US Editor and
43 D IANA C LEE Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of a Assistant Editor of The Times.
Great British Dynasty Catherine Bailey
RICHARD GRAY is a Fellow of the
44 J ASON G OODWIN Tea: The Drink that Changed the World British Academy. His History of
John Griffiths American Literature was published by
45 ELISABETH LUARD ON THREE BOOKS ABOUT FOOD Blackwell in 2004. He is currently
47 N ICK G ARRARD ON G RAPHIC N OVELS working on the literary and cultural
relations between Europe and the
American South.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS 48 P HILIP W OMACK ON F IVE C HILDREN ’ S B OOKS
BRENDA MADDOX’s books include
FICTION 49 C RESSIDA C ONNOLLY Cheating at Canasta William Trevor Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of
50 J OHN D UGDALE Now is the Hour Tom Spanbauer DNA (HarperCollins).
51 P AMELA N ORRIS Life Class Pat Barker
EDWARD NORMAN is Emeritus Fellow
52 N IGEL J ONES Charlemagne and Roland Allan Massie of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Curate
52 MARTYN BEDFORD The Missing Person’s Guide to Love Susanna Jones of the St James Garlickhythe Church
53 M ONI M OHSIN Insomnia Aamer Hussein in the City of London.
54 FRANCIS KING The Condor’s Head Ferdinand Mount
GRAHAM STEWART’s Friendship and
55 MATT THORNE If You Liked School You’ll Love Work Irvine Welsh
Betrayal: Ambition and the Limits of
56 L OUISE G UINNESS Consequences Penelope Lively Loyalty was published in April by
57 L INDY B URLEIGH Safe Houses David Pryce-Jones Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
58 R ACHEL H ORE Minding Chris Paling
FRANCES WILSON’s books include
Literary Seductions and, most recent-
SILENCED VOICES 59 L UCY P OPESCU
ly, The Courtesan’s Revenge, available
CRIME 60 J ESSICA M ANN in paperback from Faber & Faber.
POETRY 62
AUDIOBOOK 58 S USAN C ROSLAND PHILIP WOMACK’s children’s novel,
LETTERS 35 The Other Book, will be published by
Bloomsbury in January 2008.
CLASSIFIEDS 64 CROSSWORD 26 BOOKSHOP 16

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LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 HISTORY

G ERARD B AKER opponents, as one of the more successful presidents.

The man dismissed as a bad B-movie actor by

SAINT RONALD Europeans led a demoralised Amer ica out of the

Vietnam-Watergate-stagflation nightmare of the 1970s
and laid the foundations for victory in the Cold War
T HE R EAGAN D IARIES and for long-term economic prosperity.
★ There is not much here that will cause the historians to
Edited by Douglas Brinkley rewrite their accounts of the 1980s. The diaries will sure-
(HarperCollins 767pp £30) ly come to be considered more as confirmatory of our
understanding of the fortieth president than revelatory.
SINCE RICHARD CROSSMAN first spilled the beans on his There are endless accounts of meetings with global lead-
Cabinet colleagues back in the 1960s, political diaries ers and US politicians, film stars and others, punctuated
have become a rich resource for historians and a potent with thoughts on the Soviet Union, free markets, religion
new weapon in the internal warfare that is modern and terrorism, but nothing that will cause a substantial
democratic government. revision of the judgement of historians. Even the tone of
For scholars and interested observers, subsequent pub- the entries seems to echo the same jaunty folksiness
lication of the contemporaneous observations of policy- Reagan made his public-speaking style. It is reflected in a
makers offers a chance to reconsider the context of simplicity, a spare writing style that can render even great
long-familiar political events. For the diarists, they serve events of state slightly banal-sounding, especially when
a much more important purpose. Like unexploded interspersed, as they often are, with references to everyday
bombs, timed to detonate life in the White House.
after their writers have left The entry for Monday,
office, diaries can excoriate 19 October, 1987 the day
critics, punish enemies and the US stock market
deride turncoats, while all recorded its largest one-
the time offering ringing day fall since the Great
self-validation of ever y Crash – but also a day that
decision made by the found Nancy Reagan, the
author in office. first lady, in hospital for
In the US the revealing surgery – gives the flavour:
political diary has played a Then a haircut, a meet-
smaller role in moder n ing with ten children
political history than it has from all over the country
in Br itain. Lyndon B who have been honored
Johnson famously taped all for performing heroic
his White House conversa- deeds. Then left (by
tions – and some of his helicopter) for Bethesda
own observational mono- and dinner with Nancy.
logues – for later release, B-list actor, A-list president She has astounded the
and so did Richard Nixon medical profession with
until the practice was curtailed by the little local difficulty her rapid recovery. She’ll be home soon.
called Watergate. By day’s end the news was a 508 fall in the Dow
It was Nixon’s unhappy experience that led his succes- Jones. Some people are talking of panic – the Dow is
sors to choose the discretion of literary silence over the down 800 points in just over a week.
valour of personal candour. So when a new trove of the Perhaps most striking about the entries is that, while
contemporary musings of one of the most important many critics may have thought Reagan’s style – opti-
political figures of the second half of the twentieth cen- mistic, homely, straight-arrow beliefs – was all part of the
tury emerges, it excites understandable interest. actor’s repertoire, it was in fact (at least if private diary
Ronald Reagan was the first US president since entries are a reliable guide) a picture of the real man.
Rutherford B Hayes in the 1870s to keep a detailed He comes across as the warm and upbeat man America
regular diary during his term of office. Now, painstak- knew from his TV commercials. The diaries are full of
ingly edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley from the stories in which the President has seen some item on the
original hardback notebooks Reagan filled in copious evening news – about a sick child or an heroic citizen –
longhand over eight years, they offer a glimpse into the and then insists his staff do something to help.
style of the man now regarded, even by his former The book is largely free of the malice that is the usual

4
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 HISTORY
currency of political dialogue. Very occasionally a critical
journalist or politician will get Reagan irate. But his respect
for the old-fashioned decencies of language are such that
he will never fully spell out even the mildest swear words
such as ‘h—l’ or ‘d—n’. Foreign villains get slightly
rougher treatment, but even then there’s something merely
chiding in his descriptions of Saddam Hussein as a ‘no
good nut’ and Muammar Gaddafi as a ‘clown’.
The deep bond with his wife Nancy (rather cloyingly,
frequently referred to as ‘Mommie’) is clear throughout.
A typical entry from 1981 reads: ‘Saw Mommie off for
the Royal Wedding. I worry when she’s out of sight six
minutes. How am I going to hold out for six days?’
Critics will be disappointed that Reagan has little new
to reveal of what he knew about the scandal that could
have unwound his presidency – the arms-for-hostages
exchange with Iran and the Nicaraguan Contras.
The main message from the diaries in today’s American
political environment is a lesson in who the real Ronald
Reagan was. Demoralised by their current plight under
an unpopular president, American conservatives have
revived the cult of Reagan, a saintly figure who defeated
communism and restored American pre-eminence
D AVID C ESARANI
BLOOD RELATIONS
T HE H IMMLER B ROTHERS : A G ERMAN
FAMILY H ISTORY
★ family shocked Katrin so much. By contrast, the picture
By Katrin Himmler
(Translated by Michael Mitchell)
(Macmillan 331pp £14.99)
WHEN SHE ASKED what grandpa Ernst did in the Third
Reich, Katrin Himmler’s father used to tell her that he
was basically an apolitical man who was prodded into
joining the Nazi Party by his elder brother, Heinrich,
and took an innocuous job in German radio. Apart from
that, Heinrich, the powerful head of the SS, had little to
do with his brothers. For a long time this explanation
‘sounded plausible’.
Then, in 1997, Katrin’s father asked her to look at the
Nazi Party files that had recently been returned to
Germany by the Americans. For reasons she does not
quite explain, he wanted to see if they shed light on
what his father and uncle got up to while their brother
was achieving notoriety. Katrin quickly discovered that
the ‘plausible’ version was full of cracks.
Her grandfather had joined the Nazi Party in
November 1931, well before Heinrich became eminent
enough to inspire or bully his brothers into signing on.
Ernst joined the SS two years later, just when he landed
5
through the bold assertion of uncompromising ideology.
But, while it is true that Reagan held to core beliefs in
free markets and the essential moral superiority of
American-style democracy, the diaries remind us that he
was also deeply pragmatic.
Though he hated communism and pledged to defeat
it, he was careful to avoid messy entanglements overseas.
When 200 US marines were killed by terrorists in
Lebanon in 1983 he immediately withdrew the US
force and never sent them back to the Middle East. On
his watch America fought only one hot war (the inva-
sion of Grenada), which lasted about a day and required
no long-term commitment. For all his genuine hatred of
communism, he was ready and willing to sit down with
Mikhail Gorbachev to seek a constructive solution to
the problem of superpower instability.
The diaries confirm that Reagan possessed a rare
political wisdom missing today. It propelled him to pur-
sue his broader goals, but always ensured he matched
those goals to the political, military and economic
resources available to him. If only Reagan’s would-be
successors could be so wise.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 16
the new job at German Radio. This was no coincidence.
Correspondence showed that, far from having little to do
with his siblings, Heinrich frequently helped them get
better jobs, bigger houses, and perks. They, in turn,
proved loyal and efficient servants of the Party.
Such cronyism is hardly surprising, and one wonders
why the discovery that it applied equally well to her
she paints of the family background and the brothers’
political formation is luminously informative. They were
hardly misfits, failures, or sociopaths, and their gravita-
tion to the Nazis was typical of males in their social
group and generation.
The Himmlers were Bavarian Catholics. The patriarch
of the family, Gebhard Himmler, was the son of a minor
official who rose to become a tutor to the Bavarian royal
family and headmaster of a prestigious school. His sons,
Gebhard, Heinr ich, and Er nst, were raised in a
respectable, prosperous family and taught the values of
‘Industry, devotion to duty, pure morals, obedience’.
Gebhard senior also imbued them with German
nationalism. So Germany’s defeat in the Great War
came as a crushing blow: ‘The Himmler family’s world
collapsed.’ At odds with the new dispensation, both
Gebhard and Heinrich joined right-wing militias and
participated in the suppression of the Bavarian Red
Republic in 1919. Diaries and correspondence from
this period show that the entire family rejected the
Weimar Republic and, with varying degrees of vehe-
mence, subscribed to anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism,
and racial thinking.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

While still a teenager Ernst
joined a right-wing militia, and
his older brothers both took
part in Hitler’s abortive putsch
in Munich in 1924. Although it
failed, Heinrich was enthralled
by Hitler. For relaxation in the
evenings he would read aloud to
his aunt and uncle from a book
of Hitler’s life and speeches.
While the Himmlers experi-
enced straitened circumstances
during the 1920s, they always
remained ‘respectable’. The
brothers were able to complete
university, although Heinrich
found it hard to get a decent job
as an agronomist. His parents disliked his unorthodox
career as a Nazi party activist, but after Hitler came to
power and Heinrich acquired high office their attachment
to respectability meshed with the Nazi hegemony. They
basked in Heinrich’s reflected fame and shared in his wax-
ing fortune. Gebhard was levered into a succession of jobs
in vocational training, ending up as a department head in
the Ministry of Education. Ernst prospered in German
radio, working on the development of television.
Both were implicated in the dark side of the Third
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
HISTORY
Reich. Gebhard fought in
Poland and trained Waffen SS
technicians. He imposed strict
racial qualifications on entrants
to the Nazi-controlled associa-
tion of engineers. Ernst joined
a Nazi secret service outfit and
investigated a half-Jewish col-
league at his brother’s request,
with lethal consequences.
Their brother-in-law, Richard
Wendler, presided over the liq-
uidation of the Cracow ghetto.
Katr in g ives evocative
accounts of the experiences of
Monsters in the making each brother’s family during
the heyday of the Reich and
during the rigours of wartime. She devotes a chapter to
Heinrich’s mistress, too, but not out of prurience.
Heinrich married in 1928 and had a daughter, but the
birth was difficult and his wife could not have another
child. He and his wife drifted apart and Katrin soberly
explains how her great-uncle regretted not having more
children. After much heart-searching he took his secre-
tary, Hedwig Potthast, as a mistress to fulfil his duty to
breed for the fatherland. The liaison was kept secret and
the brothers closed ranks around him like honourable
SS men.
Overall, the women fared better. Heinrich committed
suicide after the collapse of the Third Reich. Ernst was
killed in the defence of Berlin. Gebhard spent several
years in Allied prison camps before he was freed to join
his wife and eke out a living in the shadow of their
infamous name. Ernst’s widow struggled to survive but
was helped and comforted by the network of ex-Nazis.
Her son seems to have revolted mildly against his Nazi
heritage but his cousin Gudrun, Heinrich’s daughter,
devoted herself to rehabilitating her father.
Katrin married an Israeli Jew living in Berlin and
wrote this book partly to explain to their son about one
side of his heritage. It is a fine portrait of the Reichsführer
and his circle and a splendid corrective to the clichés
about the ‘desk perpetrators’. While deeply informed by
recent research, it is free of the leaden prose and jargon
that curse so much scholarship in this field.
More than that, it is a courageous work. Katrin
Himmler is candid about her naivety while growing up
and the ‘belated recognition’ of her family’s grim story.
She wrestles with her reluctance to accept her grandpar-
ents’ complicity and her equivocal feeling towards her
father, who, for decades, avoided confronting the crimes
of his parents. Her book is a model of how those who
are not guilty themselves can nevertheless take responsi-
bility for the crimes of their forebears.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 16
6
 HISTORY
D AVID K YNASTON
EAST END CHRONICLES
C ALL THE M IDWIFE : A T RUE S TORY OF THE
E AST E ND IN THE 1950 S
★ At the heart of the memoir, though, are the pregnant
By Jennifer Worth
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 340pp £12.99)
FAMILY AND K INSHIP IN E AST L ONDON
★
By Michael Young and Peter Willmott
(Penguin Books 210pp £9.99)
THE PUBLISHER’S HYPE for Call the Midwife does Jennifer
Worth few favours. ‘Appeals to the huge market for nos-
talgia … Jennifer is a natural-born storyteller. She’ll be
perfect for publicity … Misery memoir meets a fascinat-
ing slice of social history.’ Increasingly convinced that
sentimentality is the bane of writing about the recent
past, I approached her book with distinct misgivings.
I could hardly have been more
wrong. Worth is indeed a natural
storyteller – in the best sense of
the term, with apparent artlessness
in fact concealing high art – and
her detailed account of being a
midwife in London’s East End
during the early 1950s is gripping,
moving and convincing from
beginning to end. One knows in
one’s bones whether one trusts an
author, and I felt I could trust her,
fortified by passing references to
Austen and Trollope. Call the
Midwife is apparently the first in a
trilogy, and it will be fascinating to
see what follows.
Jenny Lee is unmarried, middle-
class and in her early twenties when
in 1950 she starts work in Poplar at
a convent of the Midwives of St
Raymund Nonnatus, her pseudo-
nym for an order of Anglican nuns
devoted to bringing safer childbirth The Docklands: as it once was
to the poor – at a time when home
births were still overwhelmingly the norm. Worth herself is
not a believer, but by the end of the book things are start-
ing to stir, so impressed has she been by the personal exam-
ple of the nuns and the power of prayer. There are
moments in the convent’s warm, human, often funny daily
life that are reminiscent of Richard Gordon’s Doctor in the
House, though with more depth of characterisation. The
7
maddening, Delphic, poetry-writing nonagenarian Sister
Monica Joan, the apparently ponderous, humourless Sister
Evangeline farting like a trooper to establish a bond with
her patients, the cruelly Amazonian but dogged Camilla
Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne (‘just call me Chummy’) –
one is soon caring almost ridiculously much about these
and the others.
women themselves. ‘Pale and haggard’ Molly, living in
squalor with a brute of a husband, has her third child at
the age of nineteen; vulgar, brassy Lil, at the antenatal
clinic in the church hall for her thirteenth pregnancy,
turns out on a home visit (at Stepney’s notorious
Peabody Buildings) to have syphilis, but is, the previously
censorious Worth belatedly realises, a ‘heroine’ cheerfully
and uncomplainingly keeping her family together in
appalling conditions; and, especially poignant, a fifteen-
year-old Irish girl, Mary, fleeing from prostitution in
Cable Street, is eventually almost destroyed by being for-
bidden to keep her baby. There is also a trilogy of ‘Of
Mixed Descent’ chapters, in each case turning on the
mother’s fears about the colour of the baby and in each
case with a twist as good as any O Henry story.
Perhaps the most memorable of
all the mothers barely speaks a
word of English. The ‘proud and
beautiful’ Conchita, married to
the resourceful, talkative and lov-
ing Len, is Spanish, and on her
twenty-fourth baby when we first
meet her. The delivery is fine, but
a year or so later things are far
more dramatic when number
twenty-five coincides with a fear-
some London smog. Worth as
usual does not spare us the gory
details as ‘water, blood, foetus, pla-
centa’ all spill out at once, leaving
a tiny, premature baby of less than
two pounds. An ambulance from
Great Ormond Street Hospital
eventually struggles through the
smog, but Conchita refuses to let
the baby be taken away. ‘He’ll stop
’ere with us, and he’ll be chris-
tened an’ if he dies, he’ll have a
Christian burial,’ says the equally
obdurate Len. ‘But he’s not goin’
nowhere without ’is mother’s consent.’ Happily, the baby
lives and flourishes. ‘He had the warmth, the touch, the
softness, the smell, the moisture of his mother,’ Worth
reflects afterwards. ‘He heard her heartbeat and her voice.
He had her milk. Above all he had her love.’
Call the Midwife is also a powerful evocation of a long-
gone world. Worth portrays grim, filthy, overcrowded
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 HISTORY
tenements, with washing perpetually flapping in the inner
courtyard (despite the near-total absence of sunlight) and
women lugging huge prams up and down stone steps;
employment dominated by the docks, still very much a
closed-shop affair and endlessly disputatious; marriages
where ‘rough indifference’ between husband and wife was
(in public anyway) the norm; frequent pub brawls and
street fights, even knifings, yet an underlying decency that
meant no old people lived in fear of being mugged; and an
almost complete lack of interest in life beyond the East
End, even beyond the next street, so that ‘other people’s
business was the primary topic of conversation – for most
it was the only interest, the only amusement or diversion’.
It was in every sense a world of its own – not necessarily
typical of working-class Britain as a whole – and in Worth
it has surely found one of its best chroniclers.
Coincidentally, her book appears hard on the heels of a
new edition of Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s wide-
ly acknowledged classic, Family and Kinship in East London,
first published exactly half a century ago. Over the years it
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
CREATION MYTH
T HE F OURTH OF J ULY AND THE F OUNDING
OF A MERICA
★ 1776 to ‘proclaim liberty throughout the land’.
By Peter de Bolla
(Profile Books 195pp £15.99)
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS insist that the earth was created
on a particular day thousands of years ago, that evolution
is rubbish, and that the Bible is the literal truth. But even
haters of Darwin, who may include President Bush,
would be surprised by the central contentions in The
Fourth of July and the Founding of America. I was brought up
in America, and every week in school, with my right
hand over my heart, I pledged
allegiance to the flag. Of
course I sniggered at the
‘Guidelines for Displaying the
Flag’, which stipulate that the
flag must never touch any-
thing beneath it, and that
worn or soiled flags must be
‘destroyed in a dignified man-
ner, preferably by burning’.
But like the Darwin-bashers I
assumed that the first
Amer ican flag had been
designed and stitched in 1777
by a simple Amer ican
woman, Betsy Ross, acting Portrait of a non-event
8
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
has had its sociological critics – mainly from the jealous
groves of academe; but this humane, pioneering study
of Bethnal Green in the mid-1950s, especially the all-
pervasive role of the extended family, still reads wonderfully
well, above all through its almost novelistic use of first-
person testimony. Kate Gavron and Geoff Mulgan, in their
stimulating introduction, point to how Young and
Willmott warned that ‘policies to relocate and scatter
existing communities to new blocks of flats and housing
on the edge of big cities were deeply flawed’ – and add
that now ‘many cities around the world are repeating pre-
cisely the same mistakes’. Whatever the respective merits
of high density and dispersal, in the end there is no intel-
lectual substitute for patient, empirical, non-judgemental
observation, not least of how families really function and
how they really interact with the rest of society. It is about
time that the high-minded, modern-minded, big-picture
planners, policy-makers, opinion-formers and ‘activators’
generally had the humility to recognise that.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
on the secret instructions of three men, one of whom was
George Washington.
I also believed that the huge painting hanging in the
Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC really depicts the sign-
ers, on 4 July 1776, of the Declaration of Independence.
And I believed that the original Liberty Bell that hangs in
Philadelphia, with its celebrated crack, was rung on 4 July
Well, maybe Yes to Betsy Ross, but absolutely No to
the painting and the Bell. I dare even the creationists to
challenge what Peter de Bolla has laid out here, as part of
a series from Profile Books that includes Et Tu Brute and
Why Alfred Burned the Cakes. But while I bet few have
ever imagined that Caesar actually said ‘Et tu, Brute’, the
Fourth of July debunking must undermine the convictions
of many otherwise sceptical people – like me.
According to De Bolla, who generously shows in his
notes that his main conclusions have long been known to
American historians, ‘The
story of the Fourth of July
presents a supreme fiction.
That the nation came into
being on a particular day in
1776.’ He makes this point
often, sometimes in that
coded language so dear to
some scholars. For instance:
the belief that attracts so
many Americans, for whom
their independence is sacred,
he describes as ‘not a meta-
physics but what might be
called an apodictic declaratory
act’. Apodictic, I find, just
 HISTORY
“Wherever they go they
raise the roof - the
sheer joy flooding
across the footlights
means ‘clearly explained’. is irresistible”
Never mind: here are De Bolla’s big points. The artist TIME OUT
John Trumbull began his studies for the great painting of
‘the signers’ in Paris in 1785, and finished it in 1818.
Thomas Jefferson, who advised Trumbull and was, of
course, a key figure in the painting, ‘misremembered
many of the details’. No one signed on the 4th. When
they did sign, days later, they never came together to do
it. The agreement to publicise the Declaration was made
on 2 July, the day a local printer was instructed to print
the text. And, De Bolla claims, the decisions to call for
independence probably began in June. Jefferson seems to
have been the man who, in 1819, alleged the signing
had occurred on the 4th. De Bolla calls this, somewhat
awkwardly, the ‘punctual moment that never was’. For
Photo of Clifton Brown by Andrew Eccles
years, he writes, fervent Republicans who adored the JUDITH JAMISON ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
French Revolution and Federalists who abhorred it Masazumi Chaya ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
quarrelled over the meaning of 4 July, and it was only in Seen by 21 million people in over 70 countries the legendary Ailey
1870 that federal legislation decreed that 4 July should company returns to Sadler's Wells for a limited season.
be a national holiday.
Betsy Ross’s role in creating a national flag was alleged Tue 4 - Sat 15 September
in 1870 in a speech by her grandson, William Canby. London engagement supported by

There is ‘no evidence’ for this, says De Bolla. ‘It is a myth.’

Nor is there evidence, he adds, that Washington was a THE NEW SHOW BY THE CREATOR OF LA VEILLÉE DES ABYSSES
member of a committee that secretly arranged for Betsy
Ross to create a national flag. Why do Americans love
this story? Because Betsy Ross, an ordinary woman, ‘is
testament to the fact that each citizen has equal opportu- JAMES THIÉRRÉE
nity, equal rights, equal potential to become a significant
player in the history of the nation’. This explains why the & COMPAGNIE DU HANNETON
flag is treated with such bizarre veneration in the United Au Revoir Parapluie
States, and why on several occasions the Supreme Court
has had to strike down attempts to make damaging the “This circus-
flag a criminal offence. Nonetheless, on a single day after inspired show
9/11, De Bolla says, Wal-Mart sold 118,000 flags. One of
the leading flag manufacturers spoke of panicky people will ravish the
who ‘didn’t just want to buy flags, they needed flags’. eye, release
As for the Liberty Bell, the myth is simple: in 1750 your inner
three superintendents of the Philadelphia State House child, and
commissioned a bell from the foundry in London which send your
had cast Big Ben. When it arrived in Philadelphia and soul soaring”
was struck, it cracked. The bell was smashed, melted TIME OUT on
Photo: Richard Haughton

down, and recast – twice. This third bell also cracked. La Veillée des Abysses
The myth holds that it was rung on 4 July 1776. It
wasn’t. And it was not called the Liberty Bell until 1839.
The sound of the bell, on the rare occasions it was
struck, was ‘tinny and unimpressive’. It has not been
struck since 1846. One and a half million people visit it TUE 30 OCT
every year. As De Bolla says of such American stories, - SAT 10 NOV
‘the foundations … lie in the playful enjoyment of fabu-
lation’. Fabulation? Come come. Until I read this book
I thought the stories not only made sense but were true.
I’m glad to know the facts, but I have to say that Peter
de Bolla could have said all this in about twenty pages.
To order this book at £12.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16

LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

 HISTORY
P ETER J ONES
THE TROUBLE WITH GOTHS
T HE DAY OF THE B ARBARIANS : T HE F IRST
B ATTLE IN THE FALL OF THE ROMAN E MPIRE
★ Huns, a ferocious Mongolian nomadic people, attacked
By Alessandro Barbero
(Translated by John Cullen)
(Atlantic Books 192pp £17.99)
IT IS ALWAYS instructive to speculate on why any particular
book should be produced at any particular time. There must
be some reason, for example, why the fall of the Roman
Empire is currently of such interest, and one contributing
factor must surely be the parallels between the problem that
the empire faced and which eventually brought it down –
massive, uncontrollable immigration – and the present
situation in the EU; they are too good to miss.
Not that Alessandro Barbero, who teaches medieval
studies at the University of Piemonte Orientale, draws
attention to the comparison. His is simply a narrative his-
tory, on the lines of Peter Heather’s brilliant The Fall of the
Roman Empire, though much narrower in scope. His focus
is the build-up to and after math of the battle of
Adrianople (AD 368), at which an army of Goths under
their leader Fritigern wiped out a complete Roman army,
killing in the process the eastern Roman emperor Valens.
This disaster, Barbero suggests, represented a turning
point in the balance of power between Germanic immi-
grants/invaders and Rome and led, ultimately, to the end
of the empire in the west. And a cracking tale it is too,
well researched and beautifully paced.
As today, foreign immigration into the Europe of Rome
brought with it certain benefits, in particular new recruits
into the Roman army. Ultimately, force was the means by
which the huge empire – stretching from Iraq in the east
to Britain in the west, and from the Rhine–Danube in the
north to North Africa and Egypt in the south – was kept
together, and Rome could never get enough manpower.
German immigrants were only too happy to oblige. Here
was a steady career, with the possibility of advancement
through the ranks and, if one reached the upper echelons,
political power as well, in (arguably) the longest surviving,
most successful and (broadly) beneficial empire the world
has ever seen. Its benefits can be gauged from the conse-
quences of its collapse: when Rome lost power in the west
and the empire split into numerous small, autonomous
Germanic kingdoms, the highly developed economic,
social, military and cultural infrastructure that went with it
folded completely, ushering in what could be said to be a
European dark age that lasted for about two hundred years.
Goths and other Germanic peoples (barbarians) had
been engaging sporadically with Rome over the
10
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
Rhine–Danube frontier since the first century AD, but
Rome itself had not attempted to deal with the threat by
conquering the country because (like Scotland then and
now) there was no advantage in it. So Rome attempted
to deal practically with the problem, resisting some
invaders, accepting others. This could have gone on for
ever, but in 376 came the turning point for Rome: the
from the east, driving hordes of panic-stricken Goths
into the eastern Roman empire. Two factors made this
incursion, ultimately, irresistible: the sheer numbers of
barbarians coming in over the ensuing years, and their
realisation that, unified, their otherwise scattered tribes
could take on the Roman army successfully.
At first the Goths driven over the Danube by the Huns
were allowed to settle under Roman supervision. But gen-
eral bad faith and incompetence led to rebellion, and the
catastrophic Roman defeat at Adrianople was the result –
the worst disaster since Hannibal wiped out Roman forces
at Cannae in 216 BC, judged the historian Ammianus.
But was it a great turning point, as Barbero argues? It
was certainly significant, since the new eastern emperor
Theodosius had to rebuild his army from scratch, and the
Goths could now do, effectively, whatever they liked.
But it was never going to be as easy as that, for three rea-
sons. First, the Gothic army at this time numbered, per-
haps, 50,000 out of 200,000 people, the Roman army,
across an empire of 70 million, about 500,000; second,
they had no experience of building or laying siege to
towns, so could never defend themselves properly or get
regular access to weapons and supplies (after Adrianople
they marched straight on Constantinople, took one look
at its mighty walls, shrugged their shoulders and depart-
ed); and third, they could feed themselves only off the
land, and therefore had to spend most of their time
roaming the country foraging.
The result was that Adrianople was a Pearl Harbor
moment: an absolute disaster, but never a foretaste of
total military defeat. Negotiations eventually resolved
the situation: peace was agreed in 382, the Goths given
settlements, the Roman army remanned and order re-
established. Not every Roman was happy – arguments
about letting immigrants/barbarians in were as heated
then as now – but it was to be many years before Rome
lost the capacity to compel. That it did so was not down
to any particular defeat in any particular battle but to the
long drawn out process of negotiating settlements with
barbarian groups in such terms as to deprive Rome of
taxes, and remitting taxes on lands ravaged by barbarian
attack. Without taxes, Rome could not keep its army up
to size; without its army, it could not deal with those
who disobeyed it. In the end, the Roman Empire in the
west collapsed because, without fear of reprisals, no one
needed to pay any attention to its commands any more.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 BIOGRAPHY

NationalTheatre
J ONATHAN S UMPTION

Necessitas non
TheHothouse
habet legem HaroldPinter
T HE F EARS OF H ENRY IV: T HE L IFE OF
At once chilling and deliriously
E NGLAND ’ S S ELF -M ADE K ING funny, Harold Pinter’s
★ The Hothouse was written
By Ian Mortimer in 1958 just before
(Jonathan Cape 480pp £18.99) The Caretaker.
THE GREAT DUKE of Marlborough, when asked what
was his authority for some historical statement, is said to
have answered: ‘Shakespeare, the only history of England
that I ever read.’ Shakespeare has cast a long shadow over
England’s late medieval history. Even today, when we
look for different things to admire in the great men of
the past, it is hard to think of Richard II or Henry V
except through the interpretations of Shakespeare and
the words that he gave them. If Henry IV seems emi-
nently forgettable by comparison, it is largely because
Shakespeare was not interested in him. Three of the plays FROM 11 JULY
cover the greater part of Henry’s public career. Yet

Philistines
Richard II is dominated by the complex and vulnerable
character of Richard himself. Bolingbroke appears in it as
a conventional man of action devoid of human interest,
the mere instrument by which Richard’s contradictions
destroyed him. In the two parts of Henry IV the principal

