March 06 COVER 17/2/06 1:45 pm Page 1

MARCH 2006 £3.00

DEATH AND THE ARCHITECT

Paul Johnson on the Sepulchral Vision of Joseph Gandy
David Pryce-Jones debunks Said’s Orientalism
Donald Rayfield laments Lenin’s Exiles
Mishima’s Sword ★ Updike’s Art
Bernard Green has Faith
Bryan Appleyard goes Gaia
Spanish Haunts ★ Chinese Walls
A House by the Thames
WHO LIKES THE FRENCH?
A Fundamentalist Friar ★ A Courageous Countess ★ A Leonine Lover
FICTION: Margaret Atwood, Jay McInerney, DBC Pierre, Irène Némirovsky...
 FROM THE PULPIT
IT WAS PRECISELY twenty years ago that A LEXANDER WAUGH
I first got myself published – a book
review that was printed in this maga-
zine shortly after my father, the late
lamented Auberon Waugh, became its
RAISE A GLASS
editor in March 1986. Little did I realise
then, as I sheepishly slipped him the script, over which I
had sweated blood for two weeks in my Manchester stu-
dent digs, that it would mark the start of a more or less
continuous stream of book, record, concert, opera and
television reviews that would somehow or other provide
the main source of my income for the next two decades.
‘Nepotism!’ I hear the congregation cluck – ‘How
unsavoury!’ Well, you may judge it as you wish.
Personally I happen to believe that most kinds of nepo-
tism are a force for the good, and in certain cases even a
moral obligation. I am supported in this by Saul Bellow’s
son, Adam, whose admirable treatise In Praise of Nepotism
(Doubleday, 2003) cogently argues in favour of the sort of
nepotism that my father proudly mastered to a fine art –
not the sort by which bossy fathers force inadequate sons
to take smart jobs that their sons don’t want and are unfit
to execute, but a positive, laudable kind of nepotism in
which sons, keen to please their fathers and sharing their
fathers’ interests, actively seek careers within the parental
sphere of influence. What could be better than that? Was
it not precisely upon this kind of nepotism that all the
greatest civilisations of our history were founded?
In any case I was not the only one to benefit from my
father’s largesse during his time as editor of the Literary
Review. There were others who were not part of his family.
These he called his ‘slaves’. From this here pulpit he
preached, twenty years ago, in his second sermon as editor:
Among the familiar list of distinguished contributors
to this month’s magazine, readers may spot some
names that are as yet unfamiliar. These contributors,
who are either still at university or just down from it, Evelyn, a generous critic, who in turn took them from
have been appropriately nicknamed ‘slaves’. They are
articulate young people of wit, originality and often
some early academic distinction who are prepared to
accept the miserable fees we pay at any rate until
some richer publication spots their talents. Then I
hope they will continue to write for us out of love.
The ‘slave’ idea became an important part of the Literary
Review ethos during his editorship and continues to this
day. In an early advertisement for the magazine Papa had
written: ‘No doubt these SLAVES will emerge as the
superstars of the future, but it is good to read them now
before they are spoiled by the ghastly reviewing establish-
ment.’ None of us can exactly be described as ‘superstars’
but my father would be proud to know how well the
careers of so many of his ‘slaves’ have subsequently fared.
In that first ‘slave’ issue to which I contributed appeared
also for the first time the names of university students
John Lanchester (now an important novelist), Nicholas
Jenkins (Auden scholar and professor at Stanford
1
University) and Clair Wills (authority
on Irish poetry), and, in the issues that
followed, the Literary Review published
the first printed ruminations of count-
less others who have since climbed to
dizzying heights.
Private Eye, perhaps a little peeved that my father had
resigned from his long-running Auberon Waugh’s Diary in
order to become editor of the Literary Review, responded
with a parody of the Literary Review’s list of contributors:
MR AUBERON WAUGH is the new editor of
the Literary Review.
LADY TERESA WAUGH is married to the edi-
tor of the Literary Review.
MARMADUKE WAUGH is studying at Combe
Florey primary school. His mother is a contributor
to the Literary Review.
FRANCESCA GUSSETT is someone the editor
of the Literary Review met on a train last week.
KEVIN WAUGH is the brother of Marmaduke
Waugh, the well-known contributor to the Literary
Review.
DEBBY FIGGIS is Kevin Waugh’s latest bird.
SID GROZZER is a taxi driver who took the editor
of the Literary Review to Paddington Station last night.
But it is not just for sticking his neck out and printing
our first wobbly-kneed efforts that I, and so many of his
erstwhile ‘slaves’, remain indebted to him. To many he
sent long and warm letters of advice concerning the
intricate craft of reviewing. He encouraged even those
whose submissions were not worthy of publication to
have another bash, and only if they failed three times in
a row would he write to them in the kindest way: ‘I fear
that book reviewing appears not to be the path that
Destiny has chosen for you.’ Many of his ideas about
reviewing were handed down to him by his father
his father, Arthur Waugh. Arthur, who was for thirty
years chief book critic of the Daily Telegraph, believed
that no review should be a bad review, and that a critic’s
negative opinions of a book were far less interesting than
a considered description of what the author presumably
had been setting out to achieve when he wrote it. Some
of Papa’s advice seemed peculiar: ‘Always delete the first
paragraph of your review before submitting it’ – surpris-
ing how often that ruse works. In general he encouraged
his ‘slaves’ to be as positive as possible about the books
they were sent.
His advice was generously given and invariably helpful,
and although not everyone agrees with all the strange
opinions he put about over his forty years in journalism, I
am comforted by the thought that in every corner of the
English literary scene there is today at least one prominent
player who, on this auspicious anniversary, will be more
than happy to raise a glass to those two redeeming forces
of his philosophy – nepotism and slavery.
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Alexander Waugh, author of books
on time, God and classical music.
He has recently finished filming a
televisual version of his latest book,
Fathers and Sons, which will be
broadcast on BBC 4 in May.
BERNARD GREEN is a Fellow of St
Benet’s Hall and member of the
Theology Faculty at Oxford, where
he teaches Patristics. He has a book on
Leo the Great coming out next year.
JERRY BROTTON is Senior Lecturer in
Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary,
University of London. His latest book,
The Sale of the Late King’s Goods:
Charles I and his Art Collection, will be
published next month by Macmillan.
ADAM LEBOR is the author of City
of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa,
published by Bloomsbury. He notes
that (amazingly) the rights to
Imperium, his racy sinister conspiracy
thriller set in Budapest during the
first election campaign for the presi-
dent of Europe, are still available.
R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
awarded the Wolfson Prize for
History 2005 and is available in
paperback from Penguin.
R AYMOND S EITZ was US
Ambassador to the Court of St
James from 1991 to 1994.
CAROLE ANGIER is a biographer of
Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. The
Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography is
available in paperback from Penguin.
F IAMMETTA R OCCO , the literary
editor of The Economist, grew up in
Kenya. Her first book, The
Miraculous Fever Tree: Malaria,
Medicine and the Cure that Changed
the World, came out in 2003.
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 A LEXANDER W AUGH
ART 4 P AUL J OHNSON Joseph Gandy: An Architectural
Visionary in Georgian England Brian Lukacher
6 J OHN M C E WEN Sir Thomas Lawrence Michael Levey
7 W ILLIAM P ACKER Still Looking: Essays on American Art
John Updike
FOREIGN PARTS 9 A LLAN M ASSIE That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British
from the Sun King to the Present Robert and Isabelle Tombs
11 MICHAEL JACOBS Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s
Hidden Past Giles Tremlett Dogs of God: Columbus, the
Inquisition and the Defeat of the Moors James Reston Jr
13 ADAM LEBOR The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel
Linda Grant
14 GRAHAM HUTCHINGS The Great Wall: China Against the
World, 1000BC – 2000AD Julia Lovell
HISTORY 16 RICHARD OVERY Thunder in the East: The Nazi–Soviet
War 1941–1945 Evan Mawdsley
18 C OLIN S MITH Prisoners of the Japanese Gavan Daws
19 JERRY BROTTON Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance
Italy Lauro Martines
21 SIMON HEFFER Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British
Monarchy Tim Harris
22 J OHN K EAY God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the
Roots of Modern Jihad Charles Allen
LETTERS 24
BIOGRAPHY 25 FIAMMETTA ROCCO Too Close to the Sun: The Life and
Times of Denys Finch Hatton Sara Wheeler
26 JONATHAN MIRSKY Mencken: American Iconoclast Marion Rodgers
27 A LISTAIR H ORNE A British Achilles: The Story of George,
2nd Earl Jellicoe Lorna Almonds Windmill
28 REG GADNEY Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack
Johnson Geoffrey C Ward
30 LILLIAN PIZZICHINI Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as A
Young Girl Wendy Jones
ANCIENT WORLD 31 RAYMOND SEITZ Ancient Americans Charles C Mann
32 PETER JONES 69 AD: The Year of the Four Emperors Gwyn Morgan
33 JUSTIN MAROZZI The Dream of Rome Boris Johnson
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistants: GEORGE NORTON, PHILIP WOMACK
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
Business Manager: SARAH MAHAFFY
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 330
2
 MARCH 2006

MEMOIRS 35 CAROLE ANGIER The Dead Man in the Bunker: Discovering My GRAHAM HUTCHINGS is Editor of
Father Martin Pollack the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief and
author of Modern China: A
36 D AVID C ESARANI Those Who Trespass Against Us: One
Companion to a Rising Power
Woman’s War Against the Nazis Countess Karolina (Penguin Press).
Lanckoronska
38 WILLIAM PALMER A Lie About My Father John Burnside PAMELA NORRIS has finally finished
Words of Love: Passionate Women from
Heloise to Sylvia Plath, which
GENERAL 39 D AVID P RYCE -J ONES For Lust of Knowing: The
HarperCollins will be publishing
Orientalists and Their Enemies Robert Irwin in June.
40 BERNARD GREEN Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The
Evolutionary Origins of Belief Lewis Wolpert Breaking the JUSTIN MAROZZI is looking for some-
Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Daniel C Dennett one bold enough to publish Islamistan,
a satirical novel based on Iraq.
The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha,
Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah Karen Armstrong JAMES FLEMING’s latest novel, White
42 B RYAN A PPLEYARD The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Blood, is set during the Russian
is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity Revolution and will be published
James Lovelock next month by Jonathan Cape. He
lives, writes and farms in Caithness.
44 D ONALD R AYFIELD The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the
Exile of the Intelligentsia Lesley Chamberlain LILLIAN PIZZICHINI is writing a biog-
45 F R A N C I S K I N G Mishima’s Sword Christopher Ross raphy of Jean Rhys for Bloomsbury,
46 J ESSICA M ANN The House by the Thames and the People which she fully intends to finish this
Who Lived There Gillian Tindall year. She is also Writer-in-Residence
at HMP Chelmsford, but that’s no
47 I NIGO W ALLACE In Touch with His Roots Naim Attallah
excuse for not finishing her biogra-
phy. Her first book was Dead Men’s
FICTION 48 C AROLINE M OOREHEAD Suite Française Irène Némirovsky Wages, which won the 2002 CWA
49 D J T AYLOR Ludmila’s Broken English D B C Pierre Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.
51 P AMELA N ORRIS The Tent Margaret Atwood
FRANCIS KING’s new collection of
52 J O H N D U G D A L E The Good Life Jay McInerney
short stories, The Sunlight on the
53 J A M E S F L E M I N G Rifling Paradise Jem Poster Garden, is published this month by
54 PAUL BINDING T h e S u c c e s s o r Ismail Kadare Arcadia. He lived in Japan for four
55 LINDY BURLEIGH House of Orphans Helen Dunmore years in the 1960s.
56 N I G E L J O N E S Winter in Madrid C J Sansom A Pair of
DAVID PRYCE-JONES is senior editor
Silver Wings James Holland Company of Spears
of National Review, and author of a
Allan Mallinson number of books, including The
57 S E B A S T I A N S H A K E S P E A R E The Match Romesh Gunesekera Closed Circle (Phoenix).

CRIME 60 JESSICA MANN J ESSICA M ANN is the author of

twenty crime novels. Her latest
SILENCED VOICES 58 LUCY POPESCU
novel, The Mystery Writer, will be
AUDIOBOOK 57 SUSAN CROSLAND published in April by Allison &
POETRY COMPETITION 60 Busby. Her book about evacuees
LR CROSSWORD 8 during the Second World War, Out
LR BOOKSHOP 59 of Harm’s Way, comes out in paper-
back this month (Headline).
CLASSIFIEDS 64

The Literary Review, incorporating Quarto, is published monthly from: 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW Tel: 020 7437 9392
Fax: 020 7734 1844 ISSN 0144 4360 © All subscription enquiries and changes of address to:
Literary Review Subscriptions, FREEPOST LON 17963 London SW20 8YY Tel: 020 8545 2755 Fax: 020 8545 2756.
UK Subscription Rate £32, Europe £39, rest of the world air mail only £54 (US$104)
USA Airspeed subscription price is £39 (US$75) per annum. Periodical pre-paid at Champlain NY (USPS 004218).
All advertising enquiries to: Sarah Mahaffy, Literary Review, 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW Tel: 020 7437 9392
Printed by Unwin Brothers, The Gresham Press, Old Woking, Surrey, GU22 9LH Tel: 01483 757 588 Fax: 01483 755 168
Distributed to newsagents worldwide by COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Rd, West Drayton, Middlesex, UB7 7QX Tel: 01895 433 800
Distributed to bookshops by Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 Tel: 020 8986 4854
www.literaryreview.co.uk email: editorial@literaryreview.co.uk

3
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ART

P AUL J OHNSON colour, and a text which gives us everything that can now
be known about this peculiar man.

The Madness Gandy was born in 1771 and received little education,
but he became an industrious autodidact and artist. At
sixteen he was apprenticed to the architect James Wyatt,
of Architecture and two years later entered the Royal Academy Schools,
where he won gold and silver medals. Thanks to a patron
he went to Rome and studied the antique with passion-
J OSEPH G ANDY: A N A RCHITECTURAL ate enthusiasm. He would probably have settled in Rome
V ISIONARY IN G EORGIAN E NGLAND (like Ingres) and made a living there painting vedutas, but
★ the arrival of official French looting parties collecting art
By Brian Lukacher for the Louvre and the bankruptcy of his patron forced
(Thames & Hudson 224pp £40) him to return home. He tried at various times to set up
practice as an architect, but a lack of working capital and
T HE EARLY NINETEENTH century was the heyday in his own impracticality in money matters meant he never
England of artistic eccentrics – gifted men who pursued made a living at the trade. Of the few commissions of his
weird, grandiose, utopian or phantasmagoric schemes well which were carried out, the two office buildings he put
outside the mainstream of art. Fuseli, Blake, Palmer and up for the Phoenix Fire Insurance Company – vigorous
John Martin are well-known examples, but there were classical houses with pillars and pilasters – were both
plenty of others who have disappeared without trace. demolished in 1924, though photos survive. There is also
Joseph Gandy is one who has hovered for a century on the Doric House in Bath, worth a visit, and you can actually
verge of oblivion, but has now been rescued. I first learned stay in a Gandy country house on the shores of
about him from Sir John Summerson, the architectural Windermere, Storrs Hall, which has been a hotel for the
historian. After lunching at the Beefsteak Club he would past century, and has a dramatic interior rotunda.
take me on meandering walks through passages and alley- Gandy made a living by working for Soane and by
ways (now in many cases demolished, alas) back to exhibiting architectural drawings at the RA. I say a living
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he worked as curator of the Sir but in fact his growing family (he had nine children, six
John Soane Museum, and I at the New Statesman in Great of whom survived infancy) and his impracticality landed
Turnstile. On the way he would treat me to learned him at least twice in debtors’ prison, and he survived on
discourses on buildings and aesthetics. One of his topics handouts from Soane, with whom he had a love–hate
was Gandy, who had worked for Sir John Soane as his relationship and who left him an annuity of £100. The
architectural draughtsman, producing huge and exquisite RA also helped him with money and displayed his work
watercolours of Soane’s projects, and helping in the cre- generously, but thought him too difficult and ‘visionary’
ation of the museum. Summerson rated Gandy a genius in (a term of disparagement) to elect him a member or even
his field and tried hard to boost his fame by publishing an associate. For this neglect they were roundly criticised
articles in learned jour- by Constable, who
nals. He did not exactly admired his work huge-
succeed, but one he ly and saw him as a
inflamed was the fellow outsider.
American scholar Brian Gandy’s watercolours
Lukacher, who devoted were and are impres-
his PhD dissertation to sive, and, as this volume
Gandy, entitled ‘The shows, a sur pr ising
Poetical Representation number have survived
and Mythology of in good condition. His
Architecture’, which architectural panoramas
was never published but in particular, often
can be seen on micro- done from multiple
film at Ann Arbor. He perspectives and with
has now got Thames & both brilliant and som-
Hudson to venture a bre lighting effects, are
full-scale and sumptu- the best things of their
ous book on Gandy, kind ever done in
with over 200 illustra- England – perhaps any-
tions, most in superb Tomb for Mrs Soane, 1816 where – and have

4
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ART
something of the fascination of Piranesi’s fantasies. One
difficulty, however, is that his work is often inextricably
linked with Soane’s, so that the imaginative credit is
unclear. Another is his obsession with sepulchral monu-
ments, first acquired during his Rome sojourn, when he
spent much of his time rummaging in the tombs on the
Appian Way. As Lukacher says, all his life Gandy was
more concerned with housing the dead than the living.
Oddly enough, Gandy’s obsession was shared by a
number of radical spirits in the early nineteenth century.
One of his mentors was William Godwin, author of the
notorious Political Justice (1793), who in 1809 produced
his Essay on Sepulchres, and proposed a scheme for a
‘Sepulchral Atlas’ of the British Isles, which attracted
Gandy’s strong support. He also enlisted in the sepulchral
army of Major John Cartwright, a retired officer of gen-
try rank who put himself at the head of numerous utopian
schemes. Cartwright is best known for his advocacy of
universal suffrage and was the chief speaker at the
Manchester meeting in 1819 which led to the notorious
Peterloo Massacre. He was savaged by Hazlitt in his 1816
essay ‘On People with One Idea’. In fact he had several
ideas, although it is true each was obsessive at the time.
In 1800, exhilarated by the great war with France and
British naval victories, Cartwright publicly announced a
scheme for a giant monument to the glorious dead, to be
called a ‘Hieronauticon or Naval Temple’. Its classical
form and gigantic size instantly attracted Gandy, who
joined the team of artists Cartwright assembled, execut-
ing twenty-six of the forty-six large-scale drawings for
the scheme which were exhibited at Christie’s. This stu-
pendous set of watercolours, one seven feet six inches
square, has disappeared, though it may still exist, waiting
to be rescued, like Martin’s phantasies: what a find for a
clever antiquarian investigator! At the time, of course,
there was no money in it. Indeed, there was trouble, for
Cartwr ight was a marked man, hated by the
Establishment, and by associating with him Gandy did
himself no good with the stiffer element at the RA, or
for that matter with potential clients.
In 1825 Gandy seems to have given up the hopeless
task of running a practice, and devoted himself entirely
to vast drawings and huge writing projects, never com-
pleted. His magnum opus was to have been called ‘The
Art, Philosophy and Science of Architecture’, in eight
gigantic volumes. Three of them survive in manuscript,
with copious illustrations, and are still in the possession
of Gandy’s descendants, waiting a munificent publisher.
His next plan was to do 1,000 large drawings for a history
of world architecture, but only five were actually com-
pleted: they can be seen in the Soane Museum. There
were other grandiose projects for volumes on heraldry,
which Gandy saw as ‘the hieroglyphics of history and
descent’, and on the architecture of the natural world,
for which weird drawings survive.
5
But by this time the curtains of sanity were being
drawn. He became a victim of what critics at the time
called ‘the Madness of Architecture’ (Hitler and his
architect Speer might also be called casualties of the
complaint; indeed, the Hitler and Speer models and
drawings have much in common with Gandy’s visions).
Sometime between 1839 and 1841, Gandy’s family
chose to commit him to a private lunatic asylum near
Plymouth, run by a Dr Duck. Even by the lax standards
of the early Victorian licensing authorities, this was a
hell-hole. In October 1843, two months before Gandy’s
death there, the Commissioners in Lunacy said of the
accommodation: ‘The whole of these cells were as dark
and damp as an underground cellar, and were in such a
foul and disgusting state that it was scarcely possible to
endure the offensive smell. We sent for a candle and a
lantern to enable us to examine them.’ The satanic scene
thus conjured up would not have been out of place in
one of Gandy’s sepulchral fantasies, and the fact that the
poor, gifted but hopeless man ended up in a living tomb
has a horrible logic to it. His beautiful drawings survive
to thrill and fascinate us and prompt thoughts on the
injustice and pathos of existence.
To order this book at £32, see order form on page 59
An exhibition dedicated to Gandy, 'Soane's Magician', runs from
31 March to 12 August at Sir John Soane's Museum, London
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS
Grants and Pensions are available to
published authors of several works who
are in financial difficulties due to
personal or professional setbacks.
Applications are considered in confidence by
the General Committee every month.
For further details please contact:
Eileen Gunn
General Secretary
The Royal Literary Fund
3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA
Tel 0207 353 7159
Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk
www.rlf.org.uk
Registered Charity no 219952
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ART
J OHN M C E WEN
GILTY LOVE
S IR T HOMAS L AWRENCE
★ right arm betrays artistic uncertainty, and some fumbling of
By Michael Levey
(Yale University Press 345pp £45)
A SMALL POINT of etiquette – why is it Sir Thomas
Lawrence but not Sir Michael Levey? Sir Michael, of
course, was knighted for his directorship of the National
Gallery. And no one has done more to rescue the repu-
tation of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), the most
successful British portraitist of the nineteenth century:
child prodigy, already in professional demand by the age
of ten; Painter to the King at twenty-three in succession
to Reynolds; Royal Academician at the youngest
permissible age of twenty-five; and President of the RA
for the last ten years of his life.
And yet immediately Lawrence died a
reaction set in – bordering, as Levey says,
‘on revulsion’ – which, at least in
England, has ‘never entirely vanished’.
Levey concludes that part of the problem
is that Lawrence’s originality – he was
largely self-taught and left no followers –
poses problems for the average art histori-
an, especially because Lawrence was an
artist of such technical brilliance, who
delighted in lavishing his talent on the
splendid uniforms and romantic clothes
of the period. For ‘frequently puritan and
inhibited’ academic critics, Lawrence is a
meretricious oddity. William Vaughan’s
put-down in British Painting: The Golden
Age (1999) is typical. He deems that
Lawrence remained ‘in a state of perma-
nent adolescence’, his art displaying
‘the vacuity of grand portraiture in the
post-revolutionary world’. ‘Pope Pius VII’, 1819
Levey is a shining exception to crabbed
academicism – an unashamed Spurs fan, a novelist and a
prizewinning autobiographer as well as an art historian,
responsible for the major exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings
and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in 1979. He
has nonetheless decided to confine himself to a defence of
Lawrence’s art rather than a biography, in the belief that his
subject ‘was a serious artist, who painted at least some por-
traits entitling him to a high and permanent place in British
art’. That he successfully makes the case is indisputable. He
admits that the Scottish-bound Raeburn is a rival for the
supreme place in the pantheon of British nineteenth-cen-
tury portraitists; but there is no denying his argument that
6
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
Lawrence was as fine a draughtsman as he was a painter,
and that the European sweep of his sitters, as a result of the
bold patronage of George IV (another undervalued
historical figure), is beyond contemporary compare.
Levey has some reservations. He says of a drawing of
1788 that ‘only a slight fumbling in the lines of the sitter’s
that kind remained with Lawrence’; and he is happy to
acknowledge that Lawrence might have concluded, as later
did Henry James, that he could ‘stand a good deal of gilt’.
It is this guiltless love of gilt which has provoked the most
criticism, then and since. Criticism of Lawrence is quoted
more fully in Kenneth Garlick’s preface to the 1989 com-
plete catalogue of the paintings. Fuseli observed that ‘when
Lawrence distinguishes Flesh from Glass he will be a good
painter’; and the diarist Joseph Farington wrote that
Lawrence was ‘sensible that his own pictures had too much
of a metallic appearance – too many shiny lights’. Levey
might have mentioned that the subsequent yoking of such
Lawrence portraits as The Calmady Children and Master
Lambton to chocolate-box advertising has
also done damage – associating him with
the sugary excesses of the Victorians.
Nor can we tell whether any of
Lawrence’s shortcomings – as Levey warns,
the completion of a picture is ‘not the
same as succeeding in making a work of
art’ – are the fault of assistants, because he
left no records. Such slackness contributed
to the debts with which he was burdened
all his professional life, despite his success
and lack of a wife or children. He tended
to charge too little and he found it difficult
to let a painting go, however grand the
commissioner. What was perhaps his mas-
terpiece, Pope Pius VII, one of the series of
depictions of European grandees connect-
ed with the Napoleonic era that he was
commissioned to paint for George IV’s
Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, was
still in the studio when he died, a decade
after the sitting.
Pius VII is just one of a number of
portraits, in oils or pencil, of women, men and children,
glamorous or restrained, which give compelling evidence
of the artist’s right to the highest praise (for example
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s William Leith, a favourite of
Lucian Freud; Lawrence excels at young men). Illustrated
details, such as the Pope’s shoes or Elizabeth Farren’s tan
leather gloves, lend force to Levey’s analyses in this copi-
ously illustrated book. The general reader will appreciate
the deftly sketched historical background, which allows for
such entertainments as George IV’s exclamation on receiv-
ing the news that Napoleon was dead: ‘Is she by God!’
To order this book at £36, see order form on page 59
 ART

W ILLIAM P ACKER of sand dunes topped with beach grass and with just a
glimpse of the sea, by one Alice W Davis, an artist who

A WRITER’S GAZE is known but obscure – as, by the chances of life and the
vagaries of fashion, so many good artists are fated to
remain. ‘Slowly’, he says, ‘I am learning to look at it
S TILL L OOKING : E SSAYS ON A MERICAN A RT with the eyes of an art critic, and judge that it possesses
★ not just sentimental value but real merit. My mother
By John Updike had good taste. … On such tenuous threads are our
(Hamish Hamilton 222pp £25) relations to art fondly woven.’
He tells us that as a child he learnt to look at paintings
J OHN U PDIKE AS art critic was new to me, and in ‘as though entitled to look’ – though in that ‘as though’
prospect gave me pause. For art criticism, like art itself, he protests his critical innocence perhaps a shade too
attracts the amateur as much to active engagement as to much. But, beyond any entitlement, the more important
passive response. Art lovers know what they like and, lesson is that which he still draws from that painting of
perhaps more to the point, what they don’t like, and, the dunes: to take the work as it is, independent of fash-
steeped in its disciplines or not, are only too likely to say ion or conventional wisdom, and to judge it on its merits.
so at length and (given the chance) in print. In my And in this his second collection of studies in American
experience, few are more egregiously opinionated while art – all written since 1990, and most hung on the topi-
at the same time ill-informed, than the educated colum- cal pegs of exhibitions ranging from Copley in the later
nist or leader-writer. So far, so bad: but Updike is also eighteenth century to Hopper, Warhol and Pollock in
an American, not always the most succinct of peoples. the twentieth – fashion hardly features, but only interest,
I need not have worried. The articles collected in this and a confident personal response.
handsome volume are not the 1,000-word reviews of our Some of the subjects are of course fairly familiar
everyday broadsheet journalism, but eighteen thorough, (Eakins, Whistler, Hopper, Pollock, Homer – who
thoughtful and sometimes lengthy pieces worthy of such comes to Dulwich this year), and so cool an appraisal as
higher-minded journals as the New York Review of Books – this of any of them by a fellow American would always
in which, as it happens, most of them first appeared. From be useful. ‘There is an American tendency’, says Updike,
the disarming personal memoir that is his introduction, to ‘to see art as a spiritual feat, a moment of amazing grace.
his final brief note on Andy Warhol, Updike is cogent and Pollock’s emblematic career tells us, with perverse reas-
to the point, and yet modest and mercifully free of the surance, how brief and hazardous the visitations of grace
conventional wisdoms. Indeed, in the last, lightly ironical can be.’ He picks out the essential tragedy of Whistler,
piece on Warhol, which compares ‘St Andy’ with the one not so much of failure as of a gift out of its time and
Dadaists, he makes the obvious point – so obvious that all unfulfilled – ‘a plucky small man whose income never
latter-day conceptualists and their apologists seem to have matched his notoriety, whose work was dogged by harsh
missed it – that Duchamp was the first, and the truer, dismissals, and whose health … had been less than
nihilist of modernism. As he wryly remarks, Warhol was robust.’ He also notes, for so well-documented a lover of
‘never so empty that he stopped working’, as Duchamp women, an odd ‘indifference to humanity’, similar to
did in a final gesture of Dadaist subversion. Cézanne’s. ‘To think of Whistler’s nudes in relation to
After leaving Harvard in 1954, Updike did in fact do Degas’s … is to confront an almost frightening lack of
some practical study in the visual arts, spending a year at interest, of that excitement which generates specificity.’
the Ruskin School at Oxford, where he must have The erotic, which Updike finds immanent in the melan-
missed Ronald Kitaj by just choly of Hopper, certainly
a year or two. But his deep UNIVERSITY OF LONDON intrigues him. In Hopper’s
SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY
engagement with art was set Summertime (1943), a girl
INSTITUTE of ENGLISH STUDIES
much earlier in his life by stands solitary in the sun-
the interest and encourage- MA in HISTORY OF THE BOOK shine. ‘With her thigh
(Ref: HOBLR05)
ment of his mother and, in An unparalleled interdisciplinary opportunity to study the book’s influence on cultural blooming pink through her
particular, by a painting his and intellectual change, emphasising creation, publication, manufacture, distribution,
reception, and survival.
gossamer dress, she belongs
mother had bought, though MA in NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LITERATURES IN
with Reginald Marsh’s lush
in much-straitened circum- ENGLISH (NILE) street girls. … How much
stances, in 1933, a year after (Ref: NILELR05) more erotic, I was led to
This MA applies an historical, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodology while
his birth. It remains with engaging fully with on-going debates about post-colonial and theoretical issues. reflect, thin summer dresses
him still, ‘this old friend Bursaries available are than today’s athletic
from my childhood’. It is a Contact: IES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU shorts and halters! Old sum-
fax: 020 7862 8720; e-mail: ies@sas.ac.uk; web: www.sas.ac.uk/ies
landscape, modest enough, mertime New York was a

7
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ART

harem in clinging cotton.’ patr iotic case on the

To an English reader, other. Updike does nei-
more stimulating still, ther, and how refreshing
perhaps (Whistler, Sargent it is to find him inveigh-
or Hopper apart), is to be ing against the modern
reminded of quite how megashow, ‘where more
much more there has time is spent in absorbing
always been to American the pedagogic text on
art than Abstract the walls than in looking
Expressionism and at the pictures’. Amen to
American Pop. As Updike that. And let’s also away
says, ‘one good thing with the tyranny of the
about nineteenth-century portable tape-guide,
American painting is that which fixes the visitor in
there is a lot of it’. And a trance and clogs up the
here he takes us through gallery. Visiting a Jackson
so much of it, from the ‘Summertime’, Edward Hopper 1943 Pollock show, Updike is
nineteenth and twentieth unwisely persuaded to
centuries alike, which, to our loss if not our shame, is try one of these devices, and manages to get it out of
still too little known here, or has been too readily for- synch. ‘I wandered from canvas to canvas … as disori-
gotten: Childe Hassam, Arthur Dove, John Sloan, ented as Pollock himself, … while curatorial voices
Martin Johnson Heade, George Bellows, the sculptor smoothly intoned appreciative phrases: “totemic mean-
Elie Nadelman, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden ing, … kind of congested intensity, … liquid enamel
Hartley, William Merritt Chase. house-paint …”.’ We may not agree with all Updike
All national schools are fascinating, as much for their says, but what he says comes from still looking at the
idiosyncrasies as for their more general connections and work as it is, with open eyes and an open mind, and
relevancies. The mistake is only to cry a nar row taking it on its merits.
parochialism on the one hand, or make an overstated To order this book at £20, see order form on page 59

