APRIL 2006 £3.

00

V S NAIPAUL AT HOME
The Nobel Laureate talks to Farrukh Dhondy

Charles Saumarez Smith covets Charles I’s Art

Christopher Woodward fancies William Kent
Roger Scruton disambiguates Wagner

Andrew Roberts on Wavell

Justin Marozzi on Kublai Khan
Jonathan Mirsky on the Long March

Gauguin and Van Gogh Shack Up

Ava Gardner plays fast ★ Massingberd plays cricket

Heaney back on song ★ Mackay Brown sings again

Isaac Newton ★ Francis Walsingham ★ Adam Smith
 FROM THE PULPIT
IF ONE WANTED a neat little illustration D J TAYLOR
of the present government’s attitude
towards literature it could be found in
Downing Street’s reaction, some years Literature and
back, to the news that V S Naipaul
had been awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Did a telegram wing its Leviathan
way out of Number Ten to convey the
Prime Minister’s congratulations? Was Cabinet business
momentarily suspended so that our legislators could pay
tribute to a man of genius, whose international standing
had now been confirmed by the Stockholm curia? Not
a bit of it. Downing Street responded to the solicitations
of telephoning arts journalists with such diffident
bewilderment as to betray immediately the fact that no
one in the building knew who the author of A House for
Mr Biswas was.
The gap between government and that part of the gov-
erned which makes its living from writing has not always
been an abyss. Victorian Cabinets came thronged with
clever men immersed in the life of the mind. Gladstone
was the author of Homeric studies; his Tory opponent
the Earl of Derby occupied his leisure time in translating
the Iliad into blank verse. A generation later the Liberal
politician John Morley estimated that at least three leading
members of the Conservative administration of 1887
could have earned their livings as authors. However
debased by falling educational standards, this interest was
kept up through the twentieth century. Harold Macmillan
was a publisher; Stanley Baldwin almost single-handedly
responsible for the revival of public interest in the novels
of Mary Webb. Even Mrs Thatcher, written off by every
progressive newspaper as a hopeless philistine, knew
enough of Larkin’s poetry to be able to quote lines from it
to their author when they met and was heard informing a
dinner-table audience that most of Western society’s
problems had been foreseen by Dostoevsky.
Twenty years on from Mrs T’s occasional dinner parties
for ‘intellectuals’ (see the amusing accounts in Anthony
Powell’s Journals), not the tiniest fragment of this tradition was being forced to look for private sponsorship.
survives. The Prime Minister’s idea of ‘culture’ is hob-
nobbing with the Gallagher brothers. The Secretary of
State for Culture’s pet scheme of the last two years has been loss without it. We had enough of that in the 1970s, with
the licensing of US-style ‘mega-casinos’. Searching for a
solitary Cabinet minister who had performed the not terri-
bly difficult act of writing a book I could only come up
with the name of Gordon Brown, who, two decades ago,
in another world, produced a rather good biography of the
ILP leader James Maxton. The single faint exception to this
rule is the Libraries Minister, David Lammy, who, despite a
reluctance to use the powers invested in him by legislation,
does at least seem to realise that public libraries are not
intended to be a subsidised version of HMV.
But if the government’s attitude to ‘books’ and their
authors veers somewhere between puzzled incomprehen-
sion and mild hostility, what about policy on the ground?
1
How, in other words, is the tiny
fraction of the Culture Department’s
budget set aside for the promotion of
literature being spent? Last month I
spent several days reading the entries
for the annual Norther n Rock
Writer’s Award, an extraordinary phil-
anthropic scheme – privately funded,
of course – which pays its laureate a salary of £20,000
for three years to get on with his or her work. The really
curious feature of this exercise, at any rate when it came
to the submissions by poets, was the similarity of the
supporting statements. ‘Unfortunately publication of this
collection has had to be delayed, owing to my publishers
losing their grant…’; ‘As funding has recently been cut, I
am afraid that…’. This kind of thing, it should instantly
be said, is not confined to the North East, and any liberal-
minded sponsor who attempted to replicate the
Northern Rock scheme in other parts of the country
would meet with an identical response.
Regional arts funding has changed dramatically since the
turn of the decade. Long-term support for such vital parts
of the local cultural fabric as the modestly attended literary
festival and the high-minded small press has mostly gone
out of the window, to be replaced by an insistence on
glamorous-sounding ‘projects’, often involving the impor-
tation of metropolitan talent, which look splendid on the
CVs of the people who organise them. Here in Norwich,
for example, an organisation called the New Writing
Partnership, lavishly supported by East England Arts,
together with the local council and the University of East
Anglia, stages an annual series of discussions, readings and
workshops. No expense is spared: at the inaugural event I
bumped into a man from the Sunday Times who remarked
– words I had never previously heard spoken by an arts
journalist – ‘Wow! This is a bit over-funded, isn’t it?’ It
was. Meanwhile, forty miles up the road, the King’s Lynn
Fiction Festival, a beacon for the literary-minded folk of
North-West Norfolk, had just had its grant taken away and
Naturally, public money spent on literature is not merely
there to subsidise events and businesses that would make a
the thousands of pounds squandered on the New Review
and the short-lived New Fiction Society, a scheme
designed to encourage the reading of new novels which
racked up such astronomical costs that critics maintained it
would have been cheaper to hand out the books gratis on
the pavement outside the Arts Council’s Piccadilly HQ.
On the other hand, there are dozens of good literary cases
crying out for funding that is currently denied them. While
nobody can do anything about the philistines around the
Cabinet table, the literature budget is something in which
we can all take an interest. If every reader of the Literary
Review wrote to ask his or her local arts-funding body
exactly how their money is laid out, it would be a start.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
D J Taylor, a novelist and biogra-
pher. His latest novel, Kept, was
published in February by Chatto &
Windus, and his On the Corinthian
Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in
Sport will appear in May.
R OGER S CRUTON is a writer and
philosopher. His Gentle Regrets:
Thoughts from a Life is published
by Continuum.
PETER MCDONALD’s new edition of
the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice
will be published later this year
by Faber.
A BIGAIL G REEN teaches modern
European history at Brasenose
College, Oxford. She is the author
of Fatherlands: State-Building and
Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century
Germany (CUP).
NORMAN STONE is Director of the
Turkish Russian Institute, Bilkent
University, Ankara.
SCOTT MANDELBROTE teaches his-
tory at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and
is an editorial director of the
Newton Project (www.newtonpro-
ject.ic.ac.uk). He is writing a book
about the reception of the Greek
text of the Old Testament in early
modern Europe and editing the
Warden’s Punishment Book of All
Souls College, Oxford.
MICHAEL BURLEIGH’s Sacred Causes
will be published this autumn by
HarperCollins.
ANDREW ROBERTS’s A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
will be published in September.
TIM HEALD’s Village Cricket is pub-
lished in paperback this month by
Little, Brown.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 D J T AYLOR
BIOGRAPHY 4 C HRISTOPHER W OODWARD William Kent: Architect,
Designer, Opportunist Timothy Mowl
6 S COTT M ANDELBROTE Newton Peter Ackroyd
8 P AUL J OHNSON Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect
Liberty James Buchan
10 A LLAN M ASSIE Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and
the Secret War that Saved England Robert Hutchinson
11 CHANDAK SENGOOPTA The Medical Detective: John Snow and
the Mystery of Cholera Sandra Hempel
12 FRANK MCLYNN Ava Gardner Lee Server
MUSIC & ART 14 ROGER SCRUTON Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire:
Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Mark Berry
15 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH The Sale of the Late King’s
Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection Jerry Brotton
16 J ANE R YE The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Nine
Turbulent Weeks in Arles Martin Gayford
18 MICHAEL PRODGER The Judgement of Paris: Manet, Meissonier
and an Artistic Revolution Ross King
INTERVIEW 20 V S NAIPAUL TALKS TO FARRUKH DHONDY
HISTORY 26 SIMON HEFFER Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and
Fatherland Carmen Callil The Unfree French: Life under the
Occupation Richard Vinen
29 J ONATHAN M IRSKY The Long March Sun Shuyun
30 DAVID CESARANI Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots
against the Führer Roger Moorhouse In the Bunker with
Hitler: The Last Witness Speaks Bernd Freytag von
Loringhoven with François d’Alançon
31 NORMAN STONE Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion
Forged Modern Greece and Turkey Marion Rodgers
WARRIORS 32 A NDREW R OBERTS Wavell: Soldier and Statesman
Victoria Schofield
34 JUSTIN MAROZZI Kublai Khan: From Xanadu to Superpower
John Man
36 CHARLES WHEELER American Shogun: MacArthur, Hirohito and
the American Duel with Japan Robert Harvey
38 ALLAN MALLINSON Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War
Richard Holmes
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistants: PHILIP WOMACK, GEORGE NORTON
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY,
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
Business Manager: ROBERT POSNER
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 331
2
 APRIL 2006

POETS 39 PETER MCDONALD District and Circle Seamus Heaney C HARLES S AUMAREZ S MITH is
40 ANDRO LINKLATER George Mackay Brown: The Life Director of the National Gallery.
Maggie Fergusson
SARA WHEELER is a much-admired
travel writer. Her biography of Denys
GENERAL 42 MICHAEL BURLEIGH Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain Finch Hatton is published by Cape.
Stefan Collini
43 A BIGAIL G REEN The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape PAUL JOHNSON thinks he has writ-
ten about forty books. His Creators
and the Making of Modern Germany David Blackbourn
will be published in June by
44 RICHARD OVERY Among the Dead Cities A C Grayling Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
46 T IM H EALD Return to Akenfield: Portrait of an English
Village in the 21st Century Craig Taylor CHRISTOPHER WOODWARD is the
47 LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Sunlight on the Garden: A Family in author of In Ruins (Vintage) and is
currently writing a book on British
Love, Madness and War Elizabeth Speller
admirers of Napoleon.
48 C RISPIN T ICKELL The Weather Makers: The History and
Future Impact of Climate Change Tim Flannery R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
49 S ARA W HEELER The Founding of Arvon: A Memoir of the Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
Early Years of the Arvon Foundation John Moat awarded the Wolfson Prize for
History 2005 and is available in
50 H U G H M A S S I N G B E R D Penguins Stopped Play: Eleven
paperback from Penguin.
Village Cricketers Take on the World Harry Thompson
FRANK MCLYNN, the author of over
FICTION 51 P AMELA N ORRIS The Other Side of You Salley Vickers twenty books, is a self-confessed
52 F RANCIS K ING The Woman who Waited Andreï Makine movie buff. His new book, Lionheart
and Lackland, will be published in
53 A NDREW B ARROW White Blood James Fleming
September by Jonathan Cape.
54 D ONALD R AYFIELD The Railway Hamid Ismailov
55 LINDY BURLEIGH Keeping the World Away Margaret Forster P AMELA N ORRIS ’s Words of Love:
56 T RISTAN Q UINN Chronicler of the Winds Henning Mankell Passionate Women from Heloise to
56 P HILIP W OMACK A Bit of a Marriage Karina Mellinger Sylvia Plath will be published by
HarperCollins in June.
57 SIMON BAKER ON FIRST NOVELS
DONALD RAYFIELD’s Stalin and his
Hangmen is published by Viking. He
is currently completing A Georgian
English Dictionary.
CRIME 60 JESSICA MANN
J USTIN M AROZZI is the author of
SILENCED VOICES 59 LUCY POPESCU Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror
AUDIOBOOK 58 SUSAN CROSLAND of the World, published in paperback
POETRY COMPETITION 62 by HarperPerennial. He is confident
LETTERS 19 a suitably bold publisher will step
forward to publish his controversial
LR CROSSWORD 9
novel Islamistan, a satire on Iraq.
LR BOOKSHOP 40
CLASSIFIEDS 64 A LLAN M ALLINSON was a profes-
sional soldier for thirty-five years.
His latest novel, Company of Spears,
is published by Bantam.

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LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

C HRISTOPHER W OODWARD The young Kent’s talent as a painter was spotted by

several of the local gentry, who clubbed together to send
BOUNTIFUL BUTTOCKS him to study in Rome. He stayed for nine years, and
painted the ceiling of the Church of San Giuliano dei
Fiamminghi – an exceptional commission for a young
W ILLIAM K ENT: A RCHITECT, Protestant and a foreigner. But his genius was not as a
D ESIGNER , O PPORTUNIST painter, in part – it is explained – because of his misguided
★ admiration for Correggio’s frescoes in the dome at Parma:
By Timothy Mowl ‘a terrible tangle of bare flesh and soft porn … a disaster
(Jonathan Cape 298pp £25) of a composition’.
It was in Italy that Kent met Burlington, and in 1718
I N THIS BOOK on the eighteenth-century designer he returned to London in his retinue of nine carriages.
William Kent, Tim Mowl recalls how he ‘outed’ Horace The next year Burlington led a palace coup. The great
Walpole in a lecture to the Georgian Group: ‘A number Sir James Thornhill was unseated from his commission to
of ladies walked out in protest. It was not just a matter paint the ceilings of Kensington Palace and replaced by
of “no sex please, we’re Georgians”’, he writes, ‘but also the new protégé. It was the first victory in Burlington’s
one of “let us have no sharp, realistic standards of appre- campaign to transform British taste. The trouble was, says
ciation of the true, coarse tone of the period”.’ Mowl, that Burlington’s taste was ignorant.
That lecture is now a legend in architectural history The book’s agenda is to show that Kent was the most
circles. ‘What do you remember?’ I asked someone who talented designer of the century – greater than Adam –
was there. ‘One or two people definitely walked out. but that his imagination was suppressed by Burlington
Maybe three. But it was a lunchtime lecture and at least and his circle. Alexander Pope is one villain: ‘the most
one was nipping out to get a sandwich.’ appalling scrounger and ingratiating creep’. Another was
Whoever walked out and for whatever reason, this is a the architect Colen Campbell, whose Vitruvius Britannicus
book on the rebound. The trauma has given an irresistible began the Palladian Revival: ‘a rogue … a charlatan …
energy to Mowl’s reappraisal of Kent’s life as a designer of one of the most malign influences ever to work in British
houses, gardens and furniture. He believes that modern architecture’. These men imposed on Britain a dull and
scholarship has a ‘sugary reverence’ for the period, placing boxy architecture for ‘nervous pedants … [with] a lurking
Kent’s work in a polite world of classical harmonies, harp- pur itan conscience’. They called their new style
sichords and porcelain; and that the idea of the Age of ‘Palladian’ but they misunderstood Palladio.
Reason is an ‘academic conspiracy’. For him, Kent was Pope and Campbell had never been to Italy, and
a ‘clown of lively genius’ who thrived in a world Burlington only spent a single day in Palladio’s Vicenza.
of quarrelling princes, corrupt The city was flooded, and he had
courtiers, sex, debtors’ prisons, to sleep in a chair. In conse-
bassoons, smallpox, and more sex. quence, he saw just three of the
Kent was born in 1685, the son master’s designs – and failed to
of a joiner in Br idlington in grasp that Palladio’s architecture
Yorkshire. His great patron, Lord was much more than the mathe-
Burlington, grew up twenty miles matics of proportion. In the rain
away. Visiting the town of and hurry, he did not appreciate
Bridlington, Mowl listens to two its play of light, colour, and views
old men talking in their local café. of landscape.
What, he wonders, was the true A second vignette from that
sound of his characters in an age same year of 1718 conjures up
before received pronunciation? what might have been. The Prince
Burlington: Oo ee, that of Wales – the future George II –
Alexander Pope a says to aye and his cosmopolitan wife
Kent: Never i this world tha Caroline of Ansbach established
don’t say. their court at a villa beside the
Sic. Certainly, Lord Burlington – Thames at Richmond. Guests flit-
who gave his name to the swanky ted between the lamp-lit avenues
Arcade in Piccadilly, those of trees, and water music played
expensive socks, and a smart dry- from gondolas. And that year, too,
cleaner’s in Kensington – will Watteau visited London. It was
never seem quite the same again. Thrusting: Worcester Lodge in Badminton Park Britain’s opportunity to become a