MaximGorky
characters are Hotspur and Henry of Monmouth, not
the King after whom the plays are named. He has reced-
ed into the background, a symbol of careworn kingship
with few great lines except in the famous scene when his
heir visits him on his deathbed. In a new version by Andrew Upton
The deposition of kings was a sensitive subject in
Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare’s discretion was no
doubt wise. Yet there is some justice in his portrait.
Before 1397 (when Richard II opens) Henry Bolingbroke Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Time Out
had been one of the most admired men of his day. He
was charming and generous, a great horseman and ‘A rich vein of black comedy...
jouster, who had been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and
fought with the Teutonic knights in Germany and a beautifully acted production.’
Independent
Poland. He matched the fourteenth century’s stereotype
of kingship far more closely than Richard ever had. He
was indeed the conventional man of action. Yet as King,
he never had the opportunity to be the crowned hero for
which his talents perhaps fitted him. His reign was over-
shadowed by disorder and rebellion, due largely to the
unresolved tensions generated by his usurpation of the
throne, as well as by the perennial financial problems of UNTIL 18 AUGUST
the Crown, and the mysterious wasting disease which
progressively disabled him in the last decade of his life.
Ian Mortimer’s is the fourth serious attempt in modern 020 7452 3000 No booking fee

nationaltheatre.org.uk
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
times to write the biography of Henry IV. The first was
that of Dr J H Wylie, a rather pedantic Victorian inspec-
tor of schools, whose four-volume work compiled most
of the known facts, without ever really seeking to under-
stand them. J L Kirby’s competent and workmanlike life,
published in 1970, is a trifle colourless, although a good
deal better than one might gather from the rather ungra-
cious comments in Mortimer’s introduction. The most
perceptive and readable account of the man and his reign,
although it is not really a biography, can be found in the
brilliant lectures of K B McFarlane, the seminal figure in
English late medieval studies, which were published in
1972 after his death. So where does Ian Mortimer fit in?
He adopts most of McFarlane’s insights. But he also adds
much of his own. He has made fuller and more effective
use than any other historian of the unpublished material
in the records of the Duchy of Lancaster. He has an
instinctive sympathy for the men about whom he writes,
a real understanding of the mentalities of late medieval
England, and a vivid historical imagination which lends
colour and excitement to his pages, even if it sometimes
carr ies him well beyond the evidence. McFarlane
observed in his lectures that if Shakespeare had focused on
the personality of Henry IV, he would have come up
with a more complex Macbeth. Mortimer has avowedly
set out to write about the more complex Macbeth that
Shakespeare never gave us.
Mortimer is a well-known advocate of biography as a
route to historical understanding. The present book,
coming after the author’s biographies of Roger Mortimer
Earl of March (no relation) and Edward III, is intended
to form part of a chain of lives through which he will tell
the history of late medieval England. It exemplifies both
the strengths and the weaknesses of the type. The advan-
tage of biography is that it adds an immediacy to history
by showing it through the experience of living people,
with words, thoughts and emotions with which we can
all empathise. The disadvantages are an inevitable ten-
dency towards speculation and hero-worship, and the
trivialisation of great issues by reducing them to the clash
of personalities.
Like Aristotle’s force of nature, biographers abhor a vacu-
um. To achieve a continuous narrative, they are more or
less compelled to fill in the inevitable gaps with speculation.
This is a particular problem in the Middle Ages, which has
left few records of early lives, even of men born to great-
ness. Almost nothing is known about Henry Bolingbroke
before 1387, when he first emerged as one of the
Appellants who challenged the government of Richard II,
except what can be gleaned from the accounts of his
household treasurer. Even what is known afterwards is
episodic and patchy. Unusually, Mortimer devotes about
half his book to the period before Henry’s accession, which
is right in terms of its intrinsic interest and importance, but
requires him to write a lot of sentences beginning with the
12
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
words: ‘We may well imagine...’.
Mortimer’s treatment of the dispute between
Bolingbroke and Richard II is perhaps the clearest illustra-
tion of the limitations of biography. Richard and Henry
were first cousins, who had been brought up together, an
experience which sowed the seeds of a lifelong antago-
nism. Richard loathed and distrusted many of the most
prominent noblemen of his realm, including Bolingbroke,
and at the end of his reign he worked to undo them.
Eventually, Bolingbroke struck back with the support of
his fellow victims and dethroned him. It is a familiar story,
told here with style and dramatic effect. But was there no
more to it than that? Mortimer’s concentration on per-
sonality obscures the fact that there were greater issues at
stake than the feelings of these two men or indeed than
the survival of either of them: issues of peace and war;
issues of finance and governance; issues which survived to
disturb the peace for generations to come. Many of
Richard’s troubles were ultimately due to his attempt to
make peace with France against the wishes of determined
vested interests among a part of the nobility, and to his
assault on the great concentrations of aristocratic power in
the north of England and the Welsh March and in
Lancashire and the Midlands. These issues are certainly
not dull. To contemporaries they were the stuff of poli-
tics. Yet there is hardly an inkling of them in Mortimer’s
tale of confrontation and derring-do. His account of one
of the most fascinating episodes of English history is all
about the clash of outsize egos.
At least Mortimer resists the more extreme symptoms
of hero-worship. He renounces the attempt to prove
that Henry was a nice man, at any rate once he had
embarked on his political career. It was just that his
enemies were nastier. He accepts, for example, that
Henry IV ordered the murder of his predecessor, but
excuses it on the ground that Richard had it coming to
him. Necessitas non habet legem (‘necessity knows no
law’), as the new King minuted on a document in
1403. The irony is that Richard, whom Mortimer
repeatedly castigates as ‘vicious’, could have cited the
same maxim in defence of the tyranny of his last two
years. It all depends on what one regards as necessary.
History has its own answer to that question. It is on the
side of the winners. Richard’s problem was that he was
not a winner. Yet in terms of personality, vicious or
not, he strikes one as uncannily like Henry VIII. The
Tudor King had the same self-obsession and narcissism,
the same ruthless and duplicitous ways, was just as para-
noid about challenges to his authority and far more
murderous in his suppression of them. Henry VIII has
gone down in history as a necessary evil, one of the
builders of the Br itish state. But then he had no
Bolingbroke to unseat him, and died in his bed. Of
such things are reputations made.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 BIOGRAPHY
J ULIA K EAY
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
F EMME FATALE : A B IOGRAPHY OF M ATA H ARI
★ able to two largely fictional movies starring two of the
By Pat Shipman
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 375pp £20)
ON 24 JULY 1917, in the darkest days of the First World
War, Margarethe Zelle MacLeod (dite Mata Hari) was
found guilty of espionage by the Troisième Conseil de
Guerre in Paris and condemned to death by firing
squad. Nearly three months later, just after dawn on the
morning of 15 October, in a clearing among the ancient
oaks of the Bois de Vincennes, the sentence was carried
out. The mysterious and once beautiful dancer who had
captivated Paris with her exotic performances at the
Trocadéro and the Folies Bergère, who had entranced
audiences in theatres and clubs and private salons
throughout Europe, who had been
notorious for her wealthy lovers, her
glamorous wardrobe and her extrava-
gant lifestyle, collapsed into a crum-
pled, bullet-ridden heap in a ditch.
The crackle of rifle fire, followed by
the single shot of the obligatory coup
de grâce delivered by Maréchal des
Logis Petay of the 23rd Regiment of
Dragoons, released a storm of myth
and legend that has engulfed her
story ever since.
Press reports of the event the fol-
lowing day were sensational: several
claimed that she had not died at all –
an impassioned lover had bribed the
firing squad to load their rifles with
blanks and had then scooped her into
the saddle and galloped off into the
morning mist; at the very moment of
firing she had thrown open her fur
coat and the sight of her naked body
had caused every member of the fir-
ing squad to miss his target. Mata Hari: danced with her whole body
Rumoured sightings of the famous
Mata Hari were still being reported more than ten years
later when the Daily Mail of 3 September 1929 had
‘well-informed sources’ declaring that ‘the mysterious
woman found unconscious on the seashore at
Montalivet near Bordeaux last week is in reality the
Dutch woman spy Mata Hari’.
How can a serious biographer compete? Pat Shipman’s
Femme Fatale must be at least the sixth full-length
English biography of Mata Hari to have been published
13
since her death, and it is not clear why she felt it was
needed. No matter how carefully researched or how
meticulously annotated (and Femme Fatale is both), they
all come up against the same problem – fact is so much
more mundane than fantasy.
Much of the fantasy is relatively harmless and attribut-
twentieth century’s most legendary filmstars, Greta
Garbo (Mata Hari, 1931) and Jeanne Moreau (Mata Hari
– Agent H.21, 1964). But the motives of the French
authorities in muddying the waters of truth were less so.
The war that had been expected to last only a few weeks
was about to enter its fourth year with no end in sight;
the few months prior to her trial had seen some 200,000
French lives lost in catastrophic fighting on the Western
Front; nearly half the army was threatening mutiny. The
Deuxième Bureau needed a success. The prosecuting
officer’s thunderous courtroom denunciation of this ‘sin-
ister Salome who has been responsible for the deaths of
more than 50,000 French soldiers’ opened the flood-
gates. Every person who had been present at Mata Hari’s
trial had his own juicy snippet to
add to the fiction. Every official
who had been involved in the
preparation of the case against her
seized the chance to justify his
actions and enhance his own reputa-
tion by painting her as the very
incarnation of evil. Half a century
later there were still those who
believed that she was responsible,
among other things, for the death of
Lord Kitchener and the success of
Ludendorff ’s submarine campaign
against Allied shipping. Even the
wildest rumours were sanctioned
by the French Militar y High
Command. The more sensational
they were the less chance there was
that the truth would emerge –
namely that her trial was a travesty
of justice and that Mata Hari had
been sacrificed to official expedien-
cy. Which is not to say she was
blameless.
Margarethe Zelle had marr ied
Captain Rudolph MacLeod of the Dutch Colonial
Army in 1895. She was eighteen and he was forty. After
the birth of their son, the MacLeods (despite his name,
Rudolph was also Dutch) had returned to the East
Indies where, in the space of five years, a daughter was
born, the two-year-old son died, they moved from one
mediocre posting to another in Java and then Sumatra,
and their marriage fell apart. On their return to Holland
the couple separated. Rudolph kept their remaining
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
child and Margarethe found herself alone and broke.
Her only asset was her luscious, dark-haired beauty.
Leaving strait-laced Den Haag for laissez-faire Paris, she
reinvented her past, took lovers, joined a circus, changed
her name to Mata Hari and set herself up as an ‘exotic
eastern dancer’. Soon all Paris was talking about ‘this
beautiful woman who has come to initiate us into the
classical dances of her native Java’. ‘Unhampered by any
clothes,’ reported the breathless correspondent of La
Presse, ‘Mata Hari does not only dance with her feet,
arms, eyes, mouth and crimson fingernails. Erect in her
glorious nudity, Mata Hari dances with her whole body.’
For the best part of eight years ‘this beautiful woman’
was the toast of Europe. But beauty is fragile and fashion
fickle; a career based on these and little more could last
only so long. Gaps started to appear in her social and
professional calendars. Rich lovers became harder to find,
as did prestigious commissions to perform. Addicted to
excitement and seriously short of money, she blundered
naively into the murky world of espionage, and it
R ALEIGH T REVELYAN
THE CRETAN LAWRENCE
T HE R ASH A DVENTURER : A L IFE OF
J OHN P ENDLEBURY
★ At school at Winchester and then at Pembroke,
By Imogen Grundon, with a Foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor
(Libri 384pp £25)
THE NAME JOHN PENDLEBURY will be familiar to admir-
ers of Dilys Powell’s marvellous account of the Villa
Ariadne at Knossos, where for a while he was curator in
succession to Sir Arthur Evans. But the photograph on
the jacket of this book shows him – inescapably English
– proudly wearing a many-layered ancient Egyptian
necklace, acquired, as we learn, when he was director of
excavations at Tell el-Amarna, the city of Akhenaten
and his wife Nefertiti. Amazingly he held both posts
simultaneously, moving
from one to the other, at
the age of twenty-five.
A foreword by Patr ick
Leigh Fermor is enough to
suggest that here was a man
with a passion for Crete and
Greece, most probably also
a war hero – and both turn
out to be true. Pendlebury
was killed a few days after
the Ger man parachutists
had landed at Crete, but for
long afterwards he remained
14
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
destroyed her.
Pat Shipman, a professor of anthropology at
Pennsylvania State University and a prize-winning sci-
ence writer, is strong on cultural and social tensions in
the Dutch East Indies and has an academic’s passion for
statistics. We learn, for example, that 3.6 per cent of male
civilians over the age of nineteen in Sumatra in 1905
were married, that 92 per cent of army officers were in
favour of keeping concubines, and that 14.4 per cent of
men who did keep concubines were punished for drunk-
enness compared with 40.9 per cent of those who fre-
quented prostitutes. Her insistence on reproducing every
shred of correspondence relating to Mata Hari that still
exists, no matter how repetitive, likewise challenges her
readers’ powers of concentration. Her thoroughness is
commendable (and will surely discourage anyone tempt-
ed to write a seventh biography), but it is hard to see
such heavy-duty reportage delivering a coup de grâce to
twinkle-toed fantasy.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16
a mythical figure: immensely brave, handsome, with
incredible stamina, and above all the organiser of fiercely
loyal Cretan guerrillas. The Germans called him the
Cretan Lawrence. Leigh Fermor describes him as giving
a ‘wonderful buccaneer and rakish impression’, due in
part to his having a glass eye. ‘His presence filled every-
one with life and optimism and a feeling of fun.’
Cambridge, in the mid 1920s, Pendlebury was a cham-
pion athlete. He competed in hurdles with Lord
Burghley, the inspiration for Chariots of Fire, and cleared
6 foot in the high jump, ending up with a Blue for ath-
letics. Early on he developed a passion for Egyptology
and eagerly followed news of Bronze Age finds at
Mycenae, especially those with links to Egypt. That he
was also fascinated by the ideals of medieval chivalry
may sound bizarre, but one soon realises that it had a
bearing on his activities in Crete – on his version of
himself (this time to cite Dilys Powell) as explorer, a fig-
ure in continuing adventure; also on his willingness,
desire even, to drive himself
to the point of exhaustion.
He could drink hard, and
had a capacity for rough
Cretan wines that was no
hindrance to his being able
to conquer the next moun-
tain range. He spoke Cretan
dialects and loved wearing
peasant costumes.
Pendlebury met his future
wife Hilda, somewhat older
but also an enthusiastic
walker and archaeologist,
 BIOGRAPHY
when both were studying at the
British School at Athens. It becomes
obvious that other women fell under
his spell, and when Hilda was in
England with the children some
were willing to join him on his vari-
ous arduous journeys.
Pendlebur y was from the first
completely captivated by Tell el-
Amarna. His letters to his father
show his continuing excitement, a
kind of running commentary:
We can look back on a really
wonderful season [1930–1]. A
Mycenaean [merchant] house.
Gold and silver [stolen ingots?].
The Princess’s head [daughter of
Akhenaten]. A splendid house
belonging to an already known
official [found buried at Luxor]
with a magnificent painted lintel.
Excellent small finds. Bronzes
which should clean up as well as Pendlebury: inescapably English
those Cairo [Museum] has kept.
A stone chapel with the second biggest house at
Amarna. The finest wall paintings ever waiting till
next year. A palace waiting likewise…
Imogen Grundon, herself an archaeologist who has
worked at Amarna and Knossos, is well placed to write
this book and has obviously spent many years in
research, even giving examples of Winchester slang
words or ‘notions’, though these are hardly relevant. But
her use of her subject’s letters and interviews with
friends splendidly conveys his exhilaration when digs
reveal one fantastic discovery after another. She provides
some historical background as war inexorably looms
(Italians invading Albania, attempted assassination in
Athens of the Cretan statesman Venizelos), but alas some
of her asides are pretty flat: ‘They were further galva-
nized by the sorry sight of surviving soldiers returning
from Dunkirk.’
In contrast with Amarna, Pendlebury found work at
Knossos monotonous, dating pottery and coping with
students. The Villa Ariadne, which had to be repaired,
had been built by Evans. The old man was completing
his massive four-volume The Palace of Minos and on his
visits was inclined to be jealous of this young firebrand.
Eventually Pendlebury resigned his curatorship and was
at last free to travel extensively. Again to quote Leigh
Fermor: ‘There was no part of the often harsh Cretan
landscape that he would not or could not tackle; he cov-
ered over 1,000 miles of the island’s wild and steep ter-
rain in a single archaeological season.’ A major site he
discovered was at Karphi, 4000 feet above sea level, and
the village of Tzermiado below the mountain became
15
almost a second home.
At the declaration of war
Pendlebury, back in England, applied
to Military Intelligence for a return
to Crete. First, however, he needed
some basic military training. At last
in June 1940 he and his friend Nick
Hammond were accepted and flown
to Athens. John’s first task in Crete
was to find out which clans were
pro-British and which pro-German.
Officially he was honorary Vice-
Consul, and he was in his element
contacting kapetans or village leaders,
gathering them under a single ban-
ner in spite of old feuds. He knew,
and they understood he knew, the
age-old Cretan passion for freedom.
One kapetan in particular was a spe-
cial ally called ‘Satanas’ (Satan),
Antonis Grigorakis, a piratical-look-
ing figure who had fought in Balkan
wars. Two others were Manolaki,
‘the Old Wolf ’, and Kronis Bardakis,
‘the Old Krone’, both with awesome physiques and large
black moustaches. British commando units nicknamed
Pendlebury the uncrowned king of Crete. Raids against
the Dodecanese islands were planned. Attempts to get
sufficient arms from Middle East HQ at Cairo were frus-
trated by bureaucracy.
The relentless advance of the German war machine
towards Greece does make gripping reading. John chose
Satanas’s home village below Mount Ida for his centre of
operations. As British troops, with Nick Hammond,
were evacuated from the mainland, guerrilla bands were
hurriedly formed, supply lines to ammunition hideouts
arranged, wirelesses distributed. On 21 May 1941
Heraklion was heavily bombed; then scores of para-
chutists came raining down. Pendlebury is said to have
killed three in hand-to-hand fighting. There are con-
flicting stories about how he died, but it does seem to
have been from wounds. The Germans had expected a
friendly reception in Crete and soon learnt about this
wild Englishman who had been organising the resis-
tance, and there were claims and counterclaims about
atrocities. It was believed that he might still be alive. The
rumour put about among mountain villagers was that
Hitler could not rest until John’s glass eye was on his
desk. Orders were given by the Gestapo for corpses to
be exhumed in the search for this eye: an exceedingly
gruesome operation.
Much later Leigh Fermor was one of the SOE officers
landed by submarine in occupied Crete. At once they
were welcomed by the kapetans as friends of the great
John Pendlebury.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
Literary Review Bookshop
B RENDA M ADDOX

YOU NEVER KNOW

M AX P ERUTZ AND THE S ECRET OF L IFE
★
By Georgina Ferry
(Chatto & Windus 352pp £25)

THIS BIOGRAPHY ENDS just the way I hoped it would,

with Max Perutz’s closing comment on Desert Island
Discs. When in June 2000 Sue Lawley asked the
Austrian-born Nobel laureate, then in his late eighties,
what luxury he would take to his desert island, he
replied: ‘A pair of skis. You never know – it might snow.’
Such mer r iment, with its Viennese overtones,
summed up the remarkable personality of a scientist
known for his niceness. Perutz was a Jew, born in 1914
to a family of textile manufacturers, who (like Gustav
Mahler) found it useful to be Catholic in an anti-Semitic
20% discount on all society. However, baptism did not save him from being
thought of as a Jew by his fellow students at the
University of Vienna, where he studied chemistry.
titles under review In October 1936 Perutz shifted to Cambridge, not as
a refugee but as a budding scientist in a search of better
training in organic biochemistry than could be had in
Vienna. He liked the place. As he later said, ‘It was
Call our Order Hotline Cambridge that made me, and I am forever grateful.’
He had trouble finding a college that would take him
and ended up at Peterhouse, not known for its scientific
0870 429 6608 leanings. He had difficulty also in finding girlfriends. As
Georgina Ferry suggests in this first full biography, perhaps
All major credit and debit cards his small stature or his unassuming manner were at fault.
His Cambridge studies, under the crystallographer J D
By email:
Bernal, were interrupted in May 1940 when ‘enemy
aliens’ like himself were interned. He was held first near
send your order to Liverpool, then on the Isle of Man, then shipped to
literaryreview@bertrams.com Canada. There, when prisoners were segregated by reli-
gion, Perutz chose to go with the Jews. By that time his
By post: father was interned too, having come to England with
send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to his wife, fleeing the Nazis in Austria in 1938. During
‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to: the painful months of separation, father, mother and son
Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams, were not allowed to communicate.
1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF Released, Perutz returned to Cambridge in January
1941, where, under the influence of Bernal and Lord
By fax: Louis Mountbatten, he worked on the (ill-conceived)
send your order, quoting Literary Review, to Habbakuk project to make floating airfields from ice. In
1942 he made a happy and lasting marriage which pro-
0870 429 6709
duced two children.
By 1944 he had shifted to what was to be his major
life’s work: the study of the structure of haemoglobin. He
£2.45 P & P acquired a colleague who never became a friend – John
Kendrew, a confident Englishman who achieved easily
No matter how many books what Perutz had longed for: a Peterhouse fellowship.
you order!
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
Perutz feared he would have to find a job in industry, but
then the Medical Research Council provided funds to set
up a unit at the Cavendish Laboratory to study the mole-
cular structure of biological systems. His ability shone
through and grand papers on haemoglobin poured forth.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954.
But Perutz was no saint: he could be churlish and bad-
tempered. In 1958 a young (refugee) colleague, Michael
Rossman, raced ahead on the computer and saw what
Perutz ought to have spotted: that haemoglobin looked
like four myoglobin molecules stuck together. When
told of Rossman’s discovery, far from being exhilarated,
Perutz was incensed, and his face, according to Ferry,
‘darkened with fury’. But he went ahead and built a
three-dimensional molecule and got the Nobel Prize in
1962 anyway, ironically sharing it with his never-quite-
comfortable colleague Kendrew.
He suffered enduring embarrassment over an episode
revealed in 1968 in James Watson’s brilliant, tactless book
The Double Helix showing that in 1953 Perutz had unwit-
tingly played a part in the Watson–Crick discovery of the
double helix of DNA. Perutz had been a member of the
British Medical Research Council visiting committee
which went to King’s College London in December 1952
to inspect the work being done there. Each member left
with a report summing up the research results of members
of the King’s biophysics laboratory. These included those
of Rosalind Franklin, who at King’s had done the best
work on measuring the structure of DNA crystals. All her
calculations were in the MRC report.
In Januar y 1953, Watson, then a brash young
American working with Francis Crick at the Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge, was shown an X-ray photo-
graph taken by Rosalind Franklin at King’s College
London, and saw that the DNA molecule exists in the
shape of a helix. He rushed back to Cambridge and told
Crick, who asked Perutz if they could see his copy of
the MRC report.
Perutz handed it over. The pamphlet was not marked
confidential but neither was it expected to reach greedy
rival eyes. One look at Franklin’s results told Crick that
DNA had two anti-parallel chains and that one went up
and the other went down. The chains came apart and
copied themselves: the secret of life. Once Watson had
revealed Perutz’s gift to them, Perutz never forgave him-
self and spent years justifying his unthinking action in
helping two Cavendish colleagues scoop the discovery
ahead of their rivals at King’s.
Fittingly, Perutz got his Nobel Prize in the same year
that Watson, Crick and Wilkins got theirs. And no one
begrudged it him. He was a fine administrator: the first
chairman of the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology
at Cambridge, opened in 1962, and later the first chair-
man of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and
the man who arranged its funding. He achieved all this
17
despite being plagued by ill-health from coeliac disease.
Perutz was a good writer too. No one has put so
clearly the difference between artistic and scientific cre-
ativity. Both activities rely on imagination, Perutz said,
but ‘while the artist is confined only by the prescriptions
imposed by himself and the culture surrounding him,
the scientist has Nature and his critical colleagues always
looking over his shoulder’.
Ferry has captured her subject’s genial, uncompetitive
personality well, and his constant love of mountaineer-
ing, skiing and rock-climbing. Her biography, with its
long, detailed explanations of how X-ray crystallography
works, may have too much science for the general read-
er. Scientific exposition, rather than narrative, is Ferry’s
forte, as evidenced by her fine 1998 biography of the
crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin.
One is left wondering whether Perutz was a great man.
Crick (whose move from Cambridge to the Salk Institute
in California in 1976 saddened Perutz) said, perhaps
unkindly, perhaps accurately, ‘Max was a plodder, but a
very persistent plodder, and he had considerable insight as
a result of his plodding.’ Perhaps. But Georgina Ferry
makes clear that Perutz was happy, in his family, his sci-
ence, and in his mountain-climbing and skiing. He took
what life brought. His philosophy to the last was, ‘You
never know.’
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
The Society of Authors
The Olive Cook Award 2008
£1,000 for a short story
The author must have had at least one
short story accepted for publication.
The story submitted may be published
or unpublished.
Closing date 31 October 2007
For full details and entry form write with SAE to:
Awards Secretary,The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton
Gardens, London SW10 9SB,
or
email: info@societyofauthors.org
website: www.societyofauthors.org
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
C HRISTOPHER C OKER
How to Fight
a Cold War
G EORGE K ENNAN : A S TUDY OF C HARACTER
★ said of Hitler and the Third
By John Lukacs
(Yale University Press 207pp £16.99)
We are a nineteenth century people. Our minds are
our great, great mother’s minds. We aren’t a twentieth
century people. Our ideas are inherited ideas.
(Dean Acheson, This Vast External Realm)
In 1989 George Kennan was eighty-five years old. His
prestige had reached its zenith. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. The head of the Soviet
Union recognised him as one of the architects of a Cold
War order that was fast coming to an end. Kennan, mod-
est as ever, took little or no interest in this adulation. He
saw something else, writes his biographer John Lukacs:
that he was a man of a century – the twentieth, which
was now irredeemably past. ‘I was ten years old in 1914,
and eighty-five in 1989,’ he wrote at the beginning of yet
another book, At a Century’s Ending. ‘While each of the
last few centuries of European history seemed to have a
certain specific character of its own,’ the twentieth centu-
ry was a short one. It began with the First World War
and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Not that Kennan’s active life came to an end at that
point. He continued writing almost up to his hundredth
birthday. Except for some expected vicissitudes his body
remained by and large unbroken. His mind weakened
not at all. He wrote two entirely new books, a dozen
articles and several book reviews, and even gave a few
public addresses. He kept writing a diary and letters to
the end.
Kennan will be forever remembered as the author of
the article he wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947
under the pseudonym of ‘X’, at a time when he was still
Director of Policy Planning in the State Department.
Because it showed its author to be one of the few men in
the United States who had a knowledge of the Soviet
Union and an understanding of Marxism-Leninism, its
governing creed, the article had an immediate impact,
even though only three pages were devoted to actual poli-
cy recommendations; the article was short on prescrip-
tions, long on analysis. The doctrine of containment was
not without its critics at the time, especially Walter
Lippmann, but Kennan’s analysis was in general accepted
by his colleagues. His premise was easy to grasp: while
Marxist ideology might be important it was so ambiguous
18
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
that its interpretation depend-
ed on an intermediary, in this
case the Soviet Union. And,
unlike Nazi Ger many, the
USSR was a country that
could be contained. ‘Its truth
is not constant, it’s actually
created’, wrote Kennan: some-
thing that could not have been
Kennan: moral might
Reich. Unlike Hitler too,
Stalin had no fixed timetable. He was in no hurry. He
could wait, confident that the ‘correlation of forces’
would result in a socialist victory. In the end, of course, as
history played false so it would become frustrated. In time
frustration would give way to self-questioning about the
nature and the future of Communism itself.
In later years Kennan became increasingly disillusioned
at the way in which containment was interpreted by
Republican and Democratic administrations alike. He
was harshly critical of the Eisenhower administration,
and John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, who
talked of ‘rolling back’ Communism and ‘liberating’
Eastern Europe. He was also critical of those in both the
State Department and the Pentagon who were prepared
to embrace some very questionable bedfellows, among
them military dictatorships in Latin America and Asia,
on the understanding that they were members of the
‘Free World’. In the Reith Lectures which he delivered
in 1957 he referred to a moment of revelation, much
like Edward Gibbon’s in the ruins of the Palatine at
dusk. Standing in the rubble of Hamburg a few years
earlier he had realised that it represented ‘an unanswer-
able symbolism which we in the West could not afford
to ignore. If the West was really going to make valid the
pretence of a higher moral departure point, … then it
had to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not
fight them at all’. In the 1960s he was to conclude that it
was not containment that had failed, but the intended
follow-up, which had never taken place. The Soviet
Union had been confronted, not engaged.
What makes Lukacs’s study valuable is that he has a
historian’s feel for what made Kennan such a distinctive
figure. ‘He was a deeply private American who respected
and venerated his ancestors. More than that: instinctive
elements of his character were formed by his ancestry’.
In his memoirs, Kennan recalls how his father came
from a long line of pioneer farmers, whose outstanding
characteristic was ‘an obdurate, tight-lipped indepen-
dence’: a reluctance to become involved with people
outside their own community (the Church); a wish to
fight clear of any association that might limit their indi-
vidual freedom of choice. Kennan came to see the
United States in a similar light – a country that had fool-
ishly lost its innocence by contracting into alliances with
 BIOGRAPHY

despicable reg imes. One suspects, however, that

Kennan’s dislike of Third World dictatorships was
informed by his own dislike of the Third World. The
contrast between the post-colonial states with their mili-
tary regimes and corrupt officialdom and the early
development of the United States itself encouraged a
peculiar cultural chauvinism which made it possible for
Kennan to compare the history of other countries
unfavourably with that of his own:
‘I am moved to recall that Wisconsin [in the 1850s]’,
he wrote in one of his later books, ‘was very much
what we today would call an undeveloped country.
Well, those people worked hard … and Wisconsin
prospered under their administration. Had the
Wisconsinites been a lazy, violent people devoted
more to war than to industry – had we wasted what
little substance we had on civil strife of one sort or
another – … would we today be seen as the possessors
of a peculiar virtue vis a vis the less developed coun-
tries, entitling us to put claims on their beneficence
and to demand of them that they exert themselves to
promote their development?’
It was an analysis which justified him in making some
very critical judgements, in particular that the Third
World had largely itself to blame for its own underdevel-
opment. Unfortunately, he was not sufficiently rigorous
in his historical analysis to appreciate how irrelevant that
experience might be to Third World conditions. Much
of what he wrote, in fact, derived from a historical myth
that sat somewhat uneasily on the distinctly unhistorical
nature of his thinking.
The problem was that the more he anchored himself
to the past, the more detached he became from contem-
porary life. He remained a Calvinist in spirit to the end.
Indeed, his criticism of China in 1979 for ‘lacking a
capacity for pity and a sense of sin’ revealed the hold
that the Puritan tradition has on Americans, even now.
Earlier he confessed to being persuaded that the
Founding Fathers were right to dislike the great cities
for being ‘pestilential to the morals, the health and
morality of mankind’. In the 1960s he criticised the stu-
dent Left for being the product of an urban existence
which he considered both tragic and metaphysical. His
criticism seems to have been at one with a general
misanthropy that became more pronounced in later life.
For all his faults, Kennan was a major figure of his age,
even if his fate was very much in tune with that of all old
people who outlive the age that they once represented.
We are all separated from the past by two forces that go
instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting
(which erases) and the force of memory (which trans-
forms). We all have different memories of Kennan; John
Luckas’s is not my own. But he presents a compelling
picture of a remarkable man.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16

LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

 BIOGRAPHY

S IMON H EFFER Schumann stor y, in the way Worthen tells it, is

Schumann’s campaign to marry Clara once she reached

Lechery, Libel adulthood, and Wieck’s campaign to stop him. To be

frank, one can’t really blame the potential father-in-law
for feeling less than good about Schumann’s designs on
and Lieder his pride and joy. Schumann had all the dissolute charac-
teristics of young men in early nineteenth-century
Germany. He was a serious drinker, he had no money
ROBERT S CHUMANN : L IFE AND D EATH (his grandfather had been a Lutheran pastor, his father a
OF A M USICIAN bookseller in the small town of Zwickau in Saxony, and
★ he was the sixth child of his parents), and, although
By John Worthen Wieck was not to know this, he had contracted syphilis
(Yale University Press 496pp £25) from a bout of serious whoring around in the early
1830s. What is not in doubt is that Schumann had a
THIS IS AN odd book. Not a bad one: but odd. It isn’t real- serious passion for music, though it was hard to quantify
ly about Schumann’s music, which is the first oddity, since his abilities. It was clear he had a compositional talent,
his life without it is rather tiresome and not really the stuff but he was no musical genius, at least not to start with:
of a serious biography. Odder still, it isn’t really about Worthen calls him, with much justification, ‘a very late
Schumann’s life either, though all the key facts of that developer’. Stuck in Zwickau, he could find no one to
short and not always glorious career are contained within foster his talent, though his parents recognised it and
its pages. It is most concerned with his decline, and his encouraged him. As a teenager he was quiet to the point
death, and concerned about them to one particular end: to of sullenness, and soon started to have difficulties with
prove that Schumann, long portrayed as the ultimate girls; it did not help that he became an increasingly sen-
Romantic who died after a mental collapse brought on by sitive youth, and buried himself in Romantic literature.
melancholia, in fact died of tertiary syphilis. However, his father’s death, and the small legacy that
Thanks to the publication, for the first time in came his way as a result of it, allowed him to go to
English, of the post-mortem report on the composer Leipzig and study with Wieck. As a biographer,
and the recording of great details about his last eighteen Worthen is helped by Schumann’s obsessive diary-keep-
months or so, spent in an asylum near Bonn, John ing (once he marries, he even records the occasions on
Worthen more or less succeeds in proving his thesis. He which he has sexual intercourse with his wife), but it
exposes the Romantic myth of Schumann’s death for also helps us to understand what a confused and difficult
what it manifestly was: a Romantic myth, constructed person the composer himself became. In the 1830s
partly to satisfy the preposterous desire of the contempo- much of the diaries seems devoted to accounts of his
rary public for an element of soap-opera about great drinking, and the often violent intensity of his hang-
artistic figures, and partly to prevent offending the dom- overs. It is remarkable that, out of this, a composer of
inant prudery of the times by referring to something so such great merit should emerge; but he did. Indeed,
shocking as venereal disease. even when in the advanced stages of psychological
Even aside from the catastrophic nature of his demise, degeneracy just before his death in 1856, Schumann
Schumann’s life seems to have been of interest largely for found the strength to write music, so a few bottles won’t
what he encountered rather than for what he was. His have made much difference.
family seemed to excel at dying, and this is the earliest By the time he sought to marry Clara, Schumann had
cause of the accusation of started to make a reasonable
melancholia that was so fre-
quently, and promiscuously, NEW AUTHORS reputation for himself as a
composer, notably of Lieder
attached to him. He became PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED and of piano music. He had
a pupil in Leipzig of Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena also become notorious not
Friedrich Wieck, though he Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first
time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
merely for his boozing but
was not the star pupil: that less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing also for lapses into periods of
role was reserved for Wieck’s houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. catatonic depression, many of
daughter Clara, a mere eight We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary them sex-related. The autop-
years old when Schumann, and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic,
spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others. sy report shows that not all of
aged eighteen, first encoun- Schumann’s brain damage
Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS
tered her, but already a was related to the possible
prodigy. By far the most QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK.
e-mail: info@athenapress.com www.athenapress.com
effects of syphilis: he also had
interesting part of the some hereditary brain disease.

20
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY

No surprise then that when he con- Schumann’s health was declining. His
fronted Wieck with the ghastly reality mental state became so erratic by
that he wished to make Clara Frau 1854 that he walked out in his dress-
Schumann, Wieck decided to leave no ing gown and slippers to a bridge
weapon unsheathed. He made them over the Rhine and threw his wed-
spend eighteen months apart, and that ding-ring into it. Worthen recounts
did not work. He took issue with in detail the hideous life in the asy-
Schumann’s financial predicament – lum, from which death manifestly
Clara was, by the age of eighteen, provided Schumann the proverbial
earning a reasonable living as a virtu- blessed release.
oso pianist, and her father manifestly This book is beautifully written and
did not want an undesirable such as meticulously researched and footnot-
Schumann leeching off her – and ed. But Schumann was a composer,
Schumann responded with what and here music is only ever incidental
turned out to be a wildly ambitious to the mental history of a troubled
claim about his own earning potential. man. John Worthen makes no claim
What Schumann could not counter otherwise: he says at the outset that
were Wieck’s ambitions for the cut he this will not be a work of musical
was going to rake in of his daughter’s analysis, and he is right. With the evi-
earnings, his rightful due, as he saw it, dence he presents, he has shown us
for all his years of hard work spent Robert and Clara: close harmony Schumann the man: Schumann the
turning her into the finest pianist in writer of music will have to be left to
Europe. So, even when Clara turned eighteen, her father someone else. Perhaps that is a fair division of labour,
would not hear of her becoming engaged to Schumann. though how one can entirely understand Schumann’s
Wieck threatened Clara with being disinherited, and psychology without linking it more directly to his main
tried other forms of moral and emotional blackmail. creative outpourings will be a mystery to many readers.
There then came a lower blow still. Schumann was trying To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
to break into the lucrative world of Viennese music, and
had for some years been assiduously cultivating contacts
there. Wieck feared this, for it might, if successful, give
Schumann the means to marry his daughter: so Wieck
wrote to some of the people in Vienna on whom
Schumann would be relying, badmouthing and generally
denigrating him. Schumann took Wieck to court, and the
court ordered that Wieck prove his slurs against Clara’s
suitor (under these attacks, Worthen shows, Schumann
started to write some of the finest music of his life, notably
Lieder, such as the Dichterliebe cycle). In July 1840
Wieck’s campaign finally failed; and on 12 September
1840 Robert and Clara finally married, in the absence of
her father, who was subsequently sent briefly to prison for
libel. As Worthen points out, it was an achievement of the
composer that he could have his father-in-law jailed while
retaining the undying love of his wife.
The Schumanns’ marriage, of only just over fifteen
years’ duration, provided eight children (Clara seemed
almost permanently to be pregnant). Although financially
stretched they regarded their offspring as a great blessing;
but life was a struggle. Whenever Clara was not with
child she was on a concert platform, maintaining their
cloudgatedance
standard of living; the great earnings from Schumann’s
music would mostly come after his death. They travelled
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– trying to earn money. From the late 1840s onwards

21
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
BOUNTY BAR BATES
OTHERWISE ENGAGED: THE LIFE OF ALAN BATES
★ (whose second name was
By Donald Spoto
(Hutchinson 308pp £18.99)
SERIALISATION, WHICH TENDS to be equally crass and
sensational whether in broadsheet or tabloid form,
often seems something of a mixed blessing. Certainly
the treatment given to this book – which appeared to
aim at provoking the crude reaction, ‘Blimey! Batesy
was a bender’, and to be stuffed with ‘exploded quotes’
along the lines of (I paraphrase) ‘The trouble with Alan,
darling, is that he didn’t know whether he was Arthur
or Martha!’ – made me mutter, ‘Surely Sir Alan, one of
our most deservedly popular performers, deserved bet-
ter than this?’
To be fair to this ‘exclusively authorised biography’
by the prolific American writer Donald Spoto, it turns
out to be an infinitely more serious and sympathetic
study than the serialisation would have led us to believe.
Indeed, the tone sometimes veers towards the prissy
(‘Protracted virginity has perhaps never been found in
vulgar profusion among worldly young men’), and the
critical lingo can be clunking. Spoto describes A Kind
of Loving (Bates’s first big film ‘break’, memorably guyed
by Peter Simple as ‘A Kind of Boring’) as ‘an explo-
ration of a certain portion of authentic adult experi-
ence’. There are also an ir r itating number of
Americanisms, and I simply don’t believe that Princess
Margaret ‘delayed’ his knighthood because he snubbed
her advances, but on the whole the author has done a
thorough and competent job.
The title is taken from a play by Simon Gray, one of a
dozen projects upon which he and Bates worked
together. Bates nicely described Gray’s plays as ‘sad
comedies’. Through them, he felt, ‘runs a tremendous
sense of separation, of being alone’. Gray, in turn,
recognised Bates as ‘the most human actor of his gener-
ation’ with ‘a gorgeous vulnerability about him’. The
director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who worked with
them both, considered that ‘there was in Alan’s nature a
kind of passivity … there was something passive about
his acting – he listened, he responded, he reacted, and
in that lay his great power’.
Among the lovable, humorous Bates’s endearingly
human foibles were his sweet tooth – nicknamed ‘Bounty
Bar Bates’, he was fond of saying, ‘I’ll just straighten the
edge of this cake’ – and the vanity which led him to go
on dyeing his hair well into his sixties. As Gray affection-
ately observed, ‘he still saw himself, too late in his career,
22
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
as a leading man’, though,
in reality, ‘physically he was
a peasant, a Derbyshire
peasant’.
Bor n in a suburb of
Derby in 1934, Alan
indeed Arthur) was the
eldest of three sons of an
insurance salesman who
had tur ned down the
opportunity of being a
cellist with the Hallé
Orchestra. His dominating
mother, who was keen on Bates: a generous heart
elocution (but, according
to one of Alan’s girlfriends, had ‘a negative attitude to
sex’), encouraged the stage-struck boy’s acting ambi-
tions. After RADA he soon found himself in the fore-
front of the theatrical new wave with parts in Look Back
in Anger and The Caretaker, as well as making an impact
in films like Whistle Down the Wind, Zorba the Greek,
Nothing But the Best and Far From the Madding Crowd.
Shortly before his death in 2003, Bates reflected that
Simon Gray’s Butley (in which the playwright himself
felt that the actor’s career ‘actually peaked’) was his
favourite play, and the classic television series The Mayor
of Casterbridge his favourite screen performance. I would
also put in a word for An Englishman Abroad and his
later ‘character’ roles in Love in a Cold Climate and
Gosford Park.
As for Bates’s private life, rather too much is made of
his need to deny his homosexuality. This was hardly sur-
prising in view of the fact that the law against it was not
changed until he was in his mid-thirties. Various friends
attest to his being ‘basically a loner’: ‘The minute some-
one got too close to him, he ran and the relationship
ended.’ As Angharad Rees summed it up, ‘He was a very
complicated man.’
The most painful part of the story is the account of
Bates’s anguished marriage to a deeply disturbed ex-
Barnardo’s girl, Valerie (‘Victoria’) Ward, with whom he
had twin sons. Asked once why he had married Victoria
(who died in 1992), Bates replied: ‘I thought I could
help her.’ As Felicity Kendal observed, ‘Victoria was
very, very strange and very, very sick.’
Although they never divorced, eventually Bates had to
take care of the boys himself. Tragically, Tristan died in
Tokyo in 1990. Benedick carries on the theatrical tradi-
tion of his father – who, as Spoto says, was ‘one of the
most articulate and best-informed actors of his or any
generation’, capable of making audiences ‘aware of
enormous depths in a character’, and, above all, a man
of ‘a generous heart’.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 BIOGRAPHY
D AVID E LLIS
Chronicles of
A Life Story
B IOGRAPHY: A B RIEF H ISTORY
★ interpretation’ in life writing. He refers scornfully to the
By Nigel Hamilton
(Harvard University Press 360pp £14.95)
BIOGRAPHY IS A difficult genre to define. Some have
tried to simplify matters by excluding from it any auto-
biographical writing, on the loosely Freudian ground
that the accounts which people give of themselves can
never be accurate. Others have insisted that texts such as
the often cited but rarely read Lives of the Saints should
not be regarded as biographies because almost all the
details they contain are invented and the aim of a biog-
rapher should be historical truth, however hard or even
impossible that may be to attain. A third limitation
comes from those who say that no genuine biography is
possible until its subject is dead. One reason here is that
only at the moment of death does the pattern of a life
become clear. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’, a
Greek once insisted, but, when there is always a chance
of impoverished eighty-year-olds winning the lottery,
he presumably meant that we ought to call no man
unhappy either.
This last method for restricting the definition of biog-
raphy is one of which Nigel Hamilton has deprived him-
self by recently publishing the first volume of a life of Bill
Clinton, a biographical subject whose life journey would
seem to reserve many more twists and turns (especially if
his wife is elected President). It is a deprivation Hamilton
will hardly regret since his ambition is not to limit but to
enlarge the definition of biography. He describes the
moment in British history when the term was coined
and simultaneously applied to a written account of a life
as ‘an epistemological misfortune whose ramifications
would continue to the present day’. In his view the word
‘biography’ should cover all ‘real-life depictions’ of what-
ever length and in whatever medium. He therefore
begins his history with drawings in the caves of Lascaux
(‘self-portraits of Paleolithic men’) and ends it with
diaries on the Internet. In between, attention is paid to
the usual suspects – Plutarch, St Augustine, Dr Johnson,
Rousseau, Lytton Strachey – but he also asks his readers
to consider as biography many works not usually seen in
that light: the epic of Gilgamesh, for example, Walter
Raleigh’s History of the World, Shakespeare’s history plays,
Rodin’s statue of Balzac, or Leni Riefenstahl’s film The
Triumph of the Will. He also usefully reminds them that
23
the most successful life story in Western culture was
written by that canny quartet of biographers, Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John.
Hamilton’s approach is often exhilarating, making you
feel what it might have been like to be a Victorian
matron taking off her stays at the end of a long day. But
the pleasure provided by the loosening of restraints can
easily give way to anxiety. One of his organising ideas is
the ‘age-old tug of war between idealisation and critical
failure of ‘mealy-mouthed’ Victorian biographers to be
critical and claims that in the nineteenth century real
biography migrated to the novel in texts such as David
Copperfield or Madame Bovary. This is a heady extension of
his subject which threatens to make it unmanageable and
may well give the impression that, in a field so vast, any
choice Hamilton makes of works to discuss can only ever
be arbitrary. What is obviously true is that a satisfactory
history of biography as Hamilton defines it would have to
run into several volumes and that, in making it brief, he is
condemned to painting with a very broad brush.
Given his general topic, the effect is particularly
painful when he claims that Dr Johnson wrote his Lives
of the English Poets because his own attempts at verse had
proved such ‘miserable failures’, or that Henry James
gloried in the downfall of Oscar Wilde because he had
not been able to write successful plays himself. But these
biographical simplifications are perhaps inevitable when
there is so much ground to cover, and detail is in any
case secondary to a writer who is not only in a hurry
but also on a mission. What he wants to demonstrate is
that biography is ‘integral to the Western concept of
individuality’ and a ‘mainstay of democratic practice’.
The story he tells is of how, in the West, investigations
into the more personal aspects of a life were hampered
by various aspects of State power so that it was not
until the 1960s that biography could really ‘come into its
own’, as one of his final chapter headings has it. It was
only then that it could become ‘the new symbol of
democratic freedoms’ and an ‘expression of a defining
borderline separating East and West’ (Nigel Nicolson’s
revealing biography of his parents in Portrait of a
Marriage, Hamilton bizarrely notes, ‘found no favour in
the Middle East’). There are no doubt connections to be
made between democratic processes in Western coun-
tries and what now amounts to an obsession with
the private lives of their citizens, especially the more
celebrated ones. But to suggest, as Hamilton does, that
the relation is one of mutual dependence is certainly
chancing one’s arm. It risks implying that anyone chron-
icling the life of the Beckhams is taking part in the war
on terror, or that fascism would be one step nearer were
it not for the latest investigator into the private life
of Madonna.
To order this book at £11.96, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

E DWARD N ORMAN be unconsecrated by verbal inerrancy was inspired by the

nature of religious tradition itself. God was seen as having
WHAT NEXT FOR GOD? delivered his revelations to a community of believers, and
it was those people – the gathered, the ‘ecclesia’ – whose
collective authority selected the texts which constitute
T HE B IBLE : A B IOGRAPHY the Bible, the canon of Holy Scripture. Thus it is tradi-
★ tion, as much as it is Scripture, that secures the authen-
By Karen Armstrong ticity of religious truth. And since the divine revelation is
(Atlantic Books 160pp £14.99) progressive, and develops over time in a dialectical
exchange with shifting human culture, it is tradition, the
IT IS NOW generally assumed, as part of modern intellec- mind of the ‘People of God’, which determines the
tual culture, that the Bible was always interpreted literally nature of Christian understanding at any given time.
until scientific knowledge and historical relativism began One of the merits of Karen Armstrong’s book is that it
to dispel its authority. Then people of reason, and points to the modern origin of literalist interpretations
Biblical scholars themselves, began to subject the sacred of Scripture, and then revisits the preceding centuries of
texts to the same kind of critical analysis as other reposi- Biblical scholarship to bring its considerable diversity to
tories of traditional knowledge received in the Age of the notice of modern readers. The idea of ‘an Open
Enlightenment. In fact, a ‘fundamentalist’ reading of the Bible’, accessible to everyone, is now a reality. It has
Bible, and the concept of verbal inerrancy, are largely become a sacralised principle of Protestantism and seems
modern: a fruit, indeed, of mass literacy and populist natural to modern readers. But it is as well to remember
choice. For most of its existence – a point brought out that ‘the people’ who were to read the text in the ver-
well in Karen Armstrong’s ‘Biography’ of the Bible – nacular, at the time of the Reformation, and for three or
there was never a single interpretation of the way in four centuries afterwards, were an educated elite. Once
which the texts were to be understood. Minds were less the masses had learned to read, it was they who opted
troubled than they have since become by apparent incon- for fundamentalism. Armstrong uses American examples
sistencies in the Scriptural passages, or by how events to show this. It is not a major feature of her study, but
which plainly followed the deaths of the authors (Moses, an indication of the general balance which describes
for example) could have been recorded by them. There much of the book.
were several reasons for this. For a start, believers were Most of the survey transports the reader through two
innocently unaware of that species of relativistic thinking and a half centuries of Jewish and Christian biblical schol-
which modern attitudes impose upon us; their sense of arship. The methods and conclusions of individual
reality lacked the harsh rationalism which makes the peo- scholars are summarised between occasional paragraphs
ple of today sceptical of recognising the authority of the explaining cultural features of the periods in which they
past. More significantly, the Bible texts were interpreted worked. The knowledge offered is accurate but unorigi-
allegorically, not only by Philo and Origen and the nal, and the cultural summaries are often rather trite. But
Alexandrian school of the second and third centuries, but the sequence of interpretation is splendidly achieved, and
by probably a significant majority of Jewish and Christian makes hugely differing exegeses available. It is also an
scholars until the end of the Middle Ages. enormous advantage, and a rewarding one, to have Jewish
Allegory is now so out of fashion as an interpretative and Christian scholarship displayed side by side. This is
tool that it has virtually passed from the scene (and has actually the best sort of popularising: there is no sacrifice
become lodged in New Age speculations), but it is as of integrity and no dumbing down. What is achieved is a
well to remember that such a helpful vade mecum to scrip-
method accepted the diversi- tural understanding.
ty inseparable from human There is another dimension
agency in the composition of of the book which becomes
texts, and allowed a single explicit towards the end, but
verbal construction to con- which is actually present
vey multiple meanings – a MA Degree in Biography throughout. Armstrong does
Starting January 2007
correct pointer to the com- Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or not write objectively. Her
plexity of things. Flor id two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first agenda is a familiar one: it
excesses were no worse than postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. projects the inclination of
in the conclusions of the Course director: Jane Ridley modern liberal culture, both
later Fundamentalists. Above Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at inside and outside the Church
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
all, however, the general cus- Tel: 01280 814080 and Synagogue, to favour the
tom of allowing the texts to reinterpretation of religion as

24
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

‘spirituality’. This is an age in which knowledge of the
Bible is becoming rare; there is no longer a common basis
of shared scriptural narrative which educated people can
recognise. Copies of the Bible are not usually found in the
classroom, and ‘religious knowledge’, where it is imparted
at all in education, tends to follow the study of ethicist lit-
erature and television ‘docu-drama’. In place of orthodox
religion comes ‘spirituality’ – a derivative of individual
sensation and concern about the state of everything. The
ground is prepared by the demoralisation of the Christian
past. The reader will find, tucked away amidst the exegesis,
all the usual, and now conventional, assaults upon
Christianity: for the Crusades (which ‘baptised violence’),
for anti-Semitism (‘a thread of hatred runs through the
New Testament’), for slavery and the slaves (to whom
Christianity was ‘grossly hypocritical’), and for ‘the
Western destruction of the environment’.
The favoured agenda for the future is clear too.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are to free themselves
from ‘the danger of raging orthodoxies’, and to devise
new canons of Scripture which will ‘moderate the reli-
giously articulated hatred of our time’. There ‘are good
things and bad in the Bible’, Armstrong declares, and
the Bible should be interpreted by direct reference to
the issues of the modern world. By what principles are
the good things and the bad things to be differentiated?
It would seem they are self-evident in the moral sense of
the present times – a conclusion which surely involves
some hazards. But in her antipathy to Fundamentalist
uses of Biblical texts she is on more secure ground, and
is right to indicate that these practices are contrary to
much that occurred in preceding religious custom. She
calls for ‘the principle of charity’ in understanding
diversity. It might well be applied to the events of the
past as well as the present.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 16

D AMIAN T HOMPSON Hindus, for example, do not recognise the linear concept
of time implicit in apocalyptic belief; nor is there any
OH LORD! close equivalent in Shinto, African religions or shaman-
ism. As for Judaism, apocalypse and the day of judgment
do not make an appearance until Daniel, the last book of
G OD I S N OT G REAT: T HE C ASE the Old Testament; they were almost certainly borrowed
AGAINST R ELIGION from Zoroastrianism, they sit uneasily with the teaching
★ of the Pentateuch and the prophets, and therefore they
By Christopher Hitchens
(Atlantic Books 320pp £17.99) MENTORING : FICTION : NON-FICTION : POETRY

:
:

CHILDREN’S
MEMOIR

The Literary Consultancy

T HIS BOOK ABOUT the pernicious effect of religion
throughout history has shaken my faith – my faith, that
is, in my journalistic idol, whom we believers know by
the name of ‘Hitch’. In God Is Not Great, Christopher The UK’s leading manuscript assessment and editorial advice service
:

Hitchens transubstantiates his erudition into lovingly

LIFE WRITING

:
crafted but cheap jibes, which he directs at his targets in An unsurpassed team of professional editors,
SCRIPTWRITING
an unfair and tasteless manner. So far, so good. That is
why we lesser hacks worship at his shrine. It can be huge readers, and mentors
fun watching an intellectual landing a really low blow.
The moment when I began to entertain what Recommended by top publishing houses and
Catholics call ‘Doubts’ was when Hitch strayed into my literary agents
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own territory and began talking about one of the very

SCRIPTWRITING

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religion: enough, anyway, to spot basic errors of fact, of

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which there are plenty in God Is Not Great. Helping writers since 1996
‘Perhaps aware that its unsupported arguments are not
entirely persuasive,’ writes Hitchens, ‘and perhaps uneasy
about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk
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and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the

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The Literary Consultancy Ltd,

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Apocalypse and the day of judgment.’ There are so many

Diorama Arts, 1 Euston Centre, London, NW1 3JG
MEMOIR

untrue assumptions knitted into this sentence that it’s

hard to know which strand to pull out first. Tel/Fax: 0207 813 4330
‘Religion’ has not preached these things ‘unceasingly’, email: info@literaryconsultancy.co.uk
for the good reason that many religions do not believe in
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POETRY : NON-FICTION : FICTION : MENTORING