ACROSS
P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D 4 One grinding out a living as a playwright? (6)
7 Father embracing a deity in temple (6)
1 2 3 4 5 6 8 Send mobile phone message to reserve manual (8)
9 Lover of London district, we hear (4)
7 10 Note unit of capacity (5)
8 12 Vegetable in ship making a return trip (4)
18 Female servant crossing river for tool (6)
9 19 Vessel I put on for concoction (6)
10 11 12 13 14 20 Search the internet to get on board? (4)
23 Tread heavily on merchant vessel (5)
15 16 17 27 Some merely retune old instrument (4)
28 Experts guarding elevation for Greek warrior (8)
18 19
29 Turn to face east (6)
30 Conspirator’s routine disrupting public transport (6)
DOWN
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 1 Bet there’s no party for widow (5)
27 2 Newspaper, say, in favour of hesitation (5)
3 The French can identify tongue (5)
Five winners will be selected from the 28 4 Saw most without hesitation (5)
correct crosswords received by noon on 5 Political party the Spanish categorise (5)
29
March 15th. Each will receive a copy of 6 Express theatrically with energy given small particle (5)
The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox, 30 11 Long irritation (4)
glowingly reviewed in our December issue. 13 Former spouse with appeal to leave (4)
The winners of our February crossword competition are: CJ Ellis of Rochester, DA Prince of Kirby 14 Philosopher displaying hypocrisy, we hear (4)
Muxloe, Jane Pettersson of Twickenham, Trent Herdman of Cambridge, T Wiilson of Largs, Prue 15 Slow-cooked birds of prey (4)
Sheldon of Norwich,Clive Murphy of London E1 and Jason Owen of Batley in West Yorkshire. Each will 16 Atmosphere mentioned by one to gain from will(4)
receive a pair of tickets to see either Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Apollo Theatre or Hamlet at 17 Monk getting right inside sleeping quarters (4)
the Ambassadors Theatre. 21 Cruel disfigurement caused by sore (5)
Answers to the February crossword: 22 Primitive tool for Stevenson’s captain? (5)
ACROSS: 1 Caveat, 4 Hobbit, 9 Euphemism, 10 Lilac, 11 Darn, 12 Yahoo, 14 Pride, 15 Craze, 17 Rigel, 23 A wild night on these with more than one slate? (5)
19, Diva, 21 Lover, 23 Betrothal, 24 Reason, 25 Pliant. 24 Fabulist such as Poe given adaptation (5)
DOWN: 1 Colley, 2 Veal, 3 Anecdote, 5 Omer, 6 Building, 7 Timbre, 8 Spurs, 13 Hiawatha, 14 Parallel, 25 I enter plot in treeless expanse (5)
15 Cibber, 16 Night, 18 Lariat, 20 Logo, 22 Visa. 26 Crazy person used to start an engine? (5)

LITERARY REVIEW March 2006

 FOREIGN PARTS

A LLAN M ASSIE They continue: ‘The invaders’ aim was to pull the Three
Kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland into a
THE OLD QUARREL European struggle to stem the growing dominance of
France.’ This is an accurate statement, though one that
tur ns the Whig inter pretation of our ‘Glor ious
T HAT S WEET E NEMY Revolution’ upside down. Macaulay – who knew, with
★ that utter certainty characteristic of him, that William of
By Robert and Isabelle Tombs Orange had been invited to these islands ‘to preserve the
(Heinemann 624pp £25) liberties of England’ – may be spinning in his grave.
Actually, of course, both versions are correct. The
THE ENGLISH AND the French have enjoyed a love–hate Tombses might, however, have remarked that William’s
relationship for centuries. I say ‘the English’ because the army also contained Scots and English regiments.
Scots stand rather apart, or betwixt and between. From 1688 to 1815 war was intermittent – the authors
Individual Scots – notably, as Robert and Isabelle Tombs call it the second Hundred Years War, fairly enough. The
remark, Adam Smith – have helped form a British nature of these wars says much about the differences
mindset which the French find repugnant; yet Scots between the two states. France was a continental power
retain fond memories of the Auld Alliance and still with global interests and ambitions; Britain the reverse.
speak of England as ‘the auld enemy’ – no sweetness Our continental interest was restricted to preventing any
there. Moreover, by a decree of Louis XII, never single power – and France was the only candidate – from
rescinded, Scots resident in France were to be regarded dominating Europe. Consequently we preferred to pay
as French nationals. In August 1944 Colette, most allies to fight France there, and there were few British
French of all French writers, told her husband she military successes on the Continent between the
would not believe in the liberation of Paris till he Marlborough wars and Wellington’s laborious Peninsular
brought her a Scottish officer. ‘In a kilt?’ ‘Certainly in a Campaign – Minden (1759) was an exception.
kilt.’ He produced a major from a Highland regiment, Political and military rivalry throughout the eighteenth
who stayed to lunch. ‘My wife reads a lot,’ he said, ‘I century didn’t prevent cultural exchanges in which the
expect she’ll have heard of you.’ This is by the by. It desire to emulate and the eagerness to disparage were
must be admitted, however, that the French usually
speak of ‘Angleterre’ and ‘les Anglais’, rather than of
Britain and the British.
I have long thought that the reason for the uneasy
relationship between the French and the English is that
neither group feels absolutely certain of its superiority to
the other, while both feel comfortably superior to
Americans, Germans, Spaniards and everybody else.
Nothing in this full, rich and utterly engrossing book
persuades me to alter this opinion.
Robert and Isabelle Tombs are husband and wife. He
is English and Reader in French History at St John’s
College, Cambridge; she is French and teaches our
diplomats to speak and write her native tongue. That
she does so is evidence – sad evidence, her compatriots
might say – of the global dominance of English. It’s not
so long since you couldn’t pass the Foreign Office exam
without perfect French.
The book is subtitled: ‘The French and the British
from the Sun King to the Present’. The authors might of
course have begun earlier, with the Hundred Years War,
or indeed the Norman conquest of England. But Louis
XIV isn’t a bad starting point, for it was in his reign that
France became the dominant power on the Continent.
Their first sentence is challenging. ‘On Guy Fawkes
Day, 1688, Europe invaded England, in the shape of
20,000 Dutch, German, Danish, French, Swedish,
Finnish (in bearskins), Polish, Greek and Swiss troops.’

9
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS

evident either side of the As for 1940, subject of myths

Channel. ‘If one could sum up a and misunderstanding, they are
vast range of language and even-handed and judicious. ‘If
imagery, it would be that the defeat were proof of nation
British either admired or laughed decadence, it would apply not
at the French and the French only to France, but to Britain
either envied or sneered at also. Its contr ibution to the
the British.’ Alliance was shamefully feeble.’
The Enlightenment flourished Few in Br itain have ever
in both countries. Adam Smith acknowledged how much the
drew on French thought, and miracle of Dunkirk owed to the
benefited from his discussions and continued resistance of the
arguments with the Physiocrats. French army. ‘French troops
‘He also concluded from his fighting from house to house in
French observations that eco- Lille held seven German divi-
nomic enterprise could survive sions away from Dunkirk for
even incompetent government.’ Yet the Tombses quote four vital days until June 1.’ Even a few days later,
the historian Claude Nicolet’s remark that ‘Smith’s ideas ‘British liaison officers and the Germans reported rising
and those of the Scottish Enlightenment generally, “the French morale and strengthening resistance, as they
birth-certificate of modernity”, have not taken root in fought to hold the Somme and the Aisne. This was the
French culture.’ ‘It was’, they say, ‘the French great battle of 1940, largely forgotten in France, and
Revolution that repudiated the modern emphasis on never heard of in England.’ 1940 was a closer-run thing
individual liberty in favour of an idealized vision of the than the common opinion has it, the battle of France
citizenship of the ancient world. Republicans being lost principally on account of the misinterpreta-
condemned Britain (‘Carthage’) as a selfish commercial tion of intelligence.
society, and praised France (‘Rome’) for upholding The Tombses are very good on Churchill and de
nobler values. Two centuries later this arguably still Gaulle, harsh on Vichy, not, somewhat uncharacteristi-
marks France off from the Anglophone world. French cally (for they are generally so fair), confronting the
rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 was in question: what do you do when you have lost a war?
large part a continuation of “the old quarrel between Laval, believing Germany would win the war, saw
the heirs of Colbert and of Adam Smith”.’ This theme is France’s future in a European union, a continental
explored at length and with great subtlety and intelli- alliance with Germany. Laval who had, as President
gence in the last chapters of the book, which deal with Mitterrand observed, never before believed in anything,
Franco-British relations after 1945. These chapters offer came to believe in ‘ce grand rêve géopolitique. Comme
a model of lucid and dispassionate exposition, and quoi, croire, ça l’a perdu.’
should be read by politicians, journalists and political This huge book is rich in detail. Space forbids me
scientists in both countries; also by any citizens who to dwell on its fascinating examination of social and
want to come to a better understanding of the history of cultural exchange. I would urge anyone interested in
the European Union to date. France to buy it. And the story of course continues. What
In the twentieth century Britain and France were happens next, after the rejection of the European consti-
allies, reluctant often, distrustful almost always, yet tution, when the French ‘began to suspect that Europe
bound together by a com- might not after all be their
mon interest: the need to offspr ing’? And what of
check German expansion. Br itain, postur ing as the
The Tombses are very good indispensable ally of the USA
on both wars, especially the when we are only its lackey?
Second, and on the sorry What of future relations?
history of appeasement. In ‘The irony is that cherished
dealing with this subject ambitions could be served if
they are more severe in Br itain and France acted
their judgement of Britain together, but they could only
than of France, and perhaps act together by giving up
underplay the reluctance of cherished ambitions.’
Third Republic politicians To order this book at £20, see
to look reality in the face. order form on page 59

10
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS

M ICHAEL J ACOBS

A Pact
of Forgetting
G HOSTS OF S PAIN : T RAVELS THROUGH A
C OUNTRY ’ S H IDDEN PAST
★
By Giles Tremlett
(Faber & Faber 433pp £16.99)

D OGS OF G OD : C OLUMBUS, THE I NQUISITION,

AND THE D EFEAT OF THE M OORS
★
By James Reston, Jr
(Faber & Faber 363pp £20)

SPAIN, FOR ALL the dramatic changes it has undergone

since Franco’s death in 1975, is still widely perceived by
foreigners in ter ms of its traditional stereotypes.
Fortunately, and in welcome contrast to many other
recent books on the country, the initial motivation
behind Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain is neither flamen-
co, nor bullfighting, nor Don Quixote, nor even Spain’s
Islamic past. Instead, Tremlett’s ‘travels’ around his
adopted land are triggered off by an interest in the exca-
vation, over the last few years, of the mass graves of Civil
War victims.
Anyone who has spent any time in a close-knit
Spanish community will have experienced the general
reluctance to discuss openly local participation in the
Civil War. Many Spaniards still believe that there are
aspects of this past which are best left buried; and heated
debates often ensue as to whether the commemoration
of those killed in the Civil War should specifically
apportion the blame between the Nationalists and
the Republicans.
In the brilliant opening chapter of his book, Tremlett
goes to the remote Gredos village of Poyales del Hoyo
to investigate events that took place there on the night
of 29 December 1936, when a group of drunken
Falangists abducted and killed three women. He arrives
in the village shortly after the remains of the women
have finally been uncovered, nearly sixty-six years after
the murder. He talks to one of the victims’ children,
who was with her mother almost up to the time of the
actual execution; and he discovers that the current,
long-standing mayor of the village is the daughter of the
death squad’s brutal leader.
This absorbing story, and the emotions aroused by the
eventual reburial of the bodies, could have been extend-
ed into a gripping narrative on the lines of Truman

LITERARY REVIEW March 2006

 FOREIGN PARTS
Capote’s In Cold Blood, or even a
probing psychological study such as
Javier Cercas’s brilliant Civil War
novel, Soldiers of Salamis. However,
Tremlett soon moves on from the
Civil War to discuss first of all the
way in which democratic Spain
gradually adopted a ‘pact of forget-
ting’ towards not only the war
but also the subsequent years
of dictatorship. Franco himself he
sees as someone whose memory is
being slowly excised from the
Spanish consciousness.
Thereafter, he seems largely to
lose track of the ‘hidden past’ and
to concentrate instead on the very
un-hidden present. In what comes
across as a skilfully linked anthology
of his journalistic assignments over
the past decade or so, he covers
such disparate aspects of modern St Dominic presiding over the burning of Qur’ans what he calls the ‘ancient Arabic
Spain as political corruption, sexual
morality, maternity wards, regional separatism, and the
widespread resort to enchufe or connections. There is
even a chapter on flamenco, which allows him to
explore the music’s proverbial roots in the drug-addicted
underbelly of Spanish society.
Ghosts of Spain, though deviating so radically from the
journey suggested by its title and subtitle, reveals
Tremlett’s considerable talents as The Guardian’s corre-
spondent in Spain. His love of the country is as impres-
sive as the range of his interviews and travels, which
have taken him to such starkly contrasting places as the
interior of the royal residence of El Pardo, a garish
Benidorm hotel, a roadside brothel, and a run-down
part of Seville where even the police are frightened of
entering. As an enjoyable, informative and remarkably
balanced account of Spanish politics and society today,
Tremlett’s book proves a worthy sequel to John Hooper’s
much acclaimed The Spaniards.
Something of Tremlett’s
subtlety and open-minded-
ness could certainly have
benefited James Reston in
Dogs of God. As does
Tremlett, he brings into his
narrative the Madrid bomb-
ings of 2004; but he does so
in order to try and persuade
the reader that these terror- Numerous awards
ist acts were the inevitable 60,000 sold
outcome of the fanaticism
Bookchair is recommended by Alexander Technique
that had led Spain in 1492 teachers, physiotherapists and Richard Ingrams
to achieve in near-simulta-
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
neous succession the defeat of a
great civilisation, the expulsion of
the country’s Jews, and the discov-
ery of America. His book is an
extreme example of what happens
when political correctness is allied
to a nineteenth-century romanti-
cism that glorifies the Islamic con-
tribution to Spain while fostering
the so-called ‘black legend’.
‘This is not history in the tradi-
tional sense, I have not included
every fact and date’, warns Reston
at the start of a book that makes the
fairy-tale approach of Washington
Irving appear historically rigorous
in comparison. The first lines of the
prologue are in fact sufficient to
judge the way in which Reston dis-
torts the past to fit his crude theo-
rising. As he stands on a terrace in
barrio of Albaicín’ (this Granadan
district was in fact founded by Berbers), he looks towards
the town’s Royal Chapel, which proudly displays a ban-
ner marking the ‘500th Anniversary of Queen Isabella’s
Death’. Then he turns with relief to the Alhambra,
where, of course, he finds ‘no banner…to commemorate
the final defeat in 1492 of the glorious, lost culture that
was the Caliphate of the Moors’.
Quite apart from the impossibility of imagining how
such a banner would be worded (not to mention the
fact that the caliphate collapsed as a result of internal dis-
sent in the early eleventh century), Reston fails to men-
tion that the Spaniards seem deliberately to have played
down the Queen Isabella celebrations of 2004. Nor does
he seem to be aware that Isabella, for all her religious
bigotry, was someone whose passionate love for the
Alhambra’s royal palaces did much to save these build-
ings from destruction.
Dogs of God appears intended pr imar ily for an
American readership. It is
Make reading comfortable aFaber mystery why Faber &
should have published
with Bookchair! the book over here, unless,
only £20.00 perhaps, some editor cyni-
including p&p cally saw the commercial
contact its inventor, Gary Lancet possibility of exploiting
The Bookchair Company those romantic stereotypes
119-121 Gloucester Road of Spain that continue to
London E17 6AF
haunt the country more
T: 020 8523 5023
website: www.bookchair.com almost than the ghosts of the
Civil War.
To order these books see form on
page 59
12
 FOREIGN PARTS
A DAM L E B OR
A Gigantic
Balagan
T HE P EOPLE ON THE S TREET : A W RITER ’ S
V IEW OF I SRAEL
★ stories she has gathered, capturing the essence of this
By Linda Grant
(Virago Press 214pp £9.99)
THERE IS A set routine for foreign correspondents arriving
in Israel. They head straight for the American Colony
Hotel in East Jerusalem, a beautiful Ottoman-era pile,
home to all sorts of useful United Nations and interna-
tional officials. The bar is full of their colleagues, last
met in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The
assembled hacks will rapidly and fluently brief the new
arrival on breaking political developments, the best ways
to pass through checkpoints into the Palestinian territo-
r ies and the latest, ablest translators and fixers.
Neophytes will soon find the telephone ringing in their
room with offers of the same, organised by friendly
Palestinians. The Palestinian public relations machine is a
wonder to behold: it knows what western journalists
want. The Israelis could learn much from the ‘other
side’. The Palestinians field young, attractive, US-
educated professionals to make their case. Israel often
wheels out snarling Yitzhak Shamir look- and sound-
alikes, losing the battle for hearts and minds before they
open their mouths.
Briefed by the Palestinian flaks, the journalists will
trek to Ramallah, Jenin and Nablus, generally delayed or
even harassed by aggressive teenage Israeli soldiers on
the way. Once inside the Palestinian territories local
contacts will provide them with the necessary sound
bites about the petty malevolence of the Israelis; the
hideous security fence that in Jerusalem even divides a
school from its playing fields; the misery of everyday life
under occupation and the crazed Zionist settler fanatics
who cut down their olive trees and poison their farm
animals. Television footage is gathered, articles are filed
and the hacks retire to an excellent Arabic mezze at the
American Colony restaurant.
What the journalists do not do is report on Israel. The
Jerusalem press corps is the only body of foreign corre-
spondents that virtually ignores the country in which it
is stationed. When was the last time you saw an article
in the British press datelined Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba
or Eilat? Probably never, unless there was a suicide
bombing or terrorist attack.
‘Jews are news’, says the old newsroom adage. But it
13
seems Jews are not news, unless they are beating
up Palestinians. With half the story untold then, there
is a need for someone to tell us about Israel and Israelis.
Who are these people? Into this considerable gap has
stepped Linda Grant. The People on the Street is just what
the title promises, and like all great ideas it is pretty
simple. Grant lived in Tel-Aviv for several months,
hanging out in cafés, meeting friends and friends of
friends, listening instead of expounding (not an everyday
event in Israel), and absorbing their stories. And what
dazzling, infuriating yet curiously addictive country.
She takes us on an emotional roller-coaster ride, such
as is the next best thing to actually sitting on Shenkin
street in downtown Tel-Aviv, yet somehow in all
the grief and pain avoids sentimentality. Her account
of her meeting with a father whose son was killed in a
suicide bombing was so heart-wrenching I had to
put the book down. ‘Me, Yossi Mendelevich, I was
considered to be a very protective father. But there was
a hole in my plan, I let my son take buses,’ the boy’s
father recounts. Yuval Mendelevich was thirteen and a
half . Seven thousand mour ners came to the
Mendelevich house to pay their respects to the family,
but not a single Arab. The family of the suicide bomber
celebrated for three days.
But there is humour here, as well as horror. A falafel-
seller slaps his head in wonder, recounting how his
father took his family from Baghdad to Israel, and then
left Israel for ... Teheran. An Israeli novelist quips to his
daughter that the government is so pleased that there is
an actual tourist in Israel (even though she is not really a
tourist) that the Post Office plans to issue a new com-
memorative stamp, called a ‘Linda’. Grant explains useful
Hebrew words, such as ‘balagan’ and ‘davka’. The for-
mer means a giant, uncontrollable mess, with a large
dollop of particularly Middle-Eastern chaos. ‘Davka’, it
turns out, is actually Aramaic, the language of Jesus,
which gives it a pedigree long pre-dating modern Israel.
It is essentially untranslatable, but in a way embodies
modern Israel: a stubborn, sometimes self-destructive
obstinacy, occasionally tinged with spite.
My only complaint is that this book, at 211 pages, is
too short. Then again, perhaps it works best as a brief,
intense series of snapshots. If you want more, then try
Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times, her novel set in
1940s Tel-Aviv, which well captures the Zeitgeist of
the end-days of the Br itish Mandate. Either way,
read about the people on the street and see the stereo-
types crumble before your eyes. I hope the American
Colony hotel bookshop will stock it for its media guests.
I recommend it to ever yone, jour nalist or not,
who seeks to understand the gigantic balagan that is
modern Israel.
To order this book at £7.99, see order form on page 59
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FOREIGN PARTS
G RAHAM H UTCHINGS
No Stone
Left Unturned
T HE G REAT WALL : C HINA AGAINST THE
WORLD, 1000 BC – 2000 AD
★ notion that the history of the Wall (whose restored and
By Julia Lovell
(Atlantic Books 412pp £19.99)
WHEN IT COMES to global icons, the Great Wall of China
is almost unsurpassed. It has become the supreme symbol
of a unique civilisation that is as remarkable for its
longevity as it is for its magnificence. It is also the object
of a patriotic cult. ‘Let us love our country and restore
our Great Wall,’ declared Deng
Xiaoping in 1984, launching a pro-
gramme of refurbishment designed to
end decades of neglect and establish
the ‘meaning’ of the Great Wall in
the consciousness of a people whom
Chairman Mao had often taught to
despise and destroy the feudal past.
The Great Wall, as thousands of con-
temporary Chinese brand names,
logos, works of art and other phe-
nomena declare, is China. It is the
monument of Chinese self-definition.
Yet as Julia Lovell argues, the
‘meaning’ of the visually stunning rib-
bon of fortifications and watchtowers
that still stretches, if often now in
ramshackle condition, for hundreds of
miles across northern China is open to
very different interpretations. A cor-
rect ‘reading’ of the Wall requires the
peeling back of layers of myths built
up by the perfidy of official Chinese
histor iography, the credulity of
Westerners, and the opportunism of
China’s twentieth-century nationalist
leaders in their search for a symbol
capable of reconciling a ‘glorious past’
with a modern sense of pride and purpose.
The myths about the Wall are legion, and believed as
often by educated Chinese as by foreigners. One of
them, again disposed of here, though it seems bound to
live on, is the assertion that the Great Wall is the only
man-made object visible from the moon. This apparently
dates from the late nineteenth century but was popu-
larised in the early 1930s, long before it was verifiable.
14
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut, told his compatriots
on his return to earth in 2003 that he had not seen the
Wall. The myth was quietly dropped from official mater-
ial on the Great Wall.
In her long-range raid across three millennia of China’s
northern-frontier history, Lovell, a Cambridge academic,
puts many of the Great Wall’s more important shibbo-
leths to the sword. They include the term ‘Great Wall’
itself, which is largely absent from the abundant written
record until the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and the
carefully maintained sections close to Beijing attract
millions of visitors each year) stretches in uninterrupted
fashion back to the first emperor, Qinshihuang, who
unified China in 221 BC. The Chinese started building
walls (the plural is important) at least as early as the ninth
century BC, and archaeological explorations have made
it clear that they often followed very different courses.
The fortifications most visitors see – at Badaling,
Mutianyu and Gubeikou, each of
them a short dr ive north from
Beijing – are relatively recently
restored sections of the Ming Wall,
built in the mid to late sixteenth
century. They are no less dramatic a
spectacle for that; it is just that they
are about 1,200 years younger than
commonly believed.
The purpose of the fortifications –
which, at their greatest extent,
stretched from Shanhaiguan on the
east coast to Yumenguan in Gansu,
where Chinese-style agr iculture
finally g ives way to the bar ren
deserts of Central Asia – is equally
controversial. China’s current rulers,
keen to show that their country’s
growing clout in world affairs is
fundamentally benign, believe that
the Great Wall is grist to this mill.
Surely millennia of defensive wall-
building provide unquestionable tes-
timony to the fact that the Chinese
have always been, as they remain, a
peace-loving people? Such magnifi-
cent fortifications, an unprecedented
human accomplishment, were built
to protect a settled, prosperous civilisation of great sophis-
tication from the depredations of less advanced peoples
known to the Chinese record (if not to present-day
diplomacy) as ‘barbarians’.
Not so, says Lovell. Wall-building was often undertaken
post bellum, after Chinese victories over the people of the
steppes, and the fortifications fenced in huge tracts of land
that extended well beyond the settled frontiers of Chinese
 FOREIGN PARTS
civilisation. In many respects, the wall marked the limits
of a Chinese land-grab that might be better described as
imperialism than as an exercise in peace-building.
The frontier between Chinese and nomadic peoples
was also more fluid than the presence of the various
walls might suggest. This was so both literally and figu-
ratively. The Great Wall can be read as a monument to
the clash of civilisations between the steppe and the set-
tled; and it is an obvious, yet often insightful, metaphor
for the frequent haughtiness and cultural superiority
associated with Sino-centrism. It is a powerful yet
almost fearful statement of the limits of China’s interests
in and need for the wider world.
As a defensive strategy, however, wall-building was
often a spectacular failure. The Mongol cavalry was
among several over the centuries which simply rode
along the Great Wall until they reached the end of a sec-
tion and then turned south to conquer China. For a
while, such invaders might seek to resist the many temp-
tations of the settled Chinese life for fear that it would
drain them of the martial spirit forged in them by the
hardships of the steppe. Just as often, they succumbed –
and set about building walls to keep out the next wave of
northern invaders. The difference between Chinese and
‘barbarian’ was often larger in the historical record (much
of it written by Chinese) than in historical practice.
Neither was the maintenance of solid northern fron-
tiers synonymous or coter minous with the era of
China’s greatest cultural accomplishments. The accom-
plishments of the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) are
arguably without equal in the long span of Chinese his-
tory; yet the Tang, so far from being great wall-builders,
opened their frontiers to foreign influences on an
unprecedented scale.
Lovell is not the first scholar to deconstruct the Great
Wall in the fashion attempted here. Much of the time (as
she acknowledges) she is following in the footsteps of
Arthur Waldron, whose The Great Wall of China: From
History to Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1990) is a
pioneering work of scholarship. Yet Lovell has broader
aims. She seeks to use the Great Wall as an interpretive
device to understand the long sweep of Chinese history,
lifting it out of its specific geographical context as an
instrument of northern-frontier control and making it
stand as a metaphor for the history and destiny of the
country as a whole.
There is an agreeable iconoclasm at work throughout
the book, often insightful and wittily expressed. Few
stones are left unturned: what the wall meant for imperial
finances is discussed, as are the human costs incurred
during its construction. There is a good section on
distant frontier posts as a source of poetic inspiration –
producing the literary genre known as ‘frontier verse’.
We seem on weaker ground when Lovell strays beyond
the Great Wall as a functioning (or otherwise) physical
15
frontier and uses it as a symbol to explain the course of
China’s tempestuous twentieth-century history. The fact
that Sun Yatsen, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping each
singled the Great Wall out in various ways as a source of
pride and modern nation-building is significant and well
observed. It is not, in this reader’s opinion, sufficient to
support a particularly convincing comprehensive inter-
pretation of modern Chinese history.
Yet as Lovell emphasises, wall-building has been an
inseparable feature of Chinese endeavour through the
centuries. Today, it takes the form of the ‘Great Firewall of
China’, the virtual wall erected by the Public Security
Bureau to prevent China’s millions of Internet users from
accessing material deemed to threaten Communist Party
rule and blight an otherwise healthy Chinese mental uni-
verse. Among the websites kept the right side of the wall is
any concerning Fa Lun Gong, the banned religious sect,
and discussions of Taiwanese or Tibetan independence.
As Lovell points out, the Great Firewall coexists with
almost unrestrained enthusiasm on the part of the gov-
ernment to ‘wire’ the whole of China and strengthen
the country’s connections with the outside world. Her
treatment of the human foibles and high statecraft
at work in the long sweep of China’s frontier history
sheds light on some of the apparent contradictions of
contemporary China.
To order this book at £15.99, see order form on page 59
Oxford University
Continuing Education
English Literature
Foundation
Certificate
Master's in
Creative Writing
These two-year
part-time courses
start in Oct 2006
For details phone 01865 270369
or email: ppcert@conted.ox.ac.uk
or see the website at
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ad/pp13
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 HISTORY
R ICHARD O VERY
DEEP WAR
T HUNDER IN THE E AST: T HE N AZI –S OVIET
WAR 1941–1945
★ which might well be justified, given the heavy emphasis
By Evan Mawdsley
(Hodder Arnold 502pp £25)
IT IS A long time now since the publication of the late
John Erickson’s magisterial two-volume study of the war
on the Eastern Front, books that have stood the test of
time when it comes to the dense narrative of the huge
number of pitched battles and lesser engagements between
the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht. He had to
rely, however, on a largely German source base for much
of the detail, despite the generosity of Soviet colleagues
who did the best they could to get him access to Russian-
language material. Since the fall of Communism, a great
deal more archival material on the war has come into the
public domain in Russia, in large collections of published
documents. This is the chief justi-
fication for Evan Mawdsley’s new
history of the conflict, which is
among the first contributions to a
new series of up-to-date military
histories under the editorship of
the Oxford professor of the histo-
ry of war, Hew Strachan.
The result is something of a
disappointment. True, Mawdsley
presents an account of the devas-
tating, murderous campaigns with
scrupulous attention to what the
new Russian material tells us that
was not known before. His con- Germans drive a horse and cart through a snowstorm
cern with military detail, in a
span a good deal briefer and more accessible than
Erickson’s, will command respect. If at times the Eastern
Front appears to be just one damn battle after another,
Mawdsley is a shrewd guide across the scarred landscapes
he describes. He has sensible things to say about most of
the contentious issues that still hang over the historiogra-
phy (he has no truck, for example, with the idea promoted
some years ago that Stalin was planning to attack Hitler in
1941; he is equally, and rightly, dubious as to whether the
few Soviet–German contacts in 1941 and 1943 should be
regarded as a serious attempt to broker peace).
These many qualities will make this an essential book
for anyone looking for an accurate guide to what hap-
pened in the East between June 1941 and May 1945. Yet
it is important to recognise that this is predominantly a
Soviet story. The German perspective is thinner and less
16
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
sure-footed; the source base is overwhelmingly Russian.
In the section discussing economic mobilisation and tech-
nology there is a manifestly less detailed treatment of the
German position – an approach that makes it difficult to
explain the huge gap that developed between German
and Soviet military production and battlefield capability.
The battle histories rely heavily on Soviet accounts,
in previous histories on the German military effort, but
the balance for a history of the ‘Nazi–Soviet War’ (why
not German–Soviet?) is less convincing. The background
to the conflict is sketchy, and on the German side heavily
weighted to the circumstances of 1941. Perhaps he is
right to accept Hitler’s view that war in the East was the
only way to defeat Britain, but the German–Soviet story
has a much longer and more complex trajectory.
The analysis is framed by assumptions that are also con-
tentious. Early on in the book Mawdsley makes clear his
view that Hitler’s plan for a new Europe was irrational
fancy; the whole German war effort was undermined by
Hitler’s ‘fatal strategic mistakes’, of which the largest was
the flawed belief that the USSR could be defeated.
Mawdsley accepts the view that Germany could never
have won the war, and indeed
sees 1941 as probably the turn-
ing-point of the whole conflict.
But was Hitler’s judgement so
irrational? His senior generals
broadly accepted the military
intelligence evaluation of the
Red Army, which they them-
selves had made. One reading of
modern history showed that
Russia was a military disaster –
beaten by the West in the
Crimea, by Japan in 1904, forced
into collapse in 1917, barely able
to defeat the Finns in 1940.
Moreover, most Western
observers of the modernisation crisis in the 1930s in the
USSR agreed that the army and economy were poorly
organised and shoddily equipped. Who in 1941 or 1942
could really predict the capacity of the rump USSR
to become a formidable military juggernaut under the
exacting conditions of total war?
Mawdsley’s argument here rests heavily on economic
determinism. The Soviet Union, he claims, had double
the population of Germany (170 million against 80 mil-
lion) and vast industrial and raw-material resources to call
upon. Yet in almost the same paragraph he observes that
60 million Soviet citizens came under German occupa-
tion, giving the Germans a large pool of additional labour
(millions were rounded up and sent to work in the Reich),
but crucially reducing the Soviet population to around 110
million. The population of Greater Germany in 1940 was