4
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 BIOGRAPHY

Rococo paradise – until Burlington’s carriages trundled

home from Italy with his boxes of classical antiquities and
a folder of pen-and-ink drawings by Palladio.
The villa he built at Chiswick in the 1720s epitomised
his intellectual pedantry, its elevations an uninspired col-
lage of quotations from Palladio’s drawings and books.
Inside the house, however, Kent created ‘the ambience
of a French bordello’. With its velvet hangings and
frescoes of nymphs was it ‘a bachelor’s pad for riotous
purposes’? The rooms are too small for dancing, and the
stairs too narrow for the skirts of ladies of the court.
In the 1730s, however, Burlington retired from Court
and Kent was free to reveal his true personality in
masterpieces such as the state bed at Houghton Hall, a
magnificent barge for Prince Frederick, and the Marble
Hall at Holkham. At Esher Place in Surrey and at Stowe
he created Picturesque gardens inspired by living and
breathing the Italian landscape for so many years. It was
Kent, wrote Horace Walpole, who leaped the fence and
saw that all Nature was a garden.
In his last decade – he died in 1748 – Kent was given
the opportunity to realise his vision of a classical Arcadia
at Rousham in Oxfordshire. And, to Mowl, it is a sex-
mad Arcadia. The statues, temples and fountains are
interpreted as symbols of the bisexuality of the client,
General Dormer. Is there documentary evidence of the
General’s ambivalence? Not a jot. Doubt it, however,
and you are in denial: there is ‘not so much a conspiracy
as an embarrassment, very English in its nature’ about
the true meaning of Rousham. Why? ‘The English have
an abiding horror of homosexuality and bisexuality’, as
shown by the fate of Edward II and Oscar Wilde. And
Kent – with his ‘huge, knowing eyes and trim, pouting
lips’ – epitomised a bisexual century.
Mowl’s writing is so engaging, however, that by this
stage the reader cares little for historic evidence. It is not so
much a biography as a point of view; Kent’s actress mis-
tress and her two children receive a single sentence. I was
reminded, above all, of Sacheverell Sitwell’s evocations of
the Baroque. Kent is as much a work of stylistic art.
However, what you remember is not so much the sex
– although I have never seen the word ‘buttocks’ so
many times – but the vitality of Kent’s genius. Kent
himself said, ‘the truth is I had as leave make a drawing
as write a letter’, and Mowl has a gift for putting his
hero’s concepts into prose. And, too, the utter likeability
of a man who died of ‘high feeding & life & much inac-
tion’: that is, too much food, too many friends, and too
little exercise. A Kent design is never just a design. The
client who has commissioned a garden feature receives a
drawing for a handsome obelisk – around which a circle
of floppy-eared bunnies dance in the moonlight.
‘Someone who could throw off those cheerful seductive
sketches must have made the sun shine every morning.’
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 40

LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

 BIOGRAPHY
S COTT M ANDELBROTE
A MAN AND HIS MYTH
N EWTON
★ Almost twenty-five years later, a close acquaintance with
By Peter Ackroyd
(Chatto & Windus 163pp £12.99)
T HE LIFE OF Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is hardly
unknown. Reclusive though Newton may have been in
the prime of his invention, long before the end of his life
he had become a moving tourist attraction. French abbés,
German academic tyros and Italian astronomers considered
a visit to Newton to be worth the detour, whether they
were seeking interpretations of ancient history, demonstra-
tions of alchemical furnaces, or guidance on mathematical
analysis. As President of the Royal Society from 1703,
Newton took control of a body at least part of whose pur-
pose was international communication
and used it shamelessly to promulgate
his own version of his past. Thanks to
his careful supervision of both evidence
and the forms of inquiry, the committee
of the Royal Society that was charged
with determining who had been the
first mathematician to discover the
calculus came down firmly on Newton’s
side. From then on, the myth of
Newton’s youthful genius began to
acquire more and more lustre. It was
burnished enthusiastically by a succes-
sion of star-struck admirers, whose
accounts of their hero were drawn
together by a calculating nephew-in-
law, with an eye to supplementing his
considerable inheritance through a
biography of, and posthumous publica- Newton: tourist attraction
tions of writings by, the great man.
Poetry, paintings, portrait medals and a memorial in
Westminster Abbey followed the scientist’s death in what
the art historian Francis Haskell referred to as ‘the apothe-
osis of Newton’. Yet always there was a darker undertow.
The authors of well-meaning English instructions for
youth discovered that the tales of Newton’s chamber-
fellows or secretaries, revealing absent-mindedness and
obsession, could easily be drawn into the penumbra of
eccentr icity that sur rounds genius. Newton’s
Continental biographers were less charitable. The nine-
teenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan
worried instead about what he believed he had uncovered
concerning Newton’s pimping of his niece to aristocratic
friends. De Morgan’s moral anxiety was ironic as well as
misplaced. He was a Unitarian, and so not likely to be
6
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
shocked by the dirty secret that really did emerge from
Newton’s manuscripts in the 1850s. Sir David Brewster
(1781–1868), whose career as a pastor in the Church of
Scotland foundered when he fainted under the stress of
having to say grace in public, had thundered in defence
of Newton’s virtue when writing his biography in 1831.
Newton’s unpublished writings convinced Brewster (and
all but the most credulous of his readers) that it was
incontrovertible that Newton had indeed been an anti-
Trinitarian heretic.
Brewster’s change of heart helped to establish that, for
a proper understanding of Newton, the biographer
would need to get behind the stories and encounter the
man as he appeared in manuscript and on the printed
page. Books that Newton’s contemporaries considered
too difficult even for their author to understand no
longer seemed so incomprehensible once their composi-
tion began to be unravelled. Yet while the facets of
mathematical and philosophical genius were gradually
illuminated by the Newtonian schol-
arship of the twentieth century, a dif-
ferent dark mist descended. Brewster
had worried about Newton’s alchemy.
It was celebrated by Maynard Keynes,
who bought most of Newton’s
alchemical manuscripts. These had
been sold in 1936 to pay for the
expensive divorce of Viscount
Lymington (whose aristocratic inter-
ests were Hitler and horses). Newton
the magus rose ascendant from the
1936 sale, and has only recently come
down in flames now that historians
have begun to understand that seven-
teenth-century alchemists were doing
real experiments when they set off to
hunt the green lion.
Familiar though parts of it may be,
the truth about Newton’s life is
indeed stranger than fiction. This was a man who
shunned company but ended up on intimate terms with
the most intelligent woman ever to become Princess of
Wales. Someone whose laughter was so infrequent that
his friends recorded it, on each of the three occasions
that they heard it. He was one of the most original
mathematicians ever to have lived, who nevertheless
believed that the ancient Greeks had really mastered
everything that he had discovered. As an obscure don,
he encouraged his university to defy the king and
justified himself before Judge Jeffreys as a consequence.
Not ten years later, as Warden of the Mint, he showed
himself to be ruthless in hunting down those who coun-
terfeited the royal coin. Yet all the while, he knew that
his own religious beliefs made it illegal for him to hold
 BIOGRAPHY

public office. Such paradoxes suggest that there is no Time Out Critics’ Choice • Guardian • Times
easy way to write the life of Isaac Newton. Independent • Sunday Times • Whatsonstage.com
Peter Ackroyd would not agree. He has cast Newton as Mail on Sunday • Sunday Express
the third in a series of brief lives, which are meant to

EXONERATED
express his own passions, commitments, and personal

THE
interests. The account he gives is indeed brief. On the
subject of passion, it is mercifully succinct and careful,
acknowledging that there simply is no evidence that
Newton loved anybody (perhaps not even himself). The
problem, unfortunately, is that Ackroyd is not particularly
interested in, and is certainly not committed to, any of the Only until 11th June
things that really bothered Newton. Like a bemused
Cambridge undergraduate hearing Newton’s lectures of
the 1680s, he is all at sea with the mathematics. Even the
great book, the Principia, cannot save him, and tugs him
under to drown in confusion over the differences in
content between the three editions that were printed in
Newton’s lifetime. Newton’s experimental natural
philosophy does not command much more historical
understanding, and it too leaves Ackroyd mouthing plati-
tudes. The modern idea of a grand, unified theory in
physics rubs shoulders with New Age reassurances that
mathematics is mystical and gravity just a vision. Ackroyd
claims that ‘we still live in a Newtonian universe’. We
don’t, and neither did Newton, but that is surely not the
point. Readers will not want to be made woozy by
Newton’s theory of fluxions or method of fluents, but
they might appreciate an author who understands the dif-
ference between such things and the differential or integral
calculus that they learnt at school. At the other extreme, ‘The stars lead an exemplary cast.
they might like to learn something about Newton’s
alchemy, apart from being told that it was ‘a recondite art’, But this is a show that doesn’t need big
and they might be curious to know how someone who
was an Arian in his beliefs differed from ordinary Puritans. names to make it essential viewing.’
Newton wrote difficult things and it is unlikely that there Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
will be many people who are capable of finding enthusiasm
for all of them. Despite this, more than a century and a half ‘This play is one of the most extraordinary events
of scholarship on Newton has been fruitful. Ackroyd might
have found out more about it. Had he done so, he would I have ever seen and it will do more to promote
not have made minor errors such as misdating several man- justice than any literary efforts I have seen.’
uscripts or attributing to John Locke an influence on the
writing of the Principia that he did not have and could not U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno
have had. He would not believe that the Principia was a
kind of textbook. He might even understand why Newton Guest stars
‘had some of the instincts of a vegetarian’: Newton did not
28 March-2 April Charles Da
nce & Suzi Quatro
refuse black pudding, as Ackroyd believes, because of a
4-9 April Nigel Harman & Ge
raldine James
desire for temperance in old age; he did so because he
thought that God had forbidden the consumption of 11-16 April Danny Glover, Mik
e McShane & Sunny Jacobs
blood, in which the living spirit of things resided. This
18-23 April Kate Mulgrew &
Mike McShane
brief life does justice neither to Newton’s achievement nor
to his oddity. For far too much of the time, it simply
rehashes old tales and gives new life to the stories that were For latest guest star updates www.theexonerated.co.uk
collected up after Newton’s death. This may perhaps be
amusing; it is certainly far too easy.
Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London W6
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 BIOGRAPHY

P AUL J OHNSON along in 1890. That in turn held the field until the mid
1930s, when John Maynard Keynes published his
THE MAN FROM KIRKCALDY General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. I
possess copies of all these tomes, and no less than three
of The Wealth of Nations, but I cannot honestly claim to
A DAM S MITH AND THE P URSUIT OF have read any. That is, I have certainly, like many people,
P ERFECT L IBERTY dipped into Wealth on a number of occasions, but never
★ read it through. But as Dr Johnson asked, aggressively:
By James Buchan ‘Do you, Sir, read books through?’
(Profile Books 288pp £14.99) Buchan, in this mercifully brief and often lively book,
is concerned to present the whole Smith, as man and
ADAM SMITH’S The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is author. That means he devotes some time to The Theory
one of those ‘great’ books which everyone cites with of Moral Sentiments, which some would say is his best
approval and no one actually reads. James Buchan, who book, and which has certainly stood up to the buffeting
has made himself our leading authority on Enlightenment of time better than Wealth. Smith saw himself not as an
Scotland, has fun at the expense of Alan Greenspan, the economist – God forbid: it had a quite different mean-
famous head of the American Federal Reserve Bank, who ing in those days and denoted ‘thrifty’, even ‘stingy’ –
came to Scotland in February 2005 to sing the praises of but as a philosopher. For many years he held the chair of
Smith at Kirkcaldy, his birthplace. He called Smith ‘a moral philosophy at Glasgow University, and Buchan
towering genius in the development of the modern world’ says ‘we have no fewer than four sets of students’ long-
for his ‘demonstration of the inherent stability and growth hand notes of his lectures’. Smith was an extremely
of what we now term free-market capitalism as a result of ambitious and self-confident man. He planned a whole
the principle of the invisible hand’ that he discovered. series of books encompassing virtually all human knowl-
According to Buchan, though the phrase ‘invisible hand’ edge. Only the Theory and Wealth actually got written,
occurs three times in Smith’s oeuvre, in none of these but other bits and pieces (and two hundred letters)
instances does it have any reference to free-market capital- survive and have been published in modern editions.
ism. Greenspan was talking nonsense. Among those There is thus no excuse for misunderstanding Adam
listening to his nonsense, and applauding it, was Gordon Smith. Yet, as Buchan argues, there are two Adam
Brown, who also comes from Kirkcaldy and is its MP. He Smiths known to us. One, the real Smith, ‘is cautious,
promotes Smith as the patron saint of his own version of voluminous, qualified, liberal with a small “l” and utterly
Scottish socialism, and this is nonsense too. disdained’. The other, the Smith of public knowledge, ‘is
So what? I don’t suppose Buchan himself would have brief, brash, Liberal with a large “L”, inaccurate, shady,
read The Wealth of Nations had he not been planning to and one of the most famous men who ever lived’. He
write a book about its author. No one reads a volume of argues that the reason for this two-Smith character is that
economics unless he is paid to do so, or about to sit an ‘Adam Smith fell among economists and politicians who
examination. What is remarkable about the book is that, constitute, more even than professional footballers, always
in the two decades after its publication, it was very the least literate sections of English-speaking society’. (I
widely read, especially by public men, and had a percep- quote this as an example of Buchan’s trenchancy – not
tible effect on policy, helping to promote the first always plausible on a second, or even a first, reading.)
glimmerings of the free-trade movement, which was Certainly, the fault is not Smith’s, since, says Buchan,
eventually to become the received wisdom of the earth. ‘No Scotsman, except maybe R L Stevenson, has ever
Then it gradually slipped written so well in the ordi-
into the background, though nary prose of England and
it continued to be praised by B O O KF IND ING SE RVICE the United States.’
all as the economist’s bible. As I say, the book is lively,
By Victorian times, Walter Out-of-print, Collectable and Antiquarian and many sentences bring
Bagehot, editor of The titles in all subjects, including fiction one up short. I wish he had
Economist, was able to dismiss Books are willingly mailed overseas written more about Smith
it as ‘a very amusing book
about old times’. It was
Visa, MasterCard & American Express welcome as a person. He was a close
personal fr iend of David
superseded by John Stuart B ARLOW M OOR B OOKS Hume, and was also his
Mill’s Principles of Political 29 Churchwood Road, Didsbury, Manchester M20 6TZ executor. They shared a dis-
Economy, which held good tel: 0161 434 5073 Fax: 0161 448 2491 belief in Christianity which
until Alfred Marshall’s email: books@barlowmoorbooks.com made them enemies among
Principles of Economics came the ministers who at that