an apocalypse or a day of judgment. Buddhists and

25
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
have never been embraced by rabbinical Judaism.
Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, genuinely was an
apocalyptic prophet whose teachings about an impending
Kingdom of Heaven was so threatening and difficult to
interpret that the Church did the very opposite of what
Hitch claims, and ‘ceased to proclaim them’ as soon as
was decently possible. Not for nothing do we associate
Bible prophecy with sweaty televangelists sporting orange
hair-weaves: respectable Christianity long ago pushed
millenarian belief to the margins. There has not been a
major apocalyptic panic in Christianity since 22 October
1844, when the followers of William Miller, a farmer
from upstate New York, expected the Second Coming
and suffered a ‘Great Disappointment’ when it didn’t hap-
pen; Hitchens’s version of the story has them all gathering
on mountaintops to await the returning Jesus, a claim for
which there is not a single contemporary source.
A section of God Is Not Great is devoted to the unreli-
ability of the Gospel narratives. Fair enough: they are
unreliable, in so far as they contradict each other, put
words into Jesus’s mouth and were written decades after
the events they describe. But Hitchens is a fine one to
talk, given that almost everything he tells us about the
New Testament is misleading. The four Gospels are the
only records of Jesus based (very loosely in the case of
John) on eyewitness accounts; it is nonsense to state, as
P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D
1 2 3 4
7 Sterne? (8)
8
9 12 English retreat in Paradise (4)
10 11
15 16
18 19
20 21 22 23 24
28
29
30
Thames & Hudson has generously decided to sponsor the prizes for this
month’s crossword. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles
received by noon on July 12th 2007. Each will receive a copy of The
Proms: A New History, a beautiful book that should prove indispensable
to fans of one of the most famous of all British institutions.
The winners of our June competition are Alan Shean from Astley, Leics, Marianne Chalmers from Reading,
Douglas Price from Petworth, W. Sussex, Eileen Clifton from York, and Andrew Porter from London W8.
Each will receive a copy of William Wilberforce by William Hague, published recently by HarperPress.
Answers to the June competition:
ACROSS: 1 Female, 4 Beggar, 9 Offenbach, 10 Gamin, 11 Anon, 12 Nadir, 14 Drier, 15 Chico, 17
Aping, 19, Atom, 21 Orbit, 23 Number Ten, 24 Tundra, 25 Osprey.
DOWN: 1 Flagon, 2 Maim, 3 Leonardo, 5 Etna, 6 Graffiti, 7 Rehear, 8 Afoot, 13 Dairyman, 14
Diamonds, 15 Cygnet, 16 State, 18 Gatsby, 20 Lear, 22 Bier.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
Hitchens does, that the late and almost entirely fictional
Gnostic Gospels are ‘of the same provenance and period’
as the canonical ones. Nor is it true that all four Gospels
were based on a possible lost book known as ‘Q’: that
letter is used to signify only those passages in Matthew
and Luke that are not borrowed from Mark.
Hitchens thinks that the existence of the historical Jesus
is disputed by scholars; it isn’t. And if Jesus was actually
born, he says, then ‘even the stoutest defenders of the
story now admit that it wasn’t until at least 4 AD’. Oh,
for Christ’s sake – believers and non-believers are unani-
mous in agreeing that Jesus couldn’t have been born later
than 4 BC, because that was when Herod the Great died.
What about Hitchens’s main contention, that ‘religion
poisons everything’? I think it’s an unarguable point, not
because it is true, but because he does not bother to tell
us what he means by religion. A case against something
that you don’t attempt to define is not worth worrying
about – and certainly not worth taking offence at.
God Is Not Great is Hitchens at Speakers’ Corner: an
entertaining spectacle but also – given the shocking
carelessness of his research – an unexpectedly sad one.
As a member of the cult of Hitch, I vote that we treat
it like the Gnostic Gospels and quietly exclude it from
the canon.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
ACROSS
4 Friend gets excellent service at royal residence (6)
5 6
7 Exam success I’m seeing regularly in text (6)
8 Good vegetables outside - Shandy’s were booked by
9 Comprehensive extra (4)
10 Play badly mistaking it for ‘Sturm’ (5)
18 Watery with plenty of space, we hear (6)
12 13 14
19 At university retain maintenance (6)
17 20 Bundle of money to secure release, it’s reported (4)
23 Part of book may be linked with chiller? (5)
27 Sign top British sportsman (4)
28 Parable, one on the banks of the Nile according to
Mrs Malaprop (8)
25 26
29 Distance of confederation (6)
27
30 Twice set out to find African fly (6)
DOWN
1 Demonstrated lustrous fabric (5)
2 Remains to see cricket tournament (5)
3 University in Roma upset by affair (5)
4 I enter carriage to see king of Troy (5)
5 The Spanish carry port up French river (5)
6 Ocean-going vessel? (5)
11 Weighty volume given to yours truly (4)
13 Regimen of legislative assembly (4)
14 Pinches 17 turning up (4)
15 Crustacean caught by poor rower (4)
16 Joiner might use it to distribute cards (4)
17 Politician’s slant on revolution (4)
21 Finally failing to conclude book of maps (5)
22 Happening taking place during the seventies (5)
23 Good person to be indebted to US novelist (5)
24 Idly stirring having left picturesque location (5)
25 Regal variation composed by him (5)
26 It’s fashionable to be in this magazine (5)
 LITERARY LIVES
R ICHARD G RAY
HOW TO WRITE A HERO
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS
★ the large inheritance they had been promised simply
By Wayne Franklin
(Yale University Press 708pp £25)
IF ANY SINGLE person was the creator of the myth of
the American West, it was James Fenimore Cooper.
But he was far more than that. He was the founding
father of the American historical novel; he helped
develop and popularise such widely diverse literary
forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political
satire, and the dynastic novel. He reflected, in all his
fiction, on themes and issues of vital concern to the
new republic: the destruction of the wilderness and the
American Indian in the name of ‘settlement’, the
competing priorities of freedom and social
order, and the potential conflict between
the creed of self-reliance and the need
for a communal ethic. ‘Cooper set the
ter ms of Amer ican dreaming,’ as
Wayne Franklin puts it in this first
volume of a major new biography.
Moreover, as Cooper struggled to
see his books into print at a time
when the publishing industry was in
its infancy, he helped establish the
material as well as the imaginative
foundations of American writing –
not just the modes in which
American books might be written,
but also the means by which they
could be produced, distributed and read.
In short, he stands at the beginning of
American literature as both a great tradition
and a marketable commodity.
Using archival mater ial previously Fenimore Cooper: self-published
unavailable to biographers, Franklin traces
the first thirty-six years of Cooper’s life, up to the
moment of his departure with his family to Europe,
where he was to find his international fame confirmed
as ‘le grand écrivain américain’. Cooper grew up in
Cooperstown, we learn, a frontier settlement established
by his father, Judge William Cooper. After his expulsion
from Yale for a dangerous prank, he went to sea as a
sailor before the mast and then as a midshipman in the
US Navy. His naval career was cut short by two events:
the death of William Cooper, which promised a life of
genteel leisure for his heirs, and his betrothal to Susan
De Lancey, whose condition for marrying him was that
he leave the navy. It was then that he joined Fenimore,
27
his mother’s name, to his patronymic, usually signing
himself thereafter J Fenimore Cooper – an act of piety
towards his mother, perhaps, but also a measure of the
ambivalent feelings he had about his authoritarian father.
The ambivalence of those feelings was compounded
when ‘like his father’s other heirs … Cooper watched as
evaporated’. His father’s estate proved to be so encum-
bered with legal claims that Cooper found himself
unable to live up to his social position. With increasing
urgency, he indulged in a series of speculative ventures –
opening a general store with an incompetent cousin,
buying a ship and fitting it out for a series of whaling
voyages – before hitting on the idea that writing and
self-publishing might be the answer. According to some
accounts, Cooper was encouraged to try writing by his
wife. His first novel was begun, so the story goes, after
he complained about an English novel he was reading
and was challenged by Susan to write something better.
The outcome of that challenge was Precaution, a
conventional novel of manners set in genteel
English society. So faithful was it to its
influences – Jane Austen, among them –
that, when it was published anony-
mously in 1820, even British review-
ers were persuaded that the author
was female and English.
Far better, and more indicative of
the direction Cooper’s literary
career would take, was his second
novel, The Spy: A Tale of the
Neutral Ground (1821). Set in
Revolutionary New York State, on
the ‘neutral ground’ of Westchester
County, its hero is Harvey Birch,
who is supposed to be a Loyalist spy
but is secretly in the service of General
Washington. Birch is faithful to the
Revolutionary cause but a convoluted plot
reveals his emotional ties to some of the
Loyalists. What the reader is presented
with here is a character prototype that
Cooper learned from Sir Walter Scott and was to use in
his later fiction, notably in his portrait of Natty
Bumppo, the hero of the Leather-Stocking tales. The
hero is himself a ‘neutral ground’ to the extent that he,
his actions and his allegiances provide an opportunity
for opposing social forces to be brought into human
relationship with one another. The moral landscape he
negotiates is a place of crisis and collision that are
expressed in personal as well as social terms, as a func-
tion of character as well as event.
With The Spy, Cooper had found his subject, the his-
tory of his own country; and he had found a template
for his fiction, with the hero who wavers between
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
opposing forces. He had also found success. Over the
next few years he compounded that success with two
books that effectively invented the modern sea novel,
The Pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1827), and the first
three books in the Leather-Stocking series, The Pioneers
(1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie
(1827). It was a remarkable feat, made all the more so
because, as Franklin shows, before 1826 Cooper had no
publishers as such. He produced his first books com-
pletely at his own risk, employing New York booksellers
as his agents. The agents made all the practical arrange-
ments with paper suppliers, printers, binders, and
wholesale and retail merchants: but they did none of the
editorial work that would normally be part of a publish-
er’s role. Only when Cooper was about to embark for
Europe did he finally negotiate a deal with one of the
nation’s pioneering publishers that placed him on more
solid ground, and it was a measure of his success that
they paid him the princely sum of $5,000 for The Last of
the Mohicans. With that advance, Franklin suggests,
‘“American literature” had been created as a cultural and
economic reality.’ More prosaically, although he was
never to enjoy complete financial security, Cooper was
at last beginning to keep the wolf from the door.
This first volume leaves Cooper at the earlier stages of
his lifelong struggle to establish not only his own finan-
cial and imaginative independence but also the cultural
and intellectual independence of his country. No char-
acter in his fiction was more crucial in that struggle
than the hero of the Leather-Stocking tales, Natty
Bumppo, an uneducated wilderness scout whose life
from adolescence to old age is traced backwards and
forwards over the course of the five Leather-Stocking
novels (the other two are The Pathfinder (1840) and The
Deerslayer (1841)). What Cooper did, perhaps without
realising it, was to write the epic of the American west-
ward movement. Natty Bumppo – also called Hawkeye,
Pathfinder and Deerslayer – gravitates towards the con-
dition of an American Adam during the course of the
Leather-Stocking series: in his allegiance to nature, in
his comradeship with another man (a Mohican called
Chingachgook), in his virg inity (women are an
uncharted territory for him), in his reliance on action
and instinct rather than thought and reasoning – and in
his indebtedness not to education or convention but to
natural wisdom and morality. Natty stands at the start of
a long line of Western and other American heroes who
are practical rather than intellectual, full of an innate
and usually unspoken integrity, bold in their defence of
freedom – and possessed of a belief in themselves and
their own judgement that is only matched (a sceptical
European might say) by their inability to construct a
coherent sentence. He hovers there, a familiar, guiding
presence, whenever John Wayne – or George W Bush –
invokes the special destiny, the mission of America; and
28
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
he hovers there, too, when Thoreau laments the
destruction of the wilderness, or a later American
writer such as Norman Mailer casts doubt on the unin-
hibited exercise of freedom. The power of Cooper’s
frontier hero, in short, is that he incorporates the differ-
ent warring possibilities that constitute the founding
myth of the nation. The figure of Natty Bumppo may
have crept up on his creator almost unawares; there is
certainly no direct correlation between a well-read
country gentleman and the illiterate scout he invented.
But at the core of both the writer and his greatest
fictional creation, as this magnificent biography shows,
was an obsession with the immense promise, and equal-
ly immense danger, of the democratic experiment. In
all his work, but particularly in his creation of Natty
Bumppo, Cooper returned compulsively to problems
that were the driving force of the infant republic. They
are the problems that still haunt America; and, for that
reason alone, both Cooper and this definitive account
of his early years deserve to be read.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 16
F RANCES W ILSON
HARDLY HUMAN
D EATH AND THE M AIDENS : FANNY
WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE S HELLEY C IRCLE
★
By Janet Todd
(Profile Books 304pp £17.99)
B EING S HELLEY: T HE P OET ’ S S EARCH
FOR H IMSELF
★
By Ann Wroe
(Jonathan Cape 464pp £25)
THERE IS A short story by Henry James called ‘The
Pr ivate Life’, in which a celebrated wr iter, Clare
Vawdrey, is invited to a weekend house party. His com-
pany, it turns out, is less illuminating than his writing
and one evening, while Vawdrey is boring his fellow
guests downstairs, the narrator goes upstairs and sees
through the author’s bedroom door, which is slightly
ajar, that Vawdrey is also sitting at his desk, scribbling
away at his latest play. There are two Clare Vawdreys, it
transpires: the dreary public figure and the brilliant pri-
vate writer, and Vawdrey inhabits, quite comfortably,
both parts at the same time.
Apart from the fact that Shelley was never thought a
bore by anyone who knew him, the brilliant new
biographies by Janet Todd and Ann Wroe give us,
respectively, the material being downstairs in company,
 LITERARY LIVES
and the ethereal creature upstairs with his pen. They are
approaches of which Shelley would approve: ‘The poet
& the man’, he wrote, ‘are two different natures; though
they exist together they may be unconscious of each
other, & incapable of deciding on each other’s powers &
effects by any reflex act.’ In Death and the Maidens, Janet
Todd describes the idealist whose Godwinian notions of
sexual freedom managed to wreck the lives of those
women who were doomed to love him. In Being Shelley,
Ann Wroe gives us an interior picture of what it was
like to have poetic power.
Janet Todd takes as her focus not Shelley himself but
his role in the suicide of Fanny Wollstonecraft/
Imlay/Godwin, illegitimate daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft and her inconstant lover, Gilbert Imlay.
The least written-about member of the Godwin clan,
Fanny was the first of Godwin’s young household to
meet Shelley when he ar r ived at the house in
Somerstown, and the first to be dazzled by him. She was
no doubt in love with him, not only because most
women Shelley met fell in love with him, but because he
spoke to her as no one had done before. What Todd
pulls off in this gripping and heartbreaking book is an
understanding of what it was like ‘Being Fanny’, a girl
‘disgracefully brought into the world’ (as one publication
put it), whose notorious mother had died after giving
birth to Fanny’s legitimate sister Mary, whose feckless
father Fanny had never known, who lived with her path-
blazing stepfather, William Godwin, and his ghastly new
wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, along with her two children
and the child Godwin and Mary Jane then had together.
It was a household in which, as Fanny’s half-sister Claire
Clairmont later put it, ‘If you cannot write an epic
poem, or a novel that by originality knocks all other
novels on the head, you are a despicable creature not
worth acknowledging.’ Not only did Fanny never write a
poem or a book, but she was also the only child in the
family without a parent of her own, and the only one of
the girls not invited to run off with Shelley into the mar-
vellous philosophical world he kept talking about. ‘Her
emotions were deep when she heard the sad fate of the
two girls. She cannot get over it,’ her stepmother wrote
of the morning Fanny heard that Shelley had absconded
with Mary and Claire. Mrs Godwin had, as usual, missed
the point of Fanny’s reaction; it was her own fate and not
that of her sisters which seemed sad to her.
From being the child so lovingly described in her
mother’s Letters from Sweden, Fanny became the
Cinderella of Godwin’s house, the hard-working and
loyal daughter left behind while her sisters went to the
ball. Her exclusion from the Shelley ménage eventually
led to her journey to Swansea, where she took a room
in an inn and swallowed enough laudanum to kill her.
‘Death in a staging place,’ Janet Todd writes, ‘simply en
route to somewhere else, fits … with Fanny’s sense of
29
her own rootless existence …
of not belonging where she
was.’ She had wr itten to
Shelley the day before, asking
him to pay for her burial, but
even though he knew more
than anyone else the reasons
for her suicide, he thought it
more prudent to have Mary
Wollstonecraft’s daughter
thrown in a pauper’s grave
where no one would question
her identity than to place her
under a stone. Two months
later, Shelley’s heavily preg- Shelley: heartless
nant wife, Harriet, drowned
herself in the Serpentine.
Ann Wroe makes no attempt to defend the poet; what
concerns her in Being Shelley is to understand her subject
from the inside rather than place him in a moral con-
text, and taking responsibility for his effect on people
like Fanny was not part of being Shelley. Wroe describes
her book as ‘an adventure story of Shelley’s search to
discover, in his words, “whence I came, and where I am,
and why”’. The task she sets herself seems dauntingly
difficult: to write a biography in which there is no
chronology, no linear narrative, no political context; to
give us Shelley not only in his own words but – take a
sharp intake of breath – through the elements of earth,
water, air and fire.
What initially saves Being Shelley from becoming a
journey into a basement of scented candles and kaftans is
that the structure works: once you have read the book,
it makes perfect sense to think of Shelley in terms of the
elements and to read his life as a series of themes rather
than events. Water, in which he would eventually
drown, obsessed him; the poet, he believed, lived on
light and air; earth was where he came from; and flames
burned through his poems long before they cremated his
dead body, leaving only his heart for Mary to take back
to England. But the other reasons why Ann Wroe is
able to pull off such a feat are that she is a marvellous
and poetic writer herself, and because she has an uncan-
ny grasp of Shelley’s metaphysical thought. Like a
method actor, she has worked her way into her troubled
subject and merged her voice with his.
Read together, Death and the Maidens and Being
Shelley give a good idea of what it was like to know
Shelley and what it was like to be him, and how vertig-
inously divided is the man who suffers – or in this case,
makes other people suffer – from the mind which cre-
ates. Read separately, they provide utterly convincing
readings of the poet who said of himself, ‘I fear that I
am hardly human’.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
C HARLES E LLIOTT
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
T HE WAY I T WASN ’ T: F ROM THE F ILES OF
J AMES L AUGHLIN
★ world today. He can write, granted, but it’s like walking
Edited by Barbara Epler and Daniel Javitch
(New Directions 344pp $45)
C OUNTERPOINTS : 25 Y EARS OF T HE N EW
C RITERION ON C ULTURE AND THE A RTS
★
Edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer
(Ivan R Dee 500pp $35)
The Way It Wasn’t is a very strange object. Grossly over-
produced, printed on glossy stock so heavy it could be
used to shingle a house, filled with gulfs of white space
amid a disorienting collection of typefaces, snapshots,
reproduced documents and book jackets, it seems to be
a gesture towards new-style autobiography (or, as James
Laughlin was wont to call it, ‘auto-
bug-offery’). With all due respect to a
man who published many of the most
important books of his time, spend-
ing a good part of his considerable
fortune in the process, The Way It
Wasn’t might better be classed as the
giblets of a memoir.
We shouldn’t blame Laughlin. He
may have been a spoiled rich kid – heir
to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, educated
at Choate and Harvard – but in his
sixty years of running New Directions,
which brought into the world writers
ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to
Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams to
William Carlos Williams, Dylan
Thomas to the Beats, he proved more
than adequately that he was a man of
taste and proportion. The present col-
location is the work of his son-in-law
and the editor-in-chief of New Laughlin: avant-garde
Directions, who apparently discerned
potential in the heap of bits and pieces Laughlin left
behind without completing his autobiography when he
died at eighty-three in 1997. In this they were more or less
wrong, because most of what they offer here – quotes,
fragments from letters, some diary entries – would have
done better to stay in the files. When it’s not mysterious
out of context, it’s banal in. There are, however, some nice
moments. Here are a few: Gertrude Stein’s conviction,
expressed heatedly to Laughlin when she caught him
30
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
reading A la recherche, that Proust and Joyce both copied
their books from her Making of Americans; Jean Cocteau’s
taking Laughlin to lunch at the Grand Véfours in the
Palais-Royal, where he ‘explained clearly all about flying
saucers. He understood mechanical things. He would
advise me. He was amiable’; W C Williams on T S Eliot:
‘I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the
into a church to me’; ‘There was not much “gracious liv-
ing” in Pittsburgh, where at one house the butler passed
chewing gum on a silver salver after the coffee’; Ezra
Pound’s tennis tactics, which were ‘based on force, not
speed. He would position himself at half-court, scowling
fiercely at his opponents, and wait to unleash a powerful
full-body-pivot forehand which was quite unreturnable’;
how and why New Directions turned down Lolita.
It’s possible that Laughlin might have been able to
transform this debris into a proper autobiography. He
could, after all, write; he had several volumes of poetry,
essays and stories published, and not just by his own
press. And even in its fragmentary state the material does
convey some sense of what the man was like, although
the picture is not especially flattering. It is necessary to
keep reminding oneself of what he
achieved, against considerable odds
over a long period, on behalf of the
avant-garde in American letters.
Needless to say, there is no men-
tion of Laughlin or New Directions
in Counterpoints, an anthology cele-
brating twenty-five years of the
right-wing intellectual monthly The
New Criterion. Founded in emulation
of T S Eliot’s Criterion, it is the flag-
bearer for a peculiarly Amer ican
brand of highbrow conservatism,
marching in defence of ‘true judge-
ment’ in the face of horrors like
postmodernism and other forms of
radicalism. What this means in prac-
tice can be seen in the essays the edi-
tors have chosen to include here,
which span the gamut from Robert
Bork (the man who was famously
tur ned down for a seat on the
Supreme Court) on judicial activism
and Roger Scruton on Enoch Powell, to Hilton Kramer
(one of the founding editors) on the death of abstract art
and Gertrude Himmelfarb on why Lord Acton deserves
our admiration. There are rehabilitations of F R Leavis,
John Buchan and Simon Raven, and a few totally pre-
dictable demolition jobs on such despicable characters as
Noam Chomsky and Eric Hobsbawm. The tone is gen-
erally serious, occasionally sour, and speaks mainly to
the converted.
 LITERARY LIVES
J ESSICA M ANN
BOHEMIAN GIRL
PAPER H OUSES : A M EMOIR
OF THE 70 S AND B EYOND
★ mise by getting a steady job (she had qualified as a
By Michèle Roberts
(Virago 337pp £16.99)
WHAT FUN THE young activists had during the early
years of women’s lib. Michèle Roberts, poet and novel-
ist, describes ‘heady, astonishing, exuberant times’.
Political agitation was exciting, sex even more so – talk-
ing about it and having as much of it as you possibly
could, both gay and straight. Roberts belonged to a
street theatre group in which she enacted scenes from
The Sensuous Woman, startling shoppers in Chapel Street
market by doing ‘a mime of using a vibrator to achieve
the multiple orgasms necessary to flatter chaps in bed’.
She even managed to get herself arrested and charged
with insulting behaviour – a gratifying achievement for a
young woman whose melodramatic desire to rebel was
based partly on a desperate need to force her parents to
understand what she was doing and approve of it, but
equally strongly on an obsessive determination to defy
the Catholic Church in which she was brought up: the
Church twists children’s minds, manages them; celibate
male priests, scared of their own feelings and desires,
have created a theology that splits body from soul; and
so on, and on. Reacting as violently as possible, Roberts
became a lesbian, ceased to be a lesbian, had kind lovers
and unkind ones, went into therapy and left therapy, all
the while industriously shocking the bourgeoisie.
In a way this is the record of an era, or an aspect of it.
Roberts’s experiences were very different from those of
most of her contemporaries. She kept outside the job
market and had no children, so she already had many of
the rights and opportunities demanded by the women’s
movement. But she discovered that the personal is politi-
cal, that few men dreamt of
doing or discussing house-
work or childcare – though
that bedrock fact of feminism
hardly impinged on her own
life. Holding events ‘satiris-
ing the hypocrisy surround-
ing the bourgeois family’
sounds more self-indulgent
than effective. It was the hard
grind of pressure, persuasion
and conventional politicking
that achieved the legislative
refor ms which actually
31
brought about change.
This autobiography is designed around the numerous
homes in which Roberts perched during two decades of
flitting between extremes – from luxury in Holland Park
stucco to squats and squalor in slums, from collectives
where privacy was anathema and the lavatory door had
been removed to lonely garrets. She would not compro-
librarian) but remained determined to concentrate on
writing, earning a hand-to-mouth living as poet or play-
wright in residence, teaching evening classes, working in
day centres. The downside was being broke and always
having to live in somebody else’s house as a guest or
roommate or lodger. ‘When you write you need to let
go and flow out, losing your boundaries, so that lan-
guage can dance up and change itself about, but if other
people are nearby you can’t let go.’
When she met and married an academic who owned
a flat in Bayswater and wore a suit, it felt like entering a
new world, light years away from life down among the
poets. It was easy for Michèle to fit in, having been at
Oxford herself. ‘I was a multilingual chameleon. Adapt
and survive.’ Her husband was selfish and overbearing,
but she seems to have effectively invited him to be just
that. ‘I treated his needs as more important than mine.’
So much for feminist principles.
The bad marriage with an art historian was followed
by a good one with an artist, a book shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, and an income one could live on; by the
time this memoir finishes, Roberts has achieved her
dream house in France and lives in the pattern of her
own childhood, zigzagging between her father’s England
and her mother’s France, between town and country.
Roberts’s sensuous, uninhibited, often beautiful writing
is filled with lush and lavish descriptions of food and places
and people and love affairs. But the subject that she keeps
returning to is that of childhood religion and its impact on
her life. ‘I had grown up, thanks to Catholicism, fearing
my own body, distrusting my own feelings and thoughts; I
feared and resented authority.’ It took a long time to dis-
solve the ‘Catholic-induced sexual guilt and sexual terrors
of childhood and adolescence
which, I came to see, had
shaped and afflicted my adult
life.’ Describing her image of
creativity, Michèle Roberts
does not sound like the one
who got away. ‘A dark dead
body becoming illuminated,
becoming golden, alive ...
writing the novel means that
the dead body sits up on the
bier and speaks.’
To order this book at £13.59,
see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
E VELYN T OYNTON
LIBER AMORIS
H AZLITT IN L OVE : A FATAL ATTACHMENT
★ stuff ’. Now, in Hazlitt in
By Jon Cook
(Short Books 214pp £12.99)
I N AUGUST 1820, at the age of forty-two, William
Hazlitt moved into a lodging house on Southampton
Row. Three days later, the nineteen-year-old daughter of
the house, Sarah Walker, brought him breakfast in his
room and turned in the doorway to look at him; in that
instant, Hazlitt fell desperately in love. Over the next few
months, Sarah sat on his knee, kissed him, allowed him
certain ‘liberties’ – though never the ultimate one – and
somehow made him feel, though she would make no
avowals, that for the first time ever his love was returned.
He abased himself before her, called her a goddess and
his ‘soul’s idol’, showered her with gifts. When she
became cool towards him, as she frequently did, he tor-
mented himself with memories of her every word and
silence, and appearance and absence, trying to find their
hidden significance; he wheedled and ranted and grovelled
and seethed with suspicion and jealousy. Having separated
from his wife a few months before, Hazlitt persuaded him-
self that Sarah’s reluctance would melt away if he could
offer her marriage, and went to enormous trouble and
expense to get a Scottish divorce (English ones being vir-
tually unobtainable for any but the upper classes). But
when he returned to London, his beloved was colder to
him than ever, and would not even listen to his proposal.
Shortly afterwards, he discovered – though Sarah would
not admit it directly – that all along she had been carrying
on an identical flirtation with another of her parents’
lodgers (a younger, handsomer one), whom she had now
chosen as her lover.
It is, of course, the stuff of farce: the middle-aged
man who makes a complete fool of himself over a
young girl, and thereby wrecks his life. When Hazlitt
published Liber Amoris, his overwrought account of the
affair, in 1823 (it was published anonymously, but
everyone knew who the author was), his enemies in the
conservative press, who had been reviling him for years
for his radical politics and his ‘ludicrous egotism’, were
beside themselves with glee: here was final proof that
the vile Jacobin, the Cockney who
had been lambasting them in
print, was as degraded and disgust- visit Literary
ing a human being as they had
always suspected. To the
Victorians, Hazlitt’s depiction of
www.literaryreview.co.uk
an unseemly passion seemed even
32
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
more reprehensible. Robert
Louis Stevenson abandoned
his plan to write a biogra-
phy of Hazlitt because of
Liber Amor is; Augustine
Birrell called it ‘vile kitchen
Love, Jon Cook re-evaluates
the book for the modern
age, eschewing any such
moral judgements.
Yet even today, when
confessions of every sort of
vice and folly are a staple of
publishing, and we are all to
some degree voyeurs, Liber Hazlitt: unlucky
Amoris is embarrassing stuff.
Nobody really wants to hear every intimate, appalling
detail of someone else’s irrational obsession; we might
put up with such tales from our closest friends, but even
then we wish to God they’d stop. Still, our very embar-
rassment is a testament to the strange power of the book,
as well as to the familiarity of the feelings Hazlitt
describes: his wild swings between hope and despair,
abject worship and bitter rage; his sense that he literally
cannot bear life without her (‘the universe without her
is one wide, hollow abyss’); his tortured attempts to
convince himself, in the teeth of all the evidence, that
she cares for him after all. We may not all have made
such spectacular fools of ourselves as he did, but few of
us will be complete strangers to the experience. All the
agonies he so minutely dissects – for he was above all
things a writer – are painfully recognisable, as is his
inability, even when he knows the worst, to rid himself
of his longing:
When shall I burn her out of my thoughts? Yet I like
to hear about her. That she had her bed gown or her
ruff on, is to me a visitation from heaven – to know
that she is a whore or an idiot is better than nothing.
Were I in hell, my only consolation would be to
learn of her.
Though one has to feel sorry for Sarah, forced to endure
those ferocious onslaughts of adoration and reproach, it
is nevertheless impossible not to sympathise with Hazlitt.
Even when he finally understood that everything he had
believed was taking place between them had really hap-
pened only in his fevered brain, he would not entirely
disown the glimpse he had had of his own capacity for
ecstasy, the sense of his deepest
self coming to life in a way it
Review online never had before.
The problem with Hazlitt in
Love is that, despite (or because of)
his careful neutrality, Jon Cook
does not add much besides a bit of
 LITERARY LIVES
historical background to Hazlitt’s own emotionally
charged account. He lays out the facts in one flat declara-
tive sentence after another and makes observations that
don’t tell us much we couldn’t figure out for ourselves
(‘Liber Amoris is a book about illusions, about the way that
love makes us see things that aren’t there’; ‘Hazlitt did not
want a society based on secrecy … He would say what he
thought even if other people wanted him to be discreet’).
Nor does he explore what could have been interesting
areas for speculation. For example, he mentions in passing
that Hazlitt’s much-loved father had died shortly before
he met Sarah Walker, but leaves it at that. Mightn’t all that
ecstatic, quasi-mystical feeling for Sarah have been some
sort of defensive transmogrification of Hazlitt’s pain? It
seems a possible explanation, at least, for the mystery of
why a 42-year-old man was behaving like a crazed adoles-
cent, working himself up into emotional states that
seemed to have no objective correlative. But Cook never
T HOMAS H ODGKINSON
AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
A LFRED D OUGLAS : A P OET ’ S L IFE AND H IS
F INEST WORK
★ I can’t help wondering if, in
By Caspar Wintermans
(Peter Owen 384pp £19.95)
YOU CAN LEARN everything you need to know about
Alfred Douglas by reading a decent biography of Oscar
Wilde. Well, almost everything. From a glance at the pho-
tographs in Richard Ellmann’s book, for example, you can
see that Douglas, in his twenties, had a kind of boyish,
petulant prettiness. (It still isn’t immediately obvious to me
what it was about his physical appearance that the play-
wright found quite so appealing. Is it possible the young
Lord Alfred was at his most attractive with his clothes off?)
Other, and weightier, minds than Caspar Wintermans’
have provided accounts of the first fatal meeting in 1891
between Wilde, then thirty-seven, and Douglas, still an
undergraduate; of their subsequent passionate affair; and of
how Wilde got dragged into the even more passionate
feud that raged between Douglas and his whip-wielding,
half-mad father, the Marquess of Queensberry, which was
to lead to the playwright’s incarceration and, ultimately,
death in 1900. Douglas lived on for another forty-five
years. The question is: was there anything he did, or
suffered, during that time which merits serious attention?
Wintermans’ answer is evidently yes. This book is nei-
ther the first homage he has paid to his lordship – he
made a documentary, Two Loves, about him in 1999, and
edited his wife’s diaries in 2005 – nor the most recent. It
turns out that the work under review is a translation, by
33
raises the possibility.
In fact, though he has devoted a book to it, Cook
seems to minimise the significance of the Sarah episode.
Whereas A C Grayling, in his moving biography, tells us
that ‘after the Sarah Walker debacle something in Hazlitt
– some silent spiritual part of himself, broken and dissi-
pated by the emotional disaster – in effect turned its back
on life’, Cook assures us that ‘Sarah ceased to dominate
his imagination and his hopes for a new life’. He even
dismisses the idea that the changes Mary Shelley noted in
Hazlitt’s appearance a year later – ‘his smile brought tears
into my eyes, it was like a sun-beam illuminating the
most melancholy ruins’ – had anything to do with Sarah.
No one can say for sure, of course. But it’s hard to see
why anyone should read Hazlitt in Love instead of Liber
Amoris itself … unless, of course, he cannot cope with
much embarrassment.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
the author himself, of a
biography he published in
Amsterdam eight years ago,
entitled De boezemvriend van
Oscar Wilde. The author’s
English is excellent, as sec-
ond languages go. However,
his native tongue, he was
more successful in control-
ling the fruitiness of his
prose. Either way, we are
pretty sure in what kind of
biographer’s hands we find
ourselves, when the sentence
opening the passage on the Bosie: petulant
subject’s university years
consists of the single word: ‘Oxford!’ Similarly, I was
struck – and, despite myself, rather charmed – by the
way Wintermans, after quoting Oscar’s words to ‘Bosie’ a
few days before he was sentenced (‘What wisdom is to
the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to
me’), observes simply: ‘Holy ground.’ Single-sentence
paragraph. End of Chapter One.
Stylistic matters aside, the defence of Douglas offered by
his biographer is, first, that he has been unjustly dealt with
by Wilde-worshippers over the decades. This is probably
valid – the temptation to cast Wilde as a gentle Aesthetic
giant, betrayed by his poisonous pupil, has been too strong
for some to resist. Nevertheless, the injustice has perhaps
not been as great as Wintermans claims. His second point is
that Douglas is a ‘first-rate poet’, worthy of consideration
in his own right. I’m not so sure about that. Douglas had
an ear for fine-sounding phrases, true, and he rarely wrote a
bad poem – but on the other hand, he wrote remarkably
few over the course of his life, as is demonstrated by the
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
way Wintermans manages to fit most of them into the
back of this book, along with his copious notes (the biog-
raphy itself, which proceeds at breakneck speed, occupies a
mere 170 pages). Moreover, in several cases, Douglas’s staid,
stately verse seems to ask to be assessed in the context of
the affair for which he is remembered. In ‘The Dead Poet’,
for example (a sonnet composed in ‘Paris, 1900–1901’), he
describes having a premonition of the death of a great
writer, whose ‘golden voice’ could ‘conjure wonder out of
emptiness’. No prizes for guessing who he’s referring to.
And when Douglas, like Wilde, ended up in gaol (for
libelling Winston Churchill), he, like Wilde, decided to
pass the time writing about the experience. Wilde had
called his work De Profundis. So what did Douglas choose
as the title for his sonnet-sequence inspired by prison life?
In Excelsis – a kind of snide riposte, surely, to Wilde’s mel-
lifluous apologia.
The six-month term Douglas served in Wormwood
Scrubs in 1924 was the low point of his life. His wife, and
his looks, had left him. The various magazines he had
worked for had either folded or found someone else to
edit them. He had disowned his son, converted to Roman
W ILLIAM P ALMER
TEN-SHILLING NOTES
T HE B OY W HO L OVED B OOKS : A M EMOIR
★ memories of his father are few, and one, of sucking his
By John Sutherland
(John Murray 261pp £16.99)
EVERY GENERATION THINKS that it has a monopoly on
virtues that were sadly and pathetically absent in previ-
ous times. The baby-boomers are perhaps more guilty
than most, with their smug assumption that the world
was born anew in 1963. John Sutherland, the writer and
critic, has the advantage over most other memoirists of
the period because the early part of his life was lived
before the Sixties Enlightenment, and his story is told
with vividness, wit and, sometimes, anger.
Sutherland was born in 1938 and lived both through
the war and through changes in British society that have
left the world of his childhood looking as exotic and dis-
tant as ancient Crete. Until the mid-Fifties, Britain
remained far more like the Britain of a century before
than that of the decade ahead. Sutherland reminds us of
the soot used as a toothpaste substitute, of the weekly
bath, and of the Monday washday that lasted all day and
employed sinks and mangles and much physical labour.
The boyhood games were marbles and fag cards, football
and cricket in their seasons, and complex games of skip-
ping and chanting for the girls. America shone its sunlit
vision through the cinema and its songs through Radio
34
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
Catholicism, and become a rabid moral conservative and
law-suit addict. It may be the case, as Wilde said, that all
women grow up like their mothers, but Douglas was in
serious danger of turning into his father. The most unex-
pected pleasure provided by this unusual biography is the
sketch it gives of its subject’s final years, as – to everyone’s
surprise – he mellowed into a curiously detached, avuncu-
lar figure, befriended by the likes of John Betjeman and
Wyndham Lewis. The former described Douglas as ‘a
vastly entertaining man who gave one a sense of holiday
and exaltation whenever one was in his company’; the lat-
ter remembered that nothing made the once irascible
nobleman lose his cool, ‘except the poetry of Mr T S
Eliot’. Once you have learned that his wife, with whom
he had been reconciled, predeceased him by a year, that
his son fell prey to schizophrenia, and that Douglas himself
died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of 20 March
1945, you really do know more or less everything you
need to about the life of Oscar Wilde’s lover, post-Wilde.
That said, you might be interested to have a quick look at
‘The Dead Poet’. It isn’t at all bad.
To order this book at £15.96, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Luxembourg, the dance hall, and the record shop. The
countryside had not yet been dismantled fully and the
author went fishing as a boy with his grandfather.
Sutherland led the disjointed and varied childhood
that may be important in breeding a writer or artist but
is rather more painful as experienced by the child. His
father’s nicotine-stained thumb, toxically Proustian. The
photographs show his father as a handsome, strapping
man; a policeman who, despite being in a reserved
occupation, joined the RAF at the start of the war. He
was killed in 1941, burned to death after crashing in a
training flight. In her photographs, Sutherland’s mother
Liz looks outrageously glamorous, with a blonde,
Veronica Lake hairdo. The portrayal of Liz is full of
vivacity, humour, and sometimes a hint of bitterness.
After his father’s death, the boy and his mother moved
to her home town of Colchester. The Americans arrived
soon after, in the form of the Eighth Air Force: ‘the
biggest thrill for Colcestrian womanhood since the
Roman legions marched in’. Liz, shrewdly and ambi-
tiously, made the most of the opportunity; she used ‘her
wits, her body, her native intelligence and the openings
which the huge shake-up of war had fortuitously offered
her’. She took American lovers, and settled on one, the
kindly, generous and shell-shocked Major Hamilton.
John was often parked on his grandmother or other
relatives while his mother was on duty as a WPC. It is
from these days that Sutherland dates both his love of
reading – a way of being at the same time quiet and self-
absorbed – and the repression that found a later outlet in
drink and eventual alcoholism. As he says, ‘Mischief,
 LITERARY LIVES
like murder, will out.’
John suffered also the usual depredatory raids by adults
on children: circumcision, tonsillectomy, sadistic and
incompetent dentistry, and a single sexual molestation.
Although he was spared the horrors of diphtheria, scarlet
fever, and polio, there were other afflictions that seem now
to have disappeared from modern life: cold and hunger.
Worse than any of these was his evacuation to Edinburgh
after the last German bombing raids on London, as his
mother went off to Argentina with Uncle Ham.
In the junior preparatory department of Colchester
Grammar School, Sutherland first fell in love – with the
Victorian novel. He read omnivorously: Ainsworth’s Old
Saint Paul’s, Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, Captain Marryat,
Biggles, William, and the Wizard, Hotspur, and Rover,
rightly named ‘boys’ papers’ until they became increasing-
ly pictorial and turned into comics and died in the 1960s.
Liz returned three years later, clad in a chinchilla fur,
tanned, and most unlike the average Colchester lady. He
compares her to a character in a Patrick Hamilton novel,
which is not very flattering when we think of Netta in
Hangover Square or Jenny in The Midnight Bell.
The ten-shilling notes his mother left for him financed
Sutherland’s adolescence. Jazz and books were constant
companions, joined, early on, by booze. He became and
remained a very heavy drinker. It took its toll early. Poor
exam results elicited the offer only of a place at Leicester
LETTERS
B LOOD R IVER
Sir,
Of course – unfortunate but true – we all make mis-
takes, and if any factual errors are in my book, Blood
River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (LR, June) then I
am responsible and will make sure my publisher corrects
them. But I believe your readers should be aware of the
factual mistakes made by your reviewer, Tom Stacey.
He got his dates wrong. Mobutu fell in 1997, not 1994.
Independence came to the Belgian Congo in 1960 on 30
June, not 1 July (a fact commemorated by ‘Boulevard 30
June’ in the country’s capital). I crossed the Congo in
2004, not 2002. And your reviewer’s dates for Stanley’s
Congo expedition in 1876–77 were both out by a month.
As for the errors your reviewer attributes to me, a few are
debatable and the remainder are not errors at all. He said I
was wrong to write ‘within a year of 1958’ the Congo was at
war when, in fact, the violent civil unrest that caused
Belgium to leave the Congo began in 1959. He said Conrad
‘never rose to be skipper’ of a boat on the Congo River
when, in fact, he was given command in 1890 of a steam-
boat, the Roi Des Belges, after its original skipper fell sick.
And there was also an incorrect and inexplicable pre-
sumption about my South African connections – even
35
University. Sutherland chose instead, in the dying days
of National Service, to join the Army. He ended up as a
second lieutenant in the Suffolks doing guard duty at
Spandau prison in Berlin. Here again, mess life was very
much on the boozy side. By one of those ludicrously
recurring ironies of life, he found when he left that all
that was on offer was that same place at Leicester.
In the summer before joining his course, Sutherland
worked as a manual labourer laying rails. His account of
his work makes up one of the most valuable parts of the
book. Such work, he says, is literally ‘back-breaking’. As
one of the Poles he worked with said scathingly, ‘This is
not a job for children.’
And so, on to Leicester University – with a bit more life
under his belt than most students had racked up and an
intense and often bitter recognition of the social vindic-
tiveness and waste of the British class system. The penulti-
mate chapter is a fast-forward through academic jobs at
Edinburgh, and UCL, and through rivers of drink. The
Afterword is a harsh and unself-pitying examination of his
alcoholism, from which he emerged after thirty years.
This is, at the least, a most entertaining book. At its
best it brings to life the world through which its author
has lived, a rueful survivor, admitting that we have
hardly worked or suffered at all when compared with
our forebears.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
though Blood River explained I am British born and was
sent to Johannesburg as a reporter, your reviewer said I
am a ‘product of Johannesburg and presumably of part-
settler inheritance’.
Yours faithfully,
Tim Butcher
Middle East Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph
WIDE THIGHS
Sir,
No translation was given of A E Housman’s letter in
Paul Johnson’s review (LR, June), so I thought that, fol-
lowing on William Goodman’s letter in the same issue
about Bad Sex, non-Classically-inclined readers might
like to have one available: ‘I have never been able to
stomach “big” [magni], because culus is “rectum”
[proktos], not “thigh”, and there seems to be little point
in accusing the lady of “having a wide rectum”
[euruproktia].’
A E Housman didn’t know all the circumstances; there
might well be a reason.
Yours faithfully,
H J S Whitfield
St Ives.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL
A LAN R YAN
THE DANGERS OF UTOPIA
B LACK M ASS : A POCALYPTIC R ELIGION AND
THE D EATH OF U TOPIA
★ desperately important, since
By John Gray
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 256pp £18.99)
F OR A BOOK that consists so largely of summary
accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is
surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its
almost equally surprising organisation. Two or three
very large and very general claims frame the book: that
politics is a form of religion, that apocalyptic fantasies
have been the stuff of Western politics since the Middle
Ages and continue to be so now, that the restoration of
peace requires a combination of political realism on the
one hand, and on the other an acceptance of the need to
accommodate in public life the non-rational needs that
religion satisfies.
Within that framework, Gray takes aim at a wide range
of targets. By no means everything he says is plausible,
but even at his most unpersuasive, he is invigorating.
Readers of a certain age will be reminded of Norman
Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, but where Cohn
wrote in detail about the Anabaptist revolt led by
Thomas Müntzer to draw parallels with Communist
totalitarianism, Gray skates lightly over not only medieval
millenarianism but also twentieth-century Communism
and Nazism in order to concentrate on our present dis-
contents. Not the madness of George III, but the utopian
follies of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld provide the main
focus of the book.
The proposition that human beings have always been
prone to kill large numbers of other human beings in
pursuit of a vision that can broadly be described as ‘reli-
gious’ is one that invites several pinches of salt. The Old
Testament certainly describes a good deal of ethnic and
religious cleansing on the direct instructions of God, but
the massacres that were a common feature of intercity
strife among the Greeks seem mostly to have resulted
from the exasperation of the victors at the intransigence
or treachery of the defeated. Gray’s interest lies in two
other places.
First, he thinks it is a characteristic of ‘Western’ polit-
ical attitudes to engage in fantasies of a utopian recon-
struction of earthly life, though he readily admits that
‘Western’ is a somewhat loose term, embracing as it
does Judaic, Islamic and Christian modes of thought. It
is therefore not always easy to see whether the case is
that Islamic political thought, say, was for most of its
history non-utopian and quietist, and only in the past
36
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
sixty or so years has been
infected by Wester n ideas
picked up in the United
States by Sayyid Qut’b, or
that all children of the Book
are vulnerable to utopian
aspirations. The point is not
the deeper point is that
utopias are dangerous.
Gray is by no means the Gray: invigorating
first person to observe this.
The thought is simple enough. If we are going to
achieve the earthly heaven, it is permissible to inflict a
few casualties on the way. Indeed, things may well be
more lethal than that; one of the apparent oddities of
Stalin’s show trials was the prosecution’s passion for
extracting confessions from the Old Bolshevik victims
that they had conspired in impossible ways to do
inconceivable amounts of damage to the Soviet Union.
Why did it matter to Stalin and his henchmen? The
obvious thought is that if the utopian impulse is essen-
tially religious – in some sense of that slippery term –
the political opponent embodies pure evil, and in
much the same way that the Inquisition sought to have
the heretic condemn himself out of his own mouth, so
Stalin’s prosecutors sought confessions with about the
same evidential likelihood as a confession to sexual
congress with the Devil.
What Gray brings to this familiar story is tremendous
narrative verve. But narrative verve is not the only thing
he brings. His second concern is to raise the stakes yet
again in his long argument with the Enlightenment.
One might think that whatever else Hitler stood for, it
was not the values of the Enlightenment. Gray says
(though it is not clear how far he really means it) that
Hitler was the product of the Enlightenment; ‘scientific
racism’ was, to the extent that it borrowed the prestige
of science, an Enlightenment doctrine.
To square the obvious fact that many Enlightenment
writers were decidedly cool towards religion in any
established form with his insistence that the natural con-
dition of politics is religious, Gray has to borrow from
Carl Becker’s wonderful essay The Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth-Century Philosophers to argue that the
Enlightenment was a religious movement. There is per-
haps too much dazzle for real illumination in this claim;
and in any case, it is a somewhat roundabout route by
which to launch the assault he really has in mind – on
the follies of the war on Iraq.
This, of course, has all the hallmarks of a utopian pro-
ject. Gray fastidiously observes that it was not, as many
have claimed, a ‘Manichean’ project in the shape of a war
between good and evil in which good was to triumph;
Manicheanism has no room for the triumph of good on
 GENERAL
earth, and even as a piece of Christian utopianism, it was
heretical – God’s reign on earth is to come at a time of
His choosing, not that of Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld. If there is anything to be said against Gray’s
attack on the so-called neo-conservatives – so-called
because, as he says, there is nothing conservative about
their millenarian aspirations – it is that it is too easy with
hindsight to see that the combination of an intoxication
with American military power and an astonishing inno-
cence about the realities of utterly different societies was
a recipe for the disasters we have seen.
Still, one ends Black Mass with the anxiety that works
of this sort always induce. Why should we think that all
G RAHAM S TEWART
GLOBAL BREAKDOWN
GLOBALISATION, DEMOCRACY AND TERRORISM
★ 1918 and 1989’.
By Eric Hobsbawm
(Little, Brown 184pp £17.99)
‘THERE ARE WORDS nobody likes to be associated with
in public, such as racism and imperialism. On the other
hand, there are others for which everyone is anxious to
demonstrate enthusiasm, such as mothers and the envi-
ronment. Democracy is one of these.’ So writes Eric
Hobsbawm, who has spent much of his long and distin-
guished life circumscribed by the title ‘Marxist historian’.
It seemed a bit cocky back in 1989 when Francis
Fukuyama postulated that Communism’s collapse meant
that, ideologically speaking, the world had ‘reached the
end of history’. And it would be surprising if Professor
Hobsbawm had now, upon his ninetieth birthday, sud-
denly concluded that liberal democrats had indeed won
the argument. Rest assured that one of Britain’s most
celebrated left-wing thinkers has not taken historical
determinism as far as embracing the neo-cons. Even
Professor Fukuyama does not hug them any more.
Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism is a slim but stim-
ulating volume of recent Hobsbawm lectures. It is a sign
of how fundamentally the Bush administration’s policies
have shaken apart old certainties that even some natural
conservatives will find much to agree with here. We
have indeed reached a peculiar moment in world affairs
when one can read some passages and not know instinc-
tively whether the author is Professor Hobsbawm or Sir
Peregrine Worsthorne.
Hobsbawm compares the United States to revolution-
ary France and the Soviet Union – a nation whose sense
of ideological self-certainty fosters a desire to go forth
and reshape the rest of the world in its own image. This
has led to ‘the imperialism of human rights’, pre-emptive
37
the disasters of the world stem from one flaw in human
nature? Human beings all end up dead, but they do not
all die of a fatal something called death; the world is
sadly full of political disasters, as also of larger and
smaller successes, but it is not obvious that they all stem
from the taste for apocalypse, as distinct from assorted
miscalculations. Nor can Gray himself quite believe
some of his larger claims; after all, if we were such hap-
less victims of the utopian – or dystopian – impulse as
he sometimes implies, we would be hard put to it to
follow the eminently sensible advice he offers about
how to avoid the disasters he describes.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 16
strikes, and regime change. But the prospects for democ-
racy’s making a better world are not as obvious as ‘the
crazies in Washington’ might like to maintain. Far from
creating order, ‘“Spreading democracy” aggravated eth-
nic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in
multinational and multi-communal regions after both
In any case, he argues, capitalism and globalisation are
not only fuelling separatism, they are even undermining
the concept of the nation state. Across the Western
world, electorates are disillusioned with voting.
Turnouts on polling day are low and getting lower
(except, seemingly, in France). Meanwhile, entities like
the European Union demonstrate that they can legislate
effectively without any clear electoral mandate at all.
Hobsbawm maintains, ‘it is not electoral democracy that
necessarily ensures the effective freedom of the press,
citizen rights, and an independent judiciary’.
The breakdown of religious or ethnic consensus with-
in nations subjected to globalisation, consumerism and
mass immigration undermines the legitimacy of their
governments. Hobsbawm suggests that
Over the past thirty years or so, the territorial state
has, for various reasons, lost its traditional monopoly
of armed force, much of its former stability and
power, and, increasingly, the fundamental sense of
legitimacy, or at least of accepted permanence, which
allows government to impose burdens such as taxes
and conscription on willing citizens. The material
equipment for warfare is now widely available to pri-
vate bodies, as are the means for financing non-state
warfare. In this way, the balance between state and
non-state organisations has changed.
But it is not just a case of hunting rifles being swapped
for Kalashnikovs. According to Hobsbawm, ‘the idea
of market sovereignty is not a complement to liberal
democracy, but an alternative to it. Indeed, it is an
alternative to any kind of politics, since it denies the
need for political decisions, which are precisely deci-
sions about common or group interests as distinct from
the sum of choices, rational or otherwise, of individuals
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL
pursuing their private preferences’. This seems to be
something of a bold statement, unless one assumes
there was no ‘need for political decisions’ in the free-
trade age of Palmerston and Gladstone. Since when
was setting price and incomes policies a prerequisite of
liberal democracy?
Despite the three elements in the book’s title, it is the
fate of democracy and government legitimacy that draws
Hobsbawm’s clearest focus. The economic effects of
globalisation are dealt with briefly, with the statement
that they are fostering inequality. Islamism is not really
his special subject, although – unlike some commenta-
tors who hold that terrorism is the by-product of Third
World poverty – he does concede that actually most of
the terrorists come from the relatively prosperous and
educated strata of their societies. At any rate, many will
share his belief that the ‘War on Terror’ represents a dan-
gerous reaction that overestimates the punch terrorists
can pack. Where previously governments sought to
deny terrorists the ‘oxygen of publicity’, now they build
them up into being a greater menace than they have yet
to prove themselves. Even the horror of 9/11 did not
put New York City out of action for long, and as for
Britain: ‘a country that never quite lost its cool during
thirty years of Irish troubles should not lose it now’.
There is much to be said for this insouciance. At any
rate, until a dirty bomb takes out Islington.
Yet it must be hoped that Globalisation, Democracy and
Terrorism will not preach to the converted alone. Those
who – like this reviewer – hold markedly different
views to Professor Hobsbawm will still find much that
is interesting and thought-provoking. The lectures are
all the more lucid for being short and to the point. The
reader should not look for a comprehensive survey in a
collection of this kind, but one unfortunate omission is
a discussion of Putin’s Russia and its faint whiff of
embryonic fascism. Here, surely, is a manifestation of
elective dictatorship that should not be left out from an
overview of modern trends.
Having continued to cherish hopes for communism
long after most Western intellectuals backslid towards
social democracy, Er ic Hobsbawm has lived long
enough to have had his optimism checked. He fears that
– in contrast to the British Empire – the United States,
with its messianic zeal, does not know its own limits.
Yet one wonders if this view is not already being over-
taken by events. Democracy and the rule of law are not
so traduced that the American people will fail to get
round to electing a new President in 2008. Whether
Democrat or Republican, how long will Bush’s succes-
sor be in office before taking the decision to bring the
boys home and curtail efforts to make the Middle East
conform to Minnesota? Even ideologues and dreamers
are occasionally overpowered by reality.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
38
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
J OHN G RIBBIN
QUANTUM LEAPS
FAUST IN C OPENHAGEN : A S TRUGGLE FOR
THE S OUL OF P HYSICS
★
By Gino Segrè
(Jonathan Cape 310pp £20)
D OOMSDAY M EN : T HE R EAL D R
S TRANGELOVE AND THE D REAM OF THE
S UPERWEAPON
★
By P D Smith
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 552pp £20)
Gino Segrè has found a new way of telling the story of
the pioneers of quantum physics, a way that is gripping
and absorbing. Faust in Copenhagen is written with a style
and skill that make it the early contender for science book
of the year. In truth, it is a book about scientists rather
than science, and all the better for that. He has chosen
one moment in time – a meeting of the cognoscenti in
Copenhagen in 1932 – as the kernel of his story, which is
constructed around the lives of six people present at the
meeting and one who should have been there. For the
reader, looming over everything is the knowledge that
this was just a year before Hitler seized power in
Germany, with consequences that would lead to the
development of nuclear weapons, using the ideas inno-
cently being developed by those experts; but the bomb
itself is scarcely mentioned by Segrè.
His Faustian conceit derives from a skit written by one
of the younger participants at that meeting, Max
Delbrück, and performed at the end of the week of
intense scientific work, parodying the physicists and the
strange new world of quantum physics as a struggle
between the old guard and the new, in the style (sort of)
of Goethe. This could have been toe-curlingly awful,
but in Segrè’s hands works surprisingly well as a way of
leading in to the lives of the individuals.
And what individuals! In 1932, the Old Guard was
represented by Niels Bohr, the man who made quantum
physics respectable; Paul Ehrenfest, regarded as the
greatest teacher of the new science; and Liese Meitner,
who later came up with the idea of nuclear fission but
was scandalously ignored by the Nobel Committee. The
Young Turks were, or would be, all Nobel Laureates:
Werner Heisenberg, of uncertainty principle fame;
Wolfgang Pauli, whose exclusion principle explains the
chemical elements; and Paul Dirac, who came up with a
complete mathematical description of the quantum
world while still a PhD student. Delbrück represented
 GENERAL