HISTORY
in fact 96 million, not 80, and in addition Germany was
supported in the East by Finland, Romania, Hungary and
Slovakia, which pushed its aggregate population in excess
of the Soviet Union’s in 1942. Moreover, populations are
not equivalent. The USSR lost a huge pool of young men
in 1941–2, more than 5 million, all of them with some
kind of military training. The Soviet Union survived only
because it made men of fifty fight in the line, and forced
every woman or youth who could work to do so.
The industrial balance is also distorted here. Germany
had 317 million tonnes of coal in 1942, the USSR only
75.5; against 8 million tonnes of Soviet steel, the Germans
had almost 28 million; and so on. Mawdsley’s comment
that Soviet production ‘slumped temporarily’ in 1941–2 is,
at the least, disingenuous. None of the major sectors had
recovered its 1941 level by 1945. Moreover, the Red
Army was wasteful of weaponry. Larger production has to
be set against much faster loss rates than those suffered by
German forces until late in the war. Of course Germany
ended up fighting against Britain and the USA as well, but
for the critical period that mattered, in 1942–3, the war
was mainly fought in the East, where the USSR faced a
massive and potentially debilitating imbalance of resources.
Mawdsley insists that the one interpretation that might
account for the Soviet capacity to withstand and then
drive back the Germans – that the Red Army became
operationally more adept – is neutralised by the fact that
the Germans, too, were operationally skilled to a high
degree. Yet the detailed evidence, much of it to be found
in Mawdsley’s own narrative, makes clear that in all kinds
of ways – from the organisation of major units right
down to the realisation that having radios in tanks might
be useful – the Red Army and air forces from 1943
onwards became a massively better fighting force, still
taking high losses, but able to inflict them on the enemy
too, and able to outmanoeuvre and out-think the much-
vaunted Wehrmacht. To argue otherwise risks returning to
the assertions of the German marshals in the 1950s, that
they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
The numbers game is not irrelevant here. The key question
in any account, old or new, of the Soviet–German war is why
the Soviets won. Mawdsley concludes that the key elements
of the answer are political: the Germans failed to make ratio-
nal political choices; they failed to win over the Soviet
population they controlled; they failed to split the Allies.
Yet a Soviet victory did not just depend on German mis-
takes. The USSR had to fight better on every battlefront,
and had to unite its many peoples to endure an annihilating
war to the death against the invader. As to the passions that
mobilised Soviet society, or the morbid fanaticism that kept
the German army fighting to the last, the hatreds and
anguish that characterised this most horrible of wars,
Mawdsley is a more reticent chronicler of what the Russian
poet Ilya Ehrenburg once evocatively termed ‘deep war’.
To order this book at £20, see order form on page 59
CENTRE FOR FREUDIAN
ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH
Introductory Course
Freud-Lacan:
The Fundamentals of
Psychoanalysis
Sept 2006 - July 2007
The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research offers a
one-year introduction to the Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. It examines Freud’s founding concepts of
psychoanalysis in the light of Lacan’s re-reading of Freud,
and introduces some of Lacan’s central theories. Topics
include the Phantasy: the Subject and the Other;
Interpretation; the Drive; and Differential Diagnosis. The
course consists of a series of lectures, complemented by
a reading group and tutorials.
It can be followed by a training in psychoanalysis.
Lacan:
Training in Psychoanalysis
CFAR offers a training in psychoanalysis within Lacan’s
orientation. The training programme is open to those with
some clinical and/or academic background and to those
who have completed the introductory course. The formal
teaching programme consists of lectures, clinical semi-
nars and study groups, and there are regular seminars by
visiting psychoanalysts from France and Spain. It takes
place in Central London on Saturdays and lasts for a min-
imum of four years. A part-time format is available to those
who live a considerable distance from London.
For full details of both programmes
please visit our website or contact:
The Administrator
Tel: 0845 838 0829 (local rate)
Email: admin@cfar.demon.co.uk
CFAR is a registered charity no 1085368
CFAR is a Member of the United Kingdom
Council for Psychotherapy
Website: www.cfar.org.uk
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 HISTORY

C OLIN S MITH of James Clavell’s novel. George Segal played the epony-
mous American prisoner of war Corporal King, ace

KING RATS survivor and black-marketeer collaborator incarcerated

P RISONERS OF THE J APANESE
★ huge success. Not only were all authority figures fair
By Gavan Daws
(Simon & Schuster 462pp £18.99)
WHEN THE FIRST draft of American prisoners arrived at
Changi, Singapore’s vast barracks complex in which the
Japanese had allowed their British and Australian cap-
tives to immure themselves, two of their hungry number
consumed an RAF dog, a mascot with 200 flying hours.
To make matters worse, one of the culprits was half
Japanese, though wholly Texan in outlook:
A dog of another nationality and he might not have
eaten it, but he felt the same way as everyone else
about the British ... Fujita got as far as picking up an
iron bar, but he could see doggy eyes looking at him
and a doggy tail wagging, and he had to wait until
dark before he could bring himself to knock it on
the head. Then, come to skinning, Rafalovich had
not the least idea, he was a city boy. Fujita was from
Texas ... but it was nothing like a rabbit ... he left a
lot of hair on.
The Americans (a Texan National Guard artillery unit
captured almost intact in Java, and sailors off the sunken
cruiser USS Houston) arrived at Changi towards the end
of 1942. By that time some 30,000 Br itish and
Australian POWs had departed Singapore for the well-
documented horrors of building the Thai–Burma railway.
Even so, Changi still had 15,000 men, locked into
accommodation designed for 5,000.
It is with obvious satisfaction that Daws, an American
academic and documentary film maker who worked in
Australia for fifteen years, records that his Texans soon
learned to prefer the Australians to the British who,
besides being terrible snobs, allegedly made them work
longer on shorter rations. Furthermore, their accents
were as difficult to swallow
as their mascots: ‘a Britisher
turned up, Royal Air Force Looking to
with a br istly moustache,
asking about the dog in his
British voice. Rafalovich was
publish
not impressed; at home in
your book?
the USA an accent like that We offer a complete service to authors
just by itself would have got wishing to self-publish their work.
a man his ass kicked.’ We work with our authors honestly
It is thirty years since we and professionally to produce books
viewed captive Br itons of which both of us can be proud.
through American eyes in
King Rat, Bryan Forbes’s film
in Changi with a bunch of starving, stiff-necked Limeys
rather dead than fed by a criminal whose only loyalty
was to himself. It was the mid-Sixties and the film was a
game but the Vietnam War was not yet an issue and
anti-Americanism as old-fashioned as seamed nylons and
untipped Lucky Strike.
‘The Americans were the great individualists,’ writes
Daws, ‘the capitalists, the cowboys, the gangsters.’ The
closest there was to a real King Rat was Ted Lewin, an
American civilian long settled in Manila’s demi-monde,
where he owned a nightclub and a brothel. After the
Japanese invaded, Lewin decided to stick close to the US
army and ended up incarcerated with the military.
Nonetheless, his Filipino contacts could get through the
wire and Lewin was able to wheel and deal his way out
of hunger and most other deprivations. He could even
supply morphine at a price, but his speciality was trading
rice rations for tobacco, which made the life expectancy
of heavy smokers even shorter. Such trading was banned
in British- and Australian- run camps, and Americans
who tried it soon stopped. When, after shipwreck,
bombing and submarine attack, Lewin arrived in Japan
in the last of the ‘hellships’ to make a home run, an
American doctor who examined the survivors noted
‘ninety-five skeletons and a fat man’. Lewin had been
trading ‘nicotine for protein’ throughout the voyage.
This is the British edition of a book first published in
the United States twelve years ago, and a much more
honest, and possibly better-selling title, would surely
have been ‘Japan’s American Prisoners’. Daws claims,
rather archly, that he writes about his countrymen
because they ‘covered the whole range of experience’.
But it is silly, especially for a British audience, to pretend
that this is somehow a comprehensive account of the
entire Allied prisoner-of-war experience in the Far East.
What we have here is an absorbing contribution on one
of the lesser-known aspects of it.
There were probably
about 15,000 Amer icans
among 140,000 or so
The answer is here Caucasians – mainly
The Better Book Australian, Br itish and
Dutch – captured dur ing
Company Japan’s five months of
Write or phone for our blitzkrieg across the Pacific
FREE Guide to Self-Publishing and South East Asia between
Warblington Lodge • The Gardens early December 1941 and
Havant • Hampshire • PO9 2XH May 1942. Most of them,
Tel: 023 9248 1160 Fax: 023 9249 2819
Email: editors@better-book.co.uk about 12,000, were taken in
the Philippines, half-starved
and fever-ridden after three

18
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 HISTORY
months’ besiegement in the Bataan Peninsula. The
notorious Death March gave the Americans their first
indication of Japanese contempt for prisoners who had
spurned their chance of a glorious death. Along the
length of this 65-mile trek exhausted stragglers were
murdered with bayonets and rifle butts.
Nobody knows how many Filipino soldiers and civil-
ians died. Daws suggests as many as 10,000 and says US
casualties were at least 500.
The next biggest catch had been on Wake Island, a
dot in the Western Pacific so plagued by rats that pre-
war Pan Am clipper crews offered bored transit passengers
air rifles to help cull them. Civilian contractors working
on the airfield and naval base outnumbered the under-
strength Marine battalion, and many were keen to fight.
Once the armoury had been emptied some were seen
clutching Pan Am’s air rifles. Fortunately, the Marines
also had shore batteries and a little air support, which
repulsed the first attempt at a landing by sinking two
destroyers and damaging a troop-carrier. Despite this
splendid beginning Honolulu failed to send reinforce-
ments and Wake was eventually overwhelmed in a night
attack. But not before its garrison had sunk more ships
and killed enough of the Japanese infantry to make them
reluctant to spare the 1,600 Americans they had rounded
up on the airfield. Only the timely intervention of the
Japanese admiral in charge prevented a massacre.
J ERRY B ROTTON
FUNDAMENTALIST FRIAR
S COURGE AND F IRE : S AVONAROLA AND
R ENAISSANCE I TALY
★
By Lauro Martines
(Jonathan Cape 334pp £20)
FOLLOWING HARD ON the heels of April Blood: Florence
and the Plot against the Medici (2004), Lauro Martines’s
Scourge and Fire sees the author taking his story of the
Florentine Renaissance on to its next bloody historical
episode. Moving from history into biography, Martines
takes as his subject the Dominican friar Girolamo
Savonarola (1452–98) and his unprecedented rise to reli-
gious and political influence in Florence over four heady
years following the expulsion of the Medici in 1494.
Martines’s main aim is to rescue the poor friar from five
centuries of predominantly bad press, often written from
the perspective of the Medici. These accounts portrayed
Savonarola as everything from a religious fanatic fanning
the flames of the bonfires of the vanities, to an atheistic
her maphrodite who reduced the glor ious centre
of the Italian Renaissance to a Year Zero policy of
19
Among the fighting contractors were Harry Jeffries
and Oklahoma Atkinson, a tough pair of West Coast
cardsharps in their mid-twenties. Riveters on San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge by day, at night they had
worked small-time gambling dens – sometimes pretending
not to know each other – until they decided that the
way to save some big stake money was a few months’
work on Wake, where the only distraction was the rats.
Daws draws character well. With a light touch and
without moralising he follows the fortunes of these
tricksters throughout their captivity along with two oth-
ers: Tom ‘Slug’ Wr ight, the descendant of Texas
Rangers who was one of the artillerymen in Java, and
Sergeant Forrest Knox, captured in the Philippines,
where he commanded a light tank. On Bataan, Knox
and his crew did a lot of machine-gunning, but probably
the only man the sergeant could be certain he had killed
was the crazed American he strangled in the grossly
overcrowded ship taking them to Japan. ‘All nationalities
were subjected to essentially the same dreadful stresses in
the holds,’ writes a clearly puzzled Daws. ‘Yet only the
Americans killed each other.’
And suddenly there is some unexpected praise for the
dog-lovers who ‘lined up in an orderly fashion’ to leave
the ships torpedoed by their own side and even, we are
assured, sang ‘Britannia rule the waves’.
To order this book at £15.20, see order form on page 59
W
NE
WORKING WITH
YOUNG PEOPLE:
LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY AND LIABILITY (6th edition) by Carolyn Hamilton
The Children’s Legal Centre has published the 6th edition of Working
with Young People: Legal responsibility and liability – the essential
guide for all professionals and practitioners who work with children
and young people.
At only £24.95 plus p&p, this comprehensive guide will help you to
negotiate the complex responsibilities and liabilities when working
with young people and answer your questions on topics such as child
protection, confidentiality, child employment and the Children Act 1989.
To order your copy call the
01206 872466
children’s
or download an order form
from our website: legal
www.childrenslegalcentre.com centre
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 HISTORY
religious fundamentalism.
Martines, a retired academic renowned
for a series of scholarly books on Italian
Renaissance humanism, knows his primary
sources too well to fall into such traps.
His interest is in the religious and rhetori-
cal power of a man whose ser mons
seduced the likes of Machiavelli,
Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola
(who was so terrified by Savonarola’s ser-
mon in 1494 that it made his hair stand
on end). Instead of pursuing the life, he
carefully charts Savonarola’s growing
political opposition to Medici rule and to Savonarola: matches at the ready
its erosion of Florentine republicanism.
He argues that the friar ‘posed a fundamental threat to
authority and to the self-interest of rulers, including reli-
gious ones’, and that after the Medici’s exile he was at
the centre of an attempt to construct a genuinely inclu-
sive civic republicanism that embraced all social classes.
Martines claims that his book ‘is not a biography’, and
he is certainly thorough on the civic and political
upheavals of the 1490s, and the labyrinthine workings of
Florentine government, from the Signory to the various
councils that first made then broke Savonarola. For a
book that is sold as the first full biography of Savonarola
(which might surprise Franco Cordero, author of a
multi-volume study published in the late 1980s), it is
disappointingly bereft of any exploration of the individual,
something Martines sniffily leaves to those with a
‘Freudian approach’. As a result, there is little convincing
explanation of how Savonarola transformed himself from
the disastrous sermoniser who joined the Dominican
convent of San Marco in the 1480s, into the ‘superb
orator’ who denounced Medici excess in the early
1490s, and thunderously anticipated the French invasion
of Florence and the eviction of Piero in the extraordi-
nary events of 1494. As a historian first and foremost,
Martines is much better at explaining how Savonarola
brought together a Christian belief in charity and love
with a powerful political belief in the long-standing
political principles of Florentine republicanism, which
had been steadily undermined by two generations of
Medici rule. He traces in painstaking detail the ebb and
flow of power between the Signory and the Grand
Council, which, after Piero’s expulsion, was increasingly
composed of Savonarolans and created what Martines
argues was ‘the foundation of a bona fide republic’.
Unfortunately for Savonarola, the looking-glass world
of Florentine politics meant that many of the elite nobles
who joined the reformed councils retained sympathies
for the exiled Medici. Once the Borgia pope Alexander
VI expressed his displeasure with ‘the little friar’, his fate
was sealed. Savonarola had broadly welcomed the
French invasion as cleansing Italy of its sins, whilst
20
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
condemning Rome as the capital of vice.
Both views were unwelcome to a pope
trying to secure a Holy League of Italian
states to get the French out of the penin-
sula through bribery and corruption.
Savonarola’s excommunication in 1497,
followed by the gradual collapse of political
support within the Signory, led to his
downfall. When the Florentines finally
turned on the friar in the spring of 1498,
first laying siege to the convent in San
Marco, then ar resting and tortur ing
Savonarola in an ‘explosion of brutality’,
it was as swift and passionate a transfor-
mation as the weeks in 1494 that saw his
followers swept to power.
Martines’s command of his historical material is not in
doubt, and, like the humanists he so greatly admires, he
assiduously unpacks the rhetorical interplay of language,
religion and high politics that defines Savonarola’s story.
He deconstructs Savonarola’s confessions, pointing out
that ‘they sound so little like the Friar himself ’, and he
spends long sections analysing the language of the
sermons. However, the claim that the friar won over the
Florentines because his rhetoric ‘marched along a line of
reasoning just as numbers and transactions marched
across’ the ledgers of Florentine merchants and accoun-
tants cannot fully explain Savonarola’s emotional power.
Martines’s abiding problem is that he is an academic his-
torian, not a biographer. Where April Blood allowed him
the opportunity to fuse his scholarly training with a
story that read (and was sold) like an episode of The
Sopranos, his new book offers no such scope. As a result,
although Martines repeatedly castigates the academics he
has left behind, his own prose is littered with donnish
asides (‘Let us consider’, ‘I trust that my own rationalism
flashes forth’, etc) and long digressions on arcane aspects
of Florentine statecraft: the book stands uneasily
between academia and popular history (or biography?).
There is also a convoluted effort to seek contemporary
‘relevance’ for Savonarola’s story by beginning the book
with an attempt on the friar’s life in 1498, which
Martines claims ‘would have been the first “terrorist”
bomb in the history of Europe’ (but it wasn’t, for several
reasons, including the fact that it didn’t happen).
Allusions are made to the friar’s religious ‘fundamental-
ism’, and the ‘different fundamentalisms of our day’,
but no conclusions are drawn, other than to caution
against taking present-day preoccupations as a basis for
condemning Savonarola. Post 9/11, are we really being
asked to reflect on Savonarola’s life in comparison to
Christian fundamentalism in the US, or Islamic funda-
mentalism in the Middle East? If we are, I wish Martines
had been more explicit about it.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 59
 HISTORY
S IMON H EFFER
UNITY AT ALL COSTS
R EVOLUTION : T HE G REAT C RISIS OF THE
B RITISH M ONARCHY 1685–1720
★ surrounding himself with advisers and ministers who
By Tim Harris
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 622pp £30)
IT OFTEN SEEMS convenient to date the beginning of
modern Britain at the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89,
when the Protestant Prince of Orange liberated first
England, then Scotland and Ireland, from the stealthy
Romanisation that the kingdoms had undergone during
the short reign of James II. As Tim Harris points out
towards the end of this well-researched and well-written
account of that period, the real revolution seemed to
take place not to secure the throne for William of
Orange, but once he had secured it. Not the least of the
reforms of the 1690s was that of
finance, with the foundation of
the Bank of England in 1694.
With the modernisation of the
economy came the need for a
more accountable political sys-
tem, and so it was that the
Revolution also brought with it
the Triennial Act, which ensured
that parliaments met at least every
three years and could not sit for
more than three years.
Even in the way that William
secured his revolution, and dealt
with his former opponents, there
was a sign that the barbarities of
the Middle Ages had finally been
left behind. Although he could Billy rides again
have enslaved or massacred the
soldiers who fought against him in Ireland, for example,
he let them go into exile in France, and transported
them there at his own expense. His accession to the
throne immediately provoked a Declaration of Rights –
subsequently the Bill of Rights – that did away with,
among other things, excessive, cruel and unusual pun-
ishments. While restrictions remained for Catholics and
dissenters (some of them formalised in the Act of
Settlement of 1701), persecution was at an end. Much
of the Britain we see today was visible by the time
William died in 1702, and more still when George I of
Hanover ascended the throne in 1714.
Harris’s book is a sequel to his excellent Restoration,
published last year and covering the reign of Charles II.
Picking up the story in 1685 at Charles’s death, he
21
shows how his brother James, Duke of York, inherited a
strong position but, by a mixture of cack-handed ruth-
lessness, slyness and stupidity, threw away his throne and
three kingdoms. James began in great popularity, but
chose to bend the rules and ignore the laws in order to
have the Catholic faith that he himself professed made
the establishment religion of his realms. He did this by
followed the same faith as he did. He ensured that
Catholics were increasingly made lords lieutenant, mag-
istrates and officers in the army, even though the laws
expressly disallowed it. He did all this under the cloak of
tolerance, but in reality was marginalising important
Protestant interests. He seems to have been especially
obtuse: not merely in wilfully breaking the law (which
he might well have got away with, as dictators before
and after him around the world routinely have) but in
failing to appreciate that a predominantly Protestant
nation would become aggrieved at having a Catholic
ruling caste imposed upon it.
The prelates of an Anglican Church that preached pas-
sive obedience to these changes
were accused by one of their
critics of having made a turd pie‚
which they would then be forced
to eat. By 1688, however, it was
bishops of that same Church in
England that would challenge the
King’s right to waive the rules,
and, when tried by the courts,
win. From that moment James’s
game was up. Realising that the
monarch was never going to
govern in the interests of the
majority of his people and in
accordance with the law but
would rather further his own
sectar ian agenda, a group of
magnates representing all the
main sectional interests of the
nation – Church, State, the landed interest and the mili-
tary – resolved to invite the Prince of Orange to bring his
army and invade. When William finally landed at Torbay
in the autumn of 1688 he found himself welcomed in to
a West Country that had seen the worst of the excessive
barbar ities of the punishment of the Monmouth
Rebellion three years earlier, by Judge Jeffreys and others.
William’s progress through southern England towards
London was remarkably free of bloodshed. James, realis-
ing that his support had melted away both in the capital
and in the provinces, tried to flee disguised as a priest.
He was captured and sent back to London. William,
whose lack of vindictiveness was the key to the success
of his revolution, let him be taken down to Kent again,
and there slip quietly away to France and exile.
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 HISTORY
The revolution in a largely Protestant England was eas-
ily accomplished. In Scotland, the home of the deposed
Stuart monarchy, the issue was clouded by the warfare
between Presbyterians and Episcopalians. As Harris
points out, an eventual settlement left plenty of scope for
the fostering of Jacobitism, out of which would quickly
emerge Scottish nationalism. With James II and then,
after 1701, his son James III in France, and with Catholic
France an active enemy of England, there was a security
as well as a theological aspect to these divisions. While
William never sought to use savage means to impose the
settlement (the massacre at Glencoe in 1692 was some-
thing of an unfortunate accident), the new, modernised
order would be enforced and secured at all costs.
Ireland was a somewhat different affair. Catholicism was
more deeply rooted, and not just among the Irish. The
Old English were still there in large numbers, and
Catholics too; and the flight of tens of thousands of
Protestants from Ireland to England late in 1688 further
tilted the balance. James II came briefly out of exile to
lead his army in Ireland in 1690, in a campaign of which
his defeat at the Boyne was perhaps the turning point.
Gradually but quickly pockets of Jacobite resistance were
eliminated all over Ireland, and William’s writ was allowed
to run there. In this theatre bloodshed was rife, not the
least in the settling of scores by Protestants against a
Catholic majority that had treated them so harshly in the
rebellion of 1641 and, though less brutally, more recently.
Hitherto, the arguments between factions in Ireland had
been more complex than they were later to become.
After 1690 they were simply about religion: about what
Catholics depicted as an alien, invading Protestant ascen-
dancy ruling over their country. That legacy remains
today. Ireland then was a kingdom entirely dependent on
England, but 1690 and the difficulties it would spawn
signalled the kingdom’s descent into a colony.
Harris is right to split up the revolution into its separate
constituent parts. His concluding chapter is a thoughtful
essay on the consequences of these upheavals leading up
to 1720, and some will find his analysis of the circum-
stances that brought about the union of the English and
Scottish crowns in 1707 somewhat controversial.
Though Harris concedes that the dire economic posi-
tion of Scotland in the years before Union was not
entirely England’s fault (the weather that inflicted several
bad harvests was an act of God, for example, and the
catastrophic failure of the Darien colonisation in Central
America in the 1690s, which used up a quarter of
Scotland’s ready cash, was due more to bad Scottish
planning and a lack of foresight than anything else), he
does hold England somewhat to blame. The Parliament
and Court in London were concerned at Scotland’s
refusal initially to accept the Hanoverian succession after
Queen Anne’s death, and imposed trading restrictions
on Scotland to help persuade that country towards the
22
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
path of r ighteousness. These adversely affected
Scotland’s commerce with France, and brought further
economic strictures. However, this account perhaps
understates the realities of the diplomacy of the time.
England had every right to seek to enforce the compli-
ance of a neighbour with whom it had shared a
common sovereign for a century and, more to the point,
of a neighbour that was neither economically nor strate-
gically viable on its own. Any other course would have
been derelict on the part of the English. All that said,
the main economic wounds that drove Scotland into the
Union of 1707 were self-inflicted.
Devotees of Macaulay will find much to quibble with
in Tim Harris’s account, but can be sure nonetheless
that the modern one has a greater claim to accuracy. It is
an important, accessible and intelligent account of a
crucial period in our nation’s past. And the attitude in
which it is written, while it may rankle with those who
hold strong views to the contrary, only serves to make it
all the more compelling as a work of history.
To order this book at £24, see order form on page 59
J OHN K EAY
THE SHOOTS OF FANATICISM
G OD ’ S T ERRORISTS : T HE WAHHABI C ULT
AND THE ROOTS OF M ODERN J IHAD
★
By Charles Allen
(Little, Brown 297pp £20)
A WORD SELDOM heard these days, though well worth
an airing, is ‘crescentade’. Analogous to ‘crusade’ and
perhaps derived from the more appetising croissantade,
(croissant being the French for ‘crescent’), a crescentade
strictly speaking signifies an Islamic holy war. But nine-
teenth-century commentators applied the word indis-
criminately to any outburst of Muslim aggression whose
theological motivation eluded them. The term was
often somewhat dismissive; and it might now be usefully
revived by anyone reluctant to dignify with the Quranic
sanction of jihad the casual dismemberment, say, of
mothers and infants, often themselves Muslim.
In Asia and North Africa crescentades constituted an
occupational hazard of colonial rule. They flared up
unexpectedly, they were led by ‘fanatics’ who enjoyed
only limited support from their co-religionists, and they
were usually quelled by force. Cross-national links were
often suspected but rarely pursued. The recognised
flashpoints ranged from Makassar and West Sumatra in
what is now Indonesia to Bengal, the Punjab, the North
West Frontier, Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria and of course
Arabia. In fact the sparks of fanaticism seemed to splutter
 HISTORY

along the highways and seaways used by pilgrims making

the haj to Mecca. For a colonial regime with a more
localised remit it was better to downplay the flare-ups as DRUMMERS
isolated incidents, ultra-conservative in character, gener- OF JAPAN
ally ineffectual and faintly ridiculous.
The British were rather good at this downplaying.
Firebrands with titles like the Khan of Amb, the Nawab
of Tonk and the Akhund of Swat failed to impress them.
In God’s Terrorists Charles Allen comes up with some still
more improbable ‘crescentaders’. ‘The Mad Fakir’ may
ring a bell, but new to this reviewer were both ‘the
Diesel Maulana’ and ‘the Manki Mullah’. They operated
along the mountain fringes of what is now Pakistan and
in neighbouring Afghanistan, a region notoriously law-
less since before British times and where their memory
has since been eclipsed by the less laughable Mullah
Omar and ‘Shaykh’ Osama bin Laden.
British India and its mountain fringes are Charles
Allen’s speciality; over the years none has served them ‘A performance of such rampaging energy that it
better. Beginning with Plain Tales from the Raj in the threatens to bring down the house!’
1970s, Allen flirted with imperial nostalgia before pro- ##### THE SCOTSMAN
ducing a succession of carefully researched and far from WED 8 - SAT 18 MARCH
rosy-eyed studies of matters military and scholarly among
the Sahib log. From such a writer, a work on terrorism
that promises an examination of ‘The Wahhabi Cult and
the Roots of Modern Jihad’ looks to be a decidedly
brave departure – and indeed it is. But those who relish
Allen’s India books will not be disappointed. The shoots
of modern jihad, if not its roots, are found to be substan-
tially in South Asia; and in this unexpected revelation lies
the originality of a complex but compelling book that is
powered throughout by great narrative skill and an
exceptional grasp of the British Indian scene.
The crescentades that sporadically ruffled the serenity
of the Raj have hitherto received little attention. In 1831 ‘A revelation of
a village in Bengal declared itself an Islamic republic brilliance... in truth,
under the leadership of a man called Titu Mir. To the a masterpiece
government of the day it was about as alarming as
Lambeth announcing itself a nuclear-free zone. When not to be missed’
some five hundred ragged ghazis armed with spades and TIME OUT

clubs charged forth to terrorise their neighbours and

send a magistrate packing, there were a few dozen fatalities Tue 21 March
and a flutter of interest from Calcutta. But the ‘fanatics’,
once disabused of a belief in their own invulnerability, - Sat 8 April
were easily routed, and that, it seemed, was that. ‘Strictly
local … arising from causes which had operation in a ‘The energy is
small extent of country’ was the official verdict.
Twelve years later, in leafy Peshawar at the other end inspiring; the
of British India, Colonel Frederick Mackeson completed comedy is a tonic’
a day’s work as senior Comissioner on the North West THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
Frontier, strode across the road to his bungalow, and en
route was so severely stabbed that he died four days later. SAVE 20% ON YOUR TICKETS!
Again the assailant turned out to be a ‘religious fanatic’; When you buy tickets for two or more
after trial and sentence he climbed the scaffold ‘glorying Sadler’s Wells and Peacock shows.
in his deed of blood’ and still insisting that it was See www.sadlerswells.com/save.
Terms and conditions apply