8
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
time set the tone of Edinburgh society.
Hume’s ‘atheism’ was well known (he was,
by rights, an agnostic but the term had
not then been coined by T H Huxley)
and the ministers were looking forward
to his death in an agony of fear.
When he died happy and unafraid,
the clergy were furious and excoriated
those, like Boswell, who testified to
the fact. Smith wrote glowingly
about Hume in an open letter,
compared him to Socrates and added:
‘Upon the whole, I have always con-
sidered him, both in his lifetime and
since his death, as approaching as near
to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of
human frailty will permit.’
This tribute provoked outrage and
retaliation. Smith recorded: ‘A single, Smith: Scottish economist
and, as I thought, a very harmless Sheet
of paper, which I happened to write concerning the
death of our late friend, Mr Hume, brought upon me
ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had
made upon the whole commercial system of Great
Britain.’ (This was how he epitomised Wealth.)
Smith, I believe, was the original of the
concept of the absent-minded professor,
and I would have welcomed more
anecdotes about him falling into ditches
while on lucubrating walks, and doing
odd things like unconsciously imitating
the porter outside the Customs
House. Buchan says that after becoming
a Commissioner of Customs, he
looked up the list of prohibited goods,
and, ‘upon examining my own
wearing apparel, I found, to my great
astonishment, that I had scarce a stock,
a cravat, a pair of ruffles, or a pocket
handkerchief which was not prohibited to
be worn or used in Great Britain. I wished
to set an example and burnt them all.’ No
wonder the Edinburgh shop-wives,
who watched him daily parading the
Old Town, with his cane on his shoul-
der like a musket, thought him mad. He is, however,
the kind of madman, ceteris paribus, one would like to
have met.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 40
 BIOGRAPHY
A LLAN M ASSIE
Sympathy for
a Devil
E LIZABETH ’ S S PY M ASTER : F RANCIS
WALSINGHAM AND THE S ECRET WAR THAT
S AVED E NGLAND
★ her himself. He prevented the Pope from imposing
By Robert Hutchinson
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 399pp £20)
IT IS DIFFICULT now to look on the Elizabethan Age as
Victorians like Charles Kingsley did. We know too
much of its seamy side, of its torture chambers and trea-
son trials, to regard it as simply the glorious dawn of
English Protestant liberty. Our experience of the ideo-
logical divisions of twentieth-century Europe has darkened
our view of the sixteenth century, and
the work of recent historians has taught
us what the men who engineered and
maintained the Protestant Revolution
knew very well: that, as an Elizabethan
Privy Councillor, Sir Ralph Sadler,
wrote, ‘the ancient faith still lay like
lees at the bottoms of men’s hearts and
if the vessel was ever so little stirred,
comes to the top’. Even our under-
standing of Shakespeare has been
changed by the evidence that most of
his family and connections were either
still Roman Catholics, or at least
Catholic sympathisers.
Robert Hutchinson has given his
compelling study of ‘Elizabeth’s spy
master’, her Secretary of State, a subti-
tle which a hundred years ago would
have seemed unremarkable, but is now
provocative. Walsingham is, he says,
‘one of the great unknown heroes of
English history. By right, he should
rank with Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Walsingham: relish for cruelty
Wellington and even Sir Winston
Churchill as one of the great patriotic defenders, against
all comers, of this island state, its monarchs, govern-
ments, beliefs and creeds.’ Setting aside the fact that
Walsingham’s England was not an island state, but a state
that formed part of an island, this is bold stuff, in line
with the ‘patr iotic’ Victor ian view of Elizabeth’s
England. Yet Hutchinson is also too honest a writer, and
too scrupulous a historian, to pretend that the man who,
investigating subversives, wrote ‘without torture I know
10
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
we shall not prevail’, was anything other than a ruthless
and unscrupulous zealot.
Walsingham, born 1532, son of a lawyer with estates
in Kent, came to prominence between 1566 and 1568,
crisis years in the history of sixteenth-century Europe.
Until then, the chief Catholic power, Spain, had acqui-
esced in the re-establishment of a Protestant regime in
England, with the Spanish king, Philip II (who had been
married to Mary Tudor and was therefore Elizabeth’s
former brother-in-law), extending his protection to
Elizabeth and even at one point thinking of marrying
sentence of excommunication on the Protestant queen.
His reason was simple: realpolitik ruled. Spain’s chief
rival was France, and, though the two countries had
been at peace since the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in
1559, that peace was uncertain. Moreover the Catholic
claimant to the English throne, Mary of Scotland, was
herself half-French and the widow of a French king. If
she should replace Elizabeth, Philip was alert to the
probability and danger of an Anglo-French alliance.
But in 1567 three things hap-
pened which wholly altered the
political situation. First, Mary was
deposed in Scotland and fled to
England, seeking help from her
cousin Elizabeth. This was refused
and she was held a pr isoner.
Second, a revolt in the
Netherlands, part of Philip’s
empire, soon took a Protestant
form. Third, civil war broke out
in France between Catholics
and Protestants. Henceforward
Western Europe was divided on
ideological lines.
In 1569 there was a Catholic
revolt in the north of England, its
leaders seeking to put Mary on
the throne and restore the old
religion. It was suppressed with
what Hutchinson calls ‘Tudor
mercilessness’. The following
year, with Philip’s restraining
hand lifted, the Pope at last
pronounced sentence of excom-
munication against Elizabeth, absolving her subjects of
any duty of allegiance to her. All English Catholics thus
became potential traitors in the minds of the ruling
Protestant clique, and some of the rasher, bolder among
them were indeed ready to engage in what the State
understandably saw as treason. Plots to remove Elizabeth
and replace her with Mary were formed.
Walsingham now came into his own, organising a
secret service of probably unprecedented efficiency. He
 BIOGRAPHY
employed spies and agents provocateurs to penetrate
Catholic circles, and to promote plots which
Walsingham then discovered, delivering the conspirators
to ‘justice’. Catholic priests were hunted down, tortured
and executed – for ‘treason’ of course, not for religion.
Hutchinson lists sixty-nine of Walsingham’s agents,
giving such biographical notes as may be found. The list
is probably incomplete.
Walsingham’s fear of a Catholic restoration was founded
in his own experience. He had fled England in Mary
Tudor’s reign, and he was in Paris as Elizabeth’s envoy at
the time of the St Bartholomew’s Night massacre of
French Protestants. So he was as quick to spot subversive
elements as any Soviet commissar: and, to do him
justice, the subversive elements were indeed present.
For fifteen years he engaged in a duel with Mary Stuart
that ended only with her execution. He worked for that,
infiltrating the groups of her sympathisers, having his
agents urge them further on, and then exposing their
plots. He employed cryptographers and forgers, extracted
confessions by torture, and finally trapped Mary into
apparently giving her consent to the assassination of
Elizabeth. Hutchinson has no doubt as to her guilt; nor,
until I read his book, had I. It still seems probable that
she did indeed agree to the murder, but, given the extent
of the forgeries practised by Walsingham’s agents, and
given also that Mary wrote her letters in French which
her secretaries transcribed in English, there must be a
possibility that she was innocent, but framed.
Walsingham was in his way undoubtedly an English
patriot, strong for the Protestant religion. Hutchinson’s
claim that he saved England – his England – may even be
granted; and so for Hutchinson he is a hero. ‘It would be
all too simple’, he admits, ‘for us glibly to equate
Elizabeth’s ubiquitous minister with the most notorious
and cruellest enforcers of a modern-day totalitarian nation
such as Lavrenti Beria… or Heinrich Himmler. But such a
hasty judgement would be wholly wrong, as it conve-
niently discounts the callous reality of the times in which
Walsingham lived and the challenges he confronted every
day.’ No doubt, no doubt, but it is surely going a bit far to
describe this police chief,
whose agents were, by
Hutchinson’s own account, Make reading comfortable in ways worthy of Sherlock
the scum of the earth, and
whose favoured instruments
were the rack and the thumb-
screw, as ‘a deeply spiritual contact its inventor, Gary Lancet
man’. We can recognise in
him rather an honest and
intelligent fanatic with a relish
Numerous awards
for cruelty – not indeed
60,000 sold
altogether unlike Beria.
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teachers, physiotherapists and Richard Ingrams
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C HANDAK S ENGOOPTA
BEWARE THE WATER
T HE M EDICAL D ETECTIVE : J OHN S NOW AND
THE M YSTERY OF C HOLERA
★
By Sandra Hempel
(Granta Books 304pp £18.99)
BRITAIN WAS STRUCK by four cholera epidemics between
1831 and 1867. Although it was an age of fatal infectious
diseases, none was as gruesome as this exotic import from
darkest Asia. It began with violent stomach cramps and
diarrhoea, and the patient died swiftly (though far from
painlessly) from acute dehydration. The disease spread like
wildfire through communities, and entire neighbourhoods
were wiped out in a matter of days. There was no cure
and no consensus on how to prevent it. The majority of
Victorian doctors thought that the disease was spread by a
miasmic influence carried by foul air. The idea was far
from implausible, especially since the filthiest parts of
towns seemed to be most vulnerable to the disease.
This book is about the nineteenth-century doctor
who did more than anybody else to undermine that
theory. John Snow (1813–58) was a general practitioner
of humble origins, and his early career was entirely
ordinary. The only remarkable things about the young
medical apprentice were his vegetarianism and teetotal-
ism. When chemical anaesthetics were introduced in the
1840s, Snow investigated them in a series of pioneering
experiments and became one of the first expert anaes-
thetists. He was to put the greatest of the land to sleep,
including Queen Victoria, but although his anaesthesia
practice was lucrative, he spent so much of his time
treating the poor that he never became truly wealthy.
Snow’s expertise with chloroform made him famous in
his lifetime, but it was his research on cholera that was to
bring him immortality as the ‘father of modern epidemi-
ology’. He was exceptional in approaching the problem
with an utterly or iginal
hypothesis, which he tested
with Bookchair! Holmes himself. Convinced
only £20.00 by the clinical picture that
including p&p cholera was an intestinal
disease spread by water con-
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1848–49 epidemic. He
showed how, on one street
in South London supplied
11
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 BIOGRAPHY
by two water companies, the cus-
tomers of one company fell victim to
cholera far more often than those who
got their water from the other supplier.
The former company drew its water
from a polluted stretch of the Thames
whilst the latter obtained its supplies
from a cleaner site upstream. Snow had
no idea what exactly caused cholera,
but whatever it was it travelled in water
and not by air, foul or otherwise.
Today, this study is justly regarded as a
classic of medical and epidemiological
research, and hindsight allows us to
appreciate that Snow, working long
before the coming of bacteriology, had
essentially solved the riddle of cholera.
It is the precision of Snow’s theory
that makes it seem so ‘modern’ to our
eyes. That very precision, however, John Bull defending Britain against cholera office, who established the causal link
made it unacceptable to the best med-
ical minds of the time. Until scientists of the late nine-
teenth century had proved beyond contention that lethal
diseases like tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid were caused
by specific microbes, most doctors found it logical to
assume that complex diseases were brought about by the
complex interactions of social, demographic and environ-
mental factors, with filth and foul air being the most
important. Polluted water might be one of the factors
involved in the spread of cholera, but for most Victorian
doctors it could not be the only one. Snow’s daring
hypothesis, therefore, was broadly dismissed at the time as
cranky, single-minded, and inadequate.
Although the hefty, multi-authored Cholera, Chloroform,
and the Science of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2003)
is the definitive biography of John Snow, most readers
F RANK M C LYNN
A Wicked,
Wicked Life
AVA G ARDNER
★ yet this did not seem to me to correspond with the
By Lee Server
(Bloomsbury 560pp £20)
AVA GARDNER, SURELY one of the best known of all
film stars, exemplified the classic rags-to-riches fable.
The seventh child of a North Carolina sharecropping
tobacco farmer, she was what the unkind describe as
poor white trailer trash, with accent and ambitions to
12
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
would probably appreciate a less
detailed account of his life and work.
Sandra Hempel’s The Medical Detective
is just that. Well researched and crisply
written, it provides a fine overview,
explaining the complexities of the
Victorian ideas of health, illness and
medicine that influenced Snow’s
research and its contemporary recep-
tion. Although Hempel obviously
admires Snow (who wouldn’t?), she is
no hagiographer and does not hesitate
to puncture ancient myths, such as the
familiar story of his stopping cholera in
Soho by removing the handle of a
water pump in Broad Street.
She also devotes a fascinating chap-
ter to William Farr, ‘Compiler of
Statistics’ in the Registrar-General’s
between cholera and contaminated
water by tracing the disease to polluted reservoirs in East
London during the 1866 epidemic. Although Snow had
conducted the same kind of study, Farr’s investigations
were more extensive; more importantly, they occurred at
a time when drainage, sanitation and clean water were
r ising to the top of the Victor ian social agenda.
Remarkable investments in public works – of which the
sewers under the Thames Embankment are but one
example – would soon transform the health of the
nation, and the 1866–67 epidemic was to be cholera’s last
visitation. It was not the research of either Snow or Farr
alone that led to the Victorian revolution in sanitation,
but any reader of Sandra Hempel’s splendid book would
agree that their contributions were fundamental to it.
To order this book at £15.20, see LR Bookshop on page 40
match. The height of her aspirations was to be a secre-
tary in New York, but she was ‘discovered’ from a
chance snapshot in a photographer’s window and
whisked away to Hollywood for the big star build-up,
purely on the basis of her looks. And here, straight away,
Lee Server’s workmanlike biography solves one problem
that has always puzzled me. While everyone agrees that
Ava Gardner was no great shakes as an actress, she was
consistently described as a woman of stunning beauty –
image I saw on the screen. According to Server, she was
one of those rare movie stars who are far more stunning
in the flesh than on celluloid; usually it works the other
way round, with fairly ordinary-looking men and
women being transformed by the magical alchemy of a
camera that likes them.
While most of the films Ava Gardner appeared in were
unmemorable to say the least, she soon attracted attention
 BIOGRAPHY
by the turbulence of her private life. At the age of nineteen
(in 1942) she married Mickey Rooney, then an MGM
superstar. Ava, who had been brought up in an atmosphere
of severe sexual repression, with parents who had major
hang-ups about carnality, was a virgin when she married
but took to sex with gusto; it soon became apparent that
she had both a natural talent and a voracious appetite for
the pleasures of the flesh. Tiring of Rooney’s habitual infi-
delities, she divorced him and married the clarinettist,
bandleader and would-be intellectual Artie Shaw. Her new
husband tried the Pygmalion treatment on her, introducing
her to books and the world of ideas, but Ava got tired of
his remorseless intellectual nagging and eventually found in
her third spouse, Frank Sinatra, a partner on her own
hedonistic level. By this time Ava was a promiscuous
woman, notably unbalanced, with a
taste for the bottle and a tendency to
fly into rages after the first few
drinks. Since Sinatra was one of the
most unpleasant individuals ever to
haunt even Hollywood – a place not
noted for its quota of St Francises –
the stage was set for a stormy,
on–off, six-year marriage, where it
was a toss-up which was the greater
prima donna. Yet even after divorce,
neither could entirely shake loose of
the other; for years afterwards there
were partial reconciliations, drink-
fuelled one-night stands and
rumours of remarriage. Sinatra, the
control freak’s control freak, was
incandescent with rage that a mere
‘broad’ could treat him with con-
tempt, but no one saw through him
more clearly than Ava, and it partic-
ularly irked him that she openly
despised his Mafia cronies like Sam
Giancana. Meanwhile, Ava was Gardner: unwholesome habits
working her way through the
dozens of lovers she acquired in her heady career: actors,
toyboys, barmen, sailors, musicians – they were all grist to
her mill. She made no distinction between Howard
Hughes, who spent much of his life vainly trying to make
her his creature, and the latest fancy she had picked up in a
bar during one of her interminable pub crawls. She had a
particular penchant for bullfighters, and had a lengthy and
torrid affair with Luis Miguel Dominguin, who in the
1950s was Spain’s premier matador.
By the age of forty Ava Gardner was a sensational
hedonist, a lady guaranteed to raise scandal wherever she
went. She was virtually thrown out of Franco’s Spain after
a long residence when she annoyed the locals by keeping
company with felonious gypsies and other lowlifes. For
the Argentine dictator Juan Perón and his second wife
13
Isabella, in exile in Madrid, she proved to be the neigh-
bour from hell. She despised acting and the world of the
movies and was by no means unintelligent, courting the
company of writers, some of whom became close friends:
Hemingway, Robert Graves, Henry Miller. But the
drunken escapades and the rampant promiscuity became
more and more pronounced. Lee Server’s description of
her fiery affair with the actor George C Scott sounds like
hell on earth, with drunken violence the norm and the
two of them engaging in a kind of obscene Attic
dialogue, the conversation sounding like some mad
sound-mixer’s amalgam of the saltiest nautical language
with a battery of four-letter words. Ava loved to shock
people with crude outbursts and crude deeds. Among the
latter, her favourite exploit was urinating in public in
hotel lobbies (a taste she shared
with other female performers, like
Edith Piaf and Rachel Roberts).
Among the for mer, her best-
known bon mot came when a
reporter asked her what she saw in
a 119-pound weakling like Sinatra.
Referring to the crooner’s notori-
ous physical endowment, she coolly
replied: ‘Well, I’ll tell you –
nineteen pounds is cock.’
Lee Server’s biography is not as
good as his previous work (on
Robert Mitchum), but this is
mainly because Ava Gardner was
neither as interesting nor as talented
as Mitchum. As a movie actress she
was close to negligible. Claims
have been made for her roles in
Show Boat, Pandora and the Flying
Dutchman, and Mogambo, but the
only part in which she really
impressed was that of Maxine Falk
in The Night of the Iguana – where
she was required to do little more
than play her own outrageous self. Cinephiles may well
be disappointed in this book, which is best read as black
comedy – the kind of thing someone like Ter ry
Southern might have devised as a fictional satire on
Hollywood. But Ava’s ‘wicked, wicked life’ – to borrow
the title of Errol Flynn’s autobiography – could be read
by feminists as the tale of a woman who never truckled
to anyone or anything. Despite all her excesses and cru-
dities, I found it difficult to dislike Ava Gardner. As she
herself often admitted, she was at root a simple country
girl, with a country girl’s values and attitudes, pitchforked
into a world of unreality simply because of her beauty.
She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and
after all who could blame her?
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 MUSIC & ART