the next generation, ‘Wigner’s sister’ rather

who would take the than as ‘my wife’. To
ideas of quantum him, this was logical; he
physics and turn them knew her as Wigner’s
to practical use. Lasers sister before she became
and computer chips are his wife, so that was a
two obvious examples more fundamental fact.
of the way in which Another family rela-
such applications tionship partly explains
changed the world; less why this book is so
familiarly, but no less good. Gino Segrè is the
importantly, quantum nephew of another
ideas transformed the Nobel Laureate, the
field of molecular biol- physicist Emilio Segrè,
ogy, and Delbrück, and grew up hero-wor-
more than anyone, was Copenhagen: meeting of minds shipping the quantum
responsible for taking pioneers. The book, he
these new ideas into biology. says, has been ‘a labour of love’, and it shows.
You do not, though, need to know anything about Another labour of love, but of a different kind, comes
science to enjoy and be infor med by Faust in from Peter Smith. It is an impassioned account of every-
Copenhagen. It is as much about the society of the times thing from the discovery of radioactivity to plans for a
and the way in which lives were transformed by the Doomsday Device (yes, there really were such plans)
upheavals in Europe as it is about science. But if you do from an author who feels that to the generations grow-
know a little of the science, it is fascinating to see the ing up who see the Cold War only as something in his-
names behind things like the uncertainty principle and tory books, the true horror of nuclear weapons has been
quantum exclusion come alive. The people who forgotten. While politicians talk glibly of ‘weapons of
changed our world for ever were a unique group of mass destruction’, nobody has any real feeling for what
undoubted geniuses; they were also undoubtedly dis- it means to experience intense machine gun fire, the
tinctly odd, as Delbrück later recalled: kind of bombing that destroyed Dresden, or a nuclear
I found out at an early age that science is a haven for holocaust. Nor do many people know that there are still
the timid, the freaks, the misfits. That is more true about 30,000 nuclear weapons still ready for launch
perhaps for the past than for now. If you were a stu- around the world. Doomsday Men aims to address that
dent in Göttingen in the 1920s and went to the gap, focusing on nuclear weapons, but also looking at
seminar [of] David Hilbert and Max Born, you other forms of mass destruction. It is no coincidence
could well imagine that you were in a madhouse as that one of Smith’s chapter headings is ‘Faust and the
you walked in. Every one of the persons there was Physicists’; but his Faustian bargain is more chilling than
obviously some kind of severe case. The least you Segrè’s light-hearted skit of scientists working at just
could do was put on some kind of stutter. about the last moment before their lives and work
The oddest of the lot was probably also the cleverest – would become part of politics.
Paul Dirac. He clearly had some kind of obsessive disor- The juxtaposition of the two books makes Smith’s
der, one manifestation of which was that when asked a story more chilling, and Segrè’s more poignant. Faust in
question he would not Copenhagen is a better book,
respond at all unless the one of the best I have read
question had been logically in a long time, and which
phrased to require an answer can be wholeheartedly rec-
(so the comment ‘I don’t ommended; Doomsday Men
understand that point’ is more important, and,
would be met with silence) depressingly, there is a need
and then only to give a pre- for it – people, especially
cise answer to the specific younger people than me,
question. He married the ought to read it. Whether it
sister of another physicist, will make a difference,
Eugene Wigner, and baffled though, is another matter.
new acquaintances by intro- To order these books, see LR
ducing his wife to them as Bookshop on page 16

39
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL
A LEXANDER M ASTERS
IGUM AND IGIBUM
U NKNOWN Q UANTITY: A R EAL AND
I MAGINED H ISTORY OF A LGEBRA
★ produce this copy of Literary Review and the knife and
By John Derbyshire
(Atlantic Books 382pp £22)
JOHN DERBYSHIRE’s Unknown Quantity is everything a
popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty,
anecdotal and full of mind-aching equations. It is a his-
tory of algebra – the study of number systems, things
such as quadratic equations, and of everything that is the
bane of schoolchildren’s lives.
Babylonian tax inspectors liked quadratic equations,
which are useful for finding areas of things. The more
you could determine about the land a man owned – not
just its total area but all its little shapes – the more effi-
ciently you could dun him for Sodom-and-Gomorrah
era VAT. Derbyshire includes a blissful problem in qua-
dratics (written in cuneiform, but to be chanted in
hoodoo) found on a clay tablet from 1800 BC, the time
of Hammurabi:
The igibum exceeded the igum by 7
What are the igum and the igibum?
12 is the igibum, 5 the igum.
Algebra is filled with Lewis Carroll-ishness and poetry.
What’s the volume of that minaret? How can we make
another even fatter/taller/more thrusting one, without
using more stones? For this you need a cubic equation.
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam, author of the
Rubaiyat, began the first serious investigation of exam-
ples of these, but what mathematicians wanted was a
general solution to all cubic questions. Then, instead of
having to agonise through every particular case, which
might take days of effort, they could
simply slot the basic information into
a standard formula and out would
pop the answer. Thousands of years
later, a swinish Italian called Cardano
published the solution. A gambler
and diviner (one of his insights was
that ‘a woman with a wart upon her
left cheek, a little to the left of the
dimple, will eventually be poisoned
by her husband’), he also worked out
the general formula for the quartic –
useful for those odd people who want
to investigate volumes in the fourth
dimension.
There’s a sense of remorselessness
about the process after this: next will
40
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
come equations called the quintic, sextic, heptic, etc etc.
Why should it ever stop? Why should anyone but the
very peculiar – or those who live in the fifth, sixth and
seventh dimensions – bother? Because equations with
these sorts of terms crop up all the time in physics, and
in finance and computing and making car engines and
aeroplanes and, no doubt, the assembly lines needed to
fork with which you ate your breakfast. Mathematicians
pursue algebraic results for the fun of the chase, in the
same way that commuters pursue sudoku puzzles; the
rest of us depend on them for the survival of our com-
fortable way of life.
The quintic is the Snark of mathematics. It was hunt-
ed across Europe until it was finally killed off by a 26-
year-old Norwegian called Niels Abel, who starved to
death shortly after. But the quintic was a Boojum, you
see. Unlike the equations that had gone before, Abel
proved that it has no general solution. The reason why
this is the case, as the French student Everiste Galois
showed, is infinitely more important than the failure of
the result. A day after he wrote down the explanation
for this boojumish fact, he was shot dead, in a duel, aged
twenty-one.
Historians of mathematics are always complaining that
mathematicians are a dry and uninteresting lot; but it’s
not so. Algebra has been powered by numerous aston-
ishing characters and absurd situations. The beautiful
virgin Hypatia, the first known woman mathematician
(there are only three, in this book), was pulled from her
chariot by an enraged mob and had her flesh scraped
from her bones with oyster shells. (Women and algebra
have not always been kind to each other. George Boole,
who developed an algebraic system for logic, died
because his wife threw buckets of icy water over him
when he was in bed with a chill.) Alexandre
Grothendieck is the most recent curious fellow: in his
prime he knocked down policemen and won the top
mathematics prize, the Fields Medal.
Now he lives in total retirement in
the Pyrenees, pondering how to sur-
vive on dandelion soup.
The best parts of Unknown
Quantity are not the anecdotes, but
the sums. In asides throughout the
text, and in special chapters he titles
‘Math Primers’, John Derbyshire
cleverly chooses one or two simple
mathematical examples to illustrate
horridly difficult ideas and, using
metaphor and fine writing, investi-
gates them closely. Vector spaces,
algebraic geometry, imaginary num-
bers, group theory, field theory,
matrices … These sections are worth
 GENERAL
reading twice just for the pleasure of being able to say
covenish phrases like ‘the ideal of a polynomial ring’
without feeling you’re turning into a dotty about to
bother people on buses.
A LLISTER H EATH
ECONOMICAL READING
ON THE W EALTH OF N ATIONS
★ imports; it would be far better
By P J O’Rourke
(Atlantic Books 242pp £14.99)
IT IS THE question all modern economists dread. Every
couple of months we are asked, usually by a well-mean-
ing colleague, what we think of the Wealth of Nations.
To which, if we were honest, we would reply that we
never really managed to plough through the entire 900
pages of Adam Smith’s sometimes dense, occasionally
brilliant and often mind-numbingly boring prose.
We have all dipped in and out, marvelled at Smith’s
bursts of lucidity, devoured his famous passages on the
division of labour, whilst making sure we skipped his
67-page ‘Digression concerning the Variations in the
Value of Silver during the Course of the Four last
Centuries’. The new generation of economics gradu-
ates, reared almost exclusively on advanced calculus and
econometrics, are even less likely to have read Smith or
any of the great founding texts of their discipline.
So it is entirely to be welcomed that P J O’Rourke, the
American satirist, has turned his piercing mind to Smith’s
work; his latest book manages to be a surprisingly sophis-
ticated and comprehensive guide to Smith’s economic and
moral philosophy, whilst retaining the author’s trademark
wit. It made me laugh out loud more than once, though
I’ll admit to being more partial than most to the kind
of right-wing wisecracks O’Rourke specialises in. The
second chapter, entitled ‘Why is The Wealth of Nations so
damn long?’, is truly brilliant (though O’Rourke’s some-
what disappointing answer is that Smith’s health was flag-
ging and he had a lot to get off his chest).
Much of Smith’s energy was spent trying to rebut the
doctrine of mercantilism, an ultimately doomed attempt
at rationalising and justifying the protectionist and com-
mercial restrictions of the time. Mercantilists held that
the best way to increase a country’s prosperity was to
maximise its exports while minimising its imports; many
of today’s arguments against allowing Western consumers
to import more Chinese goods share in that defective
intellectual heritage, as does the media’s obsession with
trade deficits between East and West.
While Smith spent many pages demolishing the mer-
cantilists, O’Rourke sums up his argument superbly,
41
Now that I’ve finally finished this distracting review,
I’m going to re-puff the pillows on my bed, and study
the formulae in the book properly.
To order this book at £17.60, see LR Bookshop on page 16
tabloid-style: ‘imports are
Christmas mornings; exports are
January’s MasterCard bill’. Far
from being of any inherent use
to a country, exports are the
price it pays to be able to buy
never to have to export anything
and simply be able to consume
as many free imports as possible. O’Rourke: wisecracks
Many of the big issues of
Smith’s time were strikingly similar to today’s, from law
and order to a burgeoning national debt, runaway public
spending and a failing education system. O’Rourke is at
his best when he highlights how Smith’s views are relevant
to today’s debates. He reveals that Smith even chipped in
to the great house-price debate, warning against betting
too much on a red-hot housing market and dismissing the
idea that investing in property is inherently a good thing.
He provides support to the side of those who believe that
Tesco and Wal-Mart should be allowed to open more
stores, arguing that ‘[shops] can never be multiplied so as
to hurt the publick, though so as to hurt one another’.
As O’Rourke rightly argues, Smith was not a modern
free-market libertarian but he was certainly a libertarian
critic of capitalism, or at least of the mixed economy
that prevailed as much in the eighteenth century as it
does today. Social problems were usually to be solved
not by increased regulation, but by increased freedom.
Wages might be too low, but as Smith wrote, ‘law can
never regulate them properly, though it has often pre-
tended to do so’. Greater equality can only properly be
achieved with increased equity capital, which would
boost workers’ productivity, so that ‘in consequence of
the flourishing circumstances of the society, the real
price of labour should rise very considerably’.
The Left, needless to say, has always found much to
disagree with Smith about, though it ought to be able to
find common ground in his rejection of feudalism,
which stands at the heart of his liberalism and which
O’Rourke rightly applauds. The Right, meanwhile, has
long detested his labour theory of value, which inspired
Karl Marx’s version, and has often suspected him of not
being especially sound on tax.
But as O’Rourke puts it, if this is to be an intelligent
squabble, we need to understand Smith’s many arguments
in full. For those without the stomach to read the real
thing, P J O’Rourke’s book will provide an unusually
enjoyable starting point.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 16
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL

C HARLOTTE A PPLEYARD the most dramatic example

being the one he used to

All You Need recover the Russborough

Is a Ladder
S TEALING THE S CREAM : T HE H UNT FOR A
M ISSING M ASTERPIECE
★ guised as a middle man for a
By Edward Dolnick
(Icon Books Ltd 272pp £12.99)
IT’S EASIER THAN you think to steal a masterpiece. Edward
Dolnick’s Museum of the Missing would include over five
hundred Picassos, forty-three Van Goghs, and nearly a
couple of hundred Rembrandts, with guest appearances
from Vermeer, Caravaggio, Van Eyck, Cézanne, El Greco
and Titian. But the centrepiece, according to Dolnick,
would be Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Not because it is
any better than the other lost works but because the story
behind its theft is so much juicier.
Dolnick’s story is one of ‘art crooks and art cops’, cen-
tred on the Philip Marlow-esque figure of Scotland Yard
detective Charley Hill, a former soldier and Fulbright
scholar who seems to spend as much time reading
Gombrich as he does catching crooks. The strategy
clearly works, as he is personally responsible for the
recovery of over one hundred million pounds’ worth of
art; ‘The first thing you have to understand about the art
world is that, with very few exceptions, including me,
everyone’s a crook’, claims Hill.
The theft of The Scream was worryingly simple. The
painting was neither alarmed nor chained to the wall of
the Norwegian National Gallery – it hung merely on pic-
ture wire. The thieves struck early in the morning,
climbed a ladder to the first-floor gallery, smashed the
window and swiped it. No one saw the two men on the
street. The limited CCTV footage showed them to be
masked, and they left behind them only a lot of broken
glass and a hastily scribbled postcard saying ‘Thanks for
the poor security’. What followed was an international
treasure hunt. After failed attempts to find the painting
through conventional routes, our hero Hill was called in
to masquerade as a fixer from the Getty who was advertis-
ing a substantial reward for the work’s recovery. This was a
crucial point: the Getty is the only museum wealthy
enough to convince a dodgy dealer
or art thief that the reward might
make it worth giving up the noto- visit Literary
rious prize. Hill, it seems, is a mas-
ter of disguise. He regularly
assumes false identities in order to www.literaryreview.co.uk
infiltrate the criminal underworld,
House paintings, which
included Ver meer’s Lady
Writing a Letter. In a rather
long supplementary chapter,
clearly intended to illustrate
Hill’s credentials as a skilled
art cop, we see him dis-
fictitious Middle Eastern
sheik interested in purchas-
ing the stolen pictures. Over
the course of several tense
meetings with Martin
Cahill, the criminal godfa-
ther of Eighties Dublin, Hill
convinces the crook that he
is the real deal and manages
to retrieve the canvas, con- How it was done
cealed in a bin liner, from
the back of a Mercedes in Antwerp.
The Scream’s retrieval did not go quite so smoothly. A
lack of funding for the ‘Art Squad’ meant that Hill could
not afford the necessary books to bone up on Munch
and ended up in the corner of a bookshop, much to the
annoyance of its manager, reading but never buying.
Then, when the much anticipated first undercover meet-
ing with a shady art dealer with connections to the
thieves took place, in a hotel crawling with vice-squad
policemen attending their national conference, naturally
the dealer got cold feet.
Dolnick writes with journalistic vigour and the story
races along. Interspersing his narrative of Hill’s search
for The Scream with earlier art thefts results in a full and
amusing history of this relatively low-risk crime; Irish
gangster Cahill was never actually charged over the
Vermeer, as so many policing authorities were involved
that none of them wanted to be the prosecuting party.
Add to that the general apathy of the author ities
towards theft as opposed to murders and fraud cases,
and we find that art thieves tend to get away with rather
a lot. Indeed, Dolnick estimates that the criminal art
world could have a turnover of as much as six billion
dollars a year. One cannot help but like Hill as he
simultaneously fights the stinginess of the Establishment
and the ruthlessness of the criminals. The moral of
Dolnick and Hill’s story seems
to be that, consider ing The
Review online Scream was stolen again a few
years later, art crime pays – all
you need is a ladder.
To order this book at £10.39, see
LR Bookshop on page 16

42
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL

D IANA C LEE footman taking a long walk down the corridors of

Wentworth to deliver a letter from one feuding member

COAL AND CALAMITY
B LACK D IAMONDS : T HE R ISE AND FALL OF A
G REAT B RITISH DYNASTY
★ so novelistic.
By Catherine Bailey
(Viking 544pp £20)
RICHES-TO-RAGS tales of the British aristocracy in the
socialistic twentieth century have been a staple of
romantic fiction for the last fifty or sixty years. The
themes are constant: death duties, heirs killed in the
world wars, penal taxation and confiscation by Mr
Attlee, a shortage of rich heiresses to shore up the family
from without, quarrelling and recriminating relatives
and, finally, the loss of the stately pile. With certain vari-
ations and modifications, this is the stuff of Catherine
Bailey’s new book.
It is both a good book – highly readable, in a way that
much romantic fiction is – and an odd one. It tells the
story of the Fitzwilliams of
Wentworth, which was and still
is the biggest privately owned
house in the country. The last
Earl Fitzwilliam died over a
quarter of a century ago, since
when the pile has passed into
other hands. The Fitzwilliam
family fortune (and what a for-
tune it was: there are tales here
of an Edwardian opulence that
would put even Mr and Mrs
David Beckham’s extravagances
in the shade) was built on coal:
hence the title of the book.
They were quite fabulously rich
on the back of it; and yet, with- The house that coal built
in a few decades, the Earls and
their fiefdom disappeared.
Bailey says repeatedly that the family was secretive,
and much paperwork that might have told a more com-
plete story of the dynasty was burned during the last 100
years. It is surprising, therefore, that she appears to know
so much, and in some cases in such detail. Taking her
cue, perhaps, from Carlyle in his dramatic reconstruc-
tion of the French Revolution, she offers an extraordi-
narily vivid series of descriptions of life at Wentworth,
and minutely described accounts of such events as the
funeral of the Sixth Earl in 1902, the visit of their
Majesties King George V and Queen Mary in 1912, a
tense meeting between the Seventh Earl and Earl Haig
at Wentworth just after the Great War, and even of a
of the family to another. Of course, Bailey has no more
idea than any of the rest of us of what actually happened
on some of these occasions, especially of the more pri-
vate aspects of them: her imagination has supplied the
minutiae, and that is why her book does at times seem
It could also have benefited from some judicious
pruning. There are long accounts of the squalid and
appalling conditions in which mineworkers lived in the
West Riding coalfields a century ago; but, by Bailey’s
own account, the miners who worked for His Lordship
were astonishingly well treated – well housed and paid
when injured, with their widows looked after if they
died at work – and their conditions had no bearing on
the eventual fall of the dynasty. Why then write about it
here? Certainly it is a colourful and, even now, disturb-
ing story, but it is irrelevant.
Similarly, when the Eighth Earl – a war hero who
died when the private plane in which he was flying
with his mistress to the South of France crashed, killing
all on board, in 1948 – comes into the picture, his liai-
son with that mistress creates
another enormous diversion.
She was Kathleen ‘Kick’
Kennedy, daughter of the
repulsive Joe, sister of the
future president of the United
States, and widow (when
Lord Fitzwilliam met her) of
the Marquess of Hartington,
heir to the Dukedom of
Devonshire, who was killed as
he headed for Germany after
the Nor mandy landings of
1944. We are given a pile of
very familiar (and again, in
terms of the Fitzwilliams’ for-
tunes, ir relevant) mater ial
about the ghastliness of the
Kennedy family and Kick’s marriage to Hartington, to
warm us up for the very brief part she played in the life
and death of a dynasty.
For this reader, the real story that emerges from the
book is one the author seems slow to bring out. It is
precisely how benevolent and proper the Fitzwilliams
were in running their business, and how respected they
were by ordinary working men and their families. The
story of the way the family concerns operated gives the
lie to the received wisdom about an oppressive aristocra-
cy whose cruelty and callousness almost caused revolu-
tion, and the confiscation of whose assets would have
been the least that social justice demanded. It makes it
all the more revolting to read of the deliberate vandalism

43
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL
of the ornamental gardens at Wentworth after the war,
on the orders of the Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny
Shinwell. Shinwell, despite representations from local
miners pointing out the futility of the exercise, insisted
on open-cast workings being established in the grounds
to help avert a fuel crisis. As experts pointed out to him,
it would do nothing of the sort, but that would not
deter him from taking the opportunity to extend the
workings almost up to the doors of the house itself.
Lord Fitzwilliam had always allowed local people to
walk in his grounds, a pleasure Shinwell therefore
denied them in what was, by any standards of spite, a
spectacular own goal.
Coal was, of course, an old technology even then, and
was soon to be superseded, not least by nuclear power.
The other lesson of the nationalisation of the mines in
1947 is that the process put them on a much more pre-
carious footing than they would have been had they
stayed in private ownership. Lord Fitzwilliam froze out
the union in negotiations, not because he was a blimpish
right-winger, but because he felt it a matter of honour
to talk directly to his men and to respond to their needs,
and other coal owners felt the same. After 1947 two
J ASON G OODWIN
STORM IN A TEACUP
TEA: THE DRINK THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
★ combination of remarkable effort and muddle, in India
By John Griffiths
(André Deutsch 384pp £17.99)
WHAT’S SO GREAT about tea? The surefooted William
Cobbett saw nothing in tea beyond idleness and ruin; he
described its effects in the 1820s as similar to dependency
on foreign oil. Thousands of tons of dried leaf were being
shipped around the world; governments grew fat on tax-
ing it, smugglers were lured into criminality to supply it,
housewives dissipated their looks and time to produce it,
men were enfeebled by sipping it. One bloated monop-
oly, the East India Company, sponsored a trade in illegal
drugs, corrupted governments at home and abroad,
fought wars, and swallowed empires to keep it coming.
The tea tax – reduced almost to nothingness – led to the
American War of Independence, via the Boston Tea
Party; Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ballad reported that: ‘The
waters in the rebel bay / Have kept the tea-leaf savor; /
Our old North-Enders in their spray / Still taste a Hyson
flavour…’, hyson being the fanciest green tea of the time,
as bohea was the cheapest black tea.
Tea really was the first global bulk commodity, and
Cobbett was undoubtedly right to make the same sort of
fuss over it that campaigners now make about SUVs or
44
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
monoliths – the National Coal Board, as the arm of the
Government, and the National Union of Mineworkers –
had to meet to settle any differences, with frequently
hideous results.
Some of the episodes in this book would be deemed
too fabulous for a novel: but they did happen. There was
a long dispute about whether the Seventh Earl, born in
a hut in Canada, was actually of the family’s blood at all,
or had been substituted at birth. Another heir, who had
sons of his own to carry on the line, was deemed to
have been born out of wedlock himself, the line then
continuing to a man with no sons to inherit. The line
died out but the family’s huge wealth remained, and was
dispersed through the female line.
This book would have benefited from being shorter,
and from the author’s avoiding the apparently irresistible
urge to end every chapter with a soap-opera-style
cliffhanger. It is not, though, so much a story of the
inevitable effect of the twentieth century on the British
aristocracy as an everyday story of the effects of time and
chance. It will fascinate many who read it, but its out-
come should not be misinterpreted as any sort of tragedy.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 16
illegal diamonds. In his day the British drank around 30
million pounds of it a year. Later in the century, the
price had fallen and consumption had risen to 250 mil-
lion pounds. The wretched Cutty Sark, with its revolu-
tionary hull, was built to race China teas to London; but
by then we were mostly drinking tea grown, through a
and Sri Lanka. Griffiths charts the development with
exhaustive patience.
But all the same, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World
is fighting an uphill battle. It’s not just that the whole
genre has become a publisher’s cliché (Tree: The
Vegetation that Changed the World?) which this book,
in its dinky hand-held format, apes so slavishly. It’s not
even that John Griffiths, whose father Percy wrote the
estimable The History of the Indian Tea Trade, is frequently
revisiting territory well-tramped by others – not least
William Ukers, whose two-volume All About Tea, pub-
lished in 1935, lives up to its title (and includes a mag-
nificent scale drawing of the Queen Elizabeth floating in
a giant cup to illustrate the amount of tea per annum we
used to drink). And it’s not entirely that planters’ tales,
without a Kipling or a Maugham to contextualise them,
are often dull.
Cobbett himself must have been aware that his splen-
did polemic against the celestial leaf would seem like a
storm in a teacup. The tea trade might have been the oil
business of his day, but Big Oil has a certain va-va-
voom. Diamonds are more glamorous. Even coffee
suggests samba, revolution, curtains stirring in the vis-
cous afternoon heat, men with stubble. Alexander
 GENERAL

McGowan, in the 1860s, described served breakfast on the back of

the perfect tea planter:
Those who, possessing but a
moderate sum of money, wish,
nevertheless, to maintain the
position in life to which they
have been educated, to whom
trade or the professions are
obnoxious, who, having no mil-
itary tastes or nautical tenden-
cies, are still anxious to use that
energy and enterprise which are
said to belong to the British – to
such, tea planting offers peculiar
inducements.
Coffee is grown on plantations. Tea
is grown in gardens. ‘I shouted at
the mob that they could recross the
bridge after 2pm,’ Griffiths quotes
from a planter’s account:
If they tried to cross before then, I would shoot them,
and I meant it. My poor driver … was dispatched to
fetch me some breakfast and get himself something.
The head servant … shortly arrived on a bike with a
carrier on the back, with breakfast. He was dressed in
immaculate white with his normal black cap and
the pick-up.
But there, in a nutshell, you have the
attraction of tea as a drink and the
problem of writing about it. I did it
in the disguise of a travel book about
China and India, and the book itself
is now out of print, which goes to
show you. Tea is an essentially
bathetic drink. If you’re tired, deeply
thirsty, working late: tea’s the thing.
It gives you caffeine, but in longer,
lighter doses than coffee. It demands
the ritual care Cobbett fumed about,
which is why our brasher, ruder
nation drinks half as much tea as it
did fifty years ago. Griffiths has all
the statistics, but André Deutsch
should have given him bigger pages
and more pictures. ‘Mechanical
rolling,’ Griffiths writes, ‘could be said to have started in a
pair of planter’s trousers.’ You could do worse than take
this book into your hammock, with maybe a cup of
Darjeeling first flush, and nod comfortably over his tales of
Mazzawattee, teabags and rogue Chinese.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16

IT SAYS MUCH about the spirit mammalian, including (when

of the times that these three E LISABETH L UARD DINES OUT ON circumstances demand) our-
fine books sing from the same selves? Wit and elegance are
hymn-sheet: the need to take a T HREE B OOKS ON F OOD not usually the hallmarks of
long hard look at how and professorial punditry. Don’t be
what we eat by examining the put off by the forty pages of
lessons of the past. scholarly footnotes – this is a mould-cracker of a book, as
Making the case for the ancestral hearth is Martin readable as any thriller.
Jones, author of Feast: Why Humans Share Food In The Last Food of England: English Food, Its Past,
(Oxford University Press 364pp £20) and George Pitt- Present and Future, Marwood Yeatman delivers an ency-
Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at clopaedic, stylish, appropriately eccentric account of the
Cambridge. Anyone heading for a career in Food state of our nation’s gastronomic health (Ebury 488pp
History would be well advised to stick to the professor £25). Divided somewhat arbitrarily into thirty-four chap-
like glue. His speciality is ‘the study of the fragmentary ters – among them ‘The English Clearances’ (in earnest,
archaeological remains of early food’. His book is a pas- George III onwards), ‘Green Top’ (a discussion of milk),
sionate plea for a return to our ancestors’ animal ‘Freshwater Fish’ (skinning eels, personal stuff) – this is not
instincts: ‘The world’s human community, by gathering an easy book to pigeonhole. Chapter Four gives us the
around meal tables, hammers planet earth, day by day, general drift of Yeatman’s autobiography: ‘I was baptised in
with an environmental force comparable with the move- a robe of Honiton lace during the big freeze of 1948.’ He
ment of glaciers, the eruption of major volcanoes, and continues: ‘My father and stepfather were both “gentle-
the impact of comets.’ Absolutely. Jones likens the for- men farmers” ... there were tiger and leopard skins in my
mality of a hierarchical dinner at High Table with the bedroom, toads in the cellar, swords in the hall ... I did not
behaviour of our forefathers round a kill – women live in a fantasy world, but a fantastic, magical and vestigial
excluded of course, lest there be sexual trading. And did one, with giant wind-blown twisted trees, wild ponies and
you ever think, when – ahem – exchanging oral intima- home-made pasties wrapped in napkins and eaten on the
cies with your beloved, that you were simply mirroring beach in a secret cove.’ Now, he keeps house with his pho-
the kiss-feeding technique practised by most of the avian tographer wife in a former pub in Fordingbridge,
and reptilian species on the planet and several of the Hampshire, in an enviable state of self-sufficiency, growing

45
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 GENERAL
their own veg, brewing their own beer
and baking their own bread.
What’s clearly an obsession for all
things gastronomic – good or bad, live or
dead, delicious or disgusting – does not
mean, Marwood is careful to point out,
that he’s a chef or a ‘foodie’. Ingredients,
common and uncommon, from mutton
to salt-fish to famine rations, are exam-
ined chapter by chapter in detail. Need
to know the difference between cut-
rounds and kissing-edges? Marwood’s
your man. His wife took the illuminating
pictures: a pork-salter cuddling ham; a
gloomy tripe-stirrer; a granny holding a
jar of pickled cucumbers; a big man rins-
ing gulls’ eggs – all things seldom seen
today. A labour of love, if ever there was
one. Take it to bed with you and dream.
Joan Thirsk’s Food in Early Modern England: Phases,
Fads and Fashions 1500–1760 (Hambledon Continuum
350pp £30) reaches well beyond what the title suggests –
a bloodless history of irrelevant domesticity – into a from-
the-heart examination of lessons to be learned from the
agricultural practices of our ancestors. In academic terms,
fifty pages of footnotes and bibliography is modest
enough back-up for 350 pages of scholarly text that
England’s
First
Family “A riveting and major work.
England’s First Family of Writers
witnesses the rare mix of creativ-
of Writers ity and philosophical rigor that
Carlson brings to scholarly writing
MARY and thinking about Romanticism
and the larger set of relations
WOLLSTONECRAFT,
between living and writing in
WILLIAM GODWIN, public culture.”
MARY SHELLEY —Theresa M. Kelley,
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Julie A. Carlson £33.50 hardcover
THE JOHNS HOPKINS
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Distributed by John Wiley
Tel: 1243 843291 • www.press.jhu.edu
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
examine the roots of how we live now.
Thirsk’s previously published work
includes Alternative Agriculture: A History,
which explains why some sixty years’
study led the author to ask herself how
changes in farming affected people’s diet.
‘As time went on, I became increasingly
dissatisfied with my shadowy image of
women cooking in the kitchen and serv-
ing their families at the meal table ... and
found my knowledge of farming and
food in the past constantly confronting
current daily news items about food fads
and fashions.’
The gorgeous cover picture – three
adorable, overdressed infants guzzling
grapes – sets the scene for an examination
Parsnip vendor of class differences. While ‘poor folk did
not write their life stories or describe their
daily foods’, the arrival in the countryside during her cho-
sen period, 1500–1760, of an increasing number of newly
prosperous gentry created ‘an exchange of knowledge and
skill ... between the classes that made everyone familiar
with new foods and tastes’. The distinguishing characteris-
tics of upper-class provisioning were ‘rarity and expense’.
Circa 1600, among the ‘exotic ingredients that had to be
fetched from far away’ for a modest country household in
expectation of distinguished visitors were 2lb capers, 3lb
anchovies and 2 gallons of olives, all of which had to be
shipped from Mediterranean ports and arrive in perfect
condition. Fascinating insights include a method of ten-
derising a cow carcass for immediate consumption by
inserting a swan’s quill into the navel and blowing up the
stomach ‘till the whole skin swelled like a bladder’. Not
for the squeamish. But nor is calf ’s head, sweetbreads, beef
marrow or pig’s cheeks – meats which dropped out of
fashion through sheer snobbery.
In addition to such moral considerations as why the
rearing of veal calves should be considered so much more
inhumane than slaughtering them at birth, Thirsk makes
a strong case for regional diversity as a promoter of health
(bread, for instance, used to be made with a wide variety
of grains), blaming the proliferation of cookery books
(Mrs Beeton et al) for introducing uniformity into the
modern kitchen. The period under study marks the end
of the medieval kitchen (pretty much the ancestral diet,
give or take a handful of spices), and the start of the
modern (whatever you can afford, from wherever you
can get it, whenever you want it). And if advances in
husbandry and horticulture during the period, including
the botanical riches of the New World, led inexorably to
the crammed shelves of modern supermarkets, it may
well be time, the author suggests, to consider turning
back the clock, if only just a little.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
46
 GENERAL

WILL EISNER’s Contract With N ICK G ARRARD LOOKS AT A B ATCH humour are a winning combi-
God trilogy, reprinted in one nation.
volume (W W Norton 544pp OF R ECENT G RAPHIC N OVELS Two further examples both
£18.99), is the foundation of embrace biography and person-
the modern graphic novel. First published nearly thirty al experience. The latest book from the award-winning
years ago, the three books have been celebrated for their Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums (Jonathan Cape
literary ambition and autobiographical sincerity: John 96pp £12.99), recounts a painful episode from her fami-
Updike is a fan, as was Kurt Vonnegut, and with good ly history. Here, Satrapi imagines the inner turmoil
reason. While Eisner’s artwork betrays its origins in the experienced by her uncle, a passionate and depressive
square-jawed realm of Saturday serial heroics, his narra- musician who decides one day to turn his back on life
tives are imbued with a broad and satisfying moral and to lie in his bed, waiting to die. Satrapi’s artwork,
vision. His focus is upon the immigrant communities with its blurred figures and stark black-and-white out-
living along the fictional Dropsie Avenue, a world of lines, perfectly handles the subject matter. Her uncle’s
Dickensian squalor and violent upheaval. With verve journey is presented with grace and sympathy, and
Eisner relates the fortunes of the various communities, although we know from the outset how the story will
tragedy and romance coming and going as often as the end, there is still a powerful, redemptive quality about its
endless waves of tenants. inevitable progression.
Whilst the first two volumes (A Contract with God, A Mar tin Lemelman’s f amily memoir, Mendel’s
Life Force) suffer, as all progenitors do, from teething Daughter (Jonathan Cape 240pp £14.99), is a fractured
pains and experimental failures, it is with the last volume series of images and recollections. In what is less a
– simply titled Dropsie Avenue – that Eisner really hits his g raphic novel than a semi-realised scrapbook,
stride. Starting from the very first cultivation of his Lemelman records his family’s experiences during the
avenue territory, he charts the rise and fall of each suc- Second World War through a combination of pho-
cessive inhabitant, deal- tographs, images and words, themselves taken from a
ing them their fates series of video diaries the author recorded with his
with a sympathy and mother, now deceased. However, adrift as it is between
delicacy that never fail scrapbook and conventional comic narrative, the piece
to move. never quite settles. We are never as fully immersed as
A glimpse at recent we should be. A shame: Lemelman has much of value
releases shows that to say.
Eisner’s pioneering spirit Perhaps the most peculiar and invigorating of these
remains; new authors releases is Andrzej Klimowski’s Horace Dorlan (Faber &
continue to experiment Faber 240pp £12.99), a hallucinatory marriage of prose
with the graphic form. and image. The protagonist, an unassuming university
As a leading example, professor, suffers a mysterious accident and his life begins
Simone Lia’s Fluffy From ‘Fluffy’ to unravel. Reality frag-
(Jonathan Cape 186pp ments and a chorus of voic-
£12.99) is an eccentric piece, delivered with emotional es emerge and entwine, but
realism and a playful dose of humour. Lia tells the story while the text suggests
of Michael Pulcino, a disappointed architect charged much, posing questions at
with raising Fluffy, a talking bunny convinced that every tur n, the author
Michael is his biological father. Their life together is fur- steers clear of a solution.
ther complicated by Michael’s interfering family and the We emerge as muddled and
attentions of Fluffy’s nursery school teacher. lost as our hero, but no
Lia’s simple narrative is marked by a surprising degree matter: this is very much a
of emotional poignancy. She intersperses the flow with a work in which form takes
series of bizarre interludes, such as chapters guest-narrat- precedence over content.
ed by a dust particle and, at key points, diagrammatical It’s presented in banks of
depictions of her protagonists’ thoughts. All this is offset text and a series of glorious
by her wonderful artwork, which combines a scruffy black-and-white pr ints,
sensibility with detailed architectural realism, a style in which draw on references From ‘Horace Dorlan’
keeping with the contradictory nature of the story itself. as diverse as the conven-
What might at first seem a slight piece, drowning in wry tions of film noir and the works of Lewis Carroll. An
self-awareness, swiftly becomes an experience in which enigmatic read, but one to savour nonetheless.
the reader is deeply involved. Lia’s candour and goofy To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16

47
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 CHILDREN’S BOOK ROUND-UP
F RANCES H ARDINGE ’s second P HILIP WOMACK RECOMMENDS F IVE
novel, Verdigris Deep (Macmillan
327pp £10.99), is complex, C HILDREN ’ S B OOKS FOR THE S UMMER novel. Usually concerned with
well-wrought and unsettling.
Three children, all unpopular at school, become the
unwilling agents of a terrifying, ancient wishing-well
sprite after they steal coins from her well. Each coin has a
wish attached to it, which must be fulfilled at all costs.
Ryan, our hero, is timid and clever. Chelle can’t stop talk-
ing and ‘looks as if she had been through the wash too
many times, losing her colour and courage in the rinse’.
And then there is Josh, brave (or stupid), whom the other
two worship.
Each is given a power by the Well Witch reflecting
their personality: Ryan grows eyes on the back of his
hands with which he can penetrate a different layer of
reality; Josh becomes able to manipulate electricity; and
Chelle acts as a psychic radio, picking up the wisher’s
thoughts – and transmitting them, whether she likes it
or not, in her own voice.
Hardinge is a mesmerising writer. She is as comfortable
with the bizarre as she is with the ordinary: shopping
trolleys stalk the children; posters move and talk. Her
description of the Well Witch sitting enthroned whilst ‘a
hundred cigarette butts smoked gently like incense sticks
in a church shrine’ and ‘A bent bicycle wheel spun slow-
ly and unevenly behind her head, a halo for a strange
saint’ conjures up a Spenserian monster.
Initially the three friends carry out simple wishes – for
a Harley Davidson, or a boyfriend. But then Chelle
picks up a killer’s thoughts, Josh becomes crazed with
power, and Ryan discovers the story of three men who,
also entrapped by the Well Witch, murdered a baby to
fulfil somebody’s wish. Things fall apart, and Hardinge
chillingly draws the story out to a startling conclusion.
This fantastical, folkloric and truly wonderful novel will
both frighten and enchant children of twelve and up.
There are also elements of the folktale and the fairy story ‘skeptical’ and ‘pleased to make your acquaintance’, espe-
in Tim Lott’s Fearless (Walker Books 267pp £9.99).
Although his novel treads familiar ground, he can be for-
given, since his heroine, Little Fearless, is appealing and
courageous. The setting is an Institute for delinquent girls
in a totalitarian city. The inmates are enslaved and deprived
of their identities, so they give each other nicknames like
Beauty and Stargazer. Little Fearless escapes – three times,
in traditional fairy tale style – to spread the word that the
Institute is not what it seems. The citizens are led by The
Boss, and fed a diet of propaganda on their vidscreens;
Little Fearless aims to break them out of their torpor.
Lott comes slightly unstuck with his MESSAGE, especial-
ly when he starts talking about the endless war on terrorism
that the city is engaged upon. You can all but hear the
creaking of the allegory wheels. That said, this is an engross- novel is slightly too obsessed with referring to other
ing, if a little worthy, book.
Marcus Sedgwick’s Blood Red, Snow White (Orion
48
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
192pp £9.99) is the closest thing
that he has written to an adult
vampires and clairvoyants, here
he turns to solid fact. It concerns the author of Old Peter’s
Russian Tales. Arthur Ransome is in Russia during the
First World War and the Revolution as a journalist; what’s
more, he’s in love with a Bolshevik – Trotsky’s secretary,
no less. Suspected by both sides of being an agent, he must
wade through the murky waters to find happiness. Based
on documents released by the secret services, Sedgwick’s
novel is challenging, stark and uncompromising, a thor-
oughly satisfying read for older teenagers – and it might
even give them a taste for history.
Flora Segunda of Crackpot Hall by Ysabeau Wilce
(Scholastic 432pp £16.99) is crazy and original, although
somewhat overlong. Flora Segunda lives in the shadow of
her dead older sister. There are four ‘great’ houses in Califa,
each inhabited by a ‘denizen’ – a Butler with supernatural
powers. The Fyrdraacas were once the glory of their coun-
try; now they moulder, their eleven-thousand-room Hall
empty. By mistake Flora stumbles across Valefor, the Butler
of the house whom her fearsome mother has imprisoned;
in trying to restore him she and her kilt-wearing friend
Udo become entangled with perilous matters.
Unfortunately, Flora is mildly irritating. It feels rather
like an American high-school girl playing at being an
English aristocrat. The world of Califa does not ring
true, either. There is an uneasy mixture of Mexican and
Germanic mythologies, and the city never becomes
alive. But Flora’s adventures are wild and exciting, and
the boisterous exuberance of the writing will carry girls
(and some boys) away for the whole holiday.
Here, There Be Dragons by James A Owen (Simon &
Schuster 336pp £12.99) made me wonder why publish-
ers don’t bother changing Americanisms into English. It is
very annoying to read supposedly English people saying
cially when they are meant to be mid-twentieth-century
Oxford men who turn out to be famous fantasy writers
(there are three – guess who). John, Jack and Charles
(Jack is a nickname) are entrusted with the ‘Imaginarium
Geographica’, an atlas of all the imaginary worlds (Lilliput
and so on) which exist in ‘The Archipelago of Dreams’.
In a Da Vinci Code-style ‘twist’ it turns out that every
‘fantasy’ writer worth his or her salt (Shakespeare, Mary
Shelley) has guarded this atlas from evil influence; the
three fledgling writers must continue their guardianship
and defend both the real and the imaginary worlds,
whilst dealing with dogmen, The Winter King and far
too many elves for my liking. I disapprove of the idea
that writers can’t make things up on their own, and the
books, but it will suit boys with a taste for adventure.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 FICTION