SADLER’S WELLS IN THE WEST END

LITERARY REVIEW March 2006

 HISTORY
designed ‘to stop the British invading his land’. Clearly
the fellow was mad. Allen’s claim that this was actually
‘the first successful blow against the British government
by a secret organisation intent on revolution’ would have
been laughed out of court.
A repeat performance in 1871, when a Chief Justice
was stabbed to death in Calcutta, was taken more seriously.
The judge was presiding over the trial of some trouble-
makers now identified as ‘Wahabees’, and his attacker,
though another fanatically incoherent Pathan from the
North West Frontier, looked to be one of their sympa-
thisers. More ominously it was this man’s example that
would prompt a yet worse outrage when, less than a year
later, while inspecting the penal colony of the Andaman
Islands, Lord Mayo, Viceroy and Governor-General of
India, fell to yet another dagger-happy Pathan. Suspicions
were now thoroughly aroused; and although any evidence
that Mayo’s murder was part of a wider conspiracy failed
to materialise, Allen seems to have since found some and
suggests that more may have been suppressed.
Indeed Allen’s sleuthing leads him to fit all these inci-
dents, and others, into a coherent and horribly familiar
narrative involving a chain of crescentader cells linked
together in their uncompromising hostility by personal
allegiances, theological convergence and strategic
opportunism. The parallels with today’s terror trails
LETTERS
OOH LA LA
Dear Sir,
Oh, do come on. The photo of Simone de Beavoir in
the February edition is hardly a candid shot. She had
time to don her high heels (thus lengthening her ‘sturdy
legs’) and pose gracefully. As they say – I don’t think so.
Yours faithfully,
Heather Kann
Teffont Evias
Wiltshire
THE BARD & THE KING
Dear Sir,
As others more qualified than I will surely have pointed
out, Edward III may have ‘had a hard time of it from
historians and biographers’, but Shakespeare is almost
certainly an exception to this neglect. Contrary to
Richard Barber’s otherwise enjoyable account of the
‘Missing Monarch’ (LR, Feb), scholarship is now largely
agreed that Shakespeare had a hand in ‘The Reign of
Edward the Third’ – and made such a decent fist of
dramatising at least parts of that reign that the printed
play went through two editions (1596 and 1599). That
24
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
scarcely need labouring. All the cells drew their inspiration
from the intolerant brand of Islam preached by
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth cen-
tury and subsequently adopted by the Saudi kingdom in
Arabia. In South Asia throughout the nineteenth century
the Wahhabis’ military headquarters were located in a
knot of mountains north of Peshawar in Pathan tribal
land. This was just beyond Britain’s administrative reach
but not its military reach. Expeditions repeatedly
scoured the area, sometimes facing frenzied resistance
from the Pathans but rarely running the ‘fanatics’ them-
selves to ground.
For funds and recruits the latter depended on radical
clerics within India whose mosques and madrasahs acted
as clearing houses. Delhi and Patna housed the most
important of these, and it took the Great Rebellion of
1857–8, which Allen still calls ‘the Sepoy Mutiny’, to
flush them out. Although the story of Wahhabism in
Arabia and of the more recent Saudi involvement in
Pakistan and Afghanistan may be familiar, the story of the
Crescentaders’ role in the Great Rebellion, and particu-
larly the British handling of it in Patna, is a highly original
contribution. This story forms the core of the book. It
could be rich in instruction for the current administration
in, say, Basra – and better still, it’s vintage Charles Allen.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 59
the play was omitted from the 1623 Folio remains
awkward – but Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Sir
Thomas More also fell beyond Heminge and Condell’s
grasp.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Nick de Somogyi
(Editor, The Shakespeare Folios)
VIRGIN TERRITORY
Dear Sir,
I don’t wish to sound cranky, but in your review of
Heather Pringle’s Master Plan (LR, Feb), Richard Overy
states that the account of the SS expeditions is virgin
territory. This is certainly the case with many of the
examples, but my book Himmler’s Crusade (2003)
provides a detailed account of the Tibet/Schaefer expe-
dition and the story of Beger’s activities in 1943.
Of course, my book has, I confess, even more refer-
ences to the smell of juniper and so on than Pringle’s:
but it was nevertheless based on extensive ‘virgin’
research in the UK, the US, Germany and Asia.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Hale
By email
 BIOGRAPHY
F IAMMETTA R OCCO
NO KENYA COWBOY
TOO C LOSE TO THE S UN : T HE L IFE AND
T IMES OF D ENYS F INCH H ATTON
★ with the idea of farming and
By Sara Wheeler
(Jonathan Cape 284pp £18.99)
I SAK D INESEN , THE Danish wr iter who Er nest
Hemingway always said should have won the Nobel
prize for literature instead of him, was a difficult woman:
needy, imperious, manipulative (of men and of the truth)
and a fearful snob. ‘It was worth having syphilis,’ she
wrote from her farm in Kenya shortly after her husband,
Baron Bror Blixen, left her, ‘to become a baroness.’ But
among the writer’s more admirable qualities were a talent
for telling stories and a gift for creating mythical heroes.
Few of her heroes embody the spirit of freedom and
gentility quite so well as Denys Finch Hatton, the narra-
tor’s close friend in Out of Africa, Blixen’s poetic memoir
of life on her African farm. Although she never explicitly
mentions that they were lovers, their spiritual union lies
at the core of the work.
Finch Hatton is handsome, athletic, a fine sportsman.
He is a connoisseur of fine music, wine and art. He
teaches Greek and Latin to the narrator, and helps her
appreciate literature by reading her the Bible. He gives
her a gramophone, which adds ‘new life on the farm’.
And he takes her up in his aeroplane, an experience that
allows her to look down on Africa like God.
It is Finch Hatton’s sheer nobility as a human being
that draws forth the deep respect of the Africans around
him. His dignity allows him to transcend cultural bound-
aries. At a time when the races in Kenya were divided
over virtually everything, Finch Hatton’s death, in an
aeroplane crash just after his forty-fourth birthday in
1931, is portrayed as a tragedy by black and white alike.
He was buried on the crest of the Ngong Hills. Later,
it was said that a pair of mating lions were often seen
sunning themselves on his g rave. Little wonder
Hollywood’s leading men fought to play the role when
the book was finally turned into a film in 1985.
Denys Finch Hatton was born in England almost a
century earlier, the younger son of a minor aristocrat;
his mother was the daughter of a former Admiral of the
British Fleet. A warm-hearted, good-looking child, he
grew up to impress his friends at Eton with his sense of
humour and wit. He excelled in sports, drawing, poetry
and storytelling, but his fingers, he would later write,
‘itched to hold a weapon rather than a book’. He left
Oxford having only just scraped a degree. Unlike
Robert Redford, who eventually won the part in the
25
film of Out of Africa, he was
tall – well over six foot – and
almost completely bald.
It was only a matter of time
before Finch Hatton sailed to a
freer corner of the Empire. In
Kenya, he bought land, toyed
then of mining, but found his
true vocation after the First
World War when he became a
professional hunter. His clients
loved his energy, his easiness in Finch Hatton: unbiddable
the bush and his spirit of boy-
ish adventure. He earned the everlasting admiration of the
Prince of Wales, who bet him he could not paste his father’s
picture upon a rhino. Having placed the prince at a safe dis-
tance, Finch Hatton crept up on a sleeping pachyderm and
stuck two British postage stamps bearing the image of the
king on its wrinkled behind, one on each cheek.
Hunting allowed Finch Hatton to sleep under the
stars, to pit his wits against nature and to exhaust himself
at the end of each unplanned day. It also allowed him to
escape the increasingly suburban atmosphere of Nairobi
– and the baroness’s burgeoning emotional demands.
Divorced (and therefore uninvited in society), short of
money, sick and lonely, Karen Blixen grew steadily more
unhappy during her years in Kenya, though she never
lacked resourcefulness. Finch Hatton shared with her an
intellectual courage, but he balked at giving up his free-
dom for her. His books took their place alongside hers
in her house, but he could never live with her for more
than a few weeks at a time. His wilfulness in this regard
was, of course, what she found most attractive about
him, and she was not the first woman to drive herself
mad pining for an unbiddable man.
Sara Wheeler has set herself a considerable challenge in
trying to tease out the real Finch Hatton from the myth.
He left no diary and only a couple of dozen short letters,
none of them very revealing. Seeing charm at work is far
more effective than merely being told that it exists,
which is one reason why biography works best when it
shows rather than tells, and Wheeler has made excellent
use of the sources at hand. Particularly well scoured is the
uncatalogued archive of the incomparably generous Errol
Trzebinski, an earlier biographer, and the letters of
Galbraith and Berkeley Cole, two of Finch Hatton’s clos-
est friends in Kenya. Moreover, Wheeler writes well, and
has a gift – shared by only very few – for pinning down
the smells and atmosphere of the African landscape. But
Finch Hatton was no Kenya cowboy; his free spirit was
nurtured and sustained by a deep inner life. He remains
opaque here, private to all but himself, which can be
seen as a tribute to his truest self.
To order this book at £15.20, see order form on page 59
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
BULL ELEPHANT UNLEASHED
M ENCKEN : T HE A MERICAN I CONOCLAST
★ Rodgers wrote much of it through gritted teeth.
By Marion Rodgers
(Oxford University Press 662pp £19.99)
T HERE WAS NEVER a journalist like H L Mencken
(1880–1956), before him or since. In the years when
there was no television and American print journalists
were stars, Mencken was a supernova. A fabulously
entertaining writer, an authority on the American
language, very funny, a libertarian – and an implacable
hater of Roosevelt, censors, lynchers, Communists,
labour unions, and most politicians. He was contemptu-
ous of Jews – but also of all other religious groups – and
of blacks, and the poor. But he could be generous and
affectionate to individual Jews and blacks. He loved
Germany and hesitated to con-
demn Hitler. He edited two maga-
zines, The Smart Set and The
Amer ican Mercury, for which
unknown and famous writers alike
clamoured to write. For decades
he wrote much of the best report-
ing, notably of the presidential
nominating conventions where,
even in his old age, he dazzled
young reporters by his energy,
long hours, meticulous research,
flagrant biases (often obsessions)
and enthusiastic dr inking. If a
newspaper wanted to increase its Mencken: the original Lunchtime O’Booze?
circulation, it had only to
announce an upcoming column by H L Mencken. He
was also a consumer of fascinating women, whom he
regularly betrayed, and a faithful husband to an invalid
wife from whose death he never recovered.
His epigrams were uniquely sparky: ‘Puritanism: the
haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’
‘Every decent man is ashamed of the government he
lives under.’ ‘It is a sin to believe evil in others, but it is
seldom a mistake.’ ‘Early essays by Henry James – some
in the English language.’
Marion Rodgers is the leading authority on H L
Mencken. She has edited his letters, combed every
archive (especially of Mencken’s own huge oeuvre), inter-
viewed those who knew or worked with him (some, still
alive, are themselves, like Russell Baker and Anthony
Lewis, famous journalists) and in this biography made
vivid use of photographs that tell us a lot about the man.
I feel there are two books here: the first half, about
26
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
Mencken the iconoclast bringing down fools, the
‘booboisie’, censors, joy-killers, and murderous racists,
was plainly a joy to write and rattles along. The second
half of the great man’s life, in which he let his hatreds
run uncontrolled and his biases blind him (notably to
what was happening to the Jews in Germany), feels as if
She does not disguise how dreadful Mencken was on
certain subjects (‘the superior man’, the awfulness of Jews
and of Roosevelt), his cruelty to young journalists who
worked for him when he became an editor, or his con-
tempt for the rural poor (‘lintheads’), who flooded into
Baltimore, his home town, to find work during the
Second World War – a war in which his emotions were
on the German side. It was typical of this man who
could write of the greatness of the Bible that nearly all of
its beauty ‘comes from the Jews, and their making of it
constitutes one of the most astounding phenomena of
human history’, that he continued: ‘For there is little in
their character, as the modern world knows them, to
suggest a talent for noble thinking.’ Without excusing
him, Rodgers, especially on the
subject of Mencken’s anti-Semitism,
points out that there were plenty of
other anti-Semites around; few of
them, however, had Mencken’s
prestige or national platform.
The two issues that made
Mencken’s reputation with the
American public, who in the first
half of the twentieth century loved
newspapers in a way unimaginable
today, were Prohibition and the
Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial. In mid-
January 1920, America became,
officially, a dry country. No one
paid any attention. Mencken
described boarding a train with a satchel full of his usual
bottles and being warned by the porter that detectives
were checking heavy luggage. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the
porter, ‘I know how to carry it so’s it looks light.’
In 1926 John Scopes, a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee,
was accused of violating state law by teaching evolution.
(Some things in America never change.) He was defended
by the famous civil-rights lawyer Clarence Darrow, and
prosecuted by, among others, the notorious demagogue –
and bête noire of Mencken – William Jennings Bryan, at
the time a hero of the rural fundamentalist booboisie. At
issue were freedom of speech and the division of Church
and State. To the amazement of all, Scopes was acquitted
and Bryan died soon after. Never missing a chance to
speak ill of the dead, Mencken went after Bryan.
Marion Rodgers has written a comprehensive and
humane biography. She ends with these words from
Mencken’s great friend and fan, James Cain: ‘we live in
 BIOGRAPHY
troubled times, with the censor, the bigot, and the patri-
oteer in full cry once more. And one wonders who the
big bull elephant will be, to smash at them hard again,
and whether there ever will be another one quite as big,
ALISTAIR HORNE
A Twentieth-Century
Gentleman
A BRITISH ACHILLES: THE STORY OF GEORGE,
2ND EARL JELLICOE
★ liberated. This bold initiative probably saved Athens
By Lorna Almonds Windmill, with a foreword by Sir Patrick
Leigh Fermor
(Pen and Sword 278pp £19.99)
Brave men were living before Agamemnon
And since, exceeding valorous and sage, …
But then they shone not on the poet’s page,
And so have been forgotten.
So wrote Byron. Had it not been for Lorna Almonds
Windmill’s excellent biography, George Jellicoe – one of
Britain’s most remarkable surviving heroes of the Second
World War – might well have remained forgotten. He
now shines brightly from her pages
I have known George for upwards of thirty years, and
was acquainted with his heroic career in the Aegean –
after all, even in the Second World War, few men
acquired a DSO and an MC, and became a brigadier by
the age of twenty-six, and lived to tell the tale. But, such
is George’s modesty, until I read A British Achilles, I had
little idea of the full extent of his valour; or of how
much his exploits contributed to the war effort.
Jellicoe was the son of the famous First World War naval
commander. Admiral Sir John was, by definition, a cau-
tious man. In contrast, George was daring to the point of
recklessness, in war as well as in his peacetime existence.
Having taken a First at Cambridge, at the outbreak of the
War, according to his biographer, he declined to follow his
illustrious father into the navy for fear of the dreadful con-
sequences of wetting his hammock. Ironically, it was large-
ly in small boats that he was to earn his reputation.
Commissioned into the Coldstream Guards, Jellicoe
was dispatched to Egypt to join David Stirling’s Long
Range Desert Group of the SAS. His first test was to lead
a raid on German-held Crete, landing by submarine in
June 1942. They managed to destroy twenty-six German
planes, for which Jellicoe was awarded a DSO – a high
decoration rarely bestowed on 24-year-old subalterns.
Following several daring desert raids by jeep 100 miles
behind the lines at El Alamein, Jellicoe was made the
27
quite as brave, quite as mad as Mencken.’
In these troubled times, compared to Mencken, with
all his faults, we journalists look like pygmies.
To order this book at £15.99, see order form on page 59
first commander of the Special Boat Service. Moving at
lightning speed, the SBS would strike in total surprise in
the Aegean: 381 such raids were carried out across sev-
enty islands, pinning down a large German force badly
needed on the main battlefields. It was indeed a ‘classic
singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’.
His frequent escapes from death were miraculous.
Now a 26-year-old brigadier, Jellicoe’s last, and most
significant, exploit of the war was to bicycle into Athens
on the heels of the retreating Germans, and proclaim it
from occupation by the Greek Communists in the
bloody civil war that was to follow. To this day he
remains more a hero of renown in Greece than at home.
With the arrival of peace, Jellicoe joined the Foreign
Service. He seemed destined for the top. But, though
married, he fell in love with another woman, Philippa,
his present wife. In those square days, the FO could not
stomach the liaison, and Jellicoe had to resign.
He then entered politics, his title enabling him to sit
in the Lords, where he was always witty and quick on
his feet. Successively he was appointed First Lord of the
University of Hertfordshire
School of Education
Owners of
the means of
instruction?
Children’s Literature
some Marxist
perspectives
a one-day conference Thursday 23 March
with Michael Rosen
Fielder Conference Centre, Hatfield, Hertfordshire
Delegate rate : £85.00
For information contact
Lisa Garner
T 01707 285695
E L.A.Garner@herts.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
Admiralty (which he described as ‘a
sort of floating soldier’), then Lord
Privy Seal in charge of reforming the
Civil Service. A natural Whig,
reforming the Lords was what most
preoccupied him, but he was to be
frustrated by party politics.
Then an unnecessary disaster struck
Jellicoe. In 1973 the wayward Lord
Lambton had been forced to resign
over a call-girl scandal; Jellicoe was in
no way implicated, but because he
was slightly tarnished on another Jellicoe: working off surplus energy
score, his old-fashioned sense of hon-
our led him to resign.
It was a serious loss for the Tory Government; the lib-
eral-minded Jellicoe would have been an important
influence during the Thatcher years. As one of his
Labour opponents, Dick Crossman, wrote: ‘The
Government had lost one of the bravest, most competent
and most humane of men in their company.’ Many felt
that Heath should never have accepted his resignation.
For a second time Jellicoe was struck through his
Achilles heel – a fondness for women. Windmill’s title is
well chosen; on the other hand, Achilles always struck me
as an unpleasant man, a humourless killing-machine, and
R EG G ADNEY
The Man with
the Golden Smile
U NFORGIVABLE B LACKNESS : T HE R ISE AND
FALL OF J ACK J OHNSON
★ sportsmen. Johnson was, of course, a hero to black
By Geoffrey C Ward
(Pimlico 492pp £8.99)
N INETY YEARS AGO last May, the world’s first black
heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, appeared
on stage at an Elephant and Castle music hall. The flam-
boyant Johnson exchanged comic patter with a diminutive
British straight man, offered a passable violin accompani-
ment for his wife Lucille, who performed a solo ragtime
dance, and introduced film footage of himself in action.
The show that night, one of many Johnson gave around
the world, has no special place in history other than it
coincided with the first Zeppelin air raid on London
which brought the fun to an abrupt halt. Johnson
grabbed his wife and ran to his waiting car, a white
Mercedes Benz. With Johnson at the wheel, the car
careered north to Haverstock Hill where the couple had
28
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
one could never conceive of George
sulking in his tent with Patroclus.
As had been typical of him in
wartime, however, with his formida-
ble energy he bounced back to have
more successful careers: in the City, at
Sotheby’s, as head of King’s College
London, and as President of the Royal
Geographical Society.
As a former captain in the regular
ar my and a civil servant, Lor na
Almonds Windmill has done impres-
sive research (the only error I could
detect was a repetition of the popu-
lar notion that Harold Macmillan resigned because of
the Profumo scandal; he did not – his prostate brought
him down). She succeeds in making this a fascinating
and most sympathetic study of a brilliant, brave but also
loveable human being; all who knew him, or served
with him, rated George as being ‘fun’.
Windmill designates him ‘one of England’s last great
military commanders, statesmen and gentlemen’. He
was, and is. Along with Peter Carrington, he was also
the last politician to resign out of principle. Blair’s
cronies don’t do that today. More’s the shame.
To order this book at £15.99, see order form on page 59
booked into a hotel. ‘No matter how fast I travelled or in
what direction I turned,’ Johnson remembered, ‘the
bombs were close upon us ... the Zeppelin was follow-
ing us. It was a miracle we were not blown to bits.’
Once again the most celebrated and reviled African
American of his age had escaped the enemy in sensa-
tional circumstances.
Based upon autobiographical material and contempo-
rary newspaper sources, Geoffrey C Ward’s magisterial
book is the definitive portrait of one of America’s greatest
Americans but loathed by white Americans, the victim of
ferocious racist abuse in newsprint around the world. To
say that he was altogether an American boxing hero of
the cut of Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali would be inaccu-
rate. Louis was a hero to black Americans, but only once
he defeated Germany’s Max Schmeling did he become a
hero to white Americans. Ali is beloved of all. For his
part, Johnson was a charming and amoral figure, a show-
man who liked to appear on stage, a brilliant fighter,
arguably the greatest defensive boxer there has ever been,
and a self-indulgent pleasure-seeker with a prison record.
In 1907, the 29-year-old Johnson fought Tommy Burns
for the world heavyweight championship in Sydney. Six
feet tall and weighing 192 pounds, Johnson had a massive
upper body and slender legs. Burns, with the build of an
overblown middleweight, was a shuffling bruiser and the
five-to-four favourite. As Johnson got into the ring, the
 BIOGRAPHY
20,000-strong crowd roared racist abuse.
Johnson, the man with the golden smile,
took a gulp of water and spat it across the
nearby pressmen.
By the thirteenth round one of
Burns’s eyes was shut and his jaw had
swollen to twice its size; police officers
clambered into the ring to ask him if
enough was enough. Johnson battered
him throughout the next round until
the referee finally pronounced Johnson
the new world champion. The crowd
remained completely silent.
The angry silence was not unusual.
For two decades as contender and cham-
pion, Johnson never entered the ring
against a white opponent in front of a
crowd that was anything but hostile.
There were innumerable threats to
murder him. Extraordinarily, he refused
to show concern. The more the crowds
jeered him, the more he grinned. In Johnson in repose
interviews he steered his questioners
back to technique. ‘It’s not how hard you hit the other
fella,’ he once said. ‘It’s how tired he gets trying to hit
you.’ His fighting style was elegant and refined; hardly
calculated to appeal to fans who liked to see a brawl. He
paid scant attention to advisers and managers. Since he
was doing the fighting he saw no reason why he
shouldn’t do the thinking too. Here was a black fighter
with brains; white managers and white sportswriters
found that impossible to swallow.
As the frantic search began for the Great White Hope
to thrash the black champion, Johnson enjoyed his fame
and fortune, spending the latter conspicuously on
diamonds, booze, women and automobiles. In 1909
there were fewer than half a million cars in the USA. By
the end of the year Johnson owned five, was involved
with two white women and about to embark on a
tumultuous relationship with a third. Then the Great
White Hope was found: the former champion, Jim
Jeffries. Taciturn, introspective and boorish, Jeffries was
all that Johnson was not.
With Jeffries the ten-to-six favourite, weighing in at
227 pounds to Johnson’s 208, ‘The Fight of the
Century’ took place in the blazing heat on 4 July 1910
in Reno, Nevada. In the fourth round Jeffries landed the
first consequential blow. He drew blood from Johnson’s
mouth. When FIRST BLOOD FOR JEFF showed on
the news bulletin boards in Times Square, thousands of
New Yorkers cheered.
Jeffries kept on rushing at his opponent. Each charge
was stopped with a hard left to Jeffries’ square head. In
the fifteenth, Johnson landed a left and three savage
rights in succession. Jeffries sank to his haunches. He
29
had never been felled before. He had
barely struggled to his feet when
Johnson hit him again and was still
thumping him when Jeffries’ corner
threw in the towel.
Twenty-six people died in the
ensuing race riots. ‘No event’, Ward
records, ‘yielded such widespread
racial violence until the assassination
of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, fifty-
eight years later.’
Which brings us to halfway in the
story: the fall was long and painful.
The private life Johnson ‘had created
for himself, the enemies he’d made
along the way, and his own unwilling-
ness to let anything or anyone interfere
with his pleasures all had begun to
work against him’. Countless romantic
entanglements, brawls, a hopeless
attempt at motor racing, poor property
investment: the list of failures mounted
until he fled to Europe.
Here, among others, a scheme was launched to match
Johnson with the British champion, Bombardier Billy
Wells. Johnson began training in Epping with a week
to go until the fight. Ten thousand seats had already
been sold.
Protest erupted. Clergymen wrote to The Times
demanding the fight be banned. The Archbishop of
Canterbury begged the Home Secretary (Churchill) to
stop the show. On behalf of Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell
followed suit. So did the headmasters of Rugby,
Dulwich, Mill Hill and Taunton. Johnson, Wells and
their representatives were summoned to Bow Street.
Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Railway, which
owned the land where the fight venue stood, issued an
injunction. The fight was banned.
Two years later, in 1912, Johnson was arrested for
violating the Mann Act. An all-white jury in Chicago
found him guilty of kidnapping a white woman (later
his wife) for purposes of debauchery. Sentenced to a
year in prison, he skipped bail and headed abroad. In
1915, he lost his title to Jess Willard in Cuba, who
knocked him out in the twenty-sixth round. After seven
years’ exile, he surrendered in 1920 and drove himself to
the federal prison at Leavenworth to serve his time.
For twenty years after his release, he continued to make
personal appearances for diminishing fees. The last car he
owned was a Lincoln Zephyr. In 1946, he was at its
wheel in North Carolina when the skills he had displayed
dodging German bombs on Haverstock Hill deserted
him. He lost control and collided with a telegraph pole at
seventy miles an hour. He was sixty-eight years old.
To order this book at £7.20, see order form on page 59
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

L ILLIAN P IZZICHINI he lacked boundaries. His

beloved aunt (one of the

A LOST BOY few responsible, loving

adults in his early life)
bound him up in bed
G RAYSON P ERRY: P ORTRAIT OF THE A RTIST tightly, which he found an
AS A YOUNG G IRL erotic exper ience. It is
★ heartbreaking, really, what
By Wendy Jones a lost boy he was, except
(Chatto & Windus 178pp £15.99) he became a little girl in his
sexual fantasies. And this
T HE MOST REMARKABLE aspect of Grayson Perry’s imaginative inversion really
biography is the resilience of the human spirit to which was the saving of him. His
it testifies. Perry, the transvestite, Turner Prize-winning bravery in becoming
potter, had a childhood characterised by neglect and Claire, and the rebellious Claire: playtime
abuse. His father left his mother when she became preg- spirit he deployed in more
nant by the milkman. The milkman went on to become typical teenage fashion, are astounding.
his stepfather and abuser. His father largely ignored him Exhibitionism is crucial to both his life and his work.
until the 15-year-old boy turned up on his doorstep Another recurring motif in his art, and the unspoken
having been ejected from his mother’s home. He took wish that underpins this book, is a desire to be loved by
Perry in but his new wife wasn’t keen on the lad dressing the father who disappeared when Grayson was four.
up in her clothes and turfed him out again. Perry spends many pages describing the mechanical
Neither family could find a place for their confused malarkeys men get up to in their sheds.
and artistic teenager, not to mention his transvestite It is this attempt to connect with his father that lies at
alter-ego, Claire. Before seeking a sexual outlet in trans- the foundation of his art and it’s what grounds him. It’s
vestism, Perry’s younger self relied on a rich inner life the only thing he can share with his missing dad. There
occupied by his teddy bear engaged in acts of sabotage are lovely moments in this book and what really comes
against an invading German army. No surprise that the across is what a lovely man Grayson Perry is.
boy should fantasise about an undercover agent in a To order this book at £12.79, see order form on page 59
family dominated by a man who took part in wrestling
competitions and practised his technique on his wife and
her eldest son. Perry’s mother comes across as distinctly
uninterested in her children and disturbingly exhibitionist
in her suffering. All this takes place in a surreally dreary
semi-rural environment. Essex in the 1970s was, despite
itself, wonderfully conducive to the various manifesta-
tions of Perry’s artistic self-expression.
The mix of petit-bourgeois complacency and aspirational
anxiety, and the juxtaposition of Sixties new-builds and
ancient farmsteads, produced an artist whose appetite for
paradox and contrast is a joy to behold.
Perry recalls his time in therapy, where he met Wendy
Jones, who has transcribed his tapes of reminiscences
into this book. The significance of therapy is made clear
in the tone of the book and the creation of his pots. In
his art, he employs classical shapes and a formal ele-
gance. The form is deceptive. On closer examination his
pots are seething with images of child abuse and sexual
dysfunction. There is a similar air of calm in the narra-
tion of his story. It speaks of processed emotions and
self-acceptance but lacks the tension that makes his pots
prize-winners. What is lacking here is a sense of drama
or conflict. We are not privy to the artist’s growth.
But we are privy to fascinating insights into his bur-
geoning sexuality. He liked bondage, he explains, because

30
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ANCIENT WORLD
R AYMOND S EITZ
BEFORE COLUMBUS
A NCIENT A MERICANS
★ with scores of archaeologists and anthropologists.
By Charles C Mann
(Granta Books 465pp £20)
IN 2002, ARCHAEOLOGISTS working at the Norte Chico
site in Peru unearthed a gourd. Etched on the bulb was
a primitive figure of the Staff God, a ferocious, fanged
deity and one of the most ancient religious representa-
tions in the Americas. Before this discovery it was
thought that the Staff God (more familiar in the
complex, maze-like paintings of the Inka creator-god
Wiraqocha) began its evolution around 500 BC. But
carbon dating places the harvesting of the gourd about
1,700 years earlier, so it seems that this awesome spirit
was part of Andean culture for
almost four millennia. Other
discoveries at Norte Chico, and
further up the Fortaleza Valley,
confirm that an agricultural, tex-
tile-making and technologically
sophisticated civilisation prospered
there at that time.
The Norte Chico gourd also
represents many features of
Charles Mann’s engrossing book
about the pre-Columbian
Americas. First, there has been in
the last two decades a veritable
explosion of archaeological and
anthropological revelation. And
the implications have been pro-
found. Second, the discoveries
have repeatedly required scholars Lord 8-Deer (right) captures 4-wind
to revise and re-revise their
assumptions about these ancient societies – Indians have
inhabited the Western Hemisphere for far longer than
anyone supposed, and there were many more of them.
Third, hardly an artefact can be unearthed or a scientific
paper published without stirring up a swirl of controversy
in this learned world (the Staff God on the Norte Chico
gourd, for example, could have been carved much later
than the date of the gourd itself). And, fourth, most of
the world, including the Americas, continues to ignore
the significance and uniqueness of this Indian past, and
history books blithely skim over the Mayans and Inkas
to get to the good stuff of Egypt, China and Europe.
Mann has a facility for translating academese into
laymen’s language, and for writing about scientific com-
plexities with a light hand. He is a correspondent for the
31
Atlantic Monthly and Science magazines, and he has previ-
ously published books which make twentieth-century
physics and the bio-ecology of endangered species accessible
to the common reader. A look at the bibliography of
Ancient Americans shows that his research has been prodi-
gious, and much of his text relies on first-hand interviews
Mann’s most effective theme is the dynamism of pre-
Columbian civilisations and the demographic calamity
which befell the Indian race as a result of the European
intrusion (there is, incidentally, nothing of political
correctness in this book other than a recognition of the
sensitivity of the issues). No one knows for sure how
Indians got to the Americas. Most probably they migrated
from Siberia via the land bridge of what is now the
Bering Strait, and until recently it was assumed that this
occurred around 10,000 BC. But it is now far more
likely that there were successive waves of migration over
thousands of years. The Monte Verde excavation in
southern Chile places an Indian society there almost
32,000 years ago, and Monte
Verde is 10,000 miles south of
the Ber ing Strait. Moreover,
Indians spoke some 1,200 lan-
guages classed in as many as 180
linguistic families (there are four
linguistic families in Europe).
Somewhere along the way, an
indigenous society (possibly the
Olmecs 6,000 years ago) ‘invent-
ed’ maize – invented, because
maize is the only grain which
cannot reproduce itself without
human intervention (the kernels
are too hard) and the only grain
without a known botanical prog-
enitor. Maize was a revolutionary
feat of genetic engineering. And
to enhance its production in
the Andean highlands and in
Mesoamerica, civil engineering on a Roman scale
changed the landscapes – stone-paved roads, terrace
farming, irrigation systems, aqueducts, reservoirs and
canals. Surplus led to cities, cities led to governments,
governments led to empires.
Art and architecture followed – the great pyramids of
the Mayans and the temples of the Wari and Tiwanaku.
The Zapotecs invented the zero before it was even
imagined in India, and there were dozens of systems of
writing in the Americas including the computer-like
and still undeciphered complexity of the Inkas’ knotted
strings. Three different, interlocking calendars governed
life in Central America (including the Long Count cal-
endar, which traces the origin of the world to 13 August
3114 BC). These successive civilisations developed
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ANCIENT WORLD

cosmologies and mythologies as colourful as the Greeks’. P ETER J ONES

The achievements are made all the more stunning by
the fact that they occurred in relative isolation. Early
Indian civilisations did not benefit from the kind of
cross-fertilisation which characterised the long interplay
ANNUS HORRIBILIS
among Europe, the Middle East, India and China. They 69 AD: T HE Y EAR OF THE F OUR E MPERORS
developed alone, and therein lies the explanation for the ★
fact that the last empires – those of the Inkas and Aztecs By Gwyn Morgan
– and the developed Indian societies of North America, (Oxford University Press 322pp £17.99)
and even the more stunted societies of Amazonia, fell so
easily to the post-Columbian invaders from the east. AS TOM HOLLAND’S Rubicon and Persian Fire thrillingly
In their isolation, Indian societies did not develop the demonstrate, the most enjoyable history tells a story, and
fortified immunity of Europeans, and, in addition to a the Roman historian and politician Tacitus (c AD
few horses and a few firearms, Europeans brought with 56–120), who in his time served as both consul and
them a lethal variety of diseases. The ravages of Pizarro provincial governor, had no better material with which
and Cortés were nothing compared to the ravages of to start his Histories than the dramatic events that unfolded
smallpox. Pandemics spread so fast and with such ferocity during the year AD 69, which saw three changes of
that when, for example, Pizarro and his 168 men emperor as various claimants battled it out to succeed
entered the Inka capital of Qosqo (Cusco) – then the the wretched Nero.
seat of the largest empire on earth – the Inka nation was The rebellion against Nero was started in March AD
already devastated. In North America, the Spanish 68 by the governor of Transalpine Gaul, Vindex, and
explorer Hernando de Soto in 1539 noted the large although it was put down, others had been encouraged
number of vibrant Indian towns and villages in the to try their luck, including Galba in Spain in concert
Mississippi Valley and along the Gulf Coast. Fifty years with Otho in Lusitania (roughly Portugal). The Senate
later, the French explorer Robert La Salle covered the opted for Galba, and Nero was declared a public enemy.
same territory and reported a virtual wilderness. In June 68 he fled Rome and committed suicide, and
No one knows how many died. Millions upon Galba became emperor. He did not last long. He had
millions for sure. Some anthropologists estimate that as won his way to power by injudiciously slaughtering
many as 90 per cent of the indigenous population per- perceived rivals and promising, but now refusing, to
ished in this unprecedented post-Columbian holocaust. open his chequebook to the Praetorian Guard in Rome.
The decimation of the Indian population also explains So when the Roman legions on the Rhine refused to
the myth of the ‘Noble Savage’, which so suited the renew their oath of allegiance to Galba and declared for
philosophising of Rousseau and Locke. The Noble their own governor Vitellius, Otho (who had accompa-
Savage was, in fact, a refugee from death. And the nied Galba to Rome) saw his chance. He joined up with
concept of a ‘virgin land’ also suited Europeans bent on the resentful Praetorian Guard, who murdered Galba in
territory and gold. Indian civilisations were more or less January AD 69 and put Otho on the imperial throne. It
consigned to historical oblivion (the conquest of Peru was of Galba that Tacitus famously said that everyone
wasn’t even written about until 1847), and Indians were agreed he was capable of being emperor had he not
conveniently portrayed as having lived in a kind of actually been emperor – ‘capax imperii, nisi imperasset’ –
perpetual stasis. but Gwyn Morgan prefers Plutarch’s judgement that no
Mann covers many other absorbing subjects as well, most one wanted him to be emperor, though they pitied the
notably Indian land manage- manner of his death.
ment in North and South Otho did not last long
America, and the Indian rela- either. The Rhine legions,
tionship to the ecology of soon backed by most of the
both continents. But his book western provinces, were not
as a whole is an excellent bit having him, and in March
of missionary work in relieving MA Degree in Biography they crossed the Alps and
Starting January 2006
the general ignorance in the crushed Otho’s ar my at
West about these once great Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year
taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first postgraduate
Bedriacum, and Otho com-
American cultures and in programme in this field to be offered in the UK. mitted suicide (on 16 April).
throwing light into some dark Course director: Jane Ridley In July their candidate
corners of world history. Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at Vitellius entered Rome in
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
To order this book at £16, see Tel: 01280 814080 triumph to become the third
order form on page 59 emperor of this chaotic year.