R OGER S CRUTON denunciation of property, of political order, and of civil

law, which is equal to the fiercest diatribes of the Young
A QUEST FOR TRUTH Hegelians. The radical political vision that had compelled
Wagner onto the barricades with Bakunin survives in the
mordant deconstruction of Wotan, symbol of law, and of
T REACHEROUS B ONDS AND L AUGHING F IRE : Alberich, symbol of capitalist accumulation. Feuerbach’s
P OLITICS AND R ELIGION IN WAGNER ’ S R ING debunking of religion animates the drama, which shows
★ the gods as human dreams, worthless shadows of the live
By Mark Berry human passions that conjure them. It was indeed the
(Ashgate 300pp £50) Young Hegelians, and not Nietzsche, who first pro-
claimed the death of God, and according to one reading
STUDIES OF THE Wagner music dramas abound; but few the Ring is an exploration of what this momentous death
of them explore, as Mark Berry does in this dense, diffi- means for us who have survived it – what it means both
cult but rewarding book, the background of philosophical personally and politically.
and political ideas from which the dramas emerged. Berry’s respect for Frankfurt School writers like
Wagner was a man of universal intellect, who had been Adorno and Marcuse complements his highly politicised
steeped in the Young Hegelian philosophy that shaped reading of Wagner’s drama. This reading has been
the ideas of Marx, and who took an active and foolhardy fortified, too, by Chéreau’s famous centenary production
part in the revolutionary movements that briefly shook of the cycle under Boulez at Bayreuth. Berry leaves the
the Continent. Greek tragedy was as important an reader in no doubt that there are abundant insights into
influence on his artistic development as the music of both music and drama to be obtained by wearing Young
Beethoven, and his growth as a composer went hand in Hegelian spectacles. He points to the way in which
hand with a more hidden but equally significant growth Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave is repeatedly drama-
as a thinker. His prose writings – hectic in style, and tised in the power-relations among the pr incipal
frequently cryptic in content – testify to an intensely characters, and he emphasises the enduring dichotomy –
serious philosophical vision. Wagner wanted to under- love or power – which can be overcome only in the
stand the modern world in its full spiritual complexity, recognition of death as a part of love and the culmination
to present its inner truth in artistic form, and to find, of every worthwhile project, from the construction of
through art, a meaning that would both illustrate and Valhalla to the vow of conjugal love. He points to the
compensate for the loss of the old religion. The result of gradual conquest of Eros by Agape as the cycle proceeds,
this quest for the truth of modern life is contained in his and seems to recognise that by the end of
masterpiece, the Ring cycle, and Berry’s exploration of Götterdämmerung the Young Hegelian who had begun
the philosophical and political ideas that inspired the work on the cycle some thirty years before no longer
drama marks a step forward, both from the cheeky exists. But what has come to replace him? Berry leaves
Marxism of George Ber nard Shaw, and from the us with an enigma, and his deferential references to
attempts, of Donington and others, to read the drama in Chéreau’s production – in my view a total travesty of
purely ‘inner’, psychological terms. Wagner’s meaning – do nothing to resolve the final
Berry is an academic historian, a specialist in the history mystery of the Ring cycle, which is the mystery of
of ideas. But he has read widely in philosophy and litera- Wagner himself, on whose great brain a Tarnhelm of his
ture, and is musically literate, able to illustrate his own was always sitting.
argument from the score. This adds to the book’s cogency Berry’s account is detailed and scholarly, and it is
by reminding us that music is impossible to do justice to
the vehicle of the drama and its subtleties in a short
the proof of the ideas that review. In response I would
Musical Director: Christopher Fifield
compel it. Berry’s argument emphasise the sympathy
hacks its way through a CONCERT PROGRAMME FEBRUARY – JULY 2006 which the music conjures
thicket of quotations from Saturday, 11 February 2006 - Glinka: Kamarinskaya; Elgar: Cello
Concerto; Brahms: Symphony No. 2. for Wotan, and the very real
Wagner and his contempo- Saturday, 25 March 2006 - Haydn: Symphony No.90; Stanford: Clarinet attempt, both dramatic and
raries, with allusions to just Concerto; Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. musical, to present the rule
about every work of litera- Saturday, 20th May 2006 - Elgar: Crown of India; Bruch: Scottish of law – established though
ture or philosophy which Fantasia, Liszt: Mazeppa; Rachmaninov: Isle of the Dead.
Saturday, 1 July 2006 - Bizet: Jeux d’enfants; Reinecke: Harp Concerto;
it is by an ‘original usurpa-
might have had a part to play Mahler: Symphony no 4. tion’, as de Maistre put it –
in shaping Wagner’s ideas. All concerts start at 7.30pm in St. Luke’s Church, Knight’s Hill, West as the necessary background
According to Berry’s reading, Norwood, London, SE27. Tickets: Adults (£8), Concessions (£6), to human fulfilment.
the Ring cycle contains a Children (£1) Wagner’s initial conception,

14
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 MUSIC & ART
which saw Siegfried as the emancipating hero who was
to break the bonds of an old and moribund authority,
gave way to another and quite incompatible vision, in
which Siegfried is the true transgressor, the one who, by
failing to understand the meaning of promises, contracts
and laws, brings about his own and others’ destruction.
No matter that the power that upholds these contracts
and laws is a projection of our human need for him; no
matter that he is imbued with all our human imperfec-
tions; no matter that he, like we, must die. The point is
that, in destroying the gods, we destroy ourselves.
In this transformation of the Ring story, from Young
Hegelian beginnings to a quasi-Christian or at any rate
Schopenhauerian end, we witness a process of growing
up in Wagner for which there is no equivalent in Marx.
C HARLES S AUMAREZ S MITH
TREASURE GOING CHEAP
T HE S ALE OF THE L ATE K ING ’ S G OODS :
C HARLES I AND H IS A RT C OLLECTION
★ a National Gallery. The reason it started off with a
By Jerry Brotton
(Macmillan 436pp £25)
LIKE ANYONE INTERESTED in seventeenth-century history
and the origins of the English Civil War, I have been
aware that there were cultural issues involved. It is well
known that Van Dyck created a powerful iconography
of kingship through his many portraits of Charles I. Art
historians have studied as an aspect of provenance the
many great works of art which were acquired by Charles
I from the Gonzaga collections in Mantua. And histori-
ans have described in detail Charles I’s lavish programme
of building construction, his addiction to the masque as
the most opulent form of
court entertainment, and his
acquisition of pictures redo-
lent of popery for Henrietta
Maria’s chapel in Somerset
House. These activities were
symptomatic of an increasing
isolation of the court – vain,
cosmopolitan and self-
indulgent – from the King’s
subjects, who were anxious to
know how his extravagance
was going to be paid for.
However, it was only
when, four years ago, I
walked into the great, barrel-
vaulted, early-nineteenth-
centur y galler ies of the Charles I: iconography of kingship
15
That is why the portrait of Nibelheim still has such
power for us, long after the Marxist cr itique of
capitalism has lost its sheen. The argument for the free
economy was won a century ago by Ludwig von Mises;
the caricature known (after Saint-Simon and Marx) as
‘capitalism’ has no relation to the service economy that
prevails today in every part of the globe. Yet the Ring
cycle still warns us of a deep and ineradicable fault in the
scheme of things, a fault that lies concealed in freedom
itself, and which we must confront and overcome not in
the world of power politics but in our own hearts,
where love battles with selfishness, and renunciation
with organic life. In other words, as I understand it, The
Ring is not about power or money or even love; it is
about original sin.
Prado and saw Jonathan Brown’s brilliant exhibition on
the sale of Charles I’s collection that I realised the full
extent of both the acquisition of great works of art by
the King and the extraordinary losses which resulted
from their subsequent sale. It has always felt as if England
was struggling to keep up with other European coun-
tries when it came to art, having been late in creating
relatively inferior national collection was because its
great royal collection, acquired in Italy, Spain and the
Low Countries during the 1620s, had been sold.
Now Jerry Brotton, a young historian at Queen Mary
College with an enviable command of the secondary
literature, both historical and art-historical, and a good
understanding of the way objects and works of art assume
ideological significance, has told the amazing story of
Charles I’s collection and its subsequent sale in full.
The story begins with Prince Henry’s activities as a
collector, dying with a Gianbologna statuette of a horse
thrust into his hand by his younger brother. Surrounded by
courtiers who were interested in acquiring portraits and
works of art for the galleries
of their Jacobean mansions
(including the Earl of Arundel,
who had travelled to Italy with
Inigo Jones), the young Prince
Charles inherited his older
brother’s interest in art and his
mother’s collection of religious
art. He showed his mettle in
1621 by complaining that
Rubens had sent him a picture
‘scarce touched by his own
hand, and the posture so forced,
as the Prince will not admit the
picture into his gallery’.
In 1623, Charles went on a
bizarre mission with the Duke
of Buckingham to Madrid,
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 MUSIC & ART
the two of them dressed in disguise as Jack and Tom
Smith. Apparently he tried ‘to collect any paintings and
original drawings he could obtain, money being no
object in their acquisition’. He bought works by Titian
and Dürer, and sat for his portrait (since lost) to the
young Diego Velázquez. From Spain, Charles ordered
the purchase of the Raphael Cartoons, and, once he had
returned, he appointed Abraham van der Doort as
Keeper of his collection.
Following his coronation, Nicholas Lanier negotiated
on the King’s behalf the acquisition of the Gonzaga
collection, including Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar and
great works by Raphael and Correggio. As is so often
the case with the acquisition of works of art, the negoti-
ations were tortuous, and Brotton admirably describes
the to-ing and fro-ing and occasional double-crossing.
When Rubens arrived in London in June 1629 (as an
envoy from the Archduchess Isabella), he described ‘the
incredible quantity of excellent pictures, statues, and
ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court’
and expressed surprise at finding ‘none of the crudeness
which one might expect from a place so remote from
Italian elegance’.
How far did Charles I’s collection of works of art
influence public prejudice against him? The answer must
be that they were emblems of his rule – expensive, for-
eign, popish, and alien to the puritanical instincts of his
subjects. After his execution in 1649, the collection was
exhibited for sale in Somerset House and dispersed. It
made a gloomy spectacle, descr ibed by Lodewijk
Huygens as ‘all so badly cared for and so dusty that it
was a pitiable sight’. Some parliamentarians were able to
acquire works extremely cheaply, like Colonel William
Webb, who bought ‘A naked Venus asleep’ by Isaac
Oliver, and Colonel Hutchinson, who spent £950 on
three Titians. But the principal beneficiary of the sale
was Alonso de Cárdenas, who was able to acquire great
works on behalf of the Spanish crown. It is a tragic
record of undervaluation, and the income was not
enough to justify the sale. Eventually Oliver Cromwell
halted it, conscious of the value of works of art in
enhancing his authority, and Charles II recovered many
of the works by forced restitution after the Restoration.
But the integrity of Charles I’s collection was destroyed,
its treasures scattered throughout Europe, and no subse-
quent monarch has had the same level of interest in art
or connoisseurship.
Brotton is inclined to view the sale of Charles I’s
collection as no bad thing, stimulating the art market
and converting an interest in art from the court to the
city. But works of art which once belonged in the royal
collection are now only to be seen in Paris, Vienna and
Madrid, and one of the great collections of seventeenth-
century Europe has been lost for ever.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 40
16
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
J ANE R YE
THE STUDIO IN THE SOUTH
T HE Y ELLOW H OUSE : VAN G OGH , G AUGUIN,
AND N INE T URBULENT W EEKS IN A RLES
★
By Martin Gayford
(Penguin Fig Tree 368pp £18.99)
MARTIN GAYFORD FEELS that biographies generally fail
to convey ‘a sense of what it would be like to meet the
subject face to face’. In his account of one of the most
famous and intimately documented episodes in the history
of art he attempts to put us ‘in the same room’ as his
subjects – even ‘inside their heads’. But looking at the
extraordinary self-portraits they exchanged (before
Gauguin finally showed up at Van Gogh’s anxiously pre-
pared Yellow House on 23 October 1888), it is difficult
to avoid the feeling that one would distinctly rather not
be in the same room as this murderous-looking pair. Van
Gogh, portraying himself, he says, ‘in the character of a
simple bonze worshipping the eternal Buddha’, comes
across as more psychopath than monk, while Gauguin,
modelling himself on Jean Valjean, Victor Hugo’s outcast
hero from Les Misérables, is a sinister villain, leering slyly
from the corner of the canvas. As for ‘inside their heads’
– in a covering letter sent with the Les Misérables self-
portrait, Gauguin wrote:
Passionate blood suffuses the face as it does a creature
in rut, and the eyes are enveloped by tones as red as
the fire of a forge, which indicate the inspiration like
molten lava which fills the soul of painters like us.
It sounds in this passage as if Gauguin aspired to madness
for creative purposes – while poor Van Gogh, his head
fizzing with ideas like a pressure-cooker, was trying to
cling on to his sanity.
There would have been more prosaic reasons, too, for
not wishing to be in a confined space with this unlikely
pair of homemakers. Setting the scene for Gauguin’s
arrival, which was awaited with nervous, almost lover-
like eagerness by Van Gogh, Gayford describes the studio
as smelling of ‘pipe smoke, as well as turpentine, pigment,
and Vincent himself ’. This last is a rare example of spec-
ulation in an account which is admirably free of ‘would
haves’ and ‘must haves’. But it seems reasonable: there
was no plumbing, and according to the catalogue of the
2000 exhibition of Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of
the South, on which this book is largely based, the artists
relied on what is described as ‘lavatory privileges’ at the
hotel next door. And Vincent talked non-stop, ‘pouring
out sentences’, according to one witness, ‘in Dutch,
English and French, then glancing back over his shoulder
at you and hissing through his teeth’.
 MUSIC & ART