C RESSIDA C ONNOLLY to be turned into a golf course, in a story which begins,

characteristically: ‘“Well, at least don’t tell him”, their

CREVICES OF THE SOUL mother begged. “At least do nothing until he’s gone.”’
In another, a clergyman withholds his crisis of belief
from his sister, so that she can die in peace. Elsewhere,
C HEATING AT C ANASTA silence must be paid for: a priest must pay his tormentor
★ not to broadcast an invented, long-past abuse, so as to
By William Trevor protect the reputation of the wider church; a longed-for
(Viking 232pp £16.99) marriage cannot take place because the groom, a wid-
ower, has a child who is unable to articulate her grief for
IF THERE IS a theme running through William Trevor’s her dead mother.
brilliant new collection, it is reticence. Again and again, All of the stories in this book are good, but two of
lives are altered, or ruined – or, less often, saved – by them are outstanding. These are the first story, ‘The
things that are left unsaid. Such silence goes against the Dressmaker’s Child’, and the last one, ‘Folie à Deux’.
grain of a culture obsessed by disclosure and personal Even if you do not as a rule enjoy short stories, I beg you
revelation, but that is not to say that Trevor is old-fash- to read these. Again, they are concerned with terrible
ioned, much less squeamish. Within these twelve stories acts and their consequences; with keeping silence and
are many crimes: the murder of a prostitute, a child hit losing faith. The final tale, in particular, is a work of per-
by a car whose driver does not stop, a youth beaten to fect control and balance, moving back and forth across
death in a suburban garden. Terrible things happen, or almost forty years, from rural Ireland (‘when secrets
threaten to happen. Two nine-year-old boys push a dog became deception’) to the empty streets of Paris in the
out to sea on a lilo; a paedophile takes a young girl – ‘her early morning. This is the twelfth story in Trevor’s
bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark’ – for twelfth collection: an almost magical number for what
a walk by a canal; a tramp blackmails an innocent priest. could be his most mesmerising and haunting story.
I was reminded of Werner Herzog’s gruelling master- William Trevor is the greatest living exponent of the
piece Grizzly Man, a documentary about an eccentric form, able to conjure from a few pages an entire world
wildlife cameraman who was torn to death by bears. of desire and loss and pain. His work is seldom cheerful,
Towards the end of the film, Herzog puts on a pair of but that scarcely registers, for he is writing about things
headphones and listens to the actual soundtrack of the that matter; about the deepest and most secret crevices
man’s death; the cinema audience are obliged to look on, of the human soul.
watching him listening to this terrible thing, without the To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
sound. Many were shocked by the film’s violence, even
though they had neither seen nor heard anything more
violent than footage of bears gambolling in a Canadian
stream. Defending the work, Herzog said: ‘The artist
must not avert his gaze.’ In other words, it is only if the
artist does not look away from the abyss that the audience
(or viewer, or reader) receives an authentic experience.
William Trevor is doing something similar here. He
does not flinch from horror and darkness, yet nor does
he sensationalise these things. Evil may be inadvertent,
or clumsy: it is never elegant or just; or even, of itself,
very interesting. Its purpose, in his stories, is to test the
moral limits of his characters. What is of interest to him
is not the crimes themselves but the way in which they
affect, change and damage people. He gives no easy
answers. Redemption is not the point; a sort of desper-
ate, unspoken atonement is more likely. Only love is
noble, but it lacks the power to save a life. A husband
plays cards with his wife, who is in a home, with
Alzheimer’s: tenderly, he cheats in order to let her win;
it is her one remaining pleasure.
In some of these stories, love makes people silent.
What you don’t know can’t hurt you: an elderly wife
does not tell her ailing husband that his beloved farm is

49
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
BOY’S OWN STORY
N OW I S THE H OUR
★ hood and teenage years. The Kluseners are Catholics
By Tom Spanbauer
(Jonathan Cape 459pp £17.99)
TOM SPANBAUER’S LITERARY career seems back to front.
The natural sequence for a gay writer from the baby-
boomer generation, you’d imagine, is a thinly disguised
autobiography, followed by an Aids novel, then an explo-
ration of homosexual history. Yet he started with the
period piece and has only now, sixteen years later and
aged sixty, got round to producing a work that has the air
of a fictionalised misery memoir. His second novel, The
Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991), which made
his name in his forties, was a late outgrowth of the
60s/70s trend for portraying the American past as much
more like the turbulent, raunchy present than you’d guess
from sanitised conventional accounts of, say, the frontier
era, or the literature of the relevant period. The film of
Little Big Man, for example, implied a parallel between
nineteenth-century Indian wars and Vietnam; while
McCabe and Mrs Miller, also adapted from a novel, showed
a turn of the century mining-town brothel as not unlike
a multicultural commune.
Fiction that was part of this movement made margin-
alised figures its heroes and heroines: Indians, blacks, gays,
hookers, outlaws, proto-feminists, dissidents, dwarfs, hallu-
cinatory drug-takers, outrageous artists or performers, and
so on. By 1991, every individual option had long ago
been snapped up; where Spanbauer scored was in perming
several. Shed, the narrator of The Man Who, ticked three
boxes as a bisexual Native American male prostitute. Set in
an alternative Wild West, the story he told centred on the
clash between a small-town whorehouse and the small-
minded Mormons trying to close it down.
When Jonathan Cape naughtily describe Now Is the
Hour as Spanbauer’s ‘first major novel’ since this break-
through book, they airbrush In the City of Shy Hunters
(2001) out of his oeuvre – though how a 560-page por-
trayal of New York in the early years of Aids can tacitly
be dismissed as piffling is not very clear. Breaking a ten-
year silence, In the City followed a sexually mixed-up
Midwesterner to the Big Apple. There, an affair with a
black homosexual drag queen (three ticks again) liberates
him, but he witnesses Aids turning from rumour to gay-
slaying plague. One disadvantage of the back-to-front
CV is that, when Spanbauer at last feels ready for his
Bildungsroman, what should come across as fresh and
heartfelt seems instead a lazy recycling. Much of Now Is
the Hour could be seen as a synthesis of the previous novels,
50
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
combining In the City’s confused country boy with The
Man Who’s sexually liberated Native American.
It is set in Idaho in the 1960s, and opens with Rigby
John Klusener, the narrator, escaping to San Francisco
towards the end of the decade. The rest of the novel then
unfolds chronologically in flashback, covering his child-
who own a farm next to an Indian reservation. Bullied at
school, Rigby John finds life equally fraught at home,
where Dad is macho and hidebound while Mom has an
artistic and potentially more tolerant side but has been
mentally fragile since the early death of a younger son.
‘Now Is the Hour’ is a song she plays on the piano,
and it comes to symbolise his bond with her when the
household atmosphere is relatively tranquil. Most of the
time, though, he’s in disgrace, and punished with a mix-
ture of beatings and emergency confessions to a priest as
Dad and Mom battle to defend their 40s time-warp
from the 60s values that either seep in via the radio or
are caught like germs through his mingling at school
with kids from less conservative households.
Friendships are the usual source of trouble. There’s
Billie, Rigby John’s platonic girlfriend, who is not
viewed as good marriage material as she comes from a
broken home and resembles a Greenwich Village
bohemian inexplicably airlifted into the Midwest. Flaco
and Acho, two young Mexicans hired to spend one
summer transporting baled hay from field to farm with
Rigby John, prompt a recognition that he can be attract-
ed to men when the trio go skinny-dipping. George,
maintaining the triple-tick tradition as a gay Indian alco-
holic (four ticks if you add his weekend transvestism),
replaces them the following year and continues the
teenager’s sexual education. While The Man Who
revived the 70s vogue for history reinterpreted, Now Is
the Hour resuscitates the same decade’s love of recreating
writers’ small-town boyhoods: in crude terms, it’s
American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show given a gay
twist and transplanted to Idaho. This may sound promis-
ing, but the novel disappoints. Given the mainstream
roles now occupied by gays, and the plethora of gay
memoirs and autobiographical fiction in recent decades,
an account of growing up lusting after men no longer
possesses the allure of novelty or transgression (describ-
ing a same-sex, different-race affair might do, if only
Spanbauer himself hadn’t done that twice before).
And although some scenes stay in the memory, the
writing never does: the prose is uniformly pedestrian,
and its appeal is not enhanced by a wearying penchant
for the kind of single-sentence paragraphs used in the
thrillers of James Patterson and Jodi Picoult, which pre-
suppose readers with limited attention-spans.
The main flaw of this overlong, stylistically barren
novel, however, is that it’s simply way too late: had it
appeared around the time Edmund White published A
 FICTION
Boy’s Own Story, it would have seemed excitingly daring
and original. With hapless irony, the title points to the
P AMELA N ORRIS
BEARING WITNESS
L IFE C LASS
★ Like Barker’s earlier, highly
By Pat Barker
(Hamish Hamilton 248pp £16.99)
PAT BARKER’S NEW novel begins in the life class at the
Slade School of Art in London, where a young artist, Paul
Tarrant, is struggling to draw a naked female model to the
exacting standards of Henry Tonks, a teacher obsessed by
anatomy. It is spring 1914, a few months before the out-
break of the First World War. By the end of the novel,
Paul will have become closely acquainted with the bones,
nerves and arteries that, as Tonks insists his students
remember, animate the smooth surface of the skin.
Paul is able to study at the Slade because his grandmother,
a working-class landlady with a talent for rent-collecting,
has left him a legacy. When Tonks points out that he
appears to have nothing to say, Paul consoles himself by his
passion for Teresa, an artist’s model who is being stalked by
her violent estranged husband. At the same time, he is
attracted to Elinor Brooke, a fellow student struggling to
liberate herself from her conventional, well-to-do family.
Beautiful but sexually wary, Elinor is also pursued by Kit
Neville, an artist building a reputation by painting indus-
trial landscapes. Elinor’s closest relationships are with her
girl-friends, particularly Catherine Stein, whose surname
leads to persecution when anti-German fever grips
England. As the action flits from Teresa’s basement behind
St Pancras station to the polished dining tables of Kit and
Elinor’s family homes, Barker traces the volatile relation-
ships between the group.
The second half of the novel takes place after the war has
begun. Working first in a makeshift hospital near Ypres and
then as an ambulance driver, Paul helps to patch up the
wounded, cauterising stumps left by amputated limbs and
bandaging bodies that are frequently damaged beyond
recovery. His infatuation with Teresa is over. Instead, his
tentative courtship of Elinor has deepened into friendship
and, eventually, when she pays a fleeting visit to Ypres, they
become lovers. But their affair is compromised by their dif-
fering histories and their opposing views of the war. As
their letters reveal, they lead increasingly parallel lives.
Elinor refuses to be deflected from her commitment to art,
and joins the circle of defiant anti-warmongers who flock
to Ottoline Morrell’s weekly parties. Paul, immersed in his
work with the wounded and his new friendship with a
Quaker, Richard Lewis, rents a room in Ypres where he
51
problem – its real hour was twenty-five years ago.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
can paint in peace. Here, he finds
his voice as an artist by recording
the realities of wounded men.
When he himself is wounded
and returns to London, his future
with Elinor seems uncertain.
praised trilogy of novels about
the 1914–18 war (The Ghost
Road won the 1995 Booker Barker: vivid
Prize), Life Class is a compelling
read, invigorated by a vivid use of language. Once again,
Barker is fascinated by class, and by the possibilities of sex,
love and intimacy. In a novel that is marked by violence
(eruptions of male aggression in the first half of the book
and, later, the organised carnage of war), she asks difficult
questions about the representation of atrocities, a problem
raised in previous novels. In The Ghost Road, Billy reflects
that words are inadequate to express what happened at
Mons, Loos and the Somme; only the names of the bat-
tles have any resonance. In a more recent novel, Double
Vision, set in the period after Bosnia, Afghanistan and
9/11, Barker worries away at the capacity of photographs
to tell the truth about rape, brutality and suffering. And
when does witness become dissemination? The debate is
continued by Paul and Elinor. Why would anyone want
to exhibit paintings of damaged men, she asks, and any-
way, wouldn’t this be voyeurism, ‘an arty freak show’? For
Elinor, the ‘proper subject’ for art is ‘the things we choose
to love’. But Paul has watched a desperate patient pouring
out meaningless scribble on sheet after sheet of paper. For
him, bearing witness is essential if non-combatants are to
understand the suffering of war.
The relationship between Paul and Elinor is central to
Life Class, but it doesn’t quite convince. The difficulty
may lie with Elinor. Perhaps because Barker takes such
pains to give her depth and nuance, her denial of the war
seems obtuse rather than reasonable, and her arguments
with Paul come across as staged and naive. There is a
general problem of credibility with the artists in the
novel. Someone is always whipping out a sketchbook,
but I had little sense that these people were truly engaged
with the challenge of putting images on paper. More
persuasive are Barker’s subliminal references to works by
real-life artists. There is a glimpse of Gertler’s The Merry-
Go-Round in the scene at the fair on Hampstead Heath,
C R W Nevinson’s Returning to the Trenches seems to lurk
behind Paul’s description of his journey to the front line,
and Goya’s desolate hanged men in the Disasters of War
sequence are disquietingly echoed by the straw-filled
‘corpses’ used for bayonet practice in Russell Square.
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 FICTION
N IGEL J ONES
HOT AND GOLD
C HARLEMAGNE AND ROLAND
★ mate greatness. For all his faults, he is, Massie convincing-
By Allan Massie
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 256pp £12.99)
THE LONG PERIOD of turmoil that enveloped Europe in
the wake of the fall of Rome was so devoid of recognis-
able written records that historians lazily dubbed it the
‘Dark Ages’. Modern archaeological discoveries, and a
reassessment of the scanty written evidence that does
survive from Europe’s big sleep, have, excitingly, enabled
contemporary historians to confirm what the myths and
the legends suggest: that the ‘barbarian’ cultures that
succeeded Rome were richer, more complex and more
‘civilised’ than the Rome-worshippers allowed. And the
Arthurian legends, it seems, were more than likely
grounded in a thick mulch of verifiable fact.
Even so, the Dark Ages still spawned many myth-
makers. Allan Massie, in his trilogy of Dark Age novels
(The Evening of the World, Arthur the King and now this,
the culminating volume), proves himself a modern
Malory, producing enchanting fiction from a mix of
historical truth and his own informed imagination.
The chief characters are the Frankish Emperor Charles
M ARTYN B EDFORD
MISTRESS OF DISGUISE
T HE M ISSING P ERSON ’ S G UIDE TO L OVE
★ since consigned to the files of unsolved crimes.
By Susanna Jones
(Picador 282pp £16.99)
WHEN A CHILD dies, the bereaved torture themselves with
asking: Why did someone so young have to die? What
kind of life might they have gone on to experience? If the
child has disappeared, presumed murdered, there is yet
more speculation: How did they die? Where is the body?
Who killed them? On such questions Susanna Jones’s new
novel turns. Julia has been gone nearly twenty years when
her one-time best friend, Isabel, revisits their childhood
town determined to piece together the puzzle of her
death once and for all. For Isabel, in addition to the tor-
ment of ‘not knowing’, there is the guilt of the survivor:
two fifteen-year-olds set off on their paper rounds that
morning in 1982, but only one came home. The catalyst
for her quest is the death in a car crash of Owen, the girls’
classmate and Julia’s newly jilted boyfriend at the time of
52
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
the Great and his knightly nephew Roland. Old Charles
is a much more complex creation than his heroic nephew,
who rides towards Roncesvalles to his death. Whilst
showing him to be cruel, cunning, brave in battle but
astonishingly mean-spirited and boringly vindictive at
times, Massie leaves us in no doubt of Charlemagne’s ulti-
ly suggests, one of the titans of history, a true father of
Europe who carried the burden of Christian chivalry and
passed it on to the next generation, represented by
Roland. He, however, was not destined to see its fruits, as
he died, stemming the influx of the Eastern infidel on a
lonely mountain pass.
Massie’s narrator throughout the trilogy is a man from
his own country: Michael Scott, a Merlin-like figure,
half wizard and half scholar, who died around 1230 and
whose body lies in Melrose Abbey. Scott’s audience and
pupil is the boy who would grow up to be one of
Charlemagne’s successors, the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II, who is clearly to be the next link in the
binding chain of civilisation. Allan Massie manages to
pull together his disparate myths and legends – of battle,
sorcery, intrigue, eroticism, suffering and cruelty – into
a coherent, enthralling whole. He can even get away
with writing a sentence like this: ‘I warn you that if you
play me false I shall split the pair of you from guts to
gizzard.’ A perfect book for those who like their history
hot and gold.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
her disappearance. Isabel suspects Owen of killing her, but
no body was found and no one has ever been charged.
Returning to her native Yorkshire from Istanbul, where
she has made a new life with her Turkish husband and
their young daughter, she sees Owen’s funeral as her
opportunity to rake over a case that the police have long
This might read like the set-up for a straightforward
murder mystery, but anyone familiar with Jones’s two
previous books will know that, in her deliciously disorien-
tating fictional worlds, nothing is ever quite as it seems. In
her debut, The Earthquake Bird, the subtle unravelling of
the heroine’s true nature from the version of herself she
offered the reader was a model of unreliable narration.
Water Lily, meanwhile, evolved into a game of psychologi-
cal chess between two people whose misrepresentations of
themselves and misreadings of one another left us
enthralled and disturbed in equal measure. Jones is a
mistress of disguise, not just in her characterisation and
plotting, but in her blurring of the divisions between right
and wrong. Hers isn’t quite the deliberate amorality of
Patricia Highsmith, but she similarly denies us any easy
options when it comes to taking sides for or against her
protagonists. With Isabel, in The Missing Person’s Guide to
Love, Jones has fashioned her most complex, involving
 FICTION
heroine yet and by far her most audacious sleight of hand in
terms of a storyteller. To call it a twist would be to devalue
what is really a hidden undercurrent of the whole narrative;
nevertheless the revelation, when it comes, is breathtaking.
From the outset, there is an unsettling quality to
Isabel’s tale that both invites readers to accept, and causes
us to question, her reconstruction of the events sur-
rounding Julia’s disappearance. Set in the two days either
side of Owen’s funeral, the novel is assembled around a
series of Isabel’s conversations (with a policewoman; with
Owen’s mate John; with Owen’s mother and sister; with
an old school friend) as she attempts to make sense of
what happened all those years ago. These edgy, almost
surreal dialogues are intercut with flashbacks to 1982,
increasingly odd text messages between Isabel and her
M ONI M OHSIN
HAUNTED SOULS
I NSOMNIA
★ before siege?’
By Aamer Hussein
(Telegram Books 133pp £8.99)
IN THE TITLE story of this, Aamer Hussein’s fourth collec-
tion of short stories, one writer asks another: ‘Why don’t
you write a story about all that – regrets, fears, loneliness
and joy?’ The book is just that: a delicate exploration of
the effect of despair – arising from personal loss and public
upheavals – on a writer’s sensibility. ‘Insomnia’ features a
writer called Murad who attempts to compose a piece on
happiness but doesn’t get beyond ‘an allusive opening pas-
sage about dead poets’. Triggered by news of a devastating
earthquake in Pakistan, his own personal sadness over-
whelms him. It robs him of sleep and stifles his creativity.
Unable to find comfort in the company of others, Murad
reflects how, ‘in dark places, the world’s grief and our own
could melt into one another and become the same’.
Hussein writes about writers and the wellsprings of
their creativity. In this gem-like collection he asks the
question that lies at the very heart of storytelling: why
and for whom do we write stories? In ‘Hibiscus Days’ he
queries the obligation of a writer to engage in political
struggle. Set in the 1980s, when Pakistan was in the grip
of a savage military dictatorship, the story charts the
dilemma of Armaan, a poet. After a brief stay in London,
Armaan returns to Pakistan, aflame with political pur-
pose. But the firebrand activist soon abandons ideological
theatre and finds succour in the local folk songs and tra-
ditional fables that touch him more profoundly than
dialectical materialism. In vacating the political arena, he
loses his many Marxist fans but asserts his ‘right to live in
peace in a troubled land’.
53
husband Mete, and a sequence of short italicised sections
narrated by Isabel’s Aunt Maggie, a famous novelist, who
provided a refuge for her niece when she became
derailed by the loss of Julia. More than one story is being
told here, and their authorship and trustworthiness are as
uncertain as Isabel’s own pursuit of ‘the truth’. What
begins as an inquiry into the apparent murder of a friend
gradually turns into a process of self-examination. Back
in the place where she grew up, immersed in memories
that don’t seem to cohere, estranged from her loved ones,
Isabel struggles to square the girl she was with the
woman she believes herself to be. In trying literally, at
one point to dig up Julia’s corpse, she risks burying her-
self in the collapsed excavations of her own past.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Hussein’s protagonists are self-aware, haunted souls,
who often question their right to personal happiness, as
if writing enforces a primary responsibility to their read-
ers. In ‘The Angelic Disposition’ a female novelist living
in the tumultuous years leading up to the partition of
India observes: ‘But to sing so blithely of love in a time
At times bleak, Hussein’s stories are nonetheless tinged
with hope. Armaan dies alone, but his book of poems
goes on to achieve cult status. Murad finds, if not happi-
ness, then solace in the realisation that ‘happiness and
despair partake of each other; are the interplay of leaf and
shadow, sun and its reflection on water’. ‘The Lark’ is a
simple, lyrical story of joyous homecoming. ‘The Angelic
Disposition’, the most beautiful story in the collection, is
an unequivocal celebration of the resilience of the creative
spirit in the face of calamity. A childless widow looks
back on a life of quiet, unassuming industry and, despite
her husband’s murder and her exile from her home, finds
peace and accommodation through her work. Creativity
becomes its own justification.
Hussein’s fiction is informed by a multitude of influ-
ences, prominent among them his knowledge of Muslim
poetry and philosophy. While this enriches his work with
layers of meaning, it also runs the risk of rendering it
inaccessible for readers not familiar with his unexplained
references. In ‘The Book of Maryam’, for instance, the
meaning hinges on a Quranic quotation about the birth
of Jesus. For those who do not recognise it as such, the
story is at best laconic, at worst, incomprehensible.
Aamer Hussein is a consummate stylist, though. His
prose is restrained, precise and yet deeply moving. He is
a sensuous writer in whose stories nature acts as a balm
on even the most weary of sensibilities. The detached,
cool narrator of ‘Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de
Barrameda’ observes the play of sunlight on a woman’s
face: ‘Sunlight dapples my sister’s cheekbones, flickers
on her fine drawn features. She dances with her face.’
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LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 FICTION
F RANCIS K ING
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
T HE C ONDOR ’ S H EAD :
A N A MERICAN ROMANCE
★ after the Duc has been killed, the
By Ferdinand Mount
(Chatto & Windus 325pp £17.99)
T HOUGH THE MAIN narrative of this novel is set in
the closing years of the eighteenth century, two near-
contemporary chapters bracket it. These – afterthoughts
I should guess – are effortful and leaden in comparison
with the confident vigour of the rest of the book.
The initial chapter presents us with four people holed
up together in the wilds of Idaho: an English male
writer, an English girl, and two American men. One of
the American men is in love with the other, who in
turn is in love with the girl. As though the chapter is a
summary of a novel or at least a long short story, we are
offered far too much information about these people
and their doings in far too cramped a space. When the
straight American asserts that his countrymen ‘are great
at saying “Hi!” to new people but have no gift for inti-
macy’, this leads to a discussion of how Western culture
has ‘segued from the idea of giving yourself totally to
Jesus to one of giving yourself totally to love’.
The next day, the gay American suggests that an ances-
tor of his, William Short, might be a good subject for the
Englishman’s next book. In 1876, Short went to Paris to
serve as secretary to Thomas Jefferson, recently appointed
as American minister to France. Seduced by the sugges-
tion, the Englishman embarks on producing the narrative
that eventually constitutes most of the novel under review.
At its centre Mount places Short’s protracted, tortuous
love affair with Rosalie (who is already married to her
elderly uncle, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld), and in
doing so puts under scrutiny the hypothesis, advanced by
the straight American, that his compatriots are incapable
of sustaining a loving relationship.
Since Short is related to Jefferson (who regards him as
an adoptive son), he meets through the great man a host
of people whose lives of power and privilege will all too
soon be consumed by the flames of revolution. Mount
brilliantly evokes this doomed world, as his hero now
enthusiastically humps his way through an extravagant
orgy in one of the architectural follies of the Désert de
Retz, now listens to the mathematician and philosopher
Condorcet hold forth at awesomely tedious length, now
admires Houdon’s ubiquitous portrait busts, and now
continues to carry on his secret liaison. Mount convinc-
ingly depicts Jefferson as a man of remarkable gifts, but
also demonstrates how, as a consummate politician, he
54
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
allows his ambition to take
precedence over both the tragedy
engulfing France and the career
of his adopted son.
From the moment Short first
sees his Rosalie, he becomes
infatuated with her. But even
lovers are only intermittently
prepared to make the sacrifices
that a marr iage will demand.
Short has had other, transitory Mount: piquant
relationships, even contracting
gonorrhoea (the chief symptom of which Mount oddly
imagines to be the chancre of syphilis) while on a tour
of Italy with two libidinous fellow countrymen. When,
having been separated by the Terror, the couple are at
last reunited, sex is listless and perfunctory. Short
returns to America and six days later Rosalie marries
another French aristocrat. Throughout, Mount keeps
teasing the reader with the question of whether the
relationship has been genuinely powered by love or
merely by sexual obsession.
Jefferson, who talked and wrote so much about human
rights but possessed some hundred slaves, took a sixteen-
year-old black girl, Sally Hemings, to Paris with him to
look after his two daughters. In recent years DNA tests
have shown it to be highly probable that she had six chil-
dren by him. Mount contests Jefferson’s parentage of the
first of these children, for reasons too complex to be given
here. In his novel, Sally’s first child is by Short – who
takes her virginity and then, after a period of intermittent
dalliance, breaks with her out of fear for his reputation,
without learning of her condition.
I prefer Mount’s contemporary novels to his historical
ones. However, apart from its wretched first chapter and
its lamely facetious and therefore even more wretched last,
this is a highly accomplished work. Whether he is describ-
ing a visit that Short makes to the mansion in which
Mesmer, magic rod in hand, receives the patients who will
submit to his treatment by animal magnetism, evoking the
neoclassical architecture of C N Ledoux, or describing
Short’s meeting with the bewildered, incompetent Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette, he has the ability to make one
see everything with extraordinary clarity. The coolness of
his irony has a way of distancing one from the passions,
delights and horrors that so constantly succeed each other;
but the overall picture is a memorable one.
The writer with whom Ferdinand Mount has most in
common in his historical novels is the Gore Vidal of
Burr, 1876 and Lincoln. There is the same erudition, the
same wit, and the same remarkable ability to imagine in
every detail a society in some ways so uncannily like our
own and in others so piquantly different.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 FICTION

writers inc.
Funded by the Arts Council
M ATT T HORNE
CELEBRATION
THE MEXICANS ARE COMING Friday 6 to Sunday 8 July
at the beautiful medieval Abbey at Sutton
I F YOU L IKED S CHOOL YOU ’ LL L OVE WORK Courtenay, Oxfordshire
★
By Irvine Welsh
(Jonathan Cape 320pp £11.99) This will be the thirtieth writers inc. residential
writing weekend held to be held at the Abbey. To
‘RATTLESNAKES’, THE OPENING story in Irvine Welsh’s If mark the occasion on the Saturday night (7.30pm)
You Liked School You’ll Love Work, his first collection since there will be a writers inc. party (in aid of the
1994’s The Acid House, is an extended dirty joke. Eugene, Abbey Restoration Fund) with readings from DAVID
Scott and Madeline, three young Americans, are out in CONSTANTINE, SUE HUBBARD, BERNARD O’DON-
the desert after frying their brains at Nevada’s notorious AGHUE, and MARIO PETRUCCI with music from
Burning Man festival. Eugene is surreptitiously mastur- TOM BUTTERWORTH (guitar)
bating in their shared tent when a snake bites his penis.
Eugene, who has lusted after Madeline for weeks, is des-
perate for her to suck the poison from his member, but There are four places still available for the resi-
dential writing
she’s too scared of catching a disease. Scott offers to do it
weekend (from £169) Call 020 8305 8844
instead, but Eugene is reluctant, suddenly afraid that his
To book for the party (tickets £15) ring the Abbey
friend is a closet homosexual. Realising he might die if
on 01235 847401
he refuses, he gives in. Then the Mexicans show up.
No other literary author could get away with this sort
of silly material. But when he’s operating at his best,
Welsh’s narrative control is so expert that he can elevate ******
anything, and ‘Rattlesnakes’ is scary, erotic and extreme-
ly funny. He performs a similar trick with the title story,
which initially seems like an over-familiar Sexy Beast IS JOURNALISM PROPER WRITING?
style tale of an expat English bar owner on the Costa Sunday 15 July 1.15 to 5.00 pm
Brava who fears his daughter is being drawn into a at the Barbican Library in the City of London
crime ring, with Welsh building up a powerful sense of
menace before revealing that the gangsters are actors, A writing workshop led by SUE HUBBARD and
and letting the dread collapse into comedy. His comedy ANDREW GILLIGAN
is based on knowing exactly when to subvert stereo- explores the skill of writing in journalism.
types, and the way he manages to do this is masterful.
A running joke in Welsh’s early novels was that every Tickets from the Barbican Box Office 020 7628 2326
book would have a scene in which a dog met an unfor- (capacity: 14 participants)
tunate end. So at first, the third story, ‘The DOGS of
Lincoln Park’, seems like a double play on this theme.
The ‘DOGS’ are ‘depressed, obsessive girl snobs’, a gang
of Chicago socialites. Kendra Cross, the leader of the ******
gang, has a papillon named Toto, and when a Korean
chef moves into her apartment and the dog disappears,
she becomes convinced that he has killed and eaten it.
Welsh maintains the possibility that the chef may have THE TOWNHOUSE AT TORROX
done exactly that and, furthermore, that he might also Two places still remain available for the writers
have killed Kendra the (human) DOG, reversing the inc. week long residential writing holiday in
structure of a horror story for humorous effect. Illegal Andalucia (from £350 – includes day trip to
dog-fighting also shows up elsewhere in the book. Granada)
Less good is ‘Miss Arizona’, a straightforward ‘Tales of To book ring writers inc. 020 8305 8844
the Unexpected’ story about a struggling hack writer and
wannabe director who has moved on from porn films to
writing a biography of an independent film director. After
tracking down the director’s widow, he finds her story so

LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

 FICTION
inspiring it transforms the screenplay he’s writing and for
the first time in years his agent starts returning his calls.
But the widow comes up with a sinister way of making
sure he doesn’t leave her. Welsh works hard but his narra-
tor doesn’t convince, and although the ending may be a
deliberate Roger Corman homage (the original Little Shop
of Horrors, maybe, or A Bucket of Blood), it feels predictable
compared to the plot twists in the rest of the collection.
While these four stories see Welsh expanding into new
territory (his characters have always enjoyed travel, but it
seems likely that his recent marriage to an American
woman may have inspired the three US-set stories), the
long, final tale ‘Kingdom of Fife’ is closer to his previous
work. His use of Scottish vernacular here makes the story
his most demanding fiction yet, and while there are
bright moments in the account of a relationship between
a jockey-tur ned-Subbuteo player and an aspir ing
L OUISE G UINNESS
THREADS OF LIFE
C ONSEQUENCES
★ breeding forced on us by pheromones? And even if it is,
By Penelope Lively
(Fig Tree 305pp £16.99)
IN HER LATEST book, which tells the stories of three gener-
ations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope
Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It
begins in 1935, when a debutante called Lorna elopes with
a wood engraver, upsetting her mother’s plans to make a
brilliant marriage. In a remote cottage in Somerset Lorna
learns to skin rabbits, grow vegetables and keep chickens.
Lively excels on the subject of tenderness, and this love
affair is finely drawn; Lorna and Matt treat each other with
kindness, humour and wonder. They have a daughter,
Molly, but then war breaks out; by the time Matt volun-
teers and is sent to Crete, the reader has a sense of forebod-
ing. The tension, and Lorna’s heart, is broken in 1941
when the postman approaches ‘neither smiling nor waving,
… the man is beyond apology; he is felled by what he has
to do, made speechless. He simply holds out the telegram.’
This is the prelude to the stories of Molly and, later, of
her daughter Ruth. The women share a dogged bohemi-
anism and reject conformity in order to live in remote
cottages or tall, crooked houses inhabited by a motley
collection of eccentrics. They organise poetry readings or
work in little art galleries. It is refreshing to read a book
by a female writer in which all the male characters have
an almost noble decency. They’re not interested in the
material world. They run the little art galleries or anti-
quarian bookshops; they mend motorcycles and write
poetry in their spare time. Some of them have beards.
56
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
showjumper, it’s essentially a rewrite of The Loneliness of
the Long Distance Runner (acknowledged in the story
itself) and wears out its welcome long before the end.
At nearly four hundred pages, this is a generous col-
lection, and alongside last year’s The Bedroom Secrets of the
Master Chefs serves as proof that in spite of his burgeon-
ing screenwriting career Welsh remains as committed to
prose fiction as ever. If the success of Trainspotting has
overshadowed much of his career so far, with recurrent
characters, reoccurring themes and stylistic connections
evident between his debut and much of his subsequent
work, If You Liked School You’ll Love Work feels like a
fresh start, and may usher in a new wave of appreciation
for an author who, whilst enjoying enormous commer-
cial success and a cultural impact beyond most writers,
has never quite received his critical due.
To order this book at £xx, see LR Bookshop on page xx
When hearts are broken the women do the damage, but
gently, extricating themselves with apologetic grace.
Lively’s characters do not go in for histrionics.
This is a thoughtful, calm and enthralling book. Lively
examines the reality of human existence mainly through
Ruth. Is love all just a matter of biology, she ponders? Is
does that matter? ‘Suppose we just mated’, Ruth says,
‘like animals. Sensible genetic behaviour.’ Death too
casts its long shadow over all the characters, and the
grief seeps through the pages, almost agonisingly so at
times; and yet the atmosphere is far from sombre, not
least because Lively allows her characters the intelligence
and courage to spurn the urge to define themselves by
the tragedies they experience. They have the ability to
deal with sorrow and the imagination to appreciate all
that is precious in life: happiness is described as ‘a sheer
relish for what’s on offer. An animal sort of feeling.’
As the novel unfolds, Lively deftly draws the fragment-
ed past together. The threads that bind Lorna, Molly and
Ruth together are as strong and as fine as silk. Ruth
makes a pilgrimage to Crete, where her grandfather was
killed in action, and visits the graveyard where she even-
tually locates a little white headstone engraved with his
name, one among thousands. She has been taken to the
spot by an impossibly good-looking guide called Manolo,
and for one perilous moment the poignancy of this scene
is threatened: is Ruth going to have a Shirley Valentine
experience? Luckily Lively is too canny a writer to opt
for such an obvious ploy. I think it was just a tease.
Consequences shows Penelope Lively at the top of her
game. She writes beautifully about people doing their best,
about generosity and compassion. She is prolific, having
now produced forty novels and short story collections,
but she is never less than vigilant in her impeccable style
and in her pursuit of probing the heart of what matters.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 16
 FICTION

L INDY B URLEIGH meets his soulmate, Francis Winham, and together they
indulge in muscular, militaristic fantasies, both deeply

DARK YOUNG THINGS ashamed of their parents’ effete liberalism and pacifism.
When the truth about his father is revealed to Charles
in a brutal fashion, his friendship with Francis is also
S AFE H OUSES destroyed, and his unease with his parents crystallises into
★ the rage that defines him. Edie’s brusque exculpatory
By David Pryce-Jones words – ‘if it doesn’t bother me, I don’t see why it should
(Sinclair-Stevenson 186pp £12.99) bother you’ – haunt his adult life and he remains ‘in
thrall to the past’, for ever emotionally trapped by the
SAFE HOUSES is a novel but it is written so convincingly greater drama and adventure of Adrian and Edie’s lives.
as a memoir, an unusually unsettling and poignant one, He is left private means by Edie’s brother killed in the
that it reads like thinly disguised autobiography. David war, gets through a couple of unsatisfactory marriages,
Pryce-Jones, an eminent historian, novelist and com- and travels in postwar Germany, where he uncovers more
mentator, keeps the reader guessing how closely the nar- dark secrets to indict a morally compromised generation.
rator’s unconventional childhood, spent before and dur- While David Pryce-Jones’s characters may be fictional,
ing the Second World War, resembles his own. The the anger he expresses, albeit in poised, measured prose,
intermingling of imaginary and real characters, as well as towards the intellectuals and artists who flirted with
the acutely observed period detail, brings a particular alternative lifestyles and radical politics in the aftermath
authenticity to the author’s vivid evocation of an era. of the First World War is genuine. The charge made
The steely and furious contempt with which the subject against them is that they are ‘wreckers, immersed in illu-
of the story, Adrian Maingard, is introduced sets the tone sion and flattery and mimicry, blurring every distinction
of the novel, and when it emerges that the incriminatory between right and wrong’, and that their careless social
narrative voice belongs to Charles Maingard, Adrian’s only and sexual experiments inflicted moral chaos and inse-
child, it seems, intriguingly, that this book is going to be curity on succeeding generations. At the end of his life
an elegantly written anatomy of a dysfunctional family. Charles’s vituperation subsides, but while there is regret
Adrian is a famous, but not quite brilliant, concert pianist, and sadness there is no spirit of forgiveness.
and he and his wife Edie are contemporaries of the elite To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 16
Bloomsbury circle (though firmly consigned to its fringes).
The critic John Middleton Murry, husband of Katherine
Mansfield and friend of D H Lawrence, is a visitor to their
house, but that’s as illustrious as it gets. Charles, a watchful,
solitary child, is mildly neglected by his parents, who
devote their energies to ‘art’ and the pursuit of Adrian’s
musical career. His early years, if lonely, pass comfortably
in Primrose Hill, where the Maingards live in a beautiful
Regency house which – like their prized possessions, a
Venetian chandelier and a painting by Guercino – has
been paid for by Edie’s parents, who bankroll their
Bohemian lifestyle. Among other things, working-class
Adrian stands accused of marrying for money.
Charles’s grievances against his parents seem to start –
rather unfairly perhaps – in earnest when their house is
hit by a stray bomb during the Blitz, leaving the family
homeless. He is evacuated to Wales to stay with his
mother’s parents as a result. Conservative by instinct and
taste, he immediately feels at home in the ordered, solid-
ly upper-middle-class world of his grandparents, and he
happily embraces the narrow conventionalism and cul-
tural philistinism which Edie was so desperate to escape.
Towards the end of the war the dispossessed Maingards
rent a cottage in the grounds of a grand estate in Kent,
giving Charles an insight into aristocratic life against
which his parents’ er ratic existence is, again,
unfavourably compared. At his progressive school he

57
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 FICTION
R ACHEL H ORE
Problems with
Parenting
M INDING
★ out to be dangerously crazy.
By Chris Paling
(Portobello 192pp £7.99)
CHRIS PALING gives a voice to the powerless in this deli-
cate and intimately drawn portrait of a mentally ill
woman who has been separated from her young son.
Jane Hackett lives every day very carefully, taking her
medication, keeping her flat clean, rarely going out, try-
ing, not always successfully, to appear ‘normal’ so that
she’ll be allowed to see nine-year-old Billy once every
three months. Her beauty makes her the target of preda-
tory men, and her over-formal style of dress marks her
out to the casual observer as ‘odd’. Whereas her friend
Patrick at the second-hand bookshop (where she’ll buy
a book and sell it back to him when she’s read it) nods
to her when she enters ‘as a compliment to her individ-
uality’, his less sensitive partner Fergus interprets the nod
as an indication that a loony has come into the shop.
This either/or approach to Jane becomes a shibboleth
for the reader. We value most those characters who
accept her as she is.
Billy is a clear-sighted child. He recognises his moth-
er’s faults, remembers her tendency to lose control easily
– once after she failed to read the small print of a special
offer at a photographer’s studio; another time when a
school mate’s parent wouldn’t allow her child home to
Billy’s for tea. Still he loves his mother and wants only to
be with her. The powers that be, however, have decided
they know better and have placed him with unsuitable
foster parents whose infertile marriage is probably head-
ing for the rocks. Practically all he has to remember Jane
by is an elderly bar of chocolate she once gave him, on
the wrapper of which she scribbled an address. When
she misses an appointment with him because she’s in
hospital again, he runs away to find her.
Billy’s got a raw deal with his parenting. So had his
mother before him, which goes some way to explain her
mental instability. Her father abused her in some unspeci-
fied fashion, then both parents abandoned her – we learn
more of this in Paling’s plausibly redemptive ending. As
an adult she longs for the stability of a loving partner,
keeps precious mementos of her fleeting relationship with
Billy’s father, a married man named John. A newspaper
story about John’s demise engenders the breakdown that
wipes out her longed-for appointment with their son.
58
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
It frequently occurs to the reader that hardly any char-
acter in Minding earns the epithet ‘normal’. They are
certainly needy, most of them, from Billy’s obsessively
clean foster mother Fiona to lonely Maude, Jane’s next-
door neighbour, who tests the bed springs with wizened
old Alf from downstairs. Paling knows when to draw
lines, though – Jane’s confidante, a fellow hospital
inmate known for her wacky dress sense as The Sugar
Plum Fairy, might dole out wise advice, but she turns
Chris Paling’s talent for wry observation saves his
novel from ever becoming depressing, earnest or dull.
And often he stirs us to r ighteous anger. Whilst
acknowledging that Jane does need psychiatric treat-
ment, one can’t help sharing in her vilification of some
of the professionals on her case who patronise her, make
decisions without listening to her, and deny Billy suffi-
cient access to his mother. Like a rebellious citizen in a
totalitarian state, Jane is old and savvy enough to play by
their rules. Billy is too powerless even to insist that his
foster parents call him by his correct name.
To order this book at £6.40, see LR Bookshop on page 16
AUDIOBOOK
T HE P ORTRAIT OF A L ADY
★
By Henry James
(Read by Gayle Hunnicutt)
(Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks 3 CDs Abridged £14.99)
THE BEST THING about the first of these three CDs is the
reader, Gayle Hunnicutt. Her accents for the various
types of Americans transplanted abroad are spot on: they
bring to life each character in Henry James’s masterpiece,
first published in 1881. Like most Jamesian plots, it is slow
to get going, but Hunnicutt’s skill keeps us patient as the
large cast is assembled. The action and characterisations
that follow are worth the wait. Isabel Archer is the ‘Lady’
of the title (‘well-born for an American’) who has all the
gifts except judgment. Her charming invalid cousin,
Ralph, lives at Gardencourt, a delightful English country
house, with his old banker father whom Ralph persuades
to give half his legacy to Isabel: ‘I want her to be rich so
she will not have to marry for support,’ he explains –
adding, with unconscious foresight, ‘The risk is she may
fall victim to a fortune-hunter.’ A popular English noble-
man, Lord Warburton, proposes, but as Isabel tells her
other suitors, she prizes her liberty. Then without warn-
ing to the reader, she marries another American abroad
unlike anyone she knows. What does this remarkable lady
do when she then discovers he is vile and has married her
for her money?
Susan Crosland
 SILENCED VOICES
A S THE U NITED Nations, the L UCY P OPESCU
European Union and America all
seek to re-engage with Syria on M ICHEL K ILO
Lebanon and Iraq, it is worth
remembering the situation for writers and human rights
activists working in Syria. Exactly a year after his arrest
on 14 May 2006, a prominent Syrian writer was jailed
for his dissident writing and pro-reform activities.
Michel Kilo is one of ten Syrian civil-society activists
who were arrested last year for their support of the
‘Beirut–Damascus Declaration’ of 12 May 2006, which
called for the establishment of diplomatic relations
between Lebanon and Syria based on respect for each
country’s sovereignty. According to Human Rights
Watch, the declaration ‘called on Syria to recognize
Lebanon’s independence, highlighted the importance of
improving economic ties on the basis of transparency,
rejected attempts to impose economic sanctions on the
Syrian people, and condemned attacks on Syrian workers
in Lebanon’. It was signed by several hundred Syrian and
Lebanese nationals and was released the day before a draft
resolution produced by America, Britain and France
went before the United Nations Security Council calling
on Syria to respect Lebanon’s sovereignty.
On 13 May 2007 Kilo was finally charged with
‘spreading false news, weakening national feeling and
inciting sectarian sentiments’ and sentenced to three
years in prison. He was convicted by the Damascus
Criminal Court. Kilo is a writer and journalist who has
written for the leading Lebanese daily Al-Nahar and the
London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi
(http://www.alquds.co.uk). He is also a widely respect-
ed member of Syria’s domestic opposition.
Many see his sentencing as part of a wider crackdown
against pro-reform activists and government opponents
in Syria in recent months. This includes the twelve-year
prison sentence with hard labour handed down on 11
May 2007 to Dr Kamal al-Labwani, a physician and
founder of the Democratic Liberal Gathering; while on
25 April 2007 Anwar al-Bunni, a prominent human
rights lawyer and another of the ten civil-society activists in Syria to allow prisoners to attend their parents’ funerals.
arrested for their support of the declaration, was sen-
tenced to five years in prison on politically motivated
charges. In fact the London-based Syrian Human Rights
Committee (SHRC) cite the period beginning May
2006 as the lowest point for human rights in Syria since
Bashar Al-Assad became President in 2000.
However, these arrests are nothing new. Syria has a his-
tory of imprisoning outspoken writers and critics of the
regime. Political prisoners frequently face unfair trials or His Excellency President Bashar al-Assad
are detained for long periods without charge or trial.
They are often held incommunicado, where they may be
subject to torture or ill-treatment. SHRC estimated at
one point that about 4,000 political prisoners were
detained in Syria. It is difficult to know exact numbers
59
because the authorities refuse
to divulge information regard-
ing numbers or names of those
detained on political or security-
related charges. It is virtually impossible for local human
rights groups to function in Syria, which makes it hard to
gather reliable information on political prisoners.
According to SHRC, all media sources in Syria are
‘owned by the ruling regime, and reflect its view exclu-
sively, whilst celebrating its achievements and attacking
and criminalising its opponents’. The authorities continue
to ban various Internet websites, including those owned
by the Syrian opposition and human rights organisations.
In September 2006 in these pages I wrote about
Professor Aref Dalila, former Dean of the Faculty of
Economics at Damascus University, arrested during the
‘Damascus Spring’ for a lecture in which he alleged offi-
cial corruption and called for democracy and transparen-
cy. Like Kilo, he was charged with ‘weakening national
sentiment’. In October 2004 I focused on Dr Abdul
Aziz Al-Khayer, sentenced in 1992 to twenty-two years’
imprisonment for his membership of the non-violent
Party for Communist Action. Al-Khayer was released in
November 2005, under a presidential amnesty, but
Dalila remains in prison, in very poor health, recent
information suggesting that he has suffered a stroke.
Kilo has been a vocal critic of Syria, particularly dur-
ing the UN inquiry into the killing of former Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafiq Hairiri, and has suffered persistent
harassment from the Syrian authorities over the years as
a result of his work in support of democratic rights.
There has been an international outcry about his recent
sentencing. Human rights organisations believe his impris-
onment is solely for his legitimate and peaceful pro-reform
activities and therefore in violation of his internationally
recognised right to freedom of expression. Amnesty
International point out that in pre-trial detention Kilo was
held in poor conditions, at times without adequate bed-
ding or bed. He was reportedly prohibited from attending
his mother’s funeral, although it is an established practice
Amnesty also believes that the fact that Kilo is detained in
’Adra prison, with suspected and convicted common
criminals rather than with political prisoners, is a further
attempt to de-legitimise his peaceful pro-democracy work.
Readers may like to send appeals calling for the release
of Michel Kilo in accordance with Article 19 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to
which Syria is a signatory, to:
President of the Republic
Presidential Palace
Abu Rummaneh, Al-Rashid Street
Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic
Fax: 00 963 11 332 3410
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007

C HRISTOPHER ’ S G HOSTS
★ spring back as good as new from tor-
By Charles McCarry
(Duckworth 272pp £16.99)
EVEN if you haven’t come across any
previous episodes in this series about
a family of spies, Christopher’s Ghosts
would be worth reading for its con-
vincing portrayal of an American
family in Berlin in 1939. Sixteen-
year-old Paul understands more of
what’s going on around him than his
novelist father, who cannot believe
that American immunity won’t pro-
tect his family. But his wife is a
German, endeavouring in desperate
secrecy to make a bargain with the
authorities; and meanwhile Paul is
playing but losing the undefined bat-
tle with the Gestapo major who has
discovered his secret: he has fallen in
love with the daughter of a Jewish
doctor. The second half of the book
jumps to postwar Europe, when Paul
is a CIA operative and is running a
private operation to track down the
Gestapo major. No happy outcome
to the love affair was possible, but
revenge is sweet. For McCarry fans
the story fills in some gaps in the
career of one of espionage fiction’s
most interesting heroes and inciden-
tally explains some of the tantalising
hints in the previous volume. But
you don’t need to be familiar with
the characters to read this beautifully
written book.
A BSOLUTION
★ who has arrived intending to uncover
By Caro Ramsay
(Penguin 416pp £12.99)
I N 1984 a young police cadet,
recently bereaved, is assigned the
apparently easy job of sitting beside
the hospital bed of the nameless,
unrecognisable victim of an acid
attack. When we meet him again in
Chapter Two, twenty years later, the
young cadet has become a happily
married Detective Chief Inspector,
but his dreams are still haunted by
the long-dead young woman and
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
her baby – and then two more
young women are found dead, the
scenes of the crimes horribly remi-
niscent of the unforgotten past. This
is a very sophisticated and compe-
tent first novel to join the expanding
brigade of Glasgow police procedu-
rals: at once humane, horrifying and
exciting.
G ONE W ITHOUT T RACE
★ inescapable. Bernie is setting up as a
By Caroline Carver
(Orion 320pp £18.99)
AN exciting adventure, centered on
the horrible legacy of the Balkans
War. Jay McCauley, formerly a cap-
tain in the army, has not been in a
war zone for five years but she still
dodges plastic bags in the road
because they might contain a bomb
and still retains all her hard-won
physical and intellectual skills. She
certainly needs them as she confronts
the worst kind of gangsters, all
involved in people-trafficking, drug-
dealing and putting the frighteners
on; but Jay is something of a super-
woman –multilingual, multiskilled,
Enrobe your copies in a
handsome black binder
with smart gold lettering
on the spine.
£10 UK/£12.50 elsewhere
(inc. postage & packing)
Tel: 020 7437 9392
Email editorial@literaryreview.co.uk
60
indefatigable, and always able to
ture or endurance tests.
T HE O NE FROM THE OTHER
★
By Philip Kerr
(Quercus 384pp £12.99)
BERNIE Gunther was an honest cop
in a dishonest place and time, pre-
war Berlin. We meet him again in
1949. He’s been in the SS and he’s
been a Russian prisoner of war, and
now, in Munich, finds it’s a place
bubbling with conspiracy and cor-
ruption, the war’s shadow
private eye and is offered a simple-
sounding job: is his client’s husband
dead? His investigation gets him
involved with people who commit-
ted crimes during the war, and vic-
tims on the lookout for revenge. The
relatively innocent but irredeemably
remorseful Bernie is a good compan-
ion for visiting the horrors of the
past.
T HE S NAKE S TONE
★
By Jason Goodwin
(Faber & Faber 308pp £12.99)
IT’S a pleasure to meet again the infi-
nitely civilised and intelligent Yashim,
eunuch of Istanbul and amateur
detective. In this second adventure he
has been commissioned to find out
more about a French archaeologist
a lost Byzantine treasure. Yashim finds
himself investigating the archaeolo-
gist’s murder instead. The vivid por-
trait of the lost world of the Ottoman
Empire seems to carry with it the
faint whiff of the mysterious East.
There is the Sultan, (in theory all-
powerful, in fact constrained like a
jewel in a box), there is the melting
pot of races, the temptation of trea-
sure, the voice of reason and the cries
of prejudice – a rich mixture adding
up to an excellent and enjoyable
crime novel.

T HE Y IDDISH P OLICEMEN ’ S
U NION
★ By Stephen L Carter
By Michael Chabon
(Fourth Estate 432pp £17.99)
TWO million of the ‘frozen Chosen’
live in Sitka, Alaska, the homeland
lent to European Jews in 1939. Now
the lease is up and the Jews are about
to be evicted from their cold home-
land. This is alter native history
(Roosevelt really did plan to settle
Jews in Alaska) combined with a
murder mystery when a junkie chess
master, son of an influential rabbi, is
found dead. One good man, a drunk
and disobedient cop, whose ex-wife
is his boss , plunges into an under-
world of orthodox gangs with rabbi
bosses. The detecting is spiced up
with wisecracks, lavish black humour
and rather too much Yiddish word-
play. Chabon’s energetic, expansive
style and originality make this well
worth reading, but it’s a rich dish;
only choose it if you’re feeling strong.
CRIME
N EW E NGLAND W HITE
★
(Jonathan Cape 556pp £17.99)
THIS is an enthralling literary thriller
based on two murders: one, thirty
years ago, which was covered-up, and
one, contemporary, of a celebrated
professor of economics who was a
notorious lothario. Suspicion falls on
his former lovers, one of them this
book’s heroine. The plot is gripping;
but the description of ‘the darker
nation’ in ‘the heart of whiteness’ is
the most interesting feature. The
author is an African-American profes-
sor at Yale, and the principal characters
are an African-American power cou-
ple: the president of a university in
New England and his wife, a dean at
its Divinity School. These clever, dis-
tinguished, rich people may be best
friends with the President of the
United States, but in their minds they
are suspicious and insecure, perpetual
outsiders; it’s a dangerous combination.
61
A ND D ON ’ T M ISS :
Die With Me by Elena Forbes
(Quercus 352pp £12.99). A very
well-written, cleverly plotted first
novel about one bad man, a series of
deluded young women, and a suicide
pact that leads to murder.
Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith
(Pan Macmillan 352pp £17.99).
Investigator Renko finds himself
increasingly at odds with the new
right-turning Russia. Relentlessly
depressing, but brilliant all the same.
Slip Knot by Priscilla Masters (Allison
& Busby 282pp £18.99). A vivid story
of contemporary life. School bullying
ends in tragedy – not so much a who-
dunnit or a whydunnit but a ‘how can
we prove it’. The investigator is a single
mother with a social conscience who is
also the local coroner.
End Games by Michael Dibdin
(Faber & Faber 356pp £12.99),
which sadly appears just after the
author’s death and must therefore be
Aurelio Zen’s last bow.
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
IAIN COLLEY wins first prize R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
this month. The subject was
‘The Gift’. He gets £300; Shirley Curran, in second entries to arrive by 25th July. Poems should rhyme,
place, gets £150; and everyone else printed gets £10 scan and make sense - harder than it sounds.
FIRST PRIZE
TIMEO DANAOS ET DONA FERENTES
by Iain Colley
They’ve got a word – ‘hubristic’. That was us.
We thought they’d done their worst and gone away,
stymied by Trojan resolution. Plus
they’d left this wooden horse as if to say
‘you win’ – dirty great thing, we never thought
we’d get it through the gate. Although we did,
and what a dumb move that was. We got caught,
just when we were rejoicing we’d got rid.
The doom-and-gloom Laocoön was right
(much good it did him, though). The bloody horse
was packed with squaddies armed and fit to fight.
That’s Greeks for you – low cunning and brute force,
a deadly combination. Bid adieu,
then sneak back in mobhanded. Rotten sods.
I figured ‘nemesis’ (that’s their word too)
and legged it pronto, praying to the gods
those hoplites wouldn’t catch me, spent a week
holed up in someone’s cellar. We were stiffed,
and no mistake. So never trust a Greek,
even when he is handing you a gift.
SECOND PRIZE
PROMETHEUS by Shirley Curran
Oh yes, you prized my gift, you wretched men,
shivering in winter caves. You thanked me when
boldly I brought you fire. A glowing coal,
hidden in my fennel wand, rashly I stole
from the fierce Titans’ hearth. In that bleak night
you welcomed blazing logs. With wild delight
you stewed the stringy flesh: no need to gnaw
on frozen mammoth bones, to rip and claw
the raw and bloody meat. My gift of fire
roused Zeus whose injured pride and vengeful ire
chained me on Caucasus. Now here I lie;
daily Ethon devours my liver. ‘Why’
I fiercely ask, ‘suffer this torment when
I witness the perversity of men?’
I gave you a good servant for your needs.
Now angrily I watch the violent deeds
of your proud master, fire: the ravaged earth,
whole forests burned, vast greed, an ashy dearth
of fuel. Awash with grief, I sadly learn
to rue my gift of fire. Long may you burn!
JUST WHAT SHE ALWAYS WANTED
by J Garth Taylor
In the first days of Christmas, she thought it was love
62
LITERARY REVIEW July 2007
each. Next month’s topic is
‘Home’. Please send your
When he gave her that bird in a tree and some doves,
But then came the hens and the swans and the geese
And she hoped his obsession with poultry would cease.
Half-buried in guano, she had to confess
She’d have liked him the more if he’d given her less.
But he kept right on giving and, after the birds,
Except for some rings, it got really absurd.
She got maidens who milked and ladies who danced
And lords who were leaping right out of their pants
And pipers apiping and drummers a-drumming
And then, on day twelve, the presents stopped coming.
By now she was sure that the man was insane
And vowed that she’d never come near him again
Which shows beyond doubt, that it would have been nice
If, when shopping for gifts, he had asked for advice.
FORETELLING by G McIlraith
‘She has the Gift,’ they said. ‘You are doubly blest.’
They took her away from me, from the sheltering clachan,
Off to that holy isle in the rainswept west,
Roars of an alien ocean, no lulling lochan.
Sheep are still lambing and I am barren, bereft
Of the consolation she gave, that chosen child.
‘She will be happy with us,’ they promised, and left
Me with the pain she will know when her dreams are
wild.
Peewits are nesting, gorse is in sunny bloom.
Where is the black-haired girl with deep strange eyes,
She who sees death-marked men and cannot reverse
their doom,
Hearing the warning notes in the seabirds’ cries?
Far in the west, where the dying sun bleeds rays
Into amassing clouds, they will train her soon
How to forget her past while she learns their ways,
Nurses her gift and watches the waxing moon.
GIVING by D A Prince
I like to give, she tells me, peering at the tin,
but mainly animals. A man slips in a pound
and winks. As though he knows it’s easier getting in
small change to help a donkey sanctuary, or found
another cats’ home. Even in the rain it’s tough
to coax the cash for homeless, or the refugees,
or the depressed and hopeless, finding life too rough
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

and needing someone listening, just a voice to ease CHANGE OF HEART by Alanna Blake
them back. And I’m the smile, and all the thank you-s here I smiled at his brash denial,
behind the tin. It isn’t only money, but the apology that was sent
a twoway thing, a small exchange – It’s not much, dear – with the gift-wrapped, gold-boxed phial
but it adds up. A few words, and the coppers put of grossly expensive scent –
more weight into the tin. How often it’s the old that fragrance my self once fancied
stretching their pensions, giving small scrapings of in its confident middle years;
their tightly-managed budgets – Thank you – and no cold the spiciness now turned rancid
shrug, but a generous smile. You’re welcome, love. reduced me to smarting tears.

PETRARCH Next week came the white carnations,

by Paul Griffin
In Avignon, one far Renaissance spring,
A sudden flood of verses filled the town
As Laura walked, and Petrarch set it down
How female beauty made creation sing
And set an age of darkness glimmering;
His sonnets on the swinging of her gown,
Made all hearts rise, and published her renown
As larks leave earth to carol on the wing.
The gift of speech is lost: so many a year
Poet and his adored have slept away
Their memory dies as well: we write in vain.
Come soon along some empty road, my dear,
Laura, our lady, beautiful as day,
And Petrarch too, to raise our hearts again.
the lilies whose graveyard smell
impugned all his protestations
that everything now would be well.
Oh, no, I won’t share the present
with her, I won’t toe their line.
In future I won’t be complaisant –
the rose-tinted past stays mine.
I willingly now bequeath her
what I pray she may find too much:
the fulltime, vacant possession
of a man with a tenuous touch.
The gift I’ll arrange to deliver
quite soon is designed to enforce
my role as a generous giver –
the papers that sue for divorce.

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LITERARY REVIEW July 2007