32
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ANCIENT WORLD
But if the legions of the western provinces had sup-
ported Vitellius, those of the east had another candidate
in mind, and in July declared for Vespasian, governor of
Judaea. The plan was for Vespasian to make for
Alexandria in Egypt and commandeer Rome’s corn
supply, while his lieutenant Mucianus marched overland
across Asia Minor and into Italy. But the plan was
thrown into confusion by the legions on the Danube
under Antonius Primus, who came out for Vespasian but
refused to wait for the eastern legions to arrive. Primus
raced his army into northern Italy and a showdown with
the Vitellians. After another bloody battle, the victorious
Primus marched on Rome. On 20 December, Vitellius
was humiliatingly pulled out of the dog-kennel where
he was hiding (if that is what pudenda latebra, ‘shameful
hiding-place’, refers to), hauled through the streets and
publicly stuck like a pig. Next day Primus entered the
city. In one of his most stunning set pieces, Tacitus
points out that, since it was festival time and baths, cafés
and whorehouses were doing a roaring trade, the spectacle
of a full-blown blood bath involving Vitellius’s and
Primus’s men was greeted with glee by the populace,
who saw it as an agreeable addition to the amusements
already offered in the streets of Rome. They treated the
whole thing like a gladiatorial contest, happily egging
on now one side, now another. The Senate declared for
Vespasian, and the dreadful year of the four emperors
came to a close.
That, broadly, is Tacitus’s story. What is Morgan’s? As a
professor of Classics and History at Austin, Texas, he
interprets his job as trying to make coherent sense of all
the available sources, within the broad structural frame-
work laid down by Tacitus. These include the Jewish
historian Josephus (born c AD 37), the Greek Plutarch (c
40), Suetonius (Roman, early 70s) and Cassius Dio
(Greek, c 164). Since Morgan offers no thrillingly novel
models of historical exegesis with which to startle the
horses, it is an old-fashioned piece of work, and nothing
wrong with that. Inevitably, the story does not crack
along like Tacitus. The sources often produce conflicting
accounts of events, motives and personalities, and Morgan
deals with each of these as they arise in the course of the
year, attempting at all times to see what the writer in
question was trying to achieve by recounting events in
this way rather than that (for example, Plutarch’s emphasis
is moralistic, his aim to condemn the greed and licen-
tiousness of the common soldier; Suetonius avoids moral-
ising but is prone to seeing trends that can be fitted into
neat categories, and so on). The debate about the book
will therefore centre on Morgan’s judgement.
He draws a number of conclusions that will certainly
be worth further discussion. First, he argues that the
sources exaggerated the upheaval across the empire:
while most provinces were indeed affected, the damage
was neither catastrophic nor irreparable. Second, he
33
resists the idea that from now on the legionaries became
a volatile and ever-present threat to the incumbent
emperor; he argues instead that a greater threat came
from the loose cannons among the senatorial and gov-
erning classes who had so energetically seized the
chance to try to grab power when Nero fell.
If there is a problem, it is that, in an effort to cover all
his positions, Morgan sometimes fails to make clear what
he thinks actually happened and the reasons for it. He is
doubtful, for example, about Tacitus’s description of
Primus’s assault on Rome (‘rhetorical trickery’ and ‘pos-
turing’), but it is not at all clear why. Sometimes this leads
to direct self-contradiction. For example, he asserts at the
start that ‘none’ of Tacitus’s evidence can be taken ‘at face
value’, but then proceeds to argue that Tacitus is a more
reliable historian than many have thought, with the result
that he takes plenty of it ‘at face value’. That said, there
will be much here for historians to chew, and fight, over.
To order this book at £14.39, see order form on page 59
J USTIN M AROZZI
One Sauce to
Fit All
T HE D REAM OF ROME
★
By Boris Johnson
(HarperCollins 210pp £18.99)
THERE HE IS on the cover, clever and tousled; there he is
on the back cover, too, a little less scruffy this time, in
suit and open-necked shirt. Then the author photo-
graph, suit and tie to the fore, one hand artfully ruffling
the flaxen mane. Three Borises, with only the hint of a
Coliseum behind him. Never mind the imperial cult.
This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?
You’d be mad not to know Boris had a book out on
Rome. That or you don’t watch television, read
newspapers, listen to the radio or walk past high-street
bookshops. Bor is, like the head of the emperor
Augustus on Roman coinage of the time, is everywhere.
His latest project is a rumbustious, conversational foray
into the classical world of Rome, informed by an inter-
esting conceit which runs something along these lines:
Rome was a marvellous, cohesive empire, minimally
regulated and lightly taxed. It stretched from Scotland to
Libya, Portugal to Iraq, its subjects bound by citizenship
and a common identity. Today’s European Union, by
contrast, is a meddlesome behemoth of nattering nation-
alities, highly taxed, smotheringly regulated, comprehen-
sively unable to instil a common European identity. How
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 ANCIENT WORLD
did the Romans pull off their extraor-
dinary feat, and how come the EU
hasn’t been able to do the same?
The beauty of Boris – somehow it
seems wrong to call him Johnson – in
full flow is that he can switch from
high classical mode to chatty aside in
an instant and, however ludicrous
some of the comparisons may at first
appear, they entertain and add spice
to his argument. Take garum, the
notoriously stinky fish sauce with
which Romans liked to enliven their
food. It was a product universally
available across the empire. Garum
amphorae can be found in Italy,
France, Spain, Portugal and North
Afr ica. It delighted palates in
Nijmegen, Palestine, Bulgaria and Boris leaving The Spectator
Switzerland. What of the sauce world
of present-day Europe? Alas, the nationalities are doing
what they always do. They’re doing their own thing,
divided by their shared borders.
‘We are still deeply sequestrated in our sauces,’ he
writes. ‘The Belgians put mayonnaise on their chips – in
a way that many British people find shocking – and are
themselves appalled to find that we sprinkle our chips
with vinegar. The Germans would not dream of putting
English mustard on their frankfurters. The French would
be quite disgusted if you offered them Marmite or
Vegemite and the Italians know nothing of brown sauce.’
Not many classicists would come up with such a com-
parison. And, I venture to suggest, their books wouldn’t
be as widely read, serialised, or made into television
series, either. Boris, unlike some of his ivory-towered
counterparts, isn’t afraid of being popular or populist. A
trenchant Eurosceptic, he delights in illustrating the
magnificent pomposity of our European rulers, the scale
of their pretension and the futility of their pan-European
– ie Roman – ideal.
Thus, to commemorate the meeting in October 2004
of the twenty-five EU leaders preparing to integrate us in
ever closer union, the Italian Gover nment had a
marble plaque inscribed with a legend in Latin boasting of
the treaty drawn up so that ‘Europae gentes in populi
unius corpus coalescerent uno animo una voluntate uno
consilio…’ – ‘so that the races of Europe might coalesce
into a body of one people with one mind, one will and
one government’. And, if there was any doubting that
Rome was harking back to her imperial past, in the heart
of the piazza of the Capitol a flag fluttered with the proud
legend, ‘Europae Rei Publicae Status’, the proclamation
of a European republic. The Dutch and French elec-
torates put an end – albeit temporary – to such grandiose
claims, but the ambition was, and remains, clear. They
34
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
yearn to recreate the simplicity and
grandeur of the Roman Empire.
Boris makes much of the aspira-
tional aspect of Roman citizenship.
People wanted to buy into the dream
of Rome. It was the most sophisticated
and advanced civilisation available. Its
economic primacy was underpinned,
too, by architectural and literary
foundations which spread the mes-
sage far and wide. It might be a poem
by Virgil, an amphitheatre in
London, or an aqueduct in Provence.
The culture of Rome was so much
more attractive than anything else on
offer. It had no rivals.
Which places modern European
leaders with a penchant for a
European state at a distinct disadvan-
tage. Their powers of coercion are
limited, the temptations of what they are offering us hard-
ly compelling. There is only so much interest in European
regulations dictating acceptable limits of lawnmower noise.
Boris does not say it, but Europe’s leaders are also faced
with troublesome electorates rather than more or less
pliable subjects. To put it crudely, an emperor could throw
someone to the lions if he didn’t like what Boris might call
the cut of his jib. The Eurocrats, luckily, have more cir-
cumscribed powers. If they are to put together this latter-
day Roman Empire, chances are it will be against our
wishes. Not that this will put any brake whatsoever on
their madcap ambitions.
He spots parallels between the bloated bureaucracy that
is Brussels and the first seeds of the decline of the
Roman Empire. In its heyday it had been run by a senior
cadre of 150 people; by the fourth century, the ranks of
bureaucrats had swollen to 30,000. By AD 400 there
were 6,000 jobs in Rome commanding senatorial status.
‘For the first time Rome was afflicted by the sclerosis that
we have seen in so many modern European economies,
when the bureaucracy becomes so big that its prime
concer n becomes self-per petuation.’ And then
Christianity and Diocletian came along, and emperor-
worship gave way to the veneration of Christ. ‘It was the
beginning of the end of the magical web that Augustus
created – the semi-religious identification between the
citizen and the central power. It was the beginning of the
end of the egg white in the cake. As a coagulating ingre-
dient, Europe has never found anything to match it.’
The Dream of Rome is an attractive argument, leavened
with the Boris brand of humour that eludes professional
classicists. It should be required reading for them and,
above all, in Brussels, where it would be as welcome as
ketchup on chips.
To order this book at £15.20, see order form on page 59
 MEMOIRS
C AROLE A NGIER
A BRUTAL BLANKNESS
T HE D EAD M AN IN THE B UNKER :
D ISCOVERING M Y FATHER
★ has told us about the Bast family – that they had cher-
By Martin Pollack
(Translated by William Hobson)
(Faber & Faber 216pp £15.99)
MARTIN POLLACK MUST be a very nice man. But nice
men can’t write good books, especially about Nazism.
To write a good book you must be prepared to lose
everything – family, friends, even yourself – for the sake
of your readers. The Dead Man in the Bunker sacrifices its
readers for Pollack’s family instead. It doesn’t discover his
father, as it promises, or anyone else either. It will tell us
a few things we didn’t know about the historical back-
ground, for example what fertile ground for Hitler some
of Austria was. But that’s about all.
Pollack’s paternal family were fierce pan-German
nationalists, anti-democratic, anti-Slav and anti-Semitic
for generations. His father belonged to Austria’s own
fascist movement in the 1920s, then joined the Nazi
party in 1931 and the SS in 1932 – ie, in their infancy –
and the Gestapo and the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or
secret service) in 1938, ie in theirs. He drew up arrest
lists and deportation orders, he interrogated their sub-
jects, he ordered executions and attended them; he led a
Sonderkommando (a killing squad) in the Caucasus and
Poland briefly, and one in Slovakia for longer. After the
war he hid (with difficulty, the Bruderschaft duelling scars
on his face impossible to hide), and probably planned to
escape to South America, like so many Nazis. In April
1947 he was shot and robbed by a mountain guide, and
his body dumped in the bunker of the title.
These facts Martin Pollack discovers, many decades
later. But that is all he discovers. He does not know – he
tells us – why his father joined the Gestapo, the heart of
the Nazi terror machine; he does not know what he did
in the Caucasus, in Poland, on the run; he doesn’t
remember whether he himself saw him when he briefly
reappeared. Above all, he doesn’t know anything about
his father’s character, or what he thought or felt about
any of this. ‘He has remained obscure to me,’ he writes,
‘a stereotype figure, reduced to a few photographs and
documents.’ This is honest, and true; but it does not
make an interesting portrait. Gerhard Bast remains
a blank, brutal body – like one of Hitler’s favourite
statues, as Pollack says of the horrifying, ludicrous
picture of him on page 104.
The consequence of this blankness is even worse.
When Pollack comes to ask his inevitable question –
35
How could my father do such things? – he is unable to
answer. He presents the acceptance of this fact as a tragic
achievement: ‘I understood that I would never be able
to find an answer to the question that tormented me.’
But it isn’t an achievement, it is simply a failure. He
didn’t need to trawl the archives, or spend hours bent
over photographs; he had merely to remember what he
ished an ideology of hatred and racial superiority for
generations. His father shared it, and leapt to serve it at
the first possible moment. He did those things because
he wanted to; like millions of others he did evil because
he had made it his good. In other words, he was wrong,
and corrupted. But this Martin Pollack cannot bring
himself to say.
Instead he buries himself in archives, and addresses
his question to a dead man whom he never knew. If he
had really wanted an answer, he had only to turn to his
family: to its earlier generations, as I’ve said, and even
more to its living members. It is this, above all, that he
doesn’t do.
Like all Germans, and especially Austrians, his family
suffered, or enjoyed, a ‘conspiracy of silence’, a ‘pro-
found muteness’ about the Nazizeit. His mother
wouldn’t talk about his father at all; his grandmother
would only repeat that he had been an idealist – they
were all idealists – and always decent. He didn’t learn
any more than this from her, he writes; which was not
just her fault, because ‘I could have asked her and I
failed to do so. With us, no one asked any questions.
That was the problem.’
The problem continues. This book, which pretends to
break the conspiracy of silence, is still bound by it. All
Pollack expresses towards his grandparents is love; he
rarely mentions them without the adjective ‘beloved’.
Towards his stepfather too he expresses only gratitude
and love, for having accepted him – the child of his
wife’s lover – as his own son. This is right; but it is also
wrong. Pollack’s stepfather was an eager Nazi as well,
and his grandparents far more than that – unquestioning
and unrepentant fanatics until the day they died.
Everyone but Germans are ‘swine’; they implacably hate
Jews, whom they’ve hardly ever met; the grandfather, a
lawyer, handles many ‘Aryanisations’ – ie thefts of Jewish
property – though he denies it afterwards; twenty years
after the war the grandmother says that if Martin marries
a Jewish girl she will never speak to him again. They
have learned nothing and forgotten nothing; they
remain the bigots and racists they always were.
And yet Pollack will not confront or even question
them. When he describes his youthful condemnation of
them, he blames himself; looking back, he calls himself
pompous, inconsiderate and self-righteous, and says he
now feels sorrow and shame. But it is they who should
feel sorrow and shame; and until they, or their ilk, do so,
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 MEMOIRS
he should not honour their conspiracy of silence any
more. They are his grandparents, and he loves them; this
is a difficult and painful situation, which writers like
Bernhard Schlink have explored with courage and care.
But Pollack doesn’t explore it at all; and that isn’t good
enough. His grandfather was kind to him: well, every
Nazi criminal was kind to his own child, or his own
dog. Perhaps Pollack’s grandfather helped one Jew,
perhaps his father helped one Slovene; but that isn’t
good enough either. What matters is the principle, not
its arbitrary suspension, which is just another exercise of
D AVID C ESARANI
THE PRIVILEGED PRISONER
T HOSE W HO T RESPASS AGAINST U S : O NE
WOMAN ’ S WAR AGAINST THE N AZIS
★ succumbed to their attentions. Lanckoronska’s comments
By Countess Karolina Lanckoronska
(Translated by Noel Clark)
(Pimlico 341pp £14.99)
COUNTESS KAROLINA LANCKORONSKA was a doughty
woman whose aristocratic demeanour, intelligence and
linguistic skills made her a valuable asset of the Polish
resistance against both Soviet and German occupations.
Between 1942 and 1945 she was in and out of Nazi
prisons and concentration camps, an experience she
recorded soon after her liberation. But there were no
takers for her modestly termed ‘report’. It was the
wrong subject at the wrong time, a casualty of post-war
politics. Initially she was turned down by English
publishers for being ‘too anti-Russian’. A few years later
her memoir was rejected for being ‘too anti-German’.
Fortunately, with the help and encouragement of friends
and an able translator, the ‘report’ now sees the light of
day. It has the weight and authenticity of
a document composed without hindsight
or layers of cultural conditioning.
Karolina Lanckoronska was born in
1898 into a Polish noble family with
extensive estates in Galicia, then part of
the Habsburg Empire. When the region
was incorporated into Poland after 1918,
the young Karolina had already aligned
herself with Polish nationalism. However,
she was educated in Vienna and graduated
in Art History in 1926. After a spell in
Rome she joined the faculty of Lwów
University. Five years later, she witnessed
the partition of Poland between the Third
Reich and the Soviet Union. It is at this
point that her memoir commences. Lanckoronska: self-effacing
36
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
power. You could resist, as Pollack shows, but his father
and grandparents didn’t. On the contrary, they were
more than willing executioners; and though he couldn’t
challenge his father, he could and should have chal-
lenged them. But he was an illegitimate child in Nazi
Germany, and I think he didn’t dare. He became, he
tells us, a professor of Slavonic languages and East
European studies: that was his lifelong unconscious
atonement. But this book, which was meant to be an
atonement, is not one.
To order this book at £12.79, see order form on page 59
Lwów ended up in the Soviet sector and Lanckoronska
watched shabby Bolshevik soldiers, accompanied by
some ‘unusually ugly women’, take over the city. To her
they were ‘non-European’. ‘We were being ruled by a
mentality absolutely alien to our own.’ Yet the invaders
found many local collaborators in this multinational city
seething with rivalries, and the university eventually
reflect not only her moral disdain for them, but also her
prejudices: ‘the future high-flyers of a Communist
university took the floor – Ukrainians, Jews and Poles.
They began to shower us with demagogic phrases.’ Even
so, she preferred Soviet rule to the ‘zoological cult of
racism’ prevailing under the Germans.
That is, until the Soviet regime began deporting dissi-
dents. In January 1940, Lanckoronska joined the Polish
underground. Five months later she fled to the German
sector with the intention of escaping occupied Europe.
She got only as far as Kraków, where she decided to
remain and help with the resistance. She spent the next
year working for the Polish Red Cross and witnessed
the effect of Nazi ethnic cleansing as Kraków filled with
displaced Polish farmers and their impoverished families.
A devout Catholic, she wondered why the Pope did not
condemn German barbarism against a Catholic nation.
After the German invasion of the USSR she joined
the RGO, the main Polish relief agency.
For the next nine months she laboured
heroically to bring succour to Polish
political detainees and POWs in
German-run prisons throughout occu-
pied Poland. Lanckoronska embraced
Jews in her humanitarian work without
hesitation.
One of the most interesting aspects of
this book lies in her occasional comments
about the Polish Jews. She notes that in
Lwów many Poles apprehended by the
Soviet secret police were tortured.
‘Sometimes the torturers were Jewish. A
large number of Jews were involved,
working with the NKVD together with
Communist-inclined members of the
 MEMOIRS

Jewish proletariat, which had largely supported the
Bolsheviks from the outset. Happily, I can assert that there
were also Jews of another kind.’ Does this apparent balance
mean that she was untainted by prejudice? She remarks
that ‘I was brought up in a spirit of hostility to anti-
Semitism, which has remained my attitude throughout.’
And yet the Polish Jews do not have the same traction
on her sympathies. Lanckoronska records the ghettoisation
of the Kraków Jews, but she comes to this via her obser-
vations about the deteriorating conditions for Poles.
When the Germans wantonly wreck a statue of the
Polish poet and patriot Mickiewicz she expresses shock
and recalls that Poles were ‘stirred to fury’. The contrast
between her response to an act of vandalism, on the one
hand, and systematic inhumanity, on the other, is
perplexing. She is a good example of the mentality of
Polish intellectuals of this period as identified by Jan
Gross. They were not anti-Jewish but they found it
difficult to include the bulk of Poland’s Jews in their
notion of Polishness and so lacked ‘an overarching civic
frame of reference’ in which to locate their suffering.
Lanckoronska’s relief work took her through the areas of
eastern Poland devastated by the Einsatzgruppen and she
fleetingly recollects first hearing in Równo about the mass
shootings of Jews. She spent several weeks in Stanislawów,
where thousands of Jews had been slaughtered by the local
SS chief Hans Krüger, but she was primarily concerned
with his role in the execution of twenty-five professors of
Lwów University. Her investigation into this crime was
probably what got her arrested in May 1942.
Between July 1942 and April 1945, Lanckoronska was
shunted through a series of prisons in Lwów and Berlin
until she reached the concentration camp for women at
Ravensbrück. She was saved from torture and execution
thanks to the intervention of the Italian royal family,
who knew her during her Rome years, and she enjoyed
the status of a ‘privileged prisoner’ for much of the time.
Acting selflessly and to her own physical detriment, she
consistently used her privileges to help less fortunate
prisoners. Her talent for inspiring others quickly led to
leadership roles in Ravensbrück. Her observations on
camp life stand with classic texts of this era.
Lanckoronska was rescued shortly before the end of
the war thanks to her friend Carl Burckhardt, the head
of the International Red Cross. But ‘liberation’ had a
bitter taste. Poland was occupied by the Red Army and
she knew she faced exile. She died in Rome aged 105,
rich in scholarly and humanitarian achievements. There
is little in her self-effacing memoir about her personal
life, but there is much that evokes Poland’s ruin and
rebirth in the twentieth century.
To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 59

The Story of Cambridge

Stephanie Boyd

Cambridge is one of Europe’s most

interesting and important small cities. This
attractively illustrated book tells the story of
the development of both town and gown in
Cambridge from its earliest origins right
through to the present day. It provides an
accessible narrative for readers of all ages
that brings to life both the institutions and
the individuals associated with this historic
and beautiful university city.

£9.99 | PB | 0 521 62897 0

96pp | 120 half-tones | 80 colour figures | 6 maps

www.cambridge.org
 MEMOIRS
W ILLIAM P ALMER
AS MUCH AS YOU CAN BEAR
A L IE A BOUT M Y FATHER
★ ness. In his early teens,
By John Burnside
(Jonathan Cape 324pp £12.99)
ANYONE SEEKING THE sources of the extraordinary and
dark imagination shown in John Burnside’s fiction and
poetry should read this memoir of his childhood and
adolescence. It is, above all, a portrait of his father and of
the deeply wounded relationship between father and son.
The book starts starkly enough: ‘My father told lies all
his life ...’. Burnside knows that fiction uses lies to tell the
truth, and in real life, lies conceal truths too terrible to tell.
There are two sayings that this book proves; one is Auden’s
recipe for creating an artist, ‘Let each child have as much
neurosis as the child can bear’, and the other is the prover-
bial ‘No man is a man until his father dies’. The history of
literature written by men might be told in terms of trouble
with fathers; from Shakespeare or Dickens, to Joyce or
Anthony Burgess, men have written of weak or failed
fathers who drank or deceived themselves to death.
Burnside’s father was a foundling who never knew his
parents. The foundling is for ever at the mercy of what-
ever fantasy he dreams up for his parentage, and the tall
stories Burnside’s father told for all of his life may have
been an attempt to make up for the sense of emotional
abandonment. The setting of Burnside’s early childhood
was Cowdenbeath, a mining town in lowland Scotland.
The family lived on the edge of town, near to woods,
which became both a refuge and a threatening place for
Burnside as a child – a place where boys would secretly
drink, or torture cats, but also one where his young
imagination found release.
This book is very far from the sort of pastoral autobi-
ography that middle-class writers used to issue at the age
of about fifty, the ones who all seemed to move seamlessly
from father’s rectory to dormitory to university. The
world in which Burnside’s parents lived was one of phys-
ical labour where a woman was prized for her quietude
and diligence in housework, and a man was measured
by his hardness. As Burnside writes, ‘For my father …
cruelty was an ideology. It was important, for the boy’s
sake, to bring a son up tough: men had to be hard to get
through life … What he wanted was to warn me against
hope.’ This last sentence, in a book of terrible things, is
perhaps the most terrible. It sums up what generations of
working-class families instilled in their sons and daughters
– that ‘out there’ is not for you, so forget it. Cruelty and
despair are paramount; beauty and softness are things to
be snatched from books and love, in secret.
38
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
Of course, the great and
only easily available ame-
lioration was to be had
through alcohol. The
capacity for dr ink was
another measure of tough-
Bur nside poured the
dr inks for his father’s
mates – ‘I was pour ing
away our food for the
week, the insurance
money, probably the rent.’
His mother went to bed Burnside: terror and beauty
early on these nights with
a Mills and Boon novel to gain some sort of escape.
A rare period of rest came to their prefab home when
his father was laid up for a time after a serious accident
at work. He encouraged his family to dream that he
would take them off to Canada for a new start. Instead
they went to Corby in Northamptonshire, another hard,
unlovely steel town.
Burnside’s mother hoped that the compensation
money from the accident could be put down on a house,
but the father spent it in the pubs; ‘with more money to
spend, his drink problems worsened’. His mother, like so
many others, continued to scrimp and save, to sew and
mend, to cook nourishing meals from scraps, to keep the
family together. At fourteen, Burnside joined his father
in the pubs, fetching and carrying drinks, learning to
keep silent among the men. He learned early on about
drink, and soon enough about drugs. His hatred of his
father grew to planning how to murder him.
Much of the later part of Burnside’s book is taken up
with his own serious addictions to drink and a whole
range of drugs, and two spells in the bin. He formed
casual relationships and deep friendships, took menial
jobs, and fell, and fell. His mother grew ill and died
from a cancer that might have been prevented. His
father blamed her early death on the worry his son and
daughter had caused her. The book ends with the death
of the father from a heart attack (his fourth) suffered on
the Via Dolorosa between bar and cigarette machine in
the Silver Band Club in Corby.
A Lie About My Father shows the extraordinary same-
ness and difference of human lives: most conflict comes
from perceptions of sameness, and most good things from
the tolerance of difference. So, in the macho world of
working men, of most men indeed, it is not permitted to
be different. But more than this, the book is about
redemption, and how human beings negotiate their way
more or less disastrously or victoriously between cradle
and grave. It is superbly written; poetic in the best sense,
summoning up a world of terror and beauty.
To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 59
 GENERAL

D AVID P RYCE -J ONES world. As a Christian and a professor at Columbia

University in New York, Said was well placed to be

MALIGNANT CHARLATANRY preaching that the West was guilty of past sins such as
colonialism and racism, and would now have to pay to
atone for them. His claim to be a Palestinian was infused
F OR L UST OF K NOWING : T HE O RIENTALISTS with obfuscation, but he masterminded the cause
AND T HEIR E NEMIES of Palestinian victimhood. The West, he held, was
★ responsible for creating the state of Israel, and it would
By Robert Irwin have to pay for that too. Those in the West who had lost
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 409pp £25) confidence in their own culture (liberals and 68ers,
Third-Worlders and anti-colonialists), shoulder to shoulder
NEARLY THIRTY YEARS have passed since Edward Said with all who wished ill to Jews and Americans, made of
published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual him a totem. Moreover, Said practised in print and
climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a speech a brand of personalised snarling and sneering, so
new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed at scholarship and that would-be critics ducked from being condemned to
scholars. In Said’s opinion, every Westerner who had a brawl. The disastrous consequence is that Middle East
ever studied or written about the Middle East had done studies everywhere are now politicised, often to the
so in bad faith. Epigraphists, archaeologists, grammarians point of being worthless, and ‘Orientalist’ has become
and linguists, papyrologists, geographers, the lot, includ- an insult, a synonym for racist.
ing poets and travellers, had nothing to do with the Bernard Lewis, Ernest Gellner and other scholars of
advancement of learning or the recording of their the Islamic world have defended their discipline within
findings and impressions. With sinister purpose, they the confines of the academy, to be met with Said’s
were imposing themselves upon innocent and harmless venom and anti-Jewish animus. In a specialist journal,
people. Century after century, the activity of these the Syrian Sadiq el-Azm wrote a long root-and-branch
assorted men was not at all what it might seem but only critique of the way Said amalgamated disparate sources
‘a rationalisation of colonial rule’ and, since for most of into a single overarching conspiracy. Said responded to
the time there was no colonial rule other than Ottoman, him – and other Arabs with an open mind such as
a justification of it ‘in advance’. Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya – with particularly
Said fashioned this massive international conspiracy out hate-filled bluster. Robert Irwin, as far as I know, is the
of the vulgar Marxist concept that knowledge only and first to bring the whole issue of Orientalism to the gen-
always serves the interest of the eral reader, and he does so
ruling class, and therefore can- with an admirable blend of
not be objective. He spiced it information, common sense
up with a supportive concept, and good humour (though
this time taken from Michel for some reason he does not
Foucault, that there is no such like Saul Bellow). Said has
thing as truth, but only ‘narra- met his match. It is a pity
tives’. This reduces facts to that he is no longer alive to
whatever anyone wishes to know it.
make of them. For the sake At the outset, Irwin declares
of his ‘nar rative’ Said left his hand, describing Said’s
out whatever did not fit, mis- Orientalism as ‘a work of
representing and inventing and malignant charlatanry’. He
generalising as he went along. proves it by examining what
Why did academics and Orientalists were actually say-
opinion-formers adopt this ing and doing, from the
farrago as some sort of sudden ancient Greeks to the present.
and thr illing insight? The In the early Middle Ages, no
answer seems to be that Said real effort was made to go
had caught the tide of rising beyond the stereotypes enter-
Islamism. In the 1970s when tained by Chr istians and
he wrote, the balance of Muslims alike. Each saw the
power was beginning to tilt other’s religion as a menace;
perceptibly against the West, and their mutual polemics
and in favour of the Muslim Occidental tourists were really a branch of

39
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 GENERAL
theology. Travel was difficult. Those who knew any Arabic
were mostly self-taught, and what they made of Arabic
texts was uncertain if not erroneous. As a rule, they were
searching for missing works by classical authors that might
have survived in this form.
The first true Orientalist, Irwin tells us, was the
Frenchman Guillaume Postel, born in 1510. He studied
Arabic and Turkish, collected manuscripts, and pub-
lished the first grammar of classical Arabic in Europe.
Unfortunately he was also pretty mad, and was finally
locked up. By the following century, universities including
Oxford and Cambridge had established chairs of Arabic,
attracting luminaries like Bishop Pococke, Lancelot
Andrewes, and Sir Henry Savile. Churchmen with a
knowledge of Hebrew turned to Arabic as another
Semitic language.
Athanasius Kircher, Scaliger, Erpenius and Golius are
hardly household names, but Irwin brings them and their
contributions and eccentricities vividly to life. The study of
the Orient was part of the burgeoning wish to learn more
about the world, at a time when it was becoming increas-
ingly possible to do so. Slowly but surely, a fascinating
range of individuals freed themselves from the constraints of
religious prejudice, translated Arabic texts including the
Qur’an, set up Arabic printing shops, and acquired pupils
in order to hand on the growing corpus of knowledge.
Great scholars popped up here and there, at Leiden, or in
Ger many (Hammer-Purgstall), Russia (Ignatius
Kratchkovsky), Budapest (Ignaz Goldziher). Irwin gives
concise and illuminating accounts of the achievements of
such men, and the influence they exercised. By and large,
they investigated the world of Islam at a time when that
world was in a trough, and so they helped Muslims to
recover their past for the sake of the present. At the core of
Orientalism, then, was intellectual curiosity, nothing to do
with a supposed colonising conspiracy.
Orientalists in the modern age are a varied lot, but,
contrary to Said’s ‘narrative’, they have almost unani-
mously opposed the imposition of Western values and
culture on Muslims. Some, like Sir Hamilton Gibb or
Albert Hourani, espoused Arab nationalism. Others have
devoted themselves to studying narrow aspects of Arab,
Turkish or Persian history and society. Louis Massignon
and the Dutchman C Snouck Hurgronje are about the
only two Orientalists who actually offered their services
to colonial governments, but Massignon was a mystical
enthusiast of Islam, which made him a hero to Said. The
perversity was typical.
Irwin has demolished Said’s fantasies about Orientalism,
and with urbanity too. This counter-revolution ought to
relegate Said to the status of a curiosity, one who in his
time pre-eminently but irrationally generated anti-
Western emotion and prejudice, and it will be a good test
of today’s culture to see if it succeeds in doing so.
To order this book at £20, see order form on page 59
40
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
B ERNARD G REEN
Was it All
Just a Meme?
S IX I MPOSSIBLE T HINGS B EFORE B REAKFAST:
T HE E VOLUTIONARY O RIGINS OF B ELIEF
★
By Lewis Wolpert
(Faber & Faber 288pp £12.99)
B REAKING THE S PELL : R ELIGION AS A
N ATURAL P HENOMENON
★
By Daniel C Dennett
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 464pp £25)
T HE G REAT T RANSFORMATION : T HE
WORLD IN THE T IME OF B UDDHA ,
S OCRATES, C ONFUCIUS AND J EREMIAH
★
By Karen Armstrong
(Atlantic Books 496pp £19.99)
I RECENTLY TOOK a sprightly, 98-year-old friend of mine
for an afternoon drive. He wanted to visit the village of
Longworth, about twelve miles from Oxford. In the mid
1930s, he had known the widow of a former Rector of
Longworth, a notable theologian called John Illingworth,
and hoped to find some trace of him. Sure enough, in
the churchyard we found the graves of Dr and Mrs
Illingworth: he had died in 1915, having served as rector
of the parish since 1883, and his wife died in 1938.
Illingworth, it turned out, had been a Fellow of Jesus and
one of the first college tutors at the newly founded Keble
College in the early 1870s. Standing in that graveyard at
Longworth, I felt the decades, and even the whole twen-
tieth century, drop away.
In 1889, Illingworth contributed two essays to the
immensely influential collection, Lux Mundi, whose
purpose among other things was to bring Christian
thought face to face with the modern world. One of
Illingworth’s essays addressed the question of evolution.
Writing thirty years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, he
treated evolution not only as an established scientific
theory, one to be accepted as readily as the motion of
the earth around the sun, but as a way of understanding
the development of everything – organisms, nations,
languages, institutions, customs, creeds. He went on to
review the implications of Darwin’s ideas for Christian
thought and to sketch out a theory of development in
which Christianity could be seen as the fulfilment of
 GENERAL
human philosophy and spiritual aspiration, from Buddha
and Zoroaster to Socrates and Plato.
What is interesting about this is its date. In 1889, this
essay caused no controversy at all. Illingworth was
offered preferment both ecclesiastical and academic, all
of which he rejected in favour of the retired life of a
country parson. Yet today we still find scientists who
suppose that Christian thought must be hostile to all
scientific progress and fearful above all else of evolution.
There are scientists who seem to devote as much energy
and fervour to attacking religion as to promoting sci-
ence, regarding the one project as the equivalent of the
other. Perhaps their problem is not so much the sup-
posed hostility of religion to science as their incongruity.
If natural selection, the survival of the fittest, drives
human destiny, then why down to modern times should
all human communities since the very earliest traces of
human thought have shown a religious instinct? How
can evolution explain religion?
Religion might be said to have some evolutionary
advantage, bonding societies together for instance, but
for the most part it seems to work against the best inter-
ests of natural selection. Sheer altruism seems to run
counter to all my instincts to assure my own survival and
the production of offspring. Some scientists would
therefore deny that altruism exists. Concern for the
weak and reproductively unfit who can make no useful
contribution to the survival of the race seems also to run
counter to all the imperatives of the survival of the
fittest. Time spent in contemplation, in praise of a
presumably imaginary deity, is time wasted. So why
should all humans, from the dawn of time down to