The idea was to found an the flamboyant Prado, whose

artists’ colony of the South: execution Gauguin later went to
the simple life in the sun, watch). And he attempts to elu-
artists working side by side, cidate the ‘vertiginous thought-
sharing ideas and techniques, associations’ that assailed Van
making a new art that would Gogh (‘Poor fighter and poor,
elevate and console the ordi- poor sufferer’ as Theo so touch-
nary man in place of religion; ingly calls him) when he was on
close to nature and away from the brink of madness.
the cold, grey, over-civilised He brings together all the
North. Both artists were late latest research, including tech-
starters and outsiders, but the nical findings on the chronology
plan was really Van Gogh’s, of the Yellow House paintings,
growing, as much as anything and adds, modestly, a few sug-
else, from his longing for the Gauguin: joie de vivre gestions and interpretations of
companionship and settled his own. There’s an appendix
domesticity that he was so spectacularly bad at. Even his headed ‘Gauguin, Vincent and the brothels’, and another
devoted brother Theo found him unbearable at close on ‘The drama of the ear and Vincent’s madness’ in
quarters. But if Vincent wanted to settle down, Gauguin which he suggests what you might call the literary
was preparing to set off on more exotic travels. sources of this act. It’s a story of such fascination on
The story of the Studio of the South is inevitably over- so many levels that it can hardly fail, but this is clearly
shadowed by its shocking climax, when Van Gogh, after a labour of love and Martin Gayford tells it vividly,
‘one of the most astonishing creative sprints in the history intelligently and intelligibly. Adequate illustrations, just
of Western art’, went temporarily mad, cut off his own ear about, are incorporated in the text, which is nice –
and presented it to a prostitute. Gauguin is often seen as though ideally one would read it with a copy of the
the villain of the piece, with Van Gogh the unworldly ‘Studio of the South’ catalogue to hand.
innocent, but as Mark Roskill pointed out there was ‘a To order this book at £15.20, see LR Bookshop on page 40
strong element of calculation’ in Van Gogh’s personality, as
in his art. In fact, bounder though he undoubtedly was in
some ways, Gauguin seems to have shown forbearance and
even a rather baffled kindness towards his difficult
companion. The dream of work and companionship was
not all disastrous and there is an element of humour in the
earnest homemaking of this essentially feral pair of geniuses,
with Gauguin, the practical sailor, taking over the cooking
and finances, deploring Vincent’s untidiness, and setting
aside a small sum every week for ‘hygienic excursions’
to the brothel. Above all, of course, as they worked
together on the same subjects, the intellectual and artistic
interaction between the two painters, which Gayford FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS
follows in detail, was, despite incomprehensions and mis-
understandings, extraordinarily, unpredictably fruitful. Grants and Pensions are available to
Both artists were prolific letter-writers, and with eleven published authors of several works who
are in financial difficulties due to
postal collections and five deliveries a day letters, canvases personal or professional setbacks.
and money shuttled constantly back and forth between
Applications are considered in confidence by
Paris and Arles. Van Gogh’s letters to Theo give an incom- the General Committee every month.
parably detailed account of the progress of paintings, as of For further details please contact:
thoughts, feelings and expenditure. There is a huge Eileen Gunn
General Secretary
amount of contemporary documentation and later The Royal Literary Fund
scholarship to draw on, and Gayford has assembled it 3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA
miraculously into a clear, if complex, narrative. He enables Tel 0207 353 7159
us to follow the painters’ activities almost from hour to Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk
hour, and to become familiar with the writers (Loti, Zola, www.rlf.org.uk
Daudet) and other artists who influenced their ideas, and Registered Charity no 219952
with the murder trials they followed (Jack the Ripper and

17
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 MUSIC & ART
M ICHAEL P RODGER
Brushes at
Twenty Paces
T HE J UDGEMENT OF PARIS : M ANET,
M EISSONIER AND AN A RTISTIC R EVOLUTION
★ submit their works to a jury, who would select those
By Ross King
(Chatto & Windus 448pp £17.99)
FRANCE’S ARTISTS HAVE never been ones to let their
country’s fondness for revolution pass them by. Jacques-
Louis David was not only a signatory to Louis XVI’s
death warrant but forged Neoclassicism into the style
of the 1789 Revolution; Antoine-Jean Gros’s daring
proto-Romanticism was born alongside the gimcrack
glamour of Napoleon’s rule; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading
the People, complete with self-portrait, was the icon of
the événements of 1830.
Ross King’s wonderfully rich The Judgement of Paris
purports to tell the story of another, artistic revolution,
the birth of Impressionism, but it is no coincidence that
the years in which the movement came into being were
also ones of civil turmoil as Napoleon III’s Second
Empire met its bloody end in the Franco-Prussian War
and the emergence of the Third Republic. The key
figures in King’s nar rative were not, however,
Impressionists but two artists who in their opposing
ways summed up the forces that were contending for
supremacy in French art, and French society as a whole.
Today, Ernest Meissonier is an almost forgotten figure.
He is known, if at all, for his minute and meticulous
historical genre scenes in which seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century gallants disport themselves like the
characters in Dumas’s novels. In 1863, the starting date
of King’s book, however, Meissonier was probably the
best-known and most lauded painter in France, and cer-
tainly the richest. Delacroix
called him ‘the incontestable
master of our epoch’ and he
lived in a plutocratic style
more befitting a banker than
a mere dauber. He would
take months or even years to
paint his pictures, but when
they did appear, the crowds
in the Paris Salon gathered www.lifelinespress.com
so thickly in front of them Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms
they had to be kept back by “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents roused, he is exemplary. He
the police.
Edouard Manet was
18
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
seventeen years younger than Meissonier, and while he
was known for his wit and his penchant for ‘intentionally
gaudy trousers’, he was not known for his paintings.
When Baudelaire called for ‘painters of modern life’, as
opposed to yet more artists with a repertoire consisting
solely of classical or religious subjects, it was just such a
man as Manet he had in mind. Unfortunately modernity
brought neither sales nor respect.
The most important showcase for contemporary art in
nineteenth-century France was the Salon. Artists could
worthy of display in the annual exhibition. Both Salon
and jur y were the fiefdom of the Comte de
Nieuwerkerke, a man who upheld the traditional
verities in painting – solid technique, high finish, and a
morally uplifting subject. He once magnificently
dismissed the work of Realists such as Courbet as ‘the
painting of democrats, of men who don’t change their
underwear’. The Salon was not, therefore, the natural
home of the avant-garde.
In 1863, fewer than half the 5,000 works submitted to
the Comte de Nieuwerkerke’s jury were accepted, and
the simmering dissatisfaction of France’s artists came to a
head. They demanded a more liberal and inclusive
regime, and after the intervention of Napoleon III the
rejected painters were granted a Salon of their own –
the Salon des Refusés. Manet, Pissarro and Cézanne
were among those who exhibited, but what they hadn’t
realised was that the public would attend as much in the
spirit of watching a freak show as to examine for them-
selves the merits of painters the official art world
had rejected. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe was not
then recognised as one of the most important paintings
of the century but was greeted with hilarity; ‘never’,
said one chuckling critic, ‘was such insane laughter
better deserved’.
Ross King points to the contrast between the two
Salons and between Meissonier and Manet as encapsu-
lating the state of French art in miniature: here was the
wider battle between reaction and progression, labour
and spontaneity, history and real life, detail and broad
effects being played out.
With g reat deftness he
tracks the careers of both
men in the decade leading
up to the most important
exhibition in the history of
art, the Impressionist group
show of 1874. As a guide to
the art scene of the period,
to the ad hoc alliances
for med and the passions
is no less lucid when
descr ibing the quickly
 MUSIC & ART

moving politics and social a painting.

shifts against which his In 1890 Meissonier’s
artists painted – these picture of a broken
were, after all, men of Napoleon in 1814, The
wide interests and deep Campaign of France, was
idealism, who took a sold for 850,000 francs,
full part in the events of the highest price paid in
their time. the nineteenth century
In many ways for any painting by any
Meissonier is the more artist – living or dead.
sympathetic of his two Since then he has, in
painters. Manet may have King’s words, ‘vanished
suffered for his art in from the histor y of
experiencing neglect and French art like a mur-
r idicule but Meissonier dered enemy of Stalin
suffered from a rarer com- airbrushed from an offi-
plaint: he took painting cial Soviet photograph’.
too seriously. While he Meissonier’s ‘La Rixe’, 1855 True to for m, Manet’s
was no reactionary and trajector y was in the
was broadly sympathetic to the aspirations of the opposite direction. His success may have been
younger generation, he nevertheless believed in the old posthumous, but he won the battle so vividly depicted
ways enough to draw 100 studies of a horse’s leg to by Ross King, and it is he who now reigns as the
get it right, or to smother his garden with several tons presiding deity of French painting.
of flour in order to imitate the effects of snow for To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 40

LETTERS

SEXY CLASSICS GAIA & GOD

Dear Sir, Dear Sir,

As a sixth-form student studying Latin and Greek, I was
very pleased to see that Boris Johnson had written a
sexy Classics book to inspire others. I did enjoy the
review very much – but I think that there is a problem
with the book. Johnson’s central thesis is wrong – there
is absolutely no point in comparing the EU and the
Roman Empire. One grew gradually and, one might
say, organically, by force of arms. But the EU has grown
the other way round – it was started to avoid war. There
is no cultural influence from Brussels in the way that
Rome influenced Europe. Nor do we ape the manners
and customs of the Belgians, but laugh at them for being
boring. The only comparison to be made is that geo-
graphically they cover similar ground. It seems rather
that Johnson has thought up a good idea for a book
without thinking too hard about his subject matter.
If interest in the Classics is to survive, then Johnson
might like to find a more convincing argument for his
next book.
Yours faithfully,
T J Kilkenny
Sussex
As a man of faith and a supporter of Gaian theory, it was
with interest that I read Bryan Appleyard’s article on
Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia. I agree with Appleyard
in the most part; the important contribution that
Lovelock has made to environmentalism is often over-
looked. Yet I find the reviewer’s comments on the
relation between religion and Gaia highly debatable.
Gaia is surely compatible with the doctrine of Christian
Stewardship – both talk of the inherent importance of
the universe and our responsibility to live in it correctly.
The idea of a finely tuned universe is not out of sync
with religious understanding either; in fact the notion of
a finely tuned universe is an argument for a divine cre-
ator. If John 3:16’s ‘for God so loved the world’ is to be
understood in truth, then the Christian has a duty not
only to understand, but to embrace the teachings of
James Lovelock.
Yours faithfully,
Don Huxley
St Mary’s Bay,
Auckland,
New Zealand

19
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 INTERVIEW

V S N AIPAUL hasn’t been well. place them in the least obtrusive

Feeling more comfortable with FARRUKH D HONDY TALKS TO position on the dining table, at
Indian doctors and medical provi- which we sit.
sion than with the National V S N AIPAUL Augustus, the cat, periodically
Health Service, he has been in appears outside on the window sill
New Delhi for several months for as we speak, and demands to be let
treatment and recovery. Now he’s back in England and in. He is a more than usually imperious fellow and insists
says he’s writing again. on attention from Vidia, who has a way of commanding
I visit him in his Wiltshire cottage and the following him to sleep. He surprisingly obeys, curling up at our feet.
interview is conducted in short periods over two days. This is our second extended interview, again for the
He’d like me, he says, to follow his own method of Literary Review. The first, in August 2001, was contro-
interviewing, which is to take notes in longhand as the versial: his comments on E M Forster, John Maynard
subject speaks: he doesn’t trust tape-recorders. I don’t Keynes and James Joyce were considered provocative. As
trust them either, and so have brought two with me, we begin, I suggest that we stay off politics in this inter-
pocket-size, and made sure they have fresh batteries. I view and he agrees.

Would you say luck has any part to play in the career and
success of a writer?
I worked so hard for so many things. The luck came
at the beginning when I was trying to get started. That
day in the Langham Hotel, the BBC building where I
was working, if it hadn’t occurred to me to write about
the street in which I grew up in Port of Spain in
Trinidad, I might have floundered for many years. If the
people in the room – the freelancers’ room in the BBC
– hadn’t encouraged me, I might never have got started.
I felt I was doing it in my own way. It wasn’t all easy
going – the book I was writing wasn’t published for
four years.
England had different ideas of writing then – from
what I was doing. This has gone on right to this day.
Would you say you were writing outside the tradition of
English literature?
That’s Leavis and Cambridge and all that – and it’s not
important. What’s important is that England didn’t
understand what I was doing. If it were my own territo-
ry it would be different, but I have no territory. England
has not appreciated or acknowledged the work I have
done. My task was to open up a territory of readership.
It was very slow – too slow for me.
Were you conscious of trying to open up this territory of
readership?
I always wrote for the smallest audience: my wife (Pat,
and now Nadira), someone I knew at the BBC, my
publishers and my editor at Deutsch.
Surely a book like Among the Believers, which entailed travels
through the Muslim world, was written for a universal audience?
Since writing is a process of learning, writing that
book was a process for me. It found a readership after it
was published.
It got into a lot of trouble in places like Harvard and
MIT. There are some very wise people in these places
who, in their wisdom, had no need to go to a country
to find out what was going on there. They already knew
what was to be known.
I can’t stress this strongly enough – everything I dis-
covered and wrote was done for myself. I didn’t know
what on earth I was doing at MIT, but I had accepted
their invitation to speak about the book and I found
they were very concerned about Iran. I remember talk-
ing about the Iranian love of blood. When a man fell
bleeding in a religious demonstration, people went and
dipped their hands and pieces of cloth in his blood. The
people I was with refused to believe it. This couldn’t
happen. Oh God! How wise they were!
There was an American paper which was going to
serialise the book in three parts, but they cancelled.
Why?
They would have been told by the Wise People that it
must be stopped. Twenty years later it may seem that
these ideas were to be given to a waiting world – but
they still had a hard time.
Even in the first book, Miguel Street, I was experi-
menting. I wanted it to be simple, new and pictorial –
every sentence.
Did your experience of writing change as you went on?
My idea of writing developed as I wrote. I still have
no big idea of writing. My only idea is that if you are
doing non-fiction it should be truthful. The people
about whom you write should themselves be able to see
the truth of it. After the book we’ve spoken about,
Among the Believers, was published, people wrote from
Iran to say I’d missed the point. I had written about
driving in Tehran. It’s dangerous and precarious. The car
I was in returned from every journey with the scrapings
of paint from other cars.
And they picked on the same observation when I read
extracts to a Harvard audience. They didn’t like that
at Harvard at all. Harvard said it was ‘colonial’ to write
the truth.

20
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 INTERVIEW

Do you think you met particularly bigoted or silly people at gives people a name – very important. There is a line of
these universities? The Wise Ones? emotion in his writing, which varies as he writes so you
I don’t think so. I think these universities have passed follow the emotion of the writer rather than the banality
their peak. The very idea of the university may be of how the narrative is going to end. There’s no one
finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were produc- like him, I think.
ing divines. Then it took a turn and the University There is the brutality of his short life. He began writing
began to produce smart people. The idea of learning when he was thirty, and then in ten years it was almost all
came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, over. He was in pain, then mad, so everything he did was
and it went on some way into the twentieth. done in ten years. He must have worked all the time and
Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no pur- yet with a kind of ease. It is a supernatural talent. And
pose to a university education. The Socialists want to when you read, you ask yourself what is the country that’s
send everybody to these places. I feel that these places giving him all this wonderful material and you have to
ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their see, after a while, that it isn’t a country that’s giving him
qualifications at the Post Office. the material. He, by his vision, is creating a country.
Not including scientific qualifications? It’s strange. When we read
No, those must remain. But the Maupassant at school he seemed
Humanities – they seem to me to very provincial, very French. That
be worthless disciplines. is still true, but the work is
Though you just said that your ideas for everybody.
of writing developed as you yourself This can’t be said of English
wrote, in the past you’ve spoken and writers. (We can leave Dickens
written about the function of writing in out of that consideration.) English
a culture, for example in Russia … writing is very much of England,
… and in France. These ideas for the people of England, and is
have themselves developed. They not meant to travel too far.
didn’t come to me from the start. I Which writers would you say partic-
was too ignorant. Say when I began ularly fall into this Englishness?
to read Maupassant I was too igno- Hardy. An unbearable writer.
rant to appreciate him fully. Some Why?
wisdom is needed, some experience He can’t wr ite. He doesn’t
is needed before you see a culture know how to compose a para-
and you see the writers more clearly. g raph, no g ift of nar rative. I
If you were talking to me twenty- would say that the Romantic fem-
five years ago I would have said inine fiction has that quality.
Balzac was the g reatest French Even the great ones? Jane Austen?
writer. Now I say Maupassant – a What trouble I have with Jane
very great man. I began to reread Austen! Jane Austen is for those
Balzac and had a certain amount of people who wish to be educated
trouble with it. I was disappointed – in English manners. If that isn’t
with myself really. I came across the Maupassant stories, part of your mission, you don’t know what to do with
all the stories – 1,100 pages. They were in chronological this material.
order and quite well translated. It was an education. There was a conference at Bath a few years ago and I
In the beginning he writes very carefully, not wishing was invited. I was a very bad conference guest – I didn’t
to put a foot wrong. In the middle he is more secure. say a word. But they gave me a copy of Jane Austen’s
He does things instinctively and well, and then, near the novel set in Bath – Northanger Abbey. In my recent illness
end of his life, his thoughts are about death, and the I’ve been looking at books I haven’t read before so I
pieces get shorter and they are very, very affecting. picked it up.
There is a character in a Chekhov play who talks about I thought halfway through the book, Here am I, a
Maupassant and says his talent is almost supernatural, and grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and
I have to agree with that, because in nearly every story her so-called love life – she calls it ‘love’, having seen
there is a complete life that is being displayed. And there this fellow once. I said to myself, What am I doing with
are so many stories. You wonder where he got the this material? This is for somebody else, really. It’s for
material and it seems so natural and easy. someone down the road, not for me.
When you read, you can analyse it and see his Are you then surprised that people make so much of her?
method. It’s very precise geographically and he always Yes, it purely depends on political power in the world.