JUT
ZPVS
MJGF
recent days, have shown this same religious instinct?
This question is not an easy one to answer and seems
to push some biologists into a frenzy of hostility to the
religions they find so anomalous.
Lewis Wolpert, the enormously distinguished biologist,
tells us that he is not hostile to religion, but the title of
his book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, does
rather give the game away. He offers an explanation of
religious belief that runs like this: what distinguishes
human beings from animals is a belief in cause and
effect; this allows humans to make tools and that in turn
pushes human development further; humans, so desperate
to explain everything, invented explanations for what
they could not understand and so developed religions,
mythologies, a belief in magic and, finally, science.
Religion, then, is a stage in the development of the
human urge to explain the universe – a rather dark
stage, to be ranked alongside superstition and an enthu-
siasm for the paranormal, a readiness to believe six
impossible things before breakfast.
The first interesting thing about this is Professor
Wolpert’s enormous confidence that he can explain the
evolution of human ideas many thousands of years ago
41
with no evidence whatsoever. When we know about
something, like the French Revolution, we tend to be
more circumspect about explaining its causes. The
second interesting thing is his definition of the nature of
belief and the purpose of religion: to offer causal expla-
nations. Towards the end of the book, he says that he is
not dismissive of religion and would not want to offend
believers because he sees the benefit that religious belief
has brought to his son. He clearly believes in his son and
in not wanting to hurt him. Religious belief is rather
more like that – rather more like love – than seeking
explanations. It is singularly odd that in his urge to
explain the existence of religion, Wolpert has advanced
a theory that is pleasing but suffers from exactly the
limitations that he lays at the door of religious belief: a
fantasy to explain the unknown.
Daniel Dennett is a very distinguished philosopher; his
attitude to religion is also rather revealed by the title of
his book, Breaking the Spell: the spell is that cast on the
human mind over the millennia by religious belief. He
wants to show us how awful religion is, claiming for
instance that religion is responsible for more deaths in
war than anything else – a surprising statement in light of
the deaths in the two world wars of the twentieth century,
dwarfing anything that had gone before, neither of which
was fought for reasons of belief in a transcendent deity.
Of course, the more you stress how awful religion is, the
*G
UIFSFT
POF
UIJOH

ZPV
TIPVME
HFU
EPXO

PO
QBQFS
3RP]EXMR]QMRSVMX]SJTISTPI´W
WXSVMIWEVITVIWIVZIHJSVTSWXIVMX]
%RHXLEX´WEXVEKIH]JSVE[LSPI
LSWXSJVIEWSRW
%X8LI&MSKVETL]'SQTER][I´PP
LIPT]SYXYVR]SYVWXSV]MRXSE
FSSOTVSFEFP]SRP]JSVTVMZEXI
HMWXVMFYXMSRXLEX[MPPJSVQE
TIVQERIRXVIGSVHSJ[LS]SYEVI
[LEX]SY´ZIHSRI[LEX´WVIEPP]
QEXXIVIHXS]SY
*SV]SYJSV]SYVJEQMP]JSV]SYV
JVMIRHWERHJSVJYXYVIKIRIVEXMSRW
8LIIRHTVSHYGX[MPPFITVMGIPIWW
¯ERHXLITVSGIWWIRNS]EFPI
ERHVI[EVHMRK
*SVQSVIMRJSVQEXMSRKSXS
[[[XLIFMSKVETL]GSQTER]GSQ
3V[VMXIXSYWEX,MKL7XVIIX
,SRMXSR(IZSR)<%.
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 GENERAL
harder it is to give it any evolutionary explanation. It
simply does not serve the advantages of the species.
Consequently you need to look elsewhere for an expla-
nation of its remarkable history and universal resilience.
Dennett finds that explanation in his theory of memes.
He is probably the only distinguished philosopher who
gives any time at all to this theory, first sketched out by
Richard Dawkins for similar purposes to those that
inspire Dennett to espouse it. Memes (rhyming with
dreams) provide a useful way of explaining the inconve-
nient fact that human ideas seldom seem to be readily
attributable to the imperative of the survival of the fittest
and natural selection. The claim is that ideas can be dis-
tinguished from the people who think them as indepen-
dent replicators which get into the mind and then pass
on from one host to another. They are driven by the
evolutionary imperative; they ‘want’ to survive and use
the mind rather like a parasite. Good examples of
memes are tunes, catchphrases, fashions, where the indi-
vidual seems to have been taken over by what gets into
his head. Dennett suggests that religion is a meme like
these, and the main thrust of his book is to try and get it
out of our heads, to purify our minds, in perhaps the
same way as we would like to escape from some annoy-
ing advertising jingle.
Somehow, I cannot see Dr Illingworth falling for that
one. But he might well have been very sympathetically
interested in Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Great
Transformation, which explores the world of Buddha,
Confucius, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Euripides and Socrates. In
four entirely separate parts of the world (India, China,
Israel and Greece), in the space of about five hundred
years, a profound revolution in human thought took
place. Religious and philosophical thought moved away
from tribal and aristocratic religion towards the personal
and the universal, while the concept of God became
more radically transcendent. Writers as distant from each
other geographically as Confucius and Jeremiah called
for the abandonment of selfishness and the embracing of
compassion, the de-throning of the self, and an orienta-
tion towards the ultimate.
This era from the ninth to the fifth century BC has
been called the axial age. Karen Armstrong characterises
it as an age of upheaval and violence against which reli-
gious thinkers called for selflessness, non-violence and
social justice. Though she has to indulge in a fair
amount of imaginary reconstruction of the roots of
religious belief, her account of this transformation in
human spiritual consciousness achieves a sympathetic
synthesis which commands respect. The 1889 essay in
which Illingworth embraced Darwin also tried to
embrace the Buddha and Zoroaster, Socrates and Plato. I
would love to hear Karen Armstrong in dialogue with
Daniel Dennett and Lewis Wolpert.
To order these books see form on page 59
42
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
B RYAN A PPLEYARD
GAIA HELP US
T HE R EVENGE OF G AIA : W HY THE E ARTH IS
F IGHTING B ACK – AND H OW W E C AN S TILL
S AVE H UMANITY
★
By James Lovelock
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 176pp £16.99)
JAMES LOVELOCK WILL be eighty-seven this year. For the
last forty-five years he has been an entirely independent
scientist, unattached to any institution. He is qualified in
medicine, chemistry and biophysics. He is garlanded
with scientific awards in all these fields. He also makes
his own instruments, for which he has filed more than
fifty patents. He invented and made the electron-capture
detector, a tiny instrument that remains the gold stan-
dard for detecting atmospheric pollution. He created the
discipline known as Earth System Sciences and, in the
Gaia hypothesis, created the most potent and urgent sci-
entific vision of our time. (He is also a friend of mine.)
I am writing in anger because I know of no man who
is more consistently underrated – in the world at large
certainly, but especially in his own country. There have
been mutterings of ‘crank’ about this book, and a few
pig-ignorant columnists have suggested it’s all just more
eco-nut, quasi-religious raving. Lovelock, let me be clear,
is the most profound scientific thinker of our time, and –
though I admit in the present climate this is not saying
much – the greatest living Englishman. Let me explain.
The Gaia hypothesis suggested that we should view the
earth as a single living organism rather than as a neutral
or dead environment in which living things evolved to
fill specific niches. This would explain how the planet
consistently stabilises itself. The salinity of the oceans and
the atmospheric temperatures remain remarkably consis-
tent over time – they would have to or we wouldn’t be
here. Originally, Lovelock proposed Gaia as a metaphor,
but now he seems closer to the view that the earth really
is a living creature. One objection to this idea is that it
doesn’t reproduce, to which his response is that an organ-
ism that is one-third as old as the cosmos doesn’t need to.
Over forty years Lovelock has refined Gaia, and she
now presides over a great deal of academic work –
though neither she nor Lovelock is often given much
credit. The fabulously complex and beautiful feedback
mechanisms by which life sustains itself have become,
both academically and popularly, a profound and moving
image of our dependence and fragility. Both Christian
doctrines of stewardship and Marxist and post-Marxist
fantasies of progress wither and die beneath the gaze of
Gaia. She and she alone grants us life. And she can take it
 GENERAL

away. Should we disturb her planetary systems, she will cloud for mation.
simply flick humanity aside and carry on without us. Fewer clouds
Before moving on to the new developments reported means less sunlight
in this book, it is necessary to say a word about the ethical is reflected and,
implications of Gaia. Gaian or Lovelockian environmen- therefore, more
talism represents the first convincing step beyond the warming and even
various manky humanisms that have sprung up since the fewer algae. In
death of God was announced – by, according to your addition, a haze
taste, Darwin or Nietzsche. Having lost God as the caused by carbon
underpinning of value, we sought new foundations in emission turns out
ourselves. The result was, as Nietzsche predicted, blood- to be reflecting
shed on a scale never before seen, and, equally pre- some sunlight and
dictably, our current descent into the condition of willing, has thus concealed
conviction-free victims of fundamentalism, PR, market- from us how far Lovelock: a voice in the wilderness
ing, and numerous other hucksterisms. the process has
Gaia restores the possibility of a source of value gone. Ceasing carbon emissions will, ironically, dispel
beyond ourselves and over which we can have no control. this haze and, temporarily, make things worse.
She resurrects piety and humility as necessary human Lovelock, a very deep green indeed, dismisses most of
virtues. She does this not through the vague feeling of the solutions offered by shallower greens. He doesn’t
wonder felt by the astronauts who first saw the complete want organic food, wind or wave power, he wants
disc of earth from space, nor through any generalised nuclear power and artificially synthesised food – he
concern about the destruction of wildlife habitat and the assures me the steaks will be much better than anything
depredations of intensive farming. Rather, Gaia tells us a currently available in Notting Hill. The former, if inter-
complete story about who we are, how we got here, by nationally adopted on a massive scale, would cut carbon
whose authority we exist, and whose wrath we shall emissions from electricity generation and the latter
incur. She also tells us that our pathetic, tribal values, would allow us to return farmland to carbon-absorbing
anxieties and angers are almost entirely meaningless, as is wilderness. He is also sympathetic to the idea of
the neurotic hypochondria with which the developed installing a great sheet in space to cut sunlight, and to
world is currently afflicted. A religion? Of course it is. that of adding sodium to aircraft fuel to replace the
Daily our actions are being judged. cloud-forming chemistry of the algae. They are tempo-
And, as The Revenge of Gaia makes clear, we are being rary fixes, but they would buy us time. Further economic
found guilty. Up to now, Lovelock has simply warned development is, of course, impossible. Our future is very
that global warming due to human carbon emissions is a high-tech and very low-energy.
reality and that something must be done. But our The whole process he describes as ‘sustainable retreat’
predicament turns out to be far worse than he realised. and it will be, to say the least, uncomfortable. At the
Temperatures are set to rise catastrophically over the next end of the process, the human population may be no
century. It is now likely that the poles – having lost their more than a billion. These perhaps not so fortunate few
ice and snow – will be the only places able to sustain will find themselves constantly having to struggle with
humanity, the rest of the world having been flooded or Gaia as the damage we have so far done has destabilised
turned to scorching desert. And, before anybody shouts earth’s systems to the point where they will continually
‘Crank!’, I should say that this is pretty much mainstream need correcting. Having been her creatures, we must
science – science created by become her enemies.
Lovelock, admittedly, but Lovelock writes so artlessly
now generally accepted. JNANE TAMSNA LITERARY SALON that people frequently miss the
in Marrakech
The situation is worse depth of his thought. They
than we thought because the Four days and three nights of stimulation in a sumptuous will be encouraged in this by
ice is melting faster than we Moroccan guesthouse. the vulgar subtitle his publish-
had previously realised and Join us in welcoming Barbara Trapido (Frankie & Stankie, ers have chosen to stick on this
because var ious new and The Travelling Hornplayer, Juggling...) from the 19 to the th book. In reality, his work
destructive positive feedback nd
22 of January, 2006. needs no artifice and no mar-
loops have been discovered. For further information: keting, it generates its own
One of these starts with http://www.jnanetamsna.com/jtlitsal.htm or contact Eleanor poetry and truth. For God’s,
warming oceans killing the O’Keeffe at eleanor@jnanetamsna.com or +33 6 88 68 68 98 sorry, Gaia’s sake, read this.
algae whose emissions pro- The Jnane Tamsna Literary Salon is designed to celebrate the achievements of recognised
authors while promoting literacy and education in Morocco and beyond.
To order this book at £13.59,
vide the chemical basis for see order form on page 59

43
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 GENERAL
D ONALD R AYFIELD
SCHOLARS ALL AT SEA
T HE P HILOSOPHY S TEAMER : L ENIN AND THE
E XILE OF THE I NTELLIGENTSIA
★ reading Nabokov’s The Gift – a portrait of Russians
By Lesley Chamberlain
(Atlantic Books 414pp £25)
THIS WARM-HEARTED AND engaging work focuses on
the hundred or so (even the author cannot be sure
exactly how many) Russian intellectuals who were
packed off (some with families) at Lenin’s behest on two
German steamers in September 1922 from Petrograd to
Stettin. The loss to Russia of this small community –
philosophers, historians, doctors, agronomists – was
enormous, though a bigger disaster was to come, when,
fifteen years later, tens of thousands of scholars and
thinkers who remained were disposed of by Lenin’s
successors with far greater brutality. Conversely, the gain
to Europe and America cannot be overstated. Had it not
been for these boatloads, and the thousands of other
Russian émigrés who had voluntarily preceded them,
it is hard to see how we could have had modern
linguistics, structuralist criticism, French existentialism,
let alone the great surge in our knowledge of Russian
literature, philosophy and art. One day a monument will
be built – in Prague, Paris or Berlin, but alas not in
London – in gratitude to this first Russian diaspora.
Without Nikolai Berdiaev’s Philosophy of the Free Spirit
Camus might not have written The Rebel nor Aldous
Huxley Brave New World. Without Trubetskoy’s Prague
linguistic circle, there might have been no Chomsky.
Admittedly, many a modern critic would like to have
seen Camus, Huxley and Chomsky stifled, if not at
birth, then in their formative period. But the fact
remains that these two steamers together constituted a
Noah’s Ark which also preserved a cult of free inquiry
and civilised values for Russia that Lenin and Stalin had
hoped to eradicate.
In the 1980s the Foreign Office ran a little bookshop
in Pimlico that took from its few visitors not money
but a promise that the books they removed would
be covertly distributed in the USSR. Intrepid Soviet
visitors willing to risk arrest at Customs came away with
the works of the philosophers Berdiaev, Frank, Lossky
and Valentin Bulgakov, the literary critic Aikhenvald,
and the historian Kizevetter, in which would be prized
– usually reproduced as typed carbon copies – by a
generation of Soviet students.
Lesley Chamberlain plays down the intellectual
importance of her subjects: she has little taste for
Berdiaev’s mystical intuitions, and she does not mention
44
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
his lucid critical studies of Dostoevsky and Leontiev,
which remain unsurpassed. Nor does she delve very far
into the originality of the Prague school, which made
linguistics a cutting-edge science. She vividly recreates,
however, the character and everyday life of a number of
selfless, unworldly refugees in Berlin, Prague and Paris.
The reader gets the same satisfaction to be found by
floundering in a parallel universe, a portable Russia of
the mind.
One is struck particularly by the generosity of some of
the exiles’ hosts. The Czechoslovaks, under their
Russophile academic president Thomas Masaryk, created
a Russian university and a social security system. When
one day someone writes the history of the Russian
Academy (closed by the Nazis and then totally sup-
pressed by the NKVD), the Czechoslovak government
of the 1920s and 1930s will be covered in glory.
Chamberlain does not have space to chronicle the
Russian emigration, and leaves out of her story equally
generous hosts, notably the Serbian government and the
University of Belgrade, whose rector Belic fostered a
Russian academic and media community to rival those
of Paris and Prague.
The story, however, ends sadly. Despite the hospitality
and attention, even in the green suburbs of Paris none of
the exiles felt happy or even safe. And when the Nazis
and then the Red Army invaded, many met a terrible
end: suicide, concentration camp, execution. Only a few
escaped to America to seed a new generation of thinkers.
Three years ago a book with the same title and same
subject matter appeared in Russia, but Lesley
Chamberlain’s focus on the everyday experience of exile
in the West, as well as her careful research, ensure that
this study will not be superseded. In only a single area
would one take issue with her. As in her previous study
of Russian philosophers, Motherland, she takes a serious
view of Lenin, not just as a Machiavellian usurper, but as
a thinker. The last chapter of this study is devoted to a
contrasting of Lenin and Berdiaev as two poles of
Russian thought: the latter intuitive and Christian, the
former rational and atheist. Her reading of Lenin’s key
work Empirocriticism and Materialism is extraordinarily
respectful. I read it as a vile vituperative rant to be com-
pared with Mein Kampf, and unworthy to be considered
in a study of philosophy. Stalin, Lenin’s best reader,
summed up the whole of Lenin when he took a blue
pencil and wrote on the last page of his copy:
1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the
only things that can be called vices. Everything else,
in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly
virtue. NB! If a man is 1) strong (spiritually), 2)
active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is good, regard-
less of any other ‘vices’!
1) and 3) make 2)
 GENERAL
Nor should Lenin be credited with despatching the two
philosophy steamers. After his first stroke, even when
the Bolsheviks were firmly in power and had no need of
further acts of terror, Lenin was subject to bouts of
incoherent violent irritation in which he would suggest
murderous reprisals – against the Church, the Latvians,
Tatars, intellectuals. Sometimes these suggestions were
acted on, sometimes not. In the case of the philosophy
steamers, the head of the secret police – Dzierzynski,
who had never read a book from cover to cover – found
it impossible to select academics for deportation; he
handed the task to his deputy, Viacheslav Menzhinsky,
F RANCIS K ING
From Middle-Class Sissy
to Heroic Samurai
M ISHIMA ’ S S WORD
★ unnecessarily, accompanied by its Japanese equivalent.
By Christopher Ross
(Fourth Estate 262pp £14.99)
THIS ODD, SOMETIMES irritating and always fascinating
book is difficult to categorise. A commonplace book
driven by a single obsession? That would certainly
convey the way in which it consists for the most part of
a series of brief, finely chiselled passages, each often no
more than a paragraph in length, with little sense of
cohesion between them. But there is nothing common-
place about either the content or the style.
Ross’s obsession, as the title suggests, is with the
Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima and the antique sword
with which, after he had plunged a
knife into his belly, spilling out his
entrails in an act of selfless or self-
glor ifying seppuku, one of his
cohorts decapitated him. The
sword, slightly bent and its once
razor-sharp edge rusty and chipped
from its violent impact with
Mishima’s jawbone, can be seen as a
symbol of the other object of Ross’s
search: Mishima himself.
At the close of the book Ross
thinks that he may eventually have
located and even handled the
sword; but can he be sure that he
has not been set up? Similarly, after
having visited so many places
frequented by Mishima, read so
many of his febrile writings, and Mishima: a consummate actor
45
himself a multi-tasking intellectual who had been a
fellow student of many of the exiles and took a sadistic
delight in summoning them for interrogation and decid-
ing their fate. Lenin was only incidental to this process.
Menzhinsky is little known, only because he was a secret
policeman’s secret policeman and made sure there were
no mentions, let alone statues, of himself. In fact, he was
the main plotter of all the Cheka’s enterprises from 1922
to 1932. The brew of Satanism and Marxism in
Menzhinsky’s mind sent Berdiaev and the philosophers
into exile.
To order this book at £20, see order form on page 59
spoken to so many people who knew him, can he
be sure that at the end of his search he has truly found
his quarry?
In the course of his journey of discovery, Ross has
enjoyed the advantage of an ability not merely to speak
but also to read Japanese. Unfortunately he is determined
that the reader should on no account be left in ignorance
of this accomplishment. As a consequence, an English
word or phrase is repeatedly, and for the most part
Ross’s obsession with Mishima and the sword clearly
derived from a boyhood preoccupation with Japanese
martial arts. ‘When I was eleven, or perhaps twelve, I
formed the firm conviction that I should become a
kung-fu master.’ The reason for this, he goes on to
explain, was that he felt that, being small and brainy, he
must acquire the magical powers necessary to repel ‘the
always malign intentions of bigger boys’. Eventually he
ended up as a neophyte in a school called the Chinese
Martial Arts Centre. The directors were two brothers.
With these powerful, older men Ross not only studied
but also spent much of his social life.
Near the end of the association one of the brothers
mar r ied a hefty woman with
cropped hair. Soon the couple
underwent gender reassignment,
the husband becoming the wife
and vice versa. At first one won-
ders about the relevance of this
odd story. Then one reminds one-
self that Mishima, having been
bullied and mocked by his school-
mates because of his femininity,
also subjected himself to a punish-
ing course of what was, in effect,
gender reassignment.
On meeting Mishima myself, I
found it difficult to believe wholly
in the transformation from mid-
dle-class sissy to heroic samurai.
What I saw was an elaborate act of
make-believe on the part of a
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 GENERAL
consummate actor in love with his role – comparable to
Olivier changing himself into a West Indian to play
Othello, or a sprightly and attractive Judi Dench becoming
an elderly Queen Victoria.
Ross presents a largely convincing portrait of
Mishima, so devoid of a novelist’s usual interest in the
people around him, so cold when he gives his mirthless
laugh, and so much obsessed with cruelty, suffering and
violent death. If he fails in any particular, it is in not
projecting enough of the absurdity of Mishima’s
attempts to impersonate the sort of hulk that so attracted
him. The muscles cultivated with self-punishing persis-
tence – on his last visit to England he told me that even
when abroad he spent many hours of each day at a gym
– could never wholly conceal the strong female compo-
nent in both physique and personality.
Absurdity, in the form of a succession of near-farcical
interruptions and mishaps, even ruined Mishima’s final
performance as sacrificial victim of the samurai code.
Ross deals with these last hours more in the manner of a
novelist than of a biographer. Many books have already
established exactly what happened. But in his imagina-
tive retelling Ross injects a ferociously compelling and,
for me at least, nauseating vividness into the facts.
Some readers may find tedious a lengthy passage about
the nature of bushido and an even lengthier one about
the art of forging a sword capable of severing a head
with a single deft blow. Of more general interest, for all
their irrelevance, are those sections in which, forgetting
both Mishima and the sword, Ross writes about himself,
with a combination of extreme frankness and self-
protective reserve.
On his life before he became a teacher in Japan and,
subsequently, a writer, he provides only scrappy infor-
mation. But we do learn in detail how, suffering from
acute abdominal pain, he retreated for a while from his
quest for the sword into a quest for NHS treatment in
Britain. Once there, he was stricken with a torrential
nosebleed (whether connected with the abdominal pain
is never clear), and so ended up in the A & E depart-
ment of a hospital. Such autobiographical revelations are
often even more interesting than what he wr ites
so capably and so tantalisingly about the part genius,
part monster and part charlatan who is the subject of
his search.
This is one of the finer literary products of the intensity
of interest that Mishima still inspires in the West. That
interest both bewilders and embarrasses most Japanese
today. Yes, they concede, he was a writer of outstanding
gifts. But in his homoerotic yearnings for the ritually
savage and death-obsessed discipline of a long since
vanished epoch, he can in no way be regarded as a rep-
resentative either of their far more humdrum selves or of
present-day Japanese culture.
To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 59
46
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
J ESSICA M ANN
SOUTH BANK SURVIVOR
T HE H OUSE BY THE T HAMES AND THE
P EOPLE W HO L IVED T HERE
★
By Gillian Tindall
(Chatto & Windus 258pp £20)
A RELIC OF old London stands between the brutally mas-
sive pile of Tate Modern, and the Disneyland fantasy of
the Globe Theatre. On this stretch of the south bank of
the Thames, where industrial buildings have been turned
into restaurants, apartments or art galleries and new office
and apartment blocks built, one single old house has
survived. Number 49 Bankside was built during the reign
of Queen Anne, on a site formerly occupied by a Tudor
inn called The Cardinal’s Hat. The fluke of survival has
meant that an ordinary house in a row of ordinary houses
has turned (along with the two smaller houses rebuilt on
either side) into an exotic sight. They look ‘like miniatures
that have strayed into the wrong construction-model’ as
Gillian Tindall says in this delightful book, which, in
relating the ‘biography’ of this one house, the site it stands
on and the people who lived there, tells by implication
the story of a city.
Tindall describes Number 49 as an example of quintes-
sentially English domestic architecture, but adds that it has
become something more – an emblem of an entire world
we have lost. The crowds of people who walk along the
river path and the tourists passing by in river boats ‘need
number 49 today, to represent for us not only the rebuilding
of London after the Great Fire and the coming
Enlightenment ... we also need it to symbolise a much
older world’. So the guides repeat and embroider romantic
legends: that Cather ine of Aragon lodged at The
Cardinal’s Hat, and Shakespeare drank there; that from
these very windows Sir Christopher Wren watched the
dome of his cathedral take shape across the water.
Tindall explodes such unsubstantiated tales and replaces
them with names of people and families previously
unknown to history: Sells, Gardeners, Holditches,
Tuckfields, Rolfes, ‘a procession of individuals called up
fleetingly from the expended generations’. The traceable
facts about the tradesmen, innkeepers, lightermen and
coal merchants who worked or ran their businesses from
49 Bankside are underpinned with an account of the tra-
ditional local trades – tanning, printing and brewing. The
area went up and down; by 1900 Victorian businesses and
their owners had gradually moved out, Bankside became
a slum and fluctuated throughout the twentieth century
between dereliction, destruction and regeneration.
Gillian Tindall is also a novelist and the author of several
 GENERAL
works on topography, including a history of
Bombay, the evocation of a French village in
the prize-winning Célestine and several books
on the infinitely various subject of London,
such as the history of Kentish Town in The
Fields Beneath. This book is designed for a
wider readership than architectural and social
historians, but is not one of those fashionable
books about individual houses and their resi-
dents in which the author’s personal quest
for elusive information purports to be some
kind of cliff-hanger. Tindall’s story is truthful
and unexaggerated, combining elegantly
elegiac prose with imaginative empathy and
descriptive power. Forgotten people and
factual details gradually emerge from the
oblivion of time as the author searches Number 49 Bankside
through census returns, rate books or elec-
toral rolls – and has to make herself stop. ‘Many years of a
current life, you begin to realise, could be expended on the
excavation of a handful of these past lives: ultimately, the
desire to re-confer humanity and personality on the lost
runs the risk of compromising life in the present.’
Documentary evidence gives way to first-hand informa-
tion: a film star called Anna Lee moved in during the
1930s and lived to tell Gillian Tindall the tale at the age of
ninety-one. After the War the young Peregr ine
I NIGO WALLACE
THE BOY GROWS UP
I N TOUCH WITH H IS ROOTS
★ Meanwhile, Intra Bank is on the up – the Royal
By Naim Attallah
(Quartet Books 319pp £15)
THIS IS THE second in a series of memoirs from Naim
Attallah – entrepreneur, banker, and one-time generous
patron of Literary Review. The books, written in the
third person, chart the rise of Attallah from a boy in
Nazareth to his present situation. This volume concerns
his early career in business, and has at its centre the rise
and fall of Intra Bank, run by the charismatic Yusif
Bedas, who, Attallah is never shy to tell us, was the bank.
At the start, Attallah is working for a French bank and
living with his wife Maria in a tiny Holland Park flat
with a shared kitchen and bathroom: ‘The days of
sowing his wild oats were over.’ But, on the strength of a
gut instinct, he falls for Bedas’s charms and takes on a
job with Intra Bank whilst it is still in its infancy.
Attallah is candid about his motives – he wants
responsibility and riches, he is ‘a young man determined
to run before he had found out how well he could
47
Worsthorne lived there with his first wife.
In Countries of the Mind (1991), a study of
the meaning of place to writers, Tindall
wrote: ‘In my teens, my personal England
seemed a dark, ramshackle threatening
place – in psychological terms, a rat-haunted
house down by the Thames.’ Sir Peregrine
Worsthorne’s autobiography, which
appeared in 1995, describes exactly that: his
Number 49 was a rat-haunted house down
by the Thames. Whether Tindall’s choice
of this house as her subject is more than
pure coincidence, only she herself could
say. In fact, by the time she was in her
teens, in the Fifties, this particular ram-
shackle place had become a family home
again. It even looked for a time as though
the traditional industries and trades of
London’s riverside were picking up. Instead, docks, facto-
ries and even the power station closed. Bankside became
derelict, silent and empty. Not even Sam Wanamaker
could have dreamt that twenty-five years on his Globe
Theatre would be just one feature of a transformed river-
side lined with bright new buildings. Alongside them
Number 49 Bankside, ‘with its old-fashioned lamp, stands
at night like a forgotten cottage in a children’s story’.
To order this book at £16, see order form on page 59
walk’. He willingly becomes a sort of unpaid escort to
Bedas’s wife, Wadad, accompanying her to casinos and
holding her hand whilst she flies all over the world. He
is ‘reluctant to damage his future prospects for the sake
of an irritating inconvenience’ and suffers the separation
from his wife this entails.
Crescent flat buzzes with friends, who sit on Naim and
Maria’s bed: ‘the degree of bonding in friendship that it
fostered was something phenomenal’.
Attallah’s rise is aided by the people he meets along
the way. Though his descriptive powers are limited
(attractive women seem always to have ‘emerald eyes’),
and the third-person narrative seems obtrusive and con-
trived, he tells his story with a matter-of-fact simplicity
which makes for some amusing scenes, including a lost
weekend with an Italian contessa and an employee who
made ‘a speciality of wrecking company cars’.
The collapse of Intra Bank and Attallah’s drive to
succeed are the pith of the book. Undeterred by crimi-
nal charges against Bedas, a supposed conspiracy against
Intra Bank on the part of the Lebanese Government,
and Bedas’s eventual imprisonment and death, Attallah
comes out of it all with the same focus on his career. He
meets John Asprey, and soon sets up his own company,
which thrives, enabling him to buy the Rolls-Royce he
always dreamed of. Another volume is promised.
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION
C AROLINE M OOREHEAD
A LOST MANUSCRIPT
S UITE F RANÇAISE
★ ed not of a diary but of a novel. Sixty-four years after their
By Irène Némirovsky
(Translated by Sandra Smith)
(Chatto & Windus 403pp £16.99)
‘TO LIFT SUCH a heavy weight, Sisyphus,’ wrote Irène
Némirovsky in notes for her novel Suite Française, ‘you
will need all your courage. I do not lack the courage to
complete the task but the goal is far and time is short.’
She did not realise quite how short it would be. It was
then June 1942. On 13 July the French police came to
arrest her. She was interned in the concentration camp
at Pithiviers, south of Orléans, and the next day deported
to Auschwitz. A month later she was dead.
What she left behind, the weight heavy with hope and
ambition, was two parts, Storm in June and Dolce, of a pro-
jected five-part novel that she hoped to publish as a single
thousand-page volume, constructed in different rhythms
and tones. She saw it as a symphony and took Beethoven’s
Fifth as her model. As she made clear in notes left with
the manuscript, she wanted the theme of her great work
to be the ‘struggle between personal identity and collec-
tive identity’. What lives on, she wrote, is ‘1. Our humble
day-to-day lives. 2. Art. 3. God.’ Published for the first
time in France last year, Suite Française, which follows the
lives of a number of people scattered from their homes in
Paris by the arrival of the Germans in June 1940, has
been greeted as a lost manuscript.
Irène Némirovsky was already a successful writer,
author of nine novels, when war broke out. She and her
husband Mikhail Epstein were both refugees who had
fled Russia separately during the Bolshevik revolution and
settled in Paris, where he became a bank manager. They
led amusing and enjoyable lives and had two daughters,
aged three and ten in 1940. Of Jewish descent,
Némirovsky had converted to Catholicism just before the
war, but she had never taken French citizenship, which
made her vulnerable to internment. When, in October
1940, Jews were excluded from all forms of teaching,
journalism, editing and public service, she switched to a
pseudonym and wrote short stories and a life of Chekhov.
Her publisher, Michel Albin, and his firm seem to have
been exceptionally concerned and generous towards her,
both during the next two years when the family went to
live in Issy-l’Evêque, just inside the occupied zone, and
after her initial arrest, when Mikhail, not at first realising
just what danger his wife was in, turned to them for help.
He too was later arrested and died in Auschwitz.
Their two daughters, however, survived, hidden by
48
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
friends, and Denise, the elder, carried their mother’s leather-
bound notebooks with her from hiding place to hiding
place, and after the war from school to school. Only many
years later did she decide to open the books and decipher
the minuscule handwriting with the help of a magnifying
glass, and it was only then that she realised that they consist-
mother’s death, Suite Française was finally published.
Together with the first two parts of the novel were many
pages of notes, containing Némirovsky’s thoughts not only
on where the next episodes would go, but on the ideas she
wished the book to provoke. These fascinating records are
published, in full, at the end of Dolce. In June, three weeks
before her arrest, Némirovsky was writing about Tolstoy
and how War and Peace seemed to fulfil E M Forster’s idea
that a novel, like music, should be about expansion, not
completion, ‘not rounding off but opening out’. In a book
like Storm in June, she noted, even if certain characters are
not wrapped up, the book itself must give the impression of
being only one episode in a long work. Reading Tolstoy
had taught her to touch lightly on historical facts, while
‘daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it
provides must be described in detail’. Into this detail, in
Némirovsky’s case, went considerable research. Notes writ-
ten soon after she started work on Suite Française in 1941
show that she had decided to get hold of a collection of
French and foreign newspapers from the time of the
German occupation of Paris, as well as books on porcelain
– one of her characters has a fine collection – and lists of
the names of birds which might have been singing as the
Parisians poured out of the city to get away from the arriv-
ing Germans. Indeed, both parts are rich in the settings and
surroundings in which the characters find themselves.
Had Irène Némirovsky lived to complete Suite Française,
she would undoubtedly have tightened up the existing
parts, as well as leading her many and memorable charac-
ters through the next stages of their lives and through a
war whose destruction and brutality sickened her. What
the notes make clear, however, is that she never intended
to do more than complete the stories of a few of her peo-
ple, and that for the rest all she wanted to do was to set
down ‘what is happening in our times, as in all times of
course’. Storm in June and Dolce are scenes of life in
wartime, written plainly but with shrewdness and compas-
sion, and need no completion. Némirovsky has a great gift
for describing the ordinariness that surrounds catastrophes,
the way birds sing just around the corner from a recently
bombed train, and how people go on being exactly who
they are, even in the middle of turmoil. It is this ability to
conjure up people, in all their moods and foibles, their
selflessness or vanity, their confusions and fears, that makes
Suite Française so remarkable. ‘Keep it simple,’ Némirovsky
wrote in a note to herself. ‘Tell what happens to people
and that’s all.’ And this is precisely what she did.
To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 59
 FICTION

D J TAYLOR predecessor’s fascination

with what might be called
A HIGH WIRE ACT US cultural imperialism.
At any rate its core
moment is a justification,
L UDMILA ’ S B ROKEN E NGLISH courtesy of an unrepen-
★ tant cor porate mega-
By D B C Pierre mogul named Truman, of
(Faber & Faber 318pp £12.99) the West’s superiority to
anything the less devel-
THE EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES of D B C Pierre’s triumph oped world might care to
in the 2003 Man Booker Prize were these. The five- cast in its path.
strong judging panel convened for its long-listing meeting Did you ever hear the
sometime in the middle of August. The opinions term ‘exceptionalism’?
expressed at this preliminary get-together are usually Memorize it for when DBC Pierre: riffs
fairly tentative: the judges are still getting to know the some bleeding heart
novels under discussion; a mild preference is generally asks you what gives us the right to run the world.
as far as it goes. Here, by contrast, unprecedented Because it’s the answer. It means this, Bob: we didn’t
communal fervour prevailed. One after another, four go out and force the world to be like us. We came
of the five judges shuffled their notes before them and up with such an awesome way of life that they’re
exclaimed that they had read this terrific novel called breaking their asses to be like us anyway…
Vernon God Little about the US Columbine High School Not all of D B C Pierre’s second novel – well, not quite
shootings and… all of it – is as flagrant as this. Set in a world grown even
The fifth judge – myself – was unconvinced. Once set nastier and more extravagant (London stifled under
in motion, however, this particular literary juggernaut curfew, the NHS long since privatised, Russia lurching
was unstoppable. At the short-list meeting, a month into civil war), it is one of those works which devote
later, each of the dozen books that merited serious con- infinite care and resourcefulness to bringing their central
sideration was rated inversely out of twelve, one being characters into joint orbit.
the highest mark available. DBC emerged from this Bunny and Blair – and I don’t imagine the latter name
winnowing so far ahead of the pack, despite my giving is arbitrary – are a pair of previously conjoined twins,
him an eleven, that someone even asked Professor John separated at the late age of thirty-three, and now
Carey, our chairman, whether there was any point in sequestered in London flatland. Bunny, less healthy and
having a final meeting. No, Carey assured us, it was our adept than his wide-awake sibling, seems only to be
duty, to sponsor, author and publisher alike, to go interested in food and drink. Blair, on the other hand,
through the six short-listed novels again, and go through pines for female company. Several thousand miles away,
them we should. And so we did. That final meeting, I meanwhile, in ‘Ublilsk Administrative District 41’,
can now reveal, lasted precisely ten minutes, after which Ludmila Derev has nimbly evaded her grandfather’s
I had to sit talking to A C Grayling about the non- game attempt to sodomise her by ramming her glove
existence of God for the best part of two hours. down the old goat’s throat and choking him to death.
As for Vernon God Little, I still maintain that it was a All these preliminary manoeuvrings, it should be said,
definitely promising, slightly over-knowing and take ages. With grandpa’s corpse cordoned off from
unashamedly faux-American cor rupt and inquisitive
first novel (the detail seem- authority, Ludmila’s family,
ing to have been grafted on Musical Director: Christopher Fifield
all of whom speak in what
rather than deriving from sounds like literally translat-
first-hand knowledge of the CONCERT PROGRAMME FEBRUARY – JULY 2006 ed Russian (‘Well, if you
environment), entertaining, Saturday, 11 February 2006 - Glinka: Kamarinskaya; Elgar: Cello
Concerto; Brahms: Symphony No. 2. can advise what time in the
but nowhere near the fighting Saturday, 25 March 2006 - Haydn: Symphony No.90; Stanford: Clarinet earth’s eternal calendar they
weight of such major-league Concerto; Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. will visit their abandoned
contenders as Margaret Saturday, 20th May 2006 - Elgar: Crown of India; Bruch: Scottish premises, I will go and
Fantasia, Liszt: Mazeppa; Rachmaninov: Isle of the Dead.
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Saturday, 1 July 2006 - Bizet: Jeux d’enfants; Reinecke: Harp Concerto; smash down something
No doubt I am wrong about Mahler: Symphony no 4. highly resemblant of their
this. Ludmila’s Broken English, All concerts start at 7.30pm in St. Luke’s Church, Knight’s Hill, West heads and upper bodies’,
though set in London and Norwood, London, SE27. Tickets: Adults (£8), Concessions (£6), etc), are plunged into a
the Caucasus, shares its Children (£1) nightmare world of

49
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION
bureaucratic obfuscation. Ultimately this leads to their
most personable member’s departure to the nearest town
and eventual appearance on a marriage-broker’s website.
The twins, meantime, allowed to caper through a
scabrous London nightclub by their Home Office min-
der, are making their own connections with an impre-
sario promising power, opportunity and foreign travel.
As for the writing, the low-level bickering with which
Blair and Bunny communicate is often intensely funny,
as are their memories of ‘Albion House’, the institution
which nurtured them (‘I mean, for God’s sake, there’s
been a high-functioning, fully ambulant human spider
on Empire wing for at least two decades, and they dress
it in black fur for the Hallowe’en party’). Elsewhere,
DBC specialises in a kind of valiant over-writing, in
which dressing gowns lie ‘piled like a waiting camel on
the floor’, the wind blows Ludmila’s hair ‘to seem like
ravens abducting a cherub’, a flannel hangs on the
side of a bath-tub ‘like a slice of ragged ham’, and
Ludmila’s brother is said to move like ‘an upholstered
whip of muscle’.
The mark of these descriptions, however dazzling
their initial impact, is that they don’t really describe
anything. What Pierre does best, like many a contempo-
rary US stylist, is riffs: sparky clumps of prose, often
bearing very little relation to the rest of the text, which
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
allow him to claw away at some obsession or other.
There is a captivating passage, for example, in which
Blair muses on his dream woman and their life together
(‘It would be a large house, but still her adoration
of him, and the things he did to her, would make
its walls throb and leak saliva’), another in which a
helpful onlooker lectures Blair on the etiquette of the
nightclub pick-up:
Very dodgy move that, pulling a bird in front of ’er
farver. So first rule: never try ’n’ pull from a mixed
table… Second rule: the lounge ain’t about that.
This is where you rest in between that sort of
palaver. It’s where you bring your mum and dad to
tell ’em you been sacked from McDonald’s…
The ending, somewhere beyond the 300th page, blends
high fantasy, blood and guts and a certain amount of
poignancy; and the sense of a high-wire act, in which
the performer occasionally sashays exultantly above the
admiring throng but more often threatens to descend on
their uplifted heads, is sometimes rather overpowering.
When he won the Man Booker thirty months ago, D B C
Pier re remarked to the jostling pressmen that
he intended to ‘be a recluse and write’. A noble and
enviable aim, of course, but I think he should get out a
bit more.
To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 59
 FICTION
P AMELA N ORRIS
A HAMPER OF DELIGHTS
T HE T ENT
★ tive scenarios for Amanda and Chris (‘a nice young couple
By Margaret Atwood
(Bloomsbury 155pp £12.99)
THE TENT IS modest in size, a pocketbook that fits snugly
into jacket or cardigan, or slips almost weightlessly into
the smallest bag. A collection of thirty or so brief essays,
stories and wry reflections on ageing and death, it’s
perfect to read on the train or bus, to fill the pauses and
distract the mind from other travellers with their burgers
and rucksacks and ambiguous expressions. At £12.99
for barely 160 pages, it might also be regarded as a pub-
lisher’s scam, something to keep the punters happy and
bridge the gap before the next major novel.
Taking such a cynical view does Atwood a disservice.
In fact, she doesn’t need this kind of hype. Apart from
being an award-winning novelist and poet with a career
that stretches back decades, in the past four years she has
published Oryx and Crake, a (weighty) novel that takes
consumerism to the bleakest of conclusions, and three
shorter works, each worthy of attention and respect.
Negotiating with the Dead reflects pithily on the writing
life, Curious Pursuits collects thirty-five years of essays
and journalism, and The Penelopiad offers a canny
retelling of the Odyssey through the eyes of the stay-at-
home wife Penelope and her twelve serving girls, the
‘pretty maids all in a row’ hanged by her vengeful hus-
band. Given this lineage, The Tent is a predictably
absorbing read, its mini-tales providing food for thought
for several journeys on the stopping line to Orpington.
It’s as if Atwood simply can’t stop writing, her ideas
overflowing into fragments of story that continue the
arguments of her novels and offer tantalising hints of
work to come. Her first published novel, The Edible
Woman, revealed a feminism that was cool, articulate and
wickedly funny. Decades later, in ‘Clothing Dreams’, she
is still reflecting on the female need for disguises and
subterfuge, for public display and borrowed identities.
‘Winter’s Tales’ looks back to the bad old days when ‘if
you were a married woman, it was all over at thirty’.
The young, she points out, are appalled by such stories:
‘they want suffering, they want scars. Shall you tell them
about pot roast?’ Even so, ‘Bring Back Mom’ is an ironic
hymn (in verse) to the lost domestic goddess, pegging
out the washing ‘on the clothesline you once briefly
considered / hanging yourself with’. Old mythologies
are given a bracing, modern twist. Helen of Troy is cast
as the local tart who runs off with ‘some man from the
city’, while her husband brags about getting up a posse.
51
Salome vamps the Religious Studies teacher, and Eve
succeeds in out-arguing the serpent.
Stories are Atwood’s stock-in-trade, the sugar with
which she coats unpalatable truths about war, suffering,
the state of the planet and the irrefutability of death. In
‘Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon’, she considers alterna-
who’ve had great sex in Chapter One’), including the
tragic demise of the worm, a giant sponge on the run and
(less survivable) a brutal political purge. Plots themselves
come under scrutiny. In ‘Take Charge’, Atwood has fun
with Hollywood’s penchant for heroism and the stiff upper
lip; in ‘Horatio’s Version’, the survivor of the Elsinore
massacre struggles to obey Hamlet’s dying command.
‘Orphan Stories’ explores the possibilities and pitfalls of
this fertile theme, while ‘Plots for Exotics’ spoofs the
limited roles available to another kind of outsider, offered
the choice of ‘a jovial, well-meaning exotic’, ‘a stupid,
drunken, wife-beating abuser of an exotic’, or (for a
woman) ‘a smouldering, beautiful, amoral degenerate’.
Perhaps most revealingly in this collection, Atwood is
frank about the process and demands of writing itself.
The title essay explains its attractions for the compulsive
scribbler. In a dangerous world, words are a prophylactic
against the howling in the wilderness outside the writer’s
tent, even though the walls are made of paper and can’t
protect loved ones, or hide the writer from a public avid
for spicy revelation. And yet, she says, the writer must
continue ‘this graphomania in a flimsy cave … because
what else can you do?’ In ‘Voice’, she counts the cost of
talent. Endowed with ‘a voice’, the speaker nurtures and
trains her gift until it takes over her identity, ‘ballooning
out in front of me like the translucent greenish mem-
brane of a frog in full trill’. Sooner or later, she knows,
her voice will shrivel and vanish, and she too will
become negligible, ‘a dead shrub, a footnote’. Possibly in
preparation for this annihilation, Atwood reflects on the
popular appetite for ‘Life Stories’ and revels in taking
her own history apart. Snip, snip, ‘away go mother and
father’; goodbye to childhood and adolescence with ‘its
fecklessness and bad romance’; farewell, too, to friends
and lovers. Soon all that is left is a paragraph, ‘a sentence
or two, only a whisper. I was born. I was. I.’
Atwood has long acted as a voice of conscience, an
eloquent interpreter of the human proclivity for prejudice,
misogyny, greed and selfishness. The Tent demonstrates
the clarity, insight, humour and inventiveness that make
her so persuasive and entertaining a writer. Despite its
readiness to engage with the bleaker side of life, the
collection ends on a note of hope. ‘Tree Baby’ and ‘But
It Could Still’ affirm the possibility of happy endings:
the new baby (perhaps) rescued from the wreckage,
the green shoots (maybe) lurking beneath the frozen
winter earth.
To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 59
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
BRIGHTNESS REVISITED
T HE G OOD L IFE
★ meanwhile, learns in the most mortifying way possible of a
By Jay McInerney
(Bloomsbury 354pp £17.99)
SET IN 1987 and published in 1992, Brightness Falls was
Jay McInerney’s attempt to emulate Tom Wolfe’s The
Bonfire of the Vanities by pinning down 1980s Manhattan.
It depicts editor Russell Calloway leading a coup at his
publishing house with the backing of the financial
mogul Bernie Melman; on the verge of success, he’s
foiled by that year’s Wall Street crash, which causes
Melman, a twentieth-century replica of Trollope’s
Melmotte, to pull out.
In The Good Life, which opens in the fall of 2001, the
Calloways reappear but the focus switches to Russell’s
wife Corrinne, a childless stockbroker in 1987 who is
now a dissatisfied, sex-starved, perpetually guilty mother
of two working part-time. The sequel differs too in
putting its shattering, vanity-exposing historical event at
the start rather than the end. After two chapters of deft,
droll, Wolfe-like ensemble scenes – a dinner party hosted
by the Calloways, a charity bash for fatcats at the Central
Park Zoo – the third opens with Corrinne encountering
an ash-covered man on the street who is returning
uptown after spending twenty-four hours working with
rescue teams. It is 12 September.
So The Good Life is a 9/11 novel, though only in a
very limited sense. Ground Zero is described, but not
the destruction of the twin towers nor the chaos within
them after the strikes. The central figures know people
who died, but – unlike the hero of Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – have not lost a
family member. The names of Messrs Bush, Giuliani
and Bin Laden are absent, and, although the protagonists
are by no means airheads, no one (no one!) discusses the
politics of the attacks or how America should react.
The massacre’s main function in the novel is to pro-
vide a mechanism for advancing the relationship
between Corrinne and the man from Ground Zero:
Luke, a disillusioned former banker first seen at the
Central Park party, who is wealthy enough to be on
indefinite vacation and has vague plans to write a book.
Working together at a temporary canteen serving cops,
National Guardsmen and others involved in clear-up
operations, they first become mutual confidants, then
lovers. McInerney, you gradually realise, has rather
breathtakingly made 9/11’s aftermath the pretext and
backdrop for yet another Updikean tale of adultery.
His adulterers have ample grounds for restlessness. Luke
52
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
is shunned by his socialite wife Sasha and teenage daughter
Ashley, both of whom are puzzled and troubled by his self-
styled ‘sabbatical’ and growing contempt for the values of
their super-rich circle; and he suspects Sasha is sleeping
with Melman (the most significant character carried over
from the earlier novel, the Calloways apart). Corrinne,
two-year affair Russell has kept secret from her.
As is perhaps signalled by her writing a film adaptation
of another Graham Greene novel, the obvious model for
the pair’s romance is The End of the Affair, in which the all-
shook-up atmosphere of the Blitz leads Greene’s heroine
to question her marriage, just as 9/11 will cause Corrinne
to do. McInerney’s main mentor, however, is Scott
Fitzgerald, chronicler of another accumulator of wealth
transformed into ardent lover. This influence proves disas-
trous. The lush, melancholy cadences of The Great Gatsby
– a novel that is, crucially, a written retrospective narrative
composed by Nick Carraway, hence legitimately eloquent
– appear incongruously in characters’ purported thoughts,
in stagey two-hander exchanges, and even in a sex scene,
as well as slightly more acceptably in narration where
the voice is unequivocally the author’s.
McInerney is plainly aware of the problem, as he gives
all three principals literary jobs or hankerings in the
hope of naturalising their wordiness, and has Luke ask
Corrinne ‘do you always talk like this?’ after a particu-
larly abstruse formulation (yes, ‘like a professor of logic’,
she concedes). Such ploys, however, merely draw atten-
tion to the implausibility of the way they sometimes
speak and think rather than making it believable.
There are plenty of good things in The Good Life. Group
scenes, where the dialogue is quickfire, are invariably
adroitly handled. Its satire on the mores of the mega-rich,
most of it centring on Sasha, is often very funny. Ashley is
portrayed with a flair that reminds you how remarkably
the author got inside an adolescent girl’s head before in
Story of My Life (although this is two-edged: the spot-on
rendition of the teenager’s idiom shows up the phoniness
in the adult exchanges). The set-piece finale at Lincoln
Center, where the lovers have to decide whether to break
up their respective families, is affecting and accomplished.
All of this is marginal, however, and the core of the
novel is deeply flawed. Averse to journalistic research à la
Wolfe, McInerney fails to rise to the challenge of
portraying a metropolis in crisis: this is not a story of
New York, as The Bonfire of the Vanities was, but of a
small set of white residents of Manhattan’s East Side,
with walk-on roles for a few outsiders.
He seems unaware how horribly the astounding vulgarity
of The Good Life’s basic premise – 9/11 as an opportunity
for a Hollywood-style ‘cute meet’ and a romantic weepie
– clashes with the graciousness his writing aspires to. And
the novel engages in a doomed endeavour to depict
Manhattanites in the era of the Web, rap and 24-hour
 FICTION
news in language appropriate to Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, all
too often turning Corrinne Calloway into Nick Carraway
in drag. The lesson its lovers learn, just as Gatsby did, is
J AMES F LEMING
MISSING THE MARK
R IFLING PARADISE
★ between a gun and a rifle. The former has a smooth bore
By Jem Poster
(Sceptre 324pp £12.99)
TOPSELL’S HISTORIE OF Foure-footed Beasts was among the
most popular books of the seventeenth century and much
used by Shakespeare. A Natural History of Selborne has been
in print since 1788. On the Origin of Species was sold out
on publication day. Tarka the Otter, Watership Down, endless
television programmes – the evidence is solid: nature sells.
So when we learn that Redbourne, the narrator of this
book, is to make a naturalising expedition to Australia (date
not found: circa 1890), our hopes are high. And can we be
blamed if the magical memory of Voss drifts towards us?
The story opens firmly: Redbourne, a middle-aged
homosexual with a weak jaw line, is knocked about one
night by a local gang for having tampered with Daniel, a
lad who’s just committed suicide. He decides to absent
himself. He’s from a good family but short of money. An
uncle gives him the fare to Australia. To repay him,
Redbourne, whose ‘true vocation’ is as a naturalist, will
‘bag a few choice specimens’ for his collection.
In Australia we meet Redbourne’s contact, Vane, an
unpleasant, angry, shouting man who’s abusing his
daughter Eleanor, now aged twenty. For the naturalising
trip into the interior, Bullen is produced, an unpleasant,
angry, shouting man who abuses aborigines. The guide
is a ‘half-and-half ’ called Billy, who gets it in the neck
from Bullen every five yards. The expedition gets no
further than a day’s walk from a railway station – a stroll.
There Billy slips over the edge of a cliff with a whiffle of
reddish-grey dust, and various things happen of which
the most unexpected concerns Eleanor, for whom the
last word is reserved after all this manly disagreeableness.
It doesn’t work. There’s too much hurry, too little
substance and authenticity. Either a longer book or a
harder style might have done the trick were it not for a
greater problem: that Redbourne is a drip.
An ‘I’ person must have the vigour to carry the narrative
without faltering, and all the props and incidents and other
actors that go with it. Redbourne lacks this quality. Nor is
he a naturalist. He has none of the what-the-hell-was-that
attitude that made Douglas Carruthers, an ornithologist,
turn a bar in Beirut upside down to get at a beetle scuttling
between the raki bottles. (It was a first and carries his name.)
53
that you can’t turn the clock back. McInerney refuses to
recognise that that’s also true stylistically.
To order this book at £14.39, see order form on page 59
We get no feeling of curiosity when Redbourne hears ‘the
mellow warbling of an unseen bird’. On walking through
strange flowers, he wails that he has no name for them
instead of trying to puzzle out their taxonomy. And he’s
squeamish, which is as useful in a naturalist as in a surgeon.
Most egregious of all is his ignorance of the difference
and fires a cartridge loaded with pellets sized according
to the quarry expected. The latter, which is commonly
used to kill mammals, has a barrel with a spiral groove to
impart spin and thus range to a solid projectile. A bullet
would have trashed the parrot that he shoots on page 58.
By page 90 the weapon’s turned into a gun, but after a
few lines it’s a rifle again, double-barrelled into the bar-
gain, and it is with this that Redbourne brings down a
‘low and fast’ duck. This, frankly, is a miracle shot that
only children and half-wits would even attempt.
There are some errors of the would/should, will/shall
variety. ‘Whose unassuageable grief had shown the ineffi-
cacy of my own confused love’ does not make a pretty
sound. Redbourne’s sexuality doesn’t become any more
convincing because he has a ‘hot, tender shock’ on seeing
the small bones of Eleanor’s neck. I’m afraid that this book
by Jem Poster, who holds a Chair of Creative Writing,
will be of little interest to the Shakespeares of the future.
To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 59
DAVID PIPER & VIKTOR WYND
ANNOUNCE THE HONORARY FELLOWS OF
the last Tuesday society
TUESDAY 7TH FEBRUARY
LORD GAWAIN DOUGLAS
BOSIE’S GREAT NEPHEW ON THE WILDE AFFAIR AND THE
HISTORY OF THE ‘BLACK’ DOUGLAs
Tuesday 7th march
philip hoare
“the pemberton billing trial & the cult of the
clitoris”
Tuesday 4th april
Michael swann on aleister crowley
Thursday 13th april
samuel beckett
Lisa dwan’s critically acclaimed performance of
“not I”
“an unforgetable sight”
the daily telegraph
DINNER WITH AN ADDRESS BY THE FELLOW AT
THE
CAFÉ ROYAL
TICKETS forty five pounds FROM
THE LAST TUESDAY SOCIETY.ORG
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION
P AUL B INDING
ALBANIAN TURMOIL
T HE S UCCESSOR
★ resemblances between the book’s eponymous Successor
By Ismail Kadare
(Translated by David Bellos)
(Canongate 207pp £9.99)
FOR WELL OVER thirty years, Mehmet Shehu was right-
hand man to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha,
twenty-seven of which (1954–81) were spent as his
Prime Minister. Respected and feared, he was Hoxha’s
obvious and presumed successor. Then Hoxha changed
his mind, preferring a younger man, Ramiz Alia. At first
Hoxha wanted Shehu to renounce the successorship
himself, and when he didn’t, organised his denunciation
by the Politburo. His offence – the marriage of his son
to the daughter of a family with ‘six or seven war crimi-
nals’ in it. A nervous crisis following this led Shehu to
shoot himself, or so the Albanian news announced on
18 December 1981. But soon, and predictably, his death
was seen as murder. Both possibilities were convenient
tools for the ailing Hoxha’s hold on the country; he vili-
fied his former friend, in speech and print, as a foreign
agent – for the Yugoslavs, the CIA, the KGB – and had
him expunged from official Albanian history. Only after
Hoxha’s death (in 1985) and the country’s long and
difficult journey into democracy has Shehu returned to
public consciousness, not least through the efforts of his
son Bashkim, an expatriate writer, with whom Ismail
Kadare has had many conversations.
Kadare was himself living and writing in Albania during
the events covered by his mesmerising novel, at the begin-
ning of which he inverts the normal authorial disclaimer,
saying: ‘any resemblance between the characters and
circumstances of this tale and real people and events is
inevitable.’ Though he changes the actual dates of the death
and its revelation, he does so in a manner calling attention
rather than otherwise to the still topical reality. ‘The
Designated Successor was found in his bedroom on 14
December. Albanian television made a brief announcement
of the facts at noon. “During the night of 13 December,
the Successor succumbed to a nervous depression and took
his own life with a firearm.”’ This would tell any Albanian
reader what the novel is dealing with; therefore it’s a great
pity that this translation lacks an explanatory preface – or
detailed notes. Of course The Successor must stand up as a
work of fiction, and it triumphantly does, but such aids for
non-Albanian readers would only enhance its force and
authority. For its difficulties are compounded by the fact
that Hoxha is never named, but simply referred to as the
Guide. Not that there could be any doubting the Guide’s
54
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
identity. His mood-swings, his bouts of murderous
paranoia, his unflinching cunning, his wife with her ‘nar-
rowed sarcastic eyes’ and his own near-blindness (the result
of diabetes) haunt the book, just as they haunted the nation
he victimised for forty years. And while Kadare takes cer-
tain liberties with Mehmet Shehu and his family, the
and the original are sufficiently conspicuous to be
irrefutable – from the man’s alleged brutalities towards tribal
chiefs up in the northern highlands to the family engage-
ment party as his nemesis (though Kadare makes the
offending betrothed a daughter, not a son).
Kadare’s narrative gifts have always owed something to
the folk and epic traditions of the Balkans – there is a
hypnotic ballad-like quality to earlier masterpieces like
Broken April (1982) and Doruntine (1986) which heightens
the tragedy of both people and occurrences – and their
legacy contributes to the extraordinary tension of The
Successor. But he is also learned in modernist literature
(particularly French), and his sophisticated artistry has
nowhere been more impressive than here – with its deft
but resonant use of recurrent images; its command of
multiple viewpoints, which never impair the unity of
tone; its controlled flights into the world of imagination
and dreams, which don’t diminish its scrupulous account
of external life. In seven chapters Kadare moves forward
from the proclamation of the Successor’s death to show
how it has affected those intimately concerned with it.
There’s the Successor’s daughter, Suzana, whose sexual
and emotional life has been destroyed by the break with
her fiancé, Genc, which her father agreed to; her plight is
rendered with real warmth of understanding. There’s her
brother, an intellectual but one mindful of Albanian lore –
of its covert role even in a severely Communist state and
of the existential truths it contains. There’s the doctor
charged with the autopsy, and there’s the troubled archi-
tect responsible for the new extension to the Successor’s
palatial residence. We are given access to the Guide him-
self and his controlling wife, and to the man most likely
to replace the late Successor, but who instead is cynically
used as a fall guy. Finally, in a last chapter of breathtaking
originality, we encounter the ghost of the dead man as he
travels for ever in the void. He it is who gives us the
needed truth about his death – and who, equally impor-
tantly, opens windows onto the metaphysical implications
of the whole sorry business in isolationist Tirana.
The dead Successor sees himself and the now dead
Guide as distinguished from ordinary humans by
unquenchable power-lust. ‘Don’t try to work out where
we went wrong. We are but the offspring of a great disorder
in the universe.’ His words are frighteningly convincing.
Both in his deployment of material and in his vision of
life, Kadare is the equal of the often invoked Kafka. The
ambiguity of his years in Hoxha’s Albania paid off after all.
To order this book at £7.99, see order form on page 59
 FICTION
L INDY B URLEIGH
FLIGHT OF THE FINNS
H OUSE OF O RPHANS
★ cally driven Russian friend, Sasha, into committing acts of
By Helen Dunmore
(Fig Tree 336pp £17.99)
HELEN DUNMORE KNOWS what goes into the telling of a
good story: solid characterisation, a suspenseful plot, and
fluent narration. House of Orphans, like her earlier book
The Siege, is an historical novel but doesn’t read too much
like one since you are not overwhelmed by attention to
period detail or irritated by glaring anachronisms. In this
respect, it is in the tradition of A Tale of Two Cities, and the
author sets the story in early twentieth-century Finland,
during a time of political turmoil, in order to explore the
conditions under which people can be seduced by
extreme politics and terrorism – a subject with obvious
resonance today. The novel opens in 1901, when the
Finnish were mounting a fierce resistance to the growing
‘Russification’ of their country, at the same time as they
were being influenced by the revolutionary socialism of
their Russian neighbour. A brief historical context is help-
fully appended, as most readers won’t be aware of the
events that led up to the assassination in 1904 of Bobrikov,
the pro-Tsarist Governor-General of Finland. It’s no sur-
prise to learn that Dunmore has lived in Finland, and her
familiarity with the landscape and people augments her
research, giving the novel an admirably authentic texture.
The book’s title refers to an orphanage which houses
young girls rescued from the ‘immorality’ of the streets
and prepares them, under the iron rule of the matron
Anna Liisa, for a life in domestic service. When the
recently widowed, country doctor who ministers to the
orphans takes one of them on as a housekeeper, the suspi-
cions of his friends and his only daughter are aroused. Dr
Eklund is a kind of Chekhovian figure, who outwardly
leads a life of quiet virtue but inwardly seethes with
repressed passions and battles with despair, feelings engen-
dered by the loveless marriage which he endured for many
years. Sixteen-year-old Eeva, who is put to work in his
remote and empty house, is unusually self-possessed, beau-
tiful, and cultivated. As the daughter of a prominent
Helsinki revolutionary, she has been immersed in the
capital’s intellectual left-wing circles from an early age and
naturally resents her position as a domestic servant. The
lonely doctor is tormented and almost destroyed by his lust
for Eeva, who in turn longs for her childhood friend
Lauri, and for the vibrant, precarious life of the city.
Eeva escapes from her ‘gilded cage’ as soon as she can
and returns to Helsinki, where the air is electric with
change and the young are engaged in political agitation.
55
She briefly enjoys the sort of independent and fulfilled life
that she has always dreamed of, and her friendship with
Lauri blossoms into love. Their happiness, dependent on
Finland’s future, is threatened, however, by Lauri’s involve-
ment in a political assassination. The idealistic Lauri is
seemingly being manipulated by his caustic and ideologi-
terrorism, although the reality is in fact far more sinister.
Dunmore is particularly adept at evoking the low-level
miseries and daily indignities that poverty and oppression
inflict, and so, of course, our imaginative sympathies are
with those – like Eeva and Lauri – whose lives are blighted
by hunger and cold and an unjust society. Despite being
the children of revolutionaries, Eeva and Lauri are
nonetheless possessed of humane instincts and liberal con-
sciences, and they baulk at the methods employed by the
ruthless ideologues to achieve their political ends.
With the help of the good Dr Eklund, the young cou-
ple flee the tyrannies of the old regime and the excesses
of the revolutionaries, and set sail for the New World
and freedom, emigrating as so many Finns did. It’s a
timely reminder that America has historically been a
refuge for the poor and persecuted, offering them a bet-
ter life. The dirty business of politics aside, Helen
Dunmore has written another well-crafted novel about
individuals caught up in the great sweep of history.
To order this book at £14.39, see order form on page 59
The British Academy
British Academy lectures are freely open to the general
public and everyone is welcome.The lectures take place
at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 and begin at
5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm
Spring Lectures 2006
5.30pm, Tuesday 14 March 2006
Joint British Academy/British Psychological
Society Lecture
Living apart, living together? The role of intergroup
contact in social integration
Professor MIles Hewstone,
FBA New College, Oxford
5.30pm, Thursday 30 March 2006
Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture
Bonjour Paresse: Waste and Recycling in
Gower’s Confessio Amantis
Professor James Simpson Harvard University
Further information and abstracts are available at
www.britac.ac.uk/events
Meetings Department, The British Academy
Telephone: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228
Email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION

N IGEL J ONES in the winter of 1940 the Nazis have conquered neigh-
bouring France; the Blitz is at full blast; the two dictators