21
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 INTERVIEW

If you come from England when your country is impor- haven’t abolished it. He hated black people. Strange, eh?
tant, then this kind of nonsensical writing becomes Do you judge the British writers of the twentieth century in
important for you. If the country had failed in the the same way?
nineteenth century no one would have been reading That’s very interesting. It’s true of Waugh. The idea of
Jane Austen. The books would have been about failure. an international readership doesn’t enter until quite late.
They would have demonstrated the reasons for failure. H G Wells, writing his early short stories, is not writing
I don’t want to be confused, in what I am saying for people outside. He is taking a lot of the clichés of
about Jane Austen, with people from the Wise places, imperialism and making the stories – good writer though
the Very Wise People who say that she represents a great he is. If you read the stories from the 1890s they have
hypocrisy, writing in this way about affairs of the heart African voodoo and Indian priests, etc. He hasn’t been
and young people while there are the slaves toiling in out of the country, he is just dealing in received ideas.
the plantations of the Caribbean. What hypocrisy! Russell was universal, even though he didn’t write
That’s the kind of thing the Wise People do say. And it’s fiction. He wrote very simply, very clearly, explaining
very foolish, because if they knew a bit more, beyond their philosophical ideas.
little disciplines, they would know that the slave trade, the He had a vast readership in English-speaking India.
British slave trade, was abolished in 1807 and this wish to The History of Western Philosophy? Yes. But people
talk about sensibility, etc, was part of the climate that made don’t have to write for the world. They must write for
this abolition of the trade possible and later, very quickly, themselves, for their friends.
in 1834, made the abolition of slavery itself possible. Doesn’t that deny books their significance?
The idea of refinement, manner, that was the climate. No. No. In great periods, what writers write for them-
So Jane Austen has some effect? selves travels. Very often it travels because the world is so
She didn’t have an effect, she was part of it. She retarded generally it has very little of its own to look to. I
reflects it. If we compare it with the ancient Romans, don’t mean people having a message for the outside
they were able to talk about the good life while encour- world. The writer, by the nature of the interests expressed
aging and having the most brutal kind of slavery all in the book, can win the attention of other people.
around them. It never occurred to them to question the Take American writing. Mark Twain is universal, in
life around them. Cicero made jokes about slaves being that anybody can read his work and find matter, whereas
treated badly or people in the arena dying horribly. Fitzgerald is local to America. In Twain’s work we can
There were different cruel tasks at different times of day. find humour, a tone of voice that appears to talk to all
A criminal would be sent out without any weapons to people, and then there’s his attitude to his material. He
fight an armed man. So there was no fight really and is not exalting his material.
that was a simple kind of excitement for the crowd. It You see your recent Indian writers exalt their material:
was Seneca who got as far as saying you must remember they are writing about daddy and mammy and chacha
that the slave is a man. He never got much further than (uncle) and chachi (aunty) and they are exalting their
that. Roman slavery was brutal. material. Critics reading their books, poor innocent
England was the first country to abolish slavery. We critics reading Indian books, might come to the conclu-
must bear that in mind. We don’t have to read Jane sion, ‘My God! X, Y or Z comes from a very grand
Austen’s novels, but we must recognise that those manners Indian family, we didn’t know about this!’
and that sensibility which she writes about were part of We don’t only find this in Indian writers.
the enlightenment that brought about the end of slavery. You only have to look at that dreadful American man
Why do you exempt Dickens from your judgement on Henry James. The worst writer in the world actually. He
English writers? never went out in the world.
I read some of the very Yes, he came to Europe and
early essays a short time ago: he ‘did’ and lived the writer’s
Sketches by Boz – they were life. He never r isked any-
good. There’s so much rub- thing. He never exposed
bish in Dickens. Wordiness, himself to anything. He trav-
too many words, repetitive- MA Degree in Biography elled always as a gentleman.
Starting September 2006
ness. He was trying to do Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or When he wrote English
something, but by God the two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first Hours about what he was see-
African never had a worse postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. ing in England – written for
Course director: Jane Ridley
enemy. In one of his essays… an American magazine – this
Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at
Which essay? The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
man would write about the
I can’t recall. The Wise Tel: 01280 814080 races at Epsom and do it all
People will tell you, if they from a distance. He never

22
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 INTERVIEW
thought he should mingle with the crowd and find out
what they were there for, or how they behaved. He did it
all from the top of a carriage or the top of a coach. A lot
of his writing is like that.
And he exalts his material because he thinks that this
subject matter he has alighted on – the grandeur of
Europe and the grandeur of American new money – is
unbeatable. Elizabeth Hardwick said to me about Henry
James many years ago, ‘What’s he going on about?
These people he is talking about are just Americans!’
It has the effect that young American people still think
they can ‘do a Henry James’ – come to Europe and
write a book like Henry James.
You couldn’t say the same about Hemingway, whom young
Americans also try to follow. He did mingle with people.
Hemingway didn’t know where he was, ever, really.
He was so busy being an American and that was his sub-
ject matter. You wouldn’t have any idea, from
Hemingway or Fitzgerald and their stories or writings
about Paris, that Paris was in the most terrible way
between the wars. They just talked about the cafés, the
drinks and oysters and things like that. They don’t see
the larger thing outside. I find it very difficult to read
that kind of writing or to take it seriously. It’s for other
people – people down the road…
We’ve come across them before…
This idea of Gay Paris and all of that, that’s what they
wrote about. The catastrophe of the wars, the death of
men – they weren’t aware of that. Nowadays they don’t
go to France to write about it any more. Because when
a place is OK, as France now is, it is very hard to know
how to write about it. It’s easier to go to places where
you can stand out against the local people more easily.
You go to India, you go to Nepal.
There’s a whole crowd of them. You can scarcely get
into the travel agents for these people pushing their way
into writing books. You don’t know. The books are sent
to me in any number every month. They wouldn’t be sent
to you because you’ve not written about India in that way.
No. You think the writing of these Europeans or Englishmen
is consciously dedicated to standing out from the population?
People do the expatriate novel not only about India,
but also – in the old days – about Italy, about Greece,
Mexico and Latin America. They themselves begin to
be defined by the background so they don’t have to do
any more work.
Explain.
Take Graham Greene and Our Man in Havana. He
doesn’t have to define his people, his lead expatriate
characters. They are defined by what they see around
them – Captain Segura, the police, and the general seed-
iness of the place.
When I was reviewing books in 1958–63, those little
expatriate books came in all the time. People who want
to put words in italics: señores and señoras, so it looks like
23
real writing.
This exaltation of the material, the pretences in Indian
writing – is this a recent trend, or was it always so?
No. I don’t think R K Narayan exalted his material or
that Mulk Raj Anand, writing in the Thirties and later,
did. I think it’s occurred with the latest crop of writers,
who have been encouraged by all kinds of foolish people
to do these family sagas, and it’s so bad for India, the
encouragement of this rubbish. Because writing isn’t that.
It shouldn’t be about cracking yourself up so that peo-
ple on the outside say, ‘We knew Indians were grand
people after all. Kipling didn’t say so, and others didn’t
say so, but here we have the evidence.’
You know and I know there’s no such thing as Indian
grandeur. Here these boys are doing it, all in a great rush
since the Nineties, and it’s as bogus as hell. It really
implies that they have never looked outside their little
tawdry family circle.
Why do you think this trend has taken hold of Indian writing?
The instinct to boast is prevalent among people
who’ve suffered. They boast easily. (I have a lot of boast-
ers in my family.) Or perhaps that’s too grand a way of
looking at it, actually. Put it this way: it makes it easier
to have a point of view if you can boast like that.
There’s only one Indian writer, in my little experi-
ence, who has not boasted. I am thinking of Bond –
Ruskin Bond. I am talking now of his autobiography,
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 11 April 2006
Annual British Academy Lecture
Kinds of People: Moving Targets
Professor I M Hacking, FBA, College de France
5.30pm, Tuesday 25 April 2006
Shakespeare Lecture
Johnson, Shakespeare and the
Invention of the Author
Professor C I E Donaldson, FBA,
The Australian National 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 April 2006
 INTERVIEW
which is called Scenes from a Writer’s Life.
Why do you find him fascinating – or at least free of this
bogus attitude?
I have read nothing like that from India or anywhere
else. It’s very simple. Everything is underplayed, and the
truths of the book come rather slowly at you.
He is writing about solitude, tremendous solitude. He
himself doesn’t say it. He leaves it all to you to pick up. I
haven’t read another book about solitude from India. In
a way, from this great subcontinent full of people, to
write a book about solitude is quite an achievement. I
was very moved by his book.
He comes from a kind of darkness. There is a darkness
all around him: a broken family in the background.
There’s a love for the father. He stays with the father
after the family breaks down. He is quite a little boy. His
father has a stamp collection. It’s a serious stamp collec-
tion, a great family possession.
Typical of Bond that he should put in a letter from his
father, just saying ‘the last letter from my father’ – just
prints it. Very affecting, very educated and sensitive, the
letter. And then he just says: ‘Two weeks later my father
died.’ That’s the way he does it.
After his father’s death he looks for the stamp collec-
tion and he never finds it. It pains one to read about it.
He does it in the Bond way, in a sentence or two.
His father was in the RAF – fell ill somewhere near
Calcutta, and probably died in the hospital. And the
stamp collection was never found. Dead men’s effects,
you can do what you want with them because there’s no
family coming to look at them either.
Tragic?
Yes, but the writer doesn’t make much of it. There’s a
sentence in the book which tells you what the book’s
about: ‘I was alone, I was lonely, but I was not afraid.’
Whereas other Indian writers have their elaborate
family structure to write about, Bond has nothing, just a
few individuals here and there. Very few. So he’s an
orphan actually.
Does that give him a unique standpoint in India?
I think so. But there’s some personal quality there. His
father called him Ruskin
after the English social com-
mentator and cr itic. He
pr ints some letters at the
back of the book from Diana
Athill, that ver y g ifted
woman who was at André
Deutsch and made Deutsch
an important publisher. Her
point is that he can take this
paring-away of inessentials
too far. He must understand
that you’ve got to give the
reader time to sink into a
24
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
new mood or a new setting. This is his way of writing,
though. He doesn’t, as it were, make a meal of events
like the death of his father.
The book ends with a little letter to his dead father.
He tells his father about the ride to the old school and
how it’s changed. He says he had a dream about a friend
of his. I think he appears as a big man and the friend
was still small, and he asks: ‘I wonder when I dream of
you I will be a big man or a child?’ Very moving.
He has, by and large, been ignored as an Indian writer. The
attention has gone recently to the imitators and boasters. Why
do you think that is?
I don’t know the fiction but I think this autobiography
is quite extraordinary. He has a kind of small following
in India.
★
You’ve always been an art collector.
Yes, but never been rich enough to be.
Well, not to be Charles Saatchi, but you’ve always been
interested in art or in having these things around you…
William Morris said, only have that around you which
is useful or beautiful.
Your taste in art has changed. You used to look at Mughal art.
I used to look at Rajput art, very coarse Rajput art.
You’ve got to understand that I began with nothing.
You know the place that I come from never gave me
any training in art or architecture, the things of a civili-
sation. We were very good about drums, but the other
things ... I knew nothing. It’s been a process of learning.
I had to teach myself.
You know, one needs to be guided by writers. I am
almost ashamed to say that my interest in Indian art
began with a book published in 1951 in the series The
Faber Gallery of Oriental Art, a book on Kangra art by
W G Archer. I am ashamed because I think Kangra art
is pretty insipid, awful, but it is what many people think
of as Indian art. It’s taken me quite some time to under-
stand that in the region of the Himalayan states there
was a great painter, great by any standards. He was called
Nainsukh – seventeenth century. But it took one a long
time to get there.
I began in ’52 with this
calendar stuff from Kangra.
Kasmin once called it ‘mer-
chant’s art’. I allowed myself
to be persuaded that there
was a special beauty in
Rajput art. Not the Mughal
but the local Indian art of the
Indian courts.
It’s fooling yourself with
intellectual ideas. They have
to collapse one day. I now
realise I don’t like Rajput art
 INTERVIEW
and I don’t like Kangra art.
I don’t like Mughal art either because it’s wasteful,
extravagant, decorative, and just done for one man holding
a book. You can’t say they are your pictures, a nation’s
art, a people’s art.
It’s only done for the Emperor, you say…
It’s done for whoever you want to call the scoundrel,
the ‘Emperor’ or ‘ruler’ or whatever. They are not
impressive people.
The awfulness of what I’ve just said is that there was
once a great album, not of the highest quality but sec-
ondary. It fell into the hands of the ‘ruler’ in the state of
Oudh in North India, after the break-up of the Mughal
Empire. And what did the man do? He gave it to the
Queen of England, and it’s still there in the Queen’s col-
lection. How can you go to that collection and say ‘this
is Indian art’? It isn’t Indian art. Indian art has to belong
to the soil of India, to the people of India.
Many of the Mughal albums are now abroad and
broken up. They don’t belong to India. They were
created by foreigners. It was a foreign way of painting
and so it’s found its resting place abroad and should not
be considered Indian.
Nevertheless, India has a vast tradition of people’s arts inter-
mingled with religion.
I am not interested in that kind of coarse art.
The temples, the sculptures of deities, the architecture?
Oh, that’s great stuff! I was thinking of work on paper.
At the end of local power, there were artists who found
patrons for a short time in the British. The British wanted
another approach to the natural world. They wanted
flowers and various things to be drawn very accurately.
These artists met their demand.
And from thinking that this was a bad art, the art of a
conquered people, I grew to feel, having rejected the
Mughal and the Rajput, that this art, where artists were
expressing individual talent – they signed all their pic-
tures – that this is very good. This is the Indian art I like.
The Company School?
Yes, but that’s a bad word for it. It lasts from about
1780 to 1840, a very short period. It is the high tech-
nique of the Prince’s school and it’s a concern with the
real world – real horses, real people. I grew to like that.
And on the way I picked up an unbearable love for
Japanese art. I find it so beautiful.
Where does that affection come from?
I don’t know. I never read about it or anything. I just
saw it and was stirred by it.
I asked a man who was an expert in Persian art. I
asked how he fell in love with Persian art and he said
when he was a child his parents would take him to the
museum on Sunday to keep him quiet; they would go
and leave him there and he fell in love with it. I asked
him, ‘Is your love today greater than when you were a
child?’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the same.’
25
You were never interested in the modernist movement?
No. I am not interested in it. From about 1100 and
1200 AD to Van Gogh, artists were learning things and
passing them on – about the rendering of the natural
world. And then there was nothing more to pass on, and
we are at that stage now when there’s nothing more to
pass on. If it can be defined like that, art is what you no
longer can pass on. In terms of learning and talent and
technique, it’s over.
Take modern singing, pop music: people say it’s very
profound and it’s part of our common present. It’s suck-
ing the world dry of aspiration, of a wish to learn and of
striving. All that’s gone with these movements in ‘art’.
Aspiration is of the essence of civilisation. Otherwise
you live like pigs in a sty. What’s happened yesterday
happens again tomorrow and it goes on like that.
Your friend Harold Pinter is the first writer in English after
yourself to win the Nobel Prize and you said you were very happy.
I was hoping that Pinter would get it and for this rea-
son, which perhaps he wouldn’t agree with, or the
Swedish Academy wouldn’t agree with. I think it’s very
hard if you’re writing about English or French people to
avoid social comment. Pinter in the beginning – I don’t
know how he did it – found a way of writing without
social comment. I think it’s quite remarkable. Now he
might say he didn’t intend it and I’d have to say, ‘Well I
was wrong, I am sorry, I was wrong.’
People have said that Pinter is merely imitating the nihilistic
blankness of Samuel Beckett. It was a fashion to write without
social reference.
I think Pinter has more of a human quality than
Beckett. He writes about real people. I think the politi-
cal Pinter has been a great red herring. I am sorry it has
been dragged into an assessment of his achievement.
Will you tell me what you are writing now?
I can’t begin to write again till I am well. You can’t
write if you are not well. That’s why I exercised so much
those years, to keep myself fit for writing. If I become
well again – I am on my feet now – I might want to
write. My writing has always been dependent on energy
– travelling, moving around. You can say that the books
radiate energy. Do you think that’s true, Farrukh?
If I can get well, properly well – I am seventy-three
and something, and you might feel what’s the point of
getting well if there’s such a short time to go?
There’s a story about old folk at a memorial service, I
think in Paris, one of these French occasions. I think it
was for Malraux. Freezing weather, freezing weather. A
couple of old men there. One of them said, ‘This has
been going on for so long, we don’t have to go home –
we just stay here.’
You didn’t actually tell me what you are writing.
Let’s leave it like that.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 HISTORY

S IMON H EFFER of the view that,

after the capitulation,
SWEPT UNDER THE CARPET France was better off
as a neutral bystander
while the two appar-
B AD FAITH : A F ORGOTTEN H ISTORY OF ently equally appalling
FAMILY AND FATHERLAND nations of Britain and
★ Ger many slugged
By Carmen Callil it out.
(Jonathan Cape 614pp £20) Worst of all for
those who chose to
T HE U NFREE F RENCH : L IFE U NDER avoid reality was
THE O CCUPATION Ophüls’ use of news-
★ reel footage, showing
By Richard Vinen (for example) French
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 448pp £25) functionaries shaking
the hand of Heydrich
THE SCARS INFLICTED on France by the Nazi occupation as they busily went Darquier: repellent
of 1940–44 – and, more to the point, by the collabora- about his mission of
tion of some of the French with the occupier – still run removing Jews from the face of the Third Reich.
deep. For decades after the event ‘collabos’ were One such functionary, pictured in full obsequiousness
shunned in French communities. Now most of them are in the film, was the preposterously named (indeed,
dead, but in some cases their children have been tarred mostly self-named) Baron Louis Darquier de Pellepoix.
with the brush of betrayal. Darquier – to give him his real handle – is the subject of
Attitudes, though, have never been black and white. Carmen Callil’s superb exploration of the fractured mind
After the purges of 1944–45, whose climax was the of French anti-Semitism. His estranged and neglected
execution of the Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval and daughter, Anne, was Callil’s psychiatrist in the 1960s. It
the sentencing to death (commuted to life imprison- was only when Callil attended Anne’s funeral in 1970
ment) of the 89-year-old Marshal Pétain, French society (she seems to have committed suicide at the age of just
seemed to draw a veil over what, to put it mildly, had 40) that she saw her full name of Darquier de Pellepoix.
been an unhappy episode. War criminals who had Further investigations revealed her to be the daughter of
helped the Nazis deport Jews and round up dissidents a man who, having spent the 1930s leading various
went unpursued, even when tried and sentenced in fascist and anti-Semitic rabbles in France, found himself
absentia. It became impolite to discuss such things, as the abundantly qualified to be Vichy’s Commissioner with
Fourth and Fifth republics set about constructing and special responsibility for dealing with the Jewish prob-
maintaining the myth of social unity as a means of lem. To say – as is true – that Darquier organised the
recovery from the trauma. notorious round-up of Jews in 1942 at the Vélodrome
That was why in 1969 Marcel Ophüls’ four-and-a-half- d’Hiver, and in the end facilitated the transfer of 75,000
hour documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié – which recounted French Jews to the death camps, suggests a man of far
events during the occupation in France in general and the greater meticulousness than was really the case.
Auvergne capital of Clermont-Ferrand in particular – The man called ‘the French Eichmann’ was a drunk, a
caused such outrage that it braggart, a womaniser, a
was not shown on French fantasist and someone whose
television until 1981. devotion to his duties, while
Throughout the documentary, Looking to The answer is here absolute in principle, was
a series of interviews demol-
ishes the myth brick by brick, publish The Better Book less so in practice. Even the
low-life Vichy Government
as interviewees reveal their your book? Company found him repellent, and he
contempt for other sections of We offer a complete service to authors Write or phone for our was cold-shouldered by
French society and expose the them. At the end of the war
frequently less-than-heroic
wishing to self-publish their work. FREE Guide to Self-Publishing he and his bizarre ex-actress
We work with our authors honestly Warblington Lodge • The Gardens
behaviour engaged in at and professionally to produce books Havant • Hampshire • PO9 2XH Australian wife, Myrtle,
the time. France’s rampant Tel: 023 9248 1160 Fax: 023 9249 2819 managed to escape to Spain,
of which both of us can be proud. Email: editors@better-book.co.uk
Anglophobia is also exposed, where for some years he
with the occasional expression taught English. Tracked

26
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 HISTORY

down in the 1970s by journalists, he tried to put his own He examines the fate of Jews, though not in such a spe-
gloss on the hideous events in which he had participated. cific fashion as Callil, and reveals how certain hill towns
Great shame too, however, falls upon the French author- in the south became havens for Jewish refugees – the
ities, who never sought to bring Darquier to justice Germans lacked the right vehicles to access them, and so
except in absentia, acting on behalf of a people whose never bothered. He deals with the everyday survival of
own complicity in his murderous acts was greater than the French people – much of their food and wealth
many of them would still care to admit. The gradual were being sent to Germany throughout the occupation,
pursuit of French war criminals such as Maurice Papon as, before long, were many of their workers. There was
and René Bousquet (Darquier’s colleague and rival in the also the fate of prisoners of war, many of whom were
messy business of ethnic cleansing) from the mid 1970s disappointed when not repatriated immediately after
was largely driven by the media, not least because so their country’s capitulation; and he writes with tact and
many politicians of the period had much to hide. without prurience about the other great feature of the
Callil gives the full story of Darquier, from his birth to a occupation, that of horizontal collaboration, and the
popular and successful doctor and his wife in Cahors in women who found themselves abused, paraded (often
1897, through his brave if unreliable service in the Great naked) through the streets, their heads shaved in the
War, to a life bordering on fantasy (in which he sponged orgy of self-righteousness that followed the liberation.
ruthlessly off his family), a life that he constructed with the Finally, Vinen deals with the other great postwar
equally dishonest Myrtle. Like too many disaffected after French myth: that the French had, somehow, liberated
the Great War, he made the Jews an easy scapegoat for his themselves. Vinen’s is an immaculately researched, well-
and his country’s troubles. A sojourn spent in cheap hotels written and original book, so compelling in its narrative
in England, forever fleeing from creditors, saw the birth in that one regrets he did not carry the story on to the
1930 of Anne, who was immediately dumped on a nanny attempt by de Gaulle to govern France, and up to the
whom the Darquiers soon stopped paying. It was only failure of the attempt in 1946. Soon these events, part
thanks to this woman’s humanity and self-sacrifice that shameful, part heroic, will no longer be part of living
Anne was not consigned to an orphanage, and managed to memory. It is as well they are recorded as carefully and
have a career. Meanwhile, Darquier had used some largely honestly as possible in preparation for that day.
bogus genealogical research to tack on the de Pellepoix To order these books at a 20% discount, see page 40
suffix to his name, and to make himself a Baron. Callil’s
researches give a valuable insight into this irredeemable
man, and therefore into a whole poisonous subculture that
actively seems to have welcomed the Nazi overthrow of
France. But they also suggest that, whatever the revenges of
1944–45, the French never did more than just go through
the motions of dealing with their pro-Nazi elements,
which is partly why the sore remains so livid even now.
Richard Vinen’s book is a refreshing contrast to those
stodgy histories of the Occupation that deal solely in the
high – or, more often, low – politics of the period. This
is a history of the French people under occupation from
their point of view, using their own accounts and
records of everyday life. After dealing with the humilia-
tion of 1940 and the establishment of Vichy, he looks in
detail at the lives of significant groups of the French,
though with less emphasis on the Resistance than is
usual in such works. Vinen’s aim is not to concentrate
on either the heroics or the frequent wickedness of daily
life under the Germans, but to present a picture of what
was a remarkably normal existence for a majority of
people, who chose simply to get on with their lives.
He mentions the often surprisingly courteous relations
that the Wehrmacht had with the conquered people,
contrasting them with the barbarism of the Gestapo
towards the Maquis and the terrifying reprisals that took
place – such as the slaughter of whole villages – as the
Germans were being driven out in the summer of 1944.

27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 HISTORY
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
A Bodyguard
of Lies
T HE L ONG M ARCH
★ she learned about the Long March contradicts or nullifies
By Sun Shuyun
(HarperCollins 302pp £20)
T HE HOTTEST BOOK about China right now is Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story. In that
big, much praised and much condemned biography, the
Long March of 1935 takes up about fifty out of 800 pages.
For decades, the main source for the epoch of the
March was the account Mao Zedong gave to the
American journalist Edgar Snow, author of Red Star over
China. Published in 1938, after careful editing by Mao
himself, this narrative underlies all the subsequent
accounts in Chinese and Western biographies of Mao
and more general histories. The story was given further
wings in 1985 by another American journalist, Harrison
Salisbury, in his The Long March.
Now comes Sun Shuyun’s Long March, which concen-
trates on the March itself. She explodes the myth. Sun,
who retraced the route of the March by bus and train,
likes long journeys. A few years ago, in Ten Thousand
Miles Without a Cloud, she followed, although not on
foot, the immense eighteen-year trek undertaken by the
monk Xuan Zang in the early seventh century from the
capital of Tang China to India and back, bringing home
with him vital Buddhist documents.
Born in China in the early Sixties, Sun is the daughter
of a Communist soldier who fought the Americans in
Korea. ‘Every nation has its founding myth,’ she writes.
‘For Communist China it is the Long March, for us a
story on a par with Moses leading the exodus out of
Egypt. The myth was born and it remains the enduring
emblem of China today.’
According to the official
story, 200,000 Red soldiers
were dr iven from their
stronghold in the south by
Chiang Kaishek’s armies.
Pursued and harried by the
Nationalist troops (Chang
and Halliday insist that
Chiang Kaishek let the Reds
escape; this is disputed), the
Communists crossed and
recrossed their own tracks for
10,000 miles, over freezing
28
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
mountains, through swamps and grasslands. Sometimes
attacked by local peoples such as the Tibetans, they finally
reached north-west China and safety with only 40,000
soldiers, one fifth of their original force.
Sun set out to discover, over still daunting terrain, what
really happened during the March. When she began her
investigation in 2004, barely 500 veterans of the March
were still alive; she found forty of them, ‘with their
memories still fresh, and their spirits undiminished’. What
the official story – or myth – in which defeats became
victories and disasters transmuted into accomplishments.
Although there was considerable heroism or at least
endurance, there was plenty of desertion and cowardice –
all of it, in my opinion, wholly understandable.
Perhaps the most celebrated and mythic episode on
the March was the crossing of the Dadu suspension
bridge by twenty-two of Mao’s daredevils in the face of
intense gunfire from Chiang Kaishek’s soldiers.
According to what Mao told Edgar Snow, crossing the
bridge enabled the remaining Red forces to escape to a
base from which Mao could eventually establish the
Communist state in 1949. Sun was raised on stories
about this epochal event, and Chinese children still learn
about it. Chang and Halliday state flatly that the battle
did not take place.
In Sun’s opinion it was at most a minor skirmish. She
interviewed a local man who lived near the bridge and
whose family had looked after the suspending chains for
generations. His father, who was there when the Reds
arrived, remembered that only a few dozen militiamen
opposed them, with ineffective weapons, and that they
were reluctant to fire when the Reds used local villagers
as shields. ‘There really wasn’t much of a battle,’ the son
reported, but he did ‘take off his hat to the soldiers who
crawled on the chains’. From the military historian Zhu
Yu, at the National Defence University, Sun obtained
further indications that stories of the decisive Dadu bat-
tle were, and remain, Maoist propaganda. ‘You call that a
battle?’ he asked. ‘Just a couple of men fell into the river
and it was over in an hour. How can that be the biggest
battle of the Long March?’
She examined the testimony
of the warlord Li Wenhui,
who was ordered by Chiang
Kaishek to defend the
bridge against Mao’s forces
but moved his reg iment
away. The Communist
General Li Jukui, who
‘commanded the division
involved in taking the
[Dadu] Bridge’ (although he
was not there), told Party
interviewers in 1984:
 HISTORY
‘When you investigate historical
facts, you should respect the truth.
How you present it is a different
matter.’
As General Li observed, presen-
tation is not the same as the truth.
Sun’s veterans scarcely mention
Mao in their eyewitness reports of
what was a disastrous, if heroic,
retreat. But in 1935 Mao, soon to
be immortalised by Edgar Snow,
proclaimed: ‘The Long March is
propaganda, it has ended in victory
for us and defeat for the enemy.’
During the course of her journey
Sun interviewed a director making
a film to celebrate its 70th anniver-
sary. He disclosed a fact new to
me and to Sun, which would, I
suspect, astound millions of Chinese. Perhaps the best-
known Chinese patriotic song is ‘The East is Red’. It
includes the lines, ‘The sun is rising, China has Mao
Zedong.’ I heard it many times in China, even in
Tiananmen Square during the 1989 uprising. The direc-
tor told Sun that it is actually a folk song and in the
original the words praise a local hero, Liu Zhidan, one
of Mao’s allies – whom he probably had murdered. He
told Sun that he had never known the origin of the
song, ‘But the story won’t make it into the series.’ Nor,
he said, would the desertions (of which there were many
thousands), the power struggles, or the battle for food.
He explained, ‘as you know, television is the voice
of the Party. On such an important event we have to
follow the line it lays down.’
Some of her most vivid accounts come from the
women who make up two-thirds of the 500 survivors of
the March. (There are other gripping accounts, such as
Lily Xiao Hong Li and Susan Wiles’s Women of the Long
March, but Sun’s are the most extensive I have seen.)
Seventy years on, these ancient women could still sing
Long March songs – which Sun herself learned decades
later as a schoolgirl. Their accounts are patriotic, moving,
and, despite the rubbish usually advanced in China about
the March, convincing. Women were among the Red
Army’s most effective recruiters, sometimes having sex
with young men in exchange for their joining up. They
carried them, fed them, and sometimes, weeping, left
them behind to die of their wounds or freeze to death.
The blood from those young women’s periods ran down
their legs and reddened the snow they waded through.
For most of the survivors the Long March was the
biggest thing in their lives, even though local govern-
ments often withheld their tiny pensions. Numbers of
them were raped repeatedly by Muslim warlords when
Mao abandoned the women’s regiment after terrific
battles. One of the highest-
ranking women on the March, a
hero by any standard, escaped
after three years and ‘spent the
next fifty years on an agonising
pilgrimage back to the Party. In
between, accusations were hung
around her neck: “traitor”,
“Nationalist spy”, “concubine of
an officer” (in the Muslim forces).
In 1989 she was finally conceded
a pension and restored to Party
membership.’ Sun asked this hero-
ine how she could remain loyal
after fifty years of ingratitude and
persecution. Her reply was, ‘The
Party are my parents. How could
Mao and admirer I not love them?’
Specialists in this period will
now burrow into Sun’s sources. It seems to me that from
the ocean of lies about the Long March she has salvaged
much truth. The Long Marchers, she concludes, ‘rose to
their challenge with a bravery and self-sacrifice unsur-
passed in China’s or anyone’s history’. Indeed. I hope
Sun Shuyun writes more books exposing how for most
of China’s history since 1930 the Party has demanded
everything of the Chinese people, while surrounding
their lives with a bodyguard of lies.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
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featuring (amongst others):
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DINNER WITH AN ADDRESS at the 1867 grill
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29
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 HISTORY
D AVID C ESARANI
FOILING THE FÜHRER
K ILLING H ITLER : T HE T HIRD R EICH AND
THE P LOTS AGAINST THE F ÜHRER
★ became a hotbed of anti-Nazi plotters under Admiral
By Roger Moorhouse
(Jonathan Cape 300pp £20)
I N THE B UNKER WITH H ITLER : T HE L AST
W ITNESS S PEAKS
★ Hitler’s genocidal war in the east rather than fear that he
By Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven with François d’Alançon
(Translated by John Gilbert)
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 208pp £12.99)
THERE WAS NO shortage of political assassinations in the
gangster-like world of interwar German politics. Rosa
Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Kurt Eisner and Walter
Rathenau were all gunned down during the early 1920s.
Surprisingly, there were few attempts on Hitler’s life
while he was seeking power, although
this was not for lack of opportunity.
His personal security was poor and he
was frequently reckless. A number of
times during election campaigns he
got into sticky situations when his car
entered Communist districts. At least
once his entourage was sprayed with
gunfire. The idea that it might be a
good idea to kill Hitler only gained
force after he became Chancellor, by
which time he was better protected.
The story of the attempts to kill
Hitler has been told before, notably in
books by Anton Gill and Joachim Fest.
Roger Moorhouse adds little to what
this literature has revealed about the
German plotters, but his survey can
claim originality thanks to the inclu-
sion of plots hatched by non-Germans. Forty-two plots against him
Of forty-two alleged attempts he
analyses eight in detail, in roughly chronological order,
and weaves around them a brief history of Hitler’s rise
and the development of the Third Reich. There are
some surprises.
The first plot that came anywhere near success was
hatched by a Swiss Catholic named Maurice Bavaud,
who was driven by religious motives. He stalked Hitler
in Munich in 1938 and had located a good point from
which to fire his pistol as Hitler’s retinue passed. But, at
the critical moment, the Führer’s open car was obscured
by a forest of arms rising in the Hitler salute. The
30
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
following year Georg Elser, a Catholic working man,
laboured for months to construct and conceal a bomb
timed to explode near Hitler while he was giving his
annual speech in celebration of the Beerhall Putsch.
Hitler was saved by a last-minute change to his schedule.
Elser was a good deal more assiduous and secretive
than the Abwehr (German military intelligence), which
Canaris. Like the plotters in the German Army, these
highly intelligent and trained men displayed an almost
suicidal insouciance. Yet Moorhouse is generous in his
assessment. He defends them against charges of dilettan-
tism and attributes their motives to moral outrage over
was leading the army to defeat.
Most strangely, Moorhouse includes Albert Speer
amongst those who wished Hitler dead. Attributing this
sentiment to Speer may be fair enough, but it hardly
earns him a place in the ranks of those who actually
tried to do something. Speer himself dubbed his notion
of killing Hitler with poison gas ‘ridiculous’, and it
might be more correct to dismiss it as an imaginary
product of his tortured conscience.
The inclusion of the Polish under-
ground and the Russian secret service
is laudable but, as it turns out, rather
pointless. The midges at Hitler’s mili-
tary headquarters in East Prussia caused
more of a problem than the Polish
underground. The NKVD, which had
much experience of carrying out assas-
sinations, could only come up with a
ludicrously complicated plan to kill
Hitler in Berlin during 1942. It was
dropped. Like the British, they seem to
have concluded that Hitler was such a
liability to the German war effort that
it was better to leave him be.
This is certainly the view of Bernd
Freytag von Loringhoven, who had
the dubious privilege of witnessing
Hitler exercise his military leadership
from close up. Loringhoven was aide-
de-camp to General Guderian, chief
of the army’s general staff from July 1944 to March
1945, and later to General Krebs, who served Hitler in
that role until the end in the bunker. Loringhoven’s life
story is a good case study of the consensus that built up
around the Nazis and the ability of Germans to deceive
themselves about Hitler.
He was born into the Baltic German nobility in 1914,
but his family were driven from Estonia in 1919 and he
was educated in Germany. Defeat and the loss of empire
made the Loringhovens natural recruits to the Right,
but not necessarily Nazis. His uncle was prominent in
 HISTORY
the DNVP, later a coalition partner of the Nazi Party,
but Loringhoven spurned a career in law after 1933
because this would have required obeisance to National
Socialism. Instead, he opted for an army career. He
fought in Poland, France and Russia, where he was
fortunate to be airlifted out of the Stalingrad pocket.
Loringhoven is careful to distance himself from anti-
Semitism or the warlike ideology of the Third Reich.
Like so many German officers before him he blames
Hitler for every defeat and attributes every war crime to
the Waffen-SS. He claims to have had no knowledge of
the mass shootings of Jews in the Soviet Union or the
death camps. Ironically, this rather under mines
Moorhouse’s claim that the generals who plotted against
Hitler were activated by ethical dismay. Loringhoven was
aware of the conspiracy because his cousin was a
member of Staufenberg’s circle. After the 20 July
bomb-plot failed, his cousin committed suicide and
Loringhoven was interrogated twice. He got off lightly,
thanks to the protection of his mentor General
N ORMAN S TONE
The People
of the Pontus
T WICE A S TRANGER : H OW M ASS E XPULSION
F ORGED M ODERN G REECE AND T URKEY
★ Turkish–Greek reconciliation.
By Bruce Clark
(Granta Books 274pp £20)
THERE IS IN the Ashmolean in Oxford an Orthodox
iconostasis from an ancient Byzantine monastery now
called Sumela, on the Black Sea, not far from Trabzon
(Trebizond). Sumela – a Turkish corruption of the origi-
nal Greek for ‘black virgin’ – is often
used in illustrations promoting
Turkish tour ism; it is a huge
construction, hewn into rock-cliffs
generally shrouded in the mists and
rain that distinguish this part of the
coast. In 1923–24 that whole area,
the Pontus, lost its Orthodox popula-
tion, or at any rate those who were
not tucked away in remote and high
places. Even now, if you ask the bus
driver about them, he will tell you
that there are ‘locals’ who speak
something that is not Turkish, though
he might not know what it is.
The towns in the area still have Sumela
31
Guder ian, a Hitler loyalist who sat on the court
of honour that condemned several high-ranking plotters.
Like other soldiers, Loringhoven was torn between
revulsion from the Führer and his oath of loyalty. He
winced when he saw Hitler relish photographs recording
the execution of the conspirators, but continued to serve
him. Consequently he became one of the key
eyewitnesses to the gruesome events in the Führer’s
bunker in April 1945. These events, too, have been
extensively documented and repeatedly narrated, but
they continue to exert a ghoulish fascination. The inter-
rogations of the eyewitnesses who were captured by the
Red Army are now available in a comprehensive collec-
tion from the Chaucer Press (400pp £25). Translated
from Russian and extensively annotated, Hitler’s Death:
Russia’s Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB
by V K Vinogradov, J F Pogonyi and N B Teptzov
includes photographs and documents that were not
previously available.
To order these books at a 20% discount, see page 40
demonstrably Greek names – ‘Of ’, ‘Giresun’. It is quite a
poor part of Turkey and there is very substantial migra-
tion (almost a quarter of the population of Istanbul
comes from the Black Sea, and they are generally much
liked as hard workers and good-humoured people). The
Pontus Greeks mainly had to migrate to Greece, and
their main centre, Salonica (until 1912 a more firmly
Ottoman city than Izmir – old Smyrna, which was half-
Christian), can – or a few years ago could – still produce
nationalist r ioting if anyone stages an attempt at
All around wester n and central Asia Minor are
monuments to two million Greeks. Izmir’s Greek
quarter was burned down after the failure of the Greek
invasion in 1922, but there are still, far into the interior,
towns that are very obviously Greek: Sinasos (now called
Mustafapasha) in Cappadocia was once the second-
largest outside Athens, and though the mid-Anatolian
winter can be very harsh, the place
nevertheless looks like a
Mediterranean town. There are even
inscriptions of Turkish words written
in Greek letters. The synthesis of the
two sides had gone a long way before
the great disaster happened. When
my small son first came with me to
Cappadocia, he had just started learn-
ing Greek, and we came across an
old, old man who had been sent to
the local Greek school: the two of
them counted together in Greek.
The old man said that when the local
Christians moved out, in a column
that took them eventually to a ship at
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 HISTORY
Mersin, there were tears all round. That is a side of
‘ethnic cleansing’ that is generally overlooked by the
bureaucrats, and of late the Athens press has apparently
been publishing letters from the Anatolian Greeks who
were supposed to be receiving national liberation at the
hands of the mainland Greek invaders. They protested at
the atrocities being committed in their name. It is a sign
of the times, thank the Lord, that the once hard-
luck-story nationalist Greeks want to make it up with
the Turks: in the days when the Ottoman Empire
worked, it was in effect a partnership of the two, and the
early Sultans, products of intermarriage, used Greek as
the court language. There is much work to be done if
such harmony is to be restored. One very obvious step
for modern Turkey to take would be to restore the
Orthodox seminary on Heybeli Island off Istanbul. It has
been closed since 1971.
There have been times when I have thought of writing
an article in support of this cause. It would not be alto-
gether popular in Turkey because many people feel rather
hard done by over the whole situation, given that the
Greek Cypriots have somehow persuaded the world that
theirs is the right cause, and that the Armenian diaspora
so often makes the running, even making criminals of
serious academics who dispute the standard (and academi-
cally questionable) line that there was a ‘genocide’ as
distinct from a process of reciprocal massacre. It would
take some courage for a Turk to write in defence of the
seminary. But, just as you get up the nerve, up jumps
some senior Beatitude in Athens who makes a declaration
to the effect that all Turks are rapists and murderers and
do not deserve to get into Europe. Thank you, Beatitude.
Bruce Clark’s book is a description of the population
exchange of 1923–24, when millions of people, bewil-
deredly for the most part, had to abandon old farms and
houses where they had lived, usually at peace with their
neighbours, for centuries. He knows Greece and Turkey
deeply and at first hand, and shows admirable fair-
mindedness as well as the clever manner of presentation
which you have to have if these complicated matters are
to be explained to a foreign readership. He has also had
the good idea of interviewing ancient survivors – even a
man whose sister had disappeared and become, over the
decades, ‘turkified’ in Samsun on the Black Sea. The
two were reunited in the end. It did quite often happen,
both with Greeks and Armenians, that neighbours
looked after them, and especially the children. So often
in these tragic affairs, ordinary people will just say that if
they had only been left alone the two sides would never
have let things develop in the murderous direction that
they took. That was the sense of Louis de Bernières’s
Birds Without Wings, which, in translation, has become a
bestseller in Turkey. Bruce Clark brings up the factual
baggage-train, and good for him.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
WARRIORS
A NDREW R OBERTS
A Model of
the Old School
WAVELL : S OLDIER AND S TATESMAN
By Victoria Schofield
(John Murray 512pp £30)
B ECAUSE F IELD M ARSHAL Lord Wavell was removed
from two very important posts – the Commandership-
in-Chief of the Middle East and the Viceroyalty of India
– he has gone down in history as an overall failure. This
sympathetic biography goes some way towards redressing
this harsh verdict, especially concerning the Indian part
of his career.
Archibald Wavell was a fine example of the British
Army officer of the old school. His family came over
with William the Conqueror, both his father and grand-
father were generals, he had a brilliant school career and
was personally brave in action. A natural sportsman
(especially golf and polo), captain of the regimental
hockey team, a fine shot, and an excellent linguist (Urdu,
Pashtu and Russian), he served in the Boer War and on
the North-West Frontier, and entered Camberley Staff
College in 1909 with an 85% exam pass. To complete
the picture, of his wife Queenie, a colonel’s daughter, he
wrote to a friend: ‘She rides well to hounds.’
Much to his chagrin, Wavell was stuck at the War
Office when the rest of the Army decamped to France
and Flanders in August 1914. Although he did see action
on the Continent, it was as a liaison officer with the
Grand Duke Nicholas’s army in Turkey, and later serving
under General Allenby in Palestine, that Wavell spent
most of the Great War. He not only distinguished
himself, but got to know the Middle East, and was sent
out to command in Palestine in 1937–38.
Wavell was thus a natural choice to form the Middle
East Command in July 1939, and his great chance came
the following June when Mussolini hubristically declared
war against Britain. After squeezing the maximum forces
out of metropolitan Britain, which was itself under threat
of invasion, Wavell launched his well-planned attack in
December 1940, defeating the Italians at Sidi Barrani and
capturing the whole of Cyrenica. It was the first major
Allied victory of the war, and Wavell was hailed as a
military hero.
Yet as this book accurately catalogues, there were
always severe personality differences between Wavell and
Winston Churchill, amounting at times to mutual detes-
tation. Even though Wavell had supported the creation
 WARRIORS
of Ralph Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Group, and had
encouraged Orde Wingate in his unorthodox fighting
practices, Churchill thought Wavell too cautious and
conventional a commander, and longed to replace him.
The author refers to the ‘increasingly argumentative
tenor of their telegrams’, as the prime minister sought to
impose his views on questions that were often best left
up to the man on the spot.
When in August 1940 Wavell returned to London to
brief the War Cabinet’s Middle East Committee, the
foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, thought his account
of operations ‘masterly’, but Churchill’s curt cross-
questioning left the general feeling bruised and insulted.
Wavell was desperate for armoured reinforcements
before his assault on the Italians in the Western Desert,
and thought that Churchill ‘never realised the necessity
for full equipment before
committing troops to
battle’. As it was, however,
Churchill allowed no fewer
than half of Britain’s tanks
to be transported to the
Middle Eastern theatre.
Wavell did not want to
go down to Chequers on
the Friday night after the
Committee’s Thursday
meeting, and had to be
ordered to by the Chief of
the Imperial General Staff,
John Dill. Churchill’s
pr ivate secretary, Jock
Colville, recorded how the
prime minister’s attempts Wavell: an Imperial childhood
‘to elicit the general’s views
were met with the silence of shyness’. Whatever the
reason for Wavell’s reticence, and it might well have been
simple dislike or distrust of Churchill rather than genuine
shyness, there was absolutely no meeting of minds. Soon
afterwards Churchill, who loved thrusting, flamboyant,
risk-taking commanders, told Eden that he thought
Wavell lacked ‘that sense of mental vigour and resolve to
overcome obstacles which is indispensable to a successful
war’. Other similarly negative assessments were that
Wavell was ‘a good average colonel’ and – equally damn-
ing – ‘a good chairman of a Tory association’.
For his part, when he got back to Cairo, Wavell
ignored many of the detailed instructions with which
the prime minister deluged him, as the tone of their
telegrams descended into barely concealed rudeness.
Every time attacks were postponed, (as the ‘Operation
Compass’ assault in the Western Desert had to be,
in November 1940), Churchill pr ivately blamed
Wavell’s timidity.
Wavell’s welcome victories over the Italians in late
33
1940 and early 1941, including Sidi Barrani, Bardia,
Tobruk and Benghazi, came to a shuddering halt after
12 February 1941, when the German army landed at
Tripoli. ‘I had certainly not budgeted for Rommel after
my experience with the Italians,’ Wavell commented
ruefully years afterwards. The Afrika