PAST MASTERS have just met at Hendaye; and Britain’s cause seems lost.
Sansom makes much of this ‘real’ political background
behind the fictional plot of his story, which is the attempt
W INTER IN M ADRID to spring Bernie, a British Communist and unlikely friend
By C J Sansom of Harry’s, from a Francoist labour camp. We learn much
(Macmillan 537pp £16.99) about a little-known but crucial historical episode: the
rivalry between the pro-British Spanish monarchists who
A PAIR OF S ILVER W INGS are having their palms greased with London’s gold and the
By James Holland pro-Nazi Falangists who are keen to join Hitler’s war. If
(Heinemann 404pp £16.99) Sansom falls too readily for the old romantic myths about
Republican Spain, he nonetheless makes a credible enough
C OMPANY OF S PEARS tale from weaving together hard facts with romantic fiction
By Allan Mallinson – and his bleak winter thriller chills to the bone.
(Bantam 372pp £17.99) James Holland is a writer of historical fiction who has
bedded down in the Second World War, which he has
IT IS A bold author who, having found acclaim with two already made his own in factual works of military history.
historical novels firmly grounded in a particular period, His debut novel, The Burning Blue, was a chocks-away-
sets his third novel in an entirely different place some chaps yarn about the Battle of Britain, with convincingly
500 years later – but that is what C J Sansom has done, realised dogfight sequences and a traditional hero. A Pair
and he has pulled it off magnificently. of Silver Wings offers more in the same enjoyable vein,
Sansom, a Sussex solicitor, won critical applause with frankly cannibalising the research Holland did for his
his first two titles, Dissolution and Dark Fire, historical books about Malta and Italy to fuel his flying fiction.
whodunits set during the dangerous reign of Henry VIII. The novel also draws heavily on Holland’s friendship with
Winter in Madrid, while not exactly a whodunit, shares former pilot Geoffrey Wellum, whose best-selling Second
with them the author’s enviable ability to land his readers World War memoir, First Light, he helped get published. The
in an alien world, yet make them feel entirely at home. fiction is none the worse – indeed probably strengthened –
At first glance, the bleak stage of Spain – its people for being so firmly grounded in fact, and as Edward Enderby
shivering, starving and suppressed – a couple of years (a Wellum-like veteran) recalls the traumas of his wartime
after the end of the Civil War seems an unpromising set- youth from the tranquillity of 1995, the reader is caught up in
ting. But in Sansom’s capable hands, story, characters and a tale at once exciting and poignant, and ultimately hopeful.
that indefinable spirit of place meld and twist into a nar- In contrast to Sansom and Holland, Allan Mallinson is a
rative that grips the reader throughout its 500-plus pages. veteran – both of the military life and of successful histori-
Harry Brett, the novel’s thoroughly decent hero (an old- cal fiction. To his growing army of devotees, Mallinson’s
fashioned word, but the only appropriate one for the work will need no introduction. Here he is again, pre-
protagonist of a book redolent with traditional values), is senting in Major Matthew Hervey a hero less caddish than
shell-shocked out of the army at Dunkirk and finds himself George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and less
posted to wartime Madrid on an espionage mission plebeian than Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe. It is remarkable,
because of a brief pre-war visit to the Spanish capital. and even heartening, in our politically over-sensitive age,
Harry finds himself among real historical figures whom that novels in an unashamedly action-packed, flag-wagging
Sansom conscripts to give his tradition like Mallinson’s can
fiction extra fibre, including still command a mass audi-
Sir Sam Hoare, ex-MI6 spy ence. If his tale of firm-jawed
and former Foreign Secretary Br its facing the fearsome
with tendencies to appease- Zulu impis under their ruth-
ment, now downgraded to less king, Shaka (‘the black
British ambassador to Franco’s Napoleon’), lacks subtlety,
Spain with a brief from and is refreshingly free from
Churchill to keep – at all costs post-imperial guilt, it still –
– the Fascist Generalissimo like the other books under
neutral, and bribe, persuade review – delivers a damn fine,
or otherwise prevent Spain rip-roaring read.
from joining the war on To order these books, see form
Hitler’s side. It’s a tough job: on page 59

56
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 FICTION
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
FAR FROM HOME
T HE M ATCH
★ game but none of his friends in the Philippines was interested.
By Romesh Gunesekera
(Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99)
THE MATCH is about a man trying to make sense of his multi-
cultural identity. Born in Colombo and brought up in Manila,
Sunny Fernando emigrates to England, where he gives up his
engineering degree to become a photographer. But he finds it
hard to focus on his place in the world. To paraphrase
T S Eliot, he is dislocated from dislocation by dislocation:
In his life he had never felt he knew anything for
sure ... the doubt never stopped growing inside,
slowly, inexorably distorting everything.
If the themes of exile and emigration seem wearisomely
familiar, their execution is less prosaic. Romesh
Gunesekera has a lightness of touch and a wry tone which
mark him out from many more fashionable novelists.
Sunny’s name belies his rather dispiriting parentage. His
father is an alcoholic ex-hack and his pianist mother died
when he was eight. The first part of the book is set during
his childhood in the Philippines. We meet his playmates
Robby and Herbie, and his father’s best friend Hector, and
learn about his crush on Tina. Gunesekera captures well
the tongue-tied adoration of a young boy for an older girl
and the comic disjunction between the adult and adoles-
cent worlds. But the mood soon darkens when Sunny
discovers the truth about his mother’s death.
The novel is divided into five parts, each of which offers a
snapshot of Sunny from one of five key years in his life –
1970, 1973, 1986, 1994 and 2002. Each chapter ends in a
rather staccato fashion, leaving us to fill in the gaps. We fast-
forward to London, where we find Sunny has turned his
back on his father and is living the life of a lonely immi-
grant. He resides in a bedsit off the Warwick Road that has
a lingering smell of stir-fry beef, and listens to the wireless:
‘It allowed him to be a new kind of Londoner: in touch
without anyone to touch.’ Ranil, a fellow Sri Lankan
student, introduces him to Guinness (‘like the nicotine he
used to clean out of his father’s tar guard’), an English family
Christmas, and Clara from Birkenhead, Sunny’s future girl-
friend and eventually the mother of his future son Mikey.
As the novel unfolds, Sunny moves to a three-bedroom
house in Hornsey with ‘a view of Alexandra Palace and the
sky above’. It is a far cry from the ‘luscious, swirling, sexy sky’
of his childhood. Throughout his life – and this novel – he
tries to reconnect with the land of his birth. But Sri Lanka
only impinges on his consciousness when there’s a riot, a
bomb or a massacre reported on the news. Other people’s
lives continue to confound him. Robby, his childhood friend
57
from the Philippines, runs a mail-order lingerie business in
East Hackney. Hector becomes a kooky spiritualist who fasts
on Tuesday and Thursday, but still keeps a big American car
parked outside his Sri Lankan house. The ‘match’ of the
book’s title refers to a memorable cricket fixture in his child-
hood, which opens the novel. As a young boy he loved the
Until Tina showed up and displayed her prowess on the field
by hitting ‘a gorgeous six’. The novel comes full circle in
rather too neat a way when Sunny goes to watch the visiting
Sri Lankans at the Oval in 2002 and bumps into Tina.
The problem with Sunny’s being so detached is that the reader
too feels a bit aloof from the characters. Clara is a rather ethereal
creature and at times it is hard to fathom their mutual attraction.
Much more convincing and moving is the portrayal of
Sunny’s relationship with his son Mikey. ‘He could see his son’s
teeth through the glass, magnified, and a kind of hunger for the
unknown that Sunny no longer had. Sunny wanted nothing to
do with the unknown. He wanted only the known.’
Sunny belongs to Gunesekera’s tradition of disaffected
heroes. Even if you don’t share his passion for cricket you
will still feel moved by his plight. By the end of the book
Sunny achieves some sort of resolution – he realises that
home is where the heart is. A bit late in the day, perhaps.
To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 59
AUDIOBOOK
A RTHUR & G EORGE
★
By Julian Barnes (Read by Nigel Anthony)
(BBC Audiobooks 4 CDs £17.99)
FOR THREE-QUARTERS OF this fascinating historical novel
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalgi lead entirely
separate lives. George’s father, the vicar, is a Christian con-
vert born a Parsee in Bombay. There was some feeling in
the village when a ‘black man’ was appointed to the pulpit.
Arthur, sent to a Jesuit school, is promised a bursary to study
medicine at Edinburgh University. Then the bursary is with-
drawn, his first experience of injustice. At twenty-six he
marries the charming Tuey, and begins to write. Sherlock
Holmes makes his fortune, and Arthur becomes a celebrated
public figure. Tuey reads everything he writes: ‘a perfect
wife – and yet?’ George is now a self-confident solicitor. A
series of sickening mutilations of village ponies begins, and
threatening letters are sent to the vicar and George. When
George is arrested for disembowelling farm animals, the
suspense is terrific as the police give false testimony. Arthur
meets Jean, a young mezzo-soprano, and they fall passion-
ately in love. When George, serving a seven-year prison
sentence, writes to Arthur enclosing a sheaf of cuttings, the
famous writer takes up his case. Each character is skilfully
developed, and Nigel Anthony’s reading does full justice to
the complex drama as it unfolds. Susan Crosland
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 SILENCED VOICES
L AST MONTH I wrote about the L UCY P OPESCU
Chinese cyber-dissident Shi Tao.
Another country that has developed M OHAMMED A BBOU
repressive measures against writers
and dissidents who express their
views online is Tunisia. In 2005, around twenty sites,
not considered illegal or harmful under international
law, were reportedly blocked for their political and
information content. We can choose how to access our
email from any number of options, but in Tunisia email
services like Hotmail, which allow one to have an
anonymous email address, have been rendered inaccessi-
ble. Consequently, Internet users are forced to sign up to
accounts that the authorities can more easily monitor.
In LR October 2002 Siobhan Dowd wrote about the
late Zouhair Yahyaoui, whose Internet site and e-maga-
zine, both critical of the authorities, earned him a prison
sentence. Another human rights activist to fall foul of
the Tunisian regime, by voicing his opinion in articles
on the Internet, is Mohammed Abbou. A human rights
lawyer, Abbou was arrested on 1 March 2005 for an
article, published on the Internet nine months earlier,
that denounced torture in Tunisia.
Human rights organisations around the world were
shocked at the timing, given that Tunisia was due to host
Phase II of the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) from 15 to 17 November, and Abbou’s
arrest completely contravened the summit’s principles.
The WSIS Declaration of Principles specifically refers to
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human
Rights, guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression.
The summit was set up as a forum to debate the digital
revolution and ways to overcome the ‘digital divide’ – the
difference between the info-rich and the info-poor.
Amnesty had hoped that as host country of the summit
(selected as such by the International Telecommunications
Union, an agency of the United Nations) Tunisia would
address its ‘appalling record’ by relaxing its controls on
free speech and peaceful association.
At the end of April (2005), Abbou was sentenced to two
years in prison, on charges that stemmed from an incident
at a conference in 2002, in which the lawyer allegedly
physically attacked a female lawyer, who apparently was
close to the government. Reportedly no evidence was
presented, apart from an unsigned medical certificate, and
the court refused to hear witnesses to the incident, who
were willing to testify that no assault took place.
In addition, Abbou was sentenced by a criminal court
to eighteen months for ‘having published information
that would disturb public order’ and for ‘insulting the
judiciary’. This was for an article published on the
Tunisnews website in August 2004 (www.tunisnews.net), in
which the lawyer denounced torture in Tunisian prisons
and compared it to the abuses carried out by US soldiers
in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The website was blocked but
58
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
Tunisians managed to read the arti-
cle as an email sent by friends and
relatives living abroad. However, it is
widely believed that Abbou’s impris-
onment is in retaliation for a
February 2005 article posted on the Tunisnews website, in
which Abbou ironically compared the Tunisian president
Ben Ali to the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
The sentences were upheld on 10 June, although the
trial had been described as grossly unfair by local and
international human rights groups and by Western
diplomats resident in Tunis. To make matters worse, the
lawyer was imprisoned in the city of Le Kef, near the
Tunisian–Algerian border, two hundred kilometres away
from his home in Tunis where his wife and children live.
Reporters Without Borders issued a damning state-
ment last September: ‘In taking Mohamed Abbou
hostage, the government is seeking to silence human
rights activists, by punishing one of its emblematic fig-
ures to make an example of a man who has always acted
free of charge in cases involving offences of opinion or
human rights.’ They also point out that Abbou was one
of the few lawyers prepared to act in corruption cases
involving those close to the family of President Ben Ali.
A coalition of fourteen organisations, all members of the
International Freedom of Expression Exchange, was set up
in 2004 to monitor freedom of expression in Tunisia in
the run-up to and following the WSIS. Known as the
Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG), the members organ-
ised a series of fact-finding missions to Tunisia. They saw
the imprisonment of Abbou as ‘directly linked to Tunisian
government efforts to suppress dissent in the run up to the
WSIS’. In their most recent report they conclude that
Abbou’s treatment is ‘a chilling blow to freedom of expres-
sion and the independence of the judiciary’.
Abbou and his wife Samia embarked on a hunger
strike at the end of July 2005 to draw international atten-
tion to his incarceration and to protest at the ‘repression
inflicted on those who voice their dissent in Tunisia’.
Human rights organisations remain concerned that
Abbou’s lawyers have been denied permission on several
occasions to visit him in prison. He is reportedly held in
degrading conditions that breach international codes on
the treatment of prisoners.
Readers may like to send appeals calling for the release
of Mohammed Abbou to:
Président Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Président de la République
Palais Présidentiel
Tunis
Tunisie
Fax: 00 216 71 744 721
Update: on 22 January 2006, following an international
outcry, the court presiding over the case of the Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk decided not to proceed with the case.
 Literary Review Bookshop
Order any title reviewed in this issue at a 20% discount!
Title Offer Price Qty Total

UK P&P is £2.45 per order, regardless of how many titles + UK Post & Pack £2.45
you order.
TOTAL:

Order by phone:
Call our Order Hotline
0870 429 6608
All major credit and debit cards accepted

By email: send your order to: literaryreview@bertrams.com

By fax: send your order to: 0870 429 6709
By post: please complete this form and send to:
Literary Review Bookshop, PO Box 582, Norwich, NR7 0GB
Please send my order to: Own details (if different)
Name: Name:
Address: Address:

Postcode: Tel: Postcode: Tel:

Payment: Please find enclosed a cheque payable to ‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ for £ OR

please debit my Visa/Mastercard/Switch/Maestro with £
Card Number: Security Digits Start Date:
Expiry Date: Switch Issue No:

Offer closes June 30th 2006. Please allow 14 days for delivery on all published items.

20% discount on all titles reviewed

£2.45 postage and packing
no matter how many books you order

PATRICK ’ S A LPHABET
★ ★
By Michael Symmons Roberts
(Jonathan Cape 240pp £10.99)
PHILIP OAKES, who wrote this col-
umn for nearly twenty years, is a
hard act to follow. Not only did he
come out top in a review of review-
ers in CADS (a specialist crime and
detection magazine), which called
him ‘unfailingly open-minded, witty,
perceptive’ and ‘a national institu-
tion’, but he was also a published
poet. For some unexplained reason,
there is a strong connection between
crime and poetry; writers of both
include C Day Lewis (aka Nicholas
Blake), George Macbeth and David
Harsent, and now the Whitbread
poetr y pr izewinner Michael
Symmons Roberts, whose first novel
is a sinister tale of crime in contem-
porary Britain.
Patrick’s Alphabet opens with an
ambulance-chasing photographer
called Perry Scholes taking pictures of
a teenage couple in the car where
they were murdered, with the letter A
painted nearby. Perry is obsessed with
cars and death, his mission in life to
record the two together. He listens in
to police radios, and races to car
crashes and crime scenes to snatch
close-up images, his lense acting as his
shield: ‘If you put the camera down
you are face to face with reality.’
The story of suspects, manhunt,
further victims and a terrorised com-
munity has a constant undertone of
anxiety and pessimism. The setting is
the dreary wasteland on an urban
outskirt, where buildings survive the
rise and fall of many a human project
but will eventually cave in ‘because
the wilderness cannot be tamed for
long’. Perry wants to show people
that these edge lands are beautiful, so
that they ‘stop driving through with
their minds closed’, just as, two cen-
turies ago mountains seemed ugly
and evil until the romantic poets
changed conventional sensibilities. I
can’t see this contemporary poet’s
highly unromantic first novel having
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
a similar effect, but it is crafty, sad
and haunting.
T HE M URDER B IRD
★ nist era, Maisie Dobbs is a delightful
By Joanna Hines
(Simon & Schuster 374pp £10.99)
THE famous American poet Kirsten
Waller has retreated to write in a cot-
tage on a Cornish cliff top. When she
is found dead, electrocuted in the
bath, the verdict is suicide. The
immediate echoes of Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton, evoked by the combi-
nation of American women, poetry
and suicide, are misleading. The
char ismatic Kirsten was not a
depresssive and her daughter Sam can
swear that she would never have
taken her own life. She is convinced
that her mother was murdered, her
diary stolen and the title poem for
her new collection suppressed. Sam
realises that the only possible suspects
are her own closest relations. Her
father, a Cornish farmer, her stepfa-
ther, a successful London QC, or one
of his family all seem to have had
either motive or opportunity. The
self-reliant, prickly Sam forces her
way through deterrence and danger
to the truth. In a parallel story the
mother of three small children, on
trial for killing her brutal husband, is
defended on the grounds of ‘justified
homicide’, an unusual plea, but one
that really does exist in English law.
This gripping mystery is told with
subtle insight into human behaviour,
and keeping most of the horrors as
noises-off. The subject is less what
people did than what made them do
it; the causes, excuses and ineradicable
psychological effect of violent acts,
which, however long ago they hap-
pened, are never forgotten. ‘At the
heart of every murder there’s a child
crying’, we are told, as we listen to
the grief echoing from behind closed
doors and down the years.
60
PARDONABLE L IES
By Jacqueline Winspear
(John Murray 328pp £12.99)
T HE third outing for this post-
Holmes, pre-Marlowe private eye.
Ostensibly a ‘flapper’ of a pre-femi-
character cleverly designed to appeal
to a post-feminist audience without
overstepping the bounds of historical
possibility in her role as a ‘psycholo-
g ist and pr ivate investigator’ in
London in 1930. Like all the best
detectives, she is equipped with the
inevitable devoted stooge – a fatherly
Cockney called Billy – plus an
Indian guru, a know-all mentor and
string-pulling patrons who paid for
her education and now give her a
home in Mayfair with servants and
her own snazzy MG.
Maisie runs several cases at once,
two concerning men recorded as
‘missing believed killed’ whose rela-
tives belatedly need to find out
exactly what happened. The search
and solutions depend heavily on
coincidence and - in breach of one
of mystery fiction’s strictest rules -
on the supernatural. Fair enough for
Maisie to rely on the automatic
interpretation of signals not con-
sciously observed (otherwise known
as feminine intuition), but it is cheat-
ing for sleuths to depend on ‘feeling’
a fact or a ‘warning chill’. Worth
reading all the same, less for the plot,
than the people, places and general
period ambience, all persuasively
evoked (though the word debrief was
not used till 1945). The war’s long
shadow over Maisie and her clients
and suspects lends emotional depth
to an enjoyable mystery.
I MMACULATE D ECEPTION
★
By Reg Gadney
(Faber & Faber 432pp £10.99)
MASTERS of disguise are a convention
of stage and spy fiction but seldom a
realistic one, so it is hard to believe
 CRIME

in a villain who can change himself lonely widowers, convincing, com- whose ministrations extend far
so that his nearest (there are no dear- passionate and like all the best series beyond the sickroom, since she
est) do not know him. This wily heroes, have troublesome personal ‘suffers from incurable and indiscrimi-
Oriental gentleman has appeared in problems which never quite stop nate helpfulness’. When patients,
Reg Gadney’s previous books, but them detecting. In this book we see employers or acquaintances have
first time readers will flounder in the Winter falling apart as he refuses to problems Imogen diagnoses, treats and
wake of the self-styled ‘citizen of the give in to increasingly cr ippling cures them. Her ministrations are not
world’. He is first encountered as a headaches and gets involved with a confined to the students and dons,
Buddhist monk in Greece, then as posh prostitute. Faraday becomes though this story begins as a tradi-
the elegant Dr Pereira lunching with obsessed beyond the call of duty with tionally ‘cosy’ mystery set in a the
her personal banker in Luxembourg, a wide-ranging investigation sparked protected, enclosed community, half
next a ‘sleek Or iental woman’ off by the discovery of a headless way through it turns into a much
known as Mitsouko Furyawa moving cor pse washed up on an Isle of harsher and more contemporary tale
into a five-star hotel. All are incarna- Wight beach. As always Hurley has of unscrupulous businessmen, a
tions of a shape-shifting sadist called pulled off the trick of filling his pages Maxwell-style financier and dysfunc-
Klaas-Pieter Terajima who is chasing with downbeat, depressing details tional families. A comfortable read
and chased by Alan Rosslyn, a pri- and making them into an upbeat, about uncomfortable real life.
vate eye. The stor y alter nates enjoyable read.
between them in terse episodes, and T HE S PANISH G AME
takes in many different parts of the D EBTS OF D ISHONOUR ★
world and a disparate cast of Russian ★ By Charles Cumming
oligarchs, Greek monks, London By Jill Paton Walsh (Michael Joseph 352pp £12.99)
crooks, Hong Kong bankers and (Hodder 264pp £18.99)
secret servants. The story was quite A LEC Milius’s previous adventure
hard to follow but the pervasive OXFORD is littered with generations ended with his disgrace and dishonor-
knowingness about wealth and of fictional corpses, while Cambridge, able discharge from MI6. When this
power, and corruption and theft, despite several graduates (myself second book opens Alec is living
made this novel irresistably gripping. included) being crime novelists, has undercover and alone in Madrid. He
It ends not with a resolution but on a not been used as a setting for murder has found a job, a girl friend (his new
cliffhanger: to be continued in very often. Jill Paton Walsh started boss’s wife) and a whole new life. But
Gadney’s next? filling in some of this gap with a series he has been guarding his back from
set in St Agatha’s College, which was MI6 and the CIA, the Spanish author-
B LOOD AND H ONEY on hold while she completed one and ities and ETA for every minute of the
★ wrote another book using Dorothy L last six years. A spy turned out into the
By Graham Hurley Sayers’ characters and style. Here she cold is doomed to loneliness and fear,
(Orion 352pp £9.99) returns to her own voice and period. to a lifetime of precautions and pre-
In this traditional whodunnit Imogen tences but are they, whoever they
NOT being police officers most readers Quy is an updated Miss Marple, a might be, really out to get him or is he
have to take on trust the accuracy of heroine who, depending on the view- paranoid? Then Alec’s past begins to
Graham Hurley’s account of their point, is a saviour or an interfering catch up with him and he cannot resist
work, but there is no doubt that his busybody. Imogen is a college nurse the chance of being an insider again, or
series of police-procedural at least, a hanger on. When
novels is one of the best KING’S LYNN FICTION FESTIVAL the enemy come for him
since the genre was invented (and it doesn’t matter
more than half a century 10-12 March 2006 whether they are Basques or
ago. Hurley makes plodding JP Donleavy appears with Beryl Bainbridge Brits) he understands that he
routine convincing but not Christopher Bigsby Carol Birch Ronald Blythe really is expendable. This is a
tedious, and his setting in Romesh Gunasekera Ann Harries Rachel Hore convoluted, well-written tale,
rough, seedy, insular but Charles Cumming took a
John Morrison Emma Richler Jake Wallis Simons
Portsmouth is as characterful gamble in making Alec
as the cops. Many of them DJ Taylor and Marina Warner Milius tell his own story. He
come and go but Detective At The Town Hall King’s Lynn is intended to expose himself
Inspector Faraday and Bookings and enquiries: TONY ELLIS 01553 691661 (office hours) as vain, selfish, conniving and
Constable Winter are the www.lynnlitfests.com tony.ellis@hawkins-solicitors.com tedious, and so he does. It
resident heroes, both men makes him bad company.

61
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

THERE WEREN’T MANY entries R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING young executive. No cuffs than
last month, perhaps because of mine are cleaner’), and therefore
the difficulty of the topic, but ineligible for first prize, but in
most of those who did care to address the subject of the end the judges decided that it was not so much a
‘The Modern Gentleman’ seemed to agree that his parody as an update. It is, incidentally, the centenary of
future is not bright. Richard Charles’s ‘The Song of Betjeman’s birth in August this year.
Nigel’ expressed that disillusionment best, not to men- Next month’s subject is ‘Thursday’; entries, which as
tion being very funny. There were suggestions that the usual must rhyme, scan and make sense, to reach
poem was a parody of Betjeman’s ‘Executive’ (‘I am a Lexington Street by 29 March.

FIRST PRIZE I drink from common mugs of tea,

THE SONG OF NIGEL by Richard Charles Especially when a camera’s nigh.
I am a country gentleman, I draw a modest pension, It makes the graphic point, you see,
Since I retired from headhunting (because of nervous That I’m a family sort of guy.
tension). I love my kids, as who would not?
I sold my little London pad in 1997. We are a team, my wife and I.
I now own 60 acres in the heart of rural Devon. (Just once, though, when things got too hot,
I had to hang her out to dry.)
I do a little freelance work, of course, from time to time.
I like to stay quite active in my body and my mind. Formality’s an old man’s rule
I do not smoke or ride to hounds, for such pursuits are evil. And I’ll be youthful till I die.
I take my pleasure and my pride in stopping other people. Rock music, football: if it’s cool
I’m always game to have a try.
I drive a little 4x4. I think they’re very good. I listen to the people’s views,
(Although I never go ‘off-road’, it’s nice to know I could.) And then I hold them too. That’s why
I realise it guzzles gas: I’m not an utter fool. This epitaph’s the one I’d choose:
But it’s handy for my wife to shop and take the kids to school. ‘A pretty decent sort of guy.’

My children will choose their careers according to their station, THE MODERN GENTLEMAN by Nick Syrett
In management consultancy or TV presentation. The Modern Gentleman and I
They’ll read at universities of concrete or redbrick, Met, by arrangement, at The Vine,
In these enlightened times, it will not matter that they’re thick. Which serves traditional shepherd’s pie
For a sensible 5.99;
I live a life of privilege, but then, I think I’m worth it. I was Nature Lover, Tall,
I’m sorry for the less well off, but maybe they deserve it. A Girl at Heart, Still Fancy Free,
I do my bit for charity, I give when I am able. And he was all, or nearly all,
I did a sponsored paraglide across the Bay of Naples. That I expected him to be.

My politics are modern, never dreamt of voting Tory, He wore a heather mixture suit,
But now you’re talking Cameron – well – that’s a different His father’s, made to last, he said,
story. And when I squealed at his cheroot
I used to be New Labour till the war got out of hand, Lobbed it into a flowerbed;
I’ll vote for anyone who gets those gypsies off my land. He ordered sherry, shot his cuffs,
Explained his love of Gloucestershire,
SECOND PRIZE But said he’d banged on long enough
A PRETTY DECENT SORT OF GUY When we moved on to his career;
by Noel Petty
We once had codes for folk like me And though I glimpsed, through his parade,
But all that formal stuff ’s gone by. His only modern quality:
Instead, I simply try to be That nearly all of him was made
A pretty decent sort of guy. Of shades of things he’d never be,
When foreign statesmen come to call I warmed in his attentive gaze,
I greet them with a friendly ‘hi!’ And found his dusty courtesy
And at my warm request we all Was more, in these relentless days,
Divest ourselves of coat and tie. Far more than adequate for me.

62
LITERARY REVIEW March 2006
 Literary Review Classifieds
To advertise, please call David Sturge on 020 8306
6292 or email david.sturge@btopenworld.com
TO THE MODERN GENTLEMAN
by Bill Greenwell
‘You are the modern gentleman,’ she told him in the dark;
‘The subtle way you hold me shows both passion and
restraint.
The pools are full of predators, but you are not a shark:
You offer me your body without question or complaint.’

She smiled. ‘You like to linger, where so many love to dash;

You stroke my curves with verve, and you ask me how I feel.
You do not dive inside me with a sudden, playful splash.
You do not grip me tightly like a leather driving wheel.’

‘Oh yes, my sweet,’ she told him, as she sprawled across

her sheet,
‘Refinement is your watchword, from your careful invitation,
To the way that you disrobe, and probe me, turning up
the heat.
Your manners are impeccable, as is your presentation.’

‘You are the modern gentleman,’ she told him, with a smile,
‘As is obvious – just watching you unbuttoning a cuff.
It’s honestly a pity, since you’re suave, and have such style,
That when it comes to bed, alas, I like a bit of rough.’

A REAL GENT by J M Harvey

I met a modern gent today
upon a crowded bus,
he gave his seat up right away –
no pantomime, no fuss.

He merely smiled at my surprise

and offered me his place,
a mild amusement in his eyes
as though he’d read my face.

I nodded my brief thanks to him If you hanker after the 1930s and 40s,try this!
and never doubted that
he would have deftly tipped the brim Growing Up in Wigan, 1930-1950, a book about
had he have worn a hat. ration books, air raid shelters, pre-war schools,
eccentric shopkeepers, relatives, National Service,
But he was casually attired what life was like for ordinary people 60 years ago,
in studded leather gear – and just how good it was.
the kind I’d distantly admired,
though seldom got too near. On sale in all bookshops in Wigan and the Wirral
I’d long-believed that manners went
or direct from the author.
with tailoring and style, Ring 0151 334 7085 or write to:
convinced the measure of a gent 7A Blakely Brow, Raby Mere, Wirral CH63 0PS
stood out the stated mile.

But since I’ve found a modern breed – PUBLISH YOUR BOOK

more difficult to spot For details please contact us
than those who cling to the old creed,
look gallant, but are not! SERENDIPITY
Dept LR, 1st Floor, 37-39 Victoria Road, Darlington DL1 5SF
Tel/fax: 0845 130 2434 info@serendipitypublishers.com
 Literary Review Classifieds
To advertise, please call David Sturge on 020 8306 6292 or email david.sturge@btopenworld.com

BOOKS & PUBLISHING FOR SALE HOLIDAYS

HATE CROWDS?
3000 half-price upmarket, EARPLUGS FROM Haverigg S. Cumbria
mint books. SNORESTORE Comfortable cottage
Keep the noise out 200 yards from sea
FREE CATALOGUE and your sanity in Easy access to the Lakes
Telephone: 0207 515 9222 Sleeps 4. No restrictions,
www.snorestore.co.uk
pets, smoking, drinking, etc
or call 020 8861 2264
BIBLIOPHILE Est. 1978 Tel 01229 776216
FREEPOST SE6933 LONDON E14 7BR
SOUTHERN
www.bibliophilebooks.com OLD PERSIAN RUGS
P&P £3 per order (UK mainland)
TUSCANY
Please quote code LR02
Mostly £100 - £3000 Beautifully restored, comfy
farmhouse to let, in unspoilt
Not a shop, just a shed.
MAVERICK WRITER Telephone first. countryside. Sleeps 6, ensuite
seeks maverick publisher. DO YOU HAVE A bedrooms, well-stocked book-
Two ticking bombs ready to BOOK TO DESMOND NORTH
shelves, walks, log fires and
be unleashed on a stale liter- PUBLISH? East Peckham, Kent
hot baths in winter; pool and
ary world. For further info: pergolas in summer.
For free appraisal
chrisjeffries@ntlworld.com send your manuscript/s to Tel 01622 871 353 Tel 01243 784806 or
www.casettadelbrinco.co.uk
Melrose Books (Ref:LR),
EXPERIENCED
CLASSICS TUTOR St Thomas’ Place, Ely, JAZZ FLOATS
offers tailored lessons Cambs, CB7 4GG
Phone: 01353 646608
“320
to professional people.
Call Philip Womack on Email: YEARS
07769 972 409 info@melrosebooks.co.uk
OF Departing for
BOOK FI N D IN G S ERV ICE New Orleans
JAZZ” 30 November 2006
Enjoy a 3 Night Pre Cruise
stay in New Orleans
Out-of-print, Collectable and Antiquarian Sailing in the Western Caribbean
onboard M/S Norwegian Sun
titles in all subjects, including fiction from 3-10 December 2006
Sailing from New Orleans
visiting Costa Maya, Guatemala,
Books are willingly mailed overseas Belize and Cozumel, Mexico
Visa, MasterCard & American Express welcome Joe Segal,
Lou Donaldson,
Jimmy Heath &
B ARLOW M OOR B OOKS Bud Shank all turning
80 years of age!
29 Churchwood Road, Didsbury, Manchester M20 6TZ FEATURING
tel: 0161 434 5073 Fax: 0161 448 2491 James Moody, Danilo
Perez Trio, Everett Greene,
email: books@barlowmoorbooks.com Harry Allen, David
“Fathead” Newman,
Everyone listed is subject to cancellation but we don’t expect any.

Eric Alexander Quintet

AUCTION CATALOGUES
Chancery
with Harold Mabern,
Jim Rotundi, Joe Farnsworth

Cruising
& John Webber, Benny Green
Sotheby’s, Christies, including Arms, Armour, Toys, & Russell Malone Duo,
Ship’s Registry: Bahamas Benny Golson &
Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, sewing, CHANCERY CRUSING (a division of Holborn Travel Ltd) Curtis Fuller Quintet,
science, sporting paintings, etc, all CALL 020 7405 7056 Scott Hamilton,
Joey DeFrancesco Trio,
subjects & quantities considered, cash paid. 2-3 Cursitor Street Chancery Lane
Bobby Hutcherson, Stu Katz,
London EC4A 1NE
bookings@chancerycruising.com Orbert Davis Quintet with
Call Ian on 07790083522 or email www.ajpas.com or Ari Brown, Donald Harrisson’s
New Orleans Jazz Indians
catalog@columbuscat.com www.chancerycruising.com PLUS INVITED GUESTS
ABTA, ATOL & IATA Fully bonded

LITERARY REVIEW March 2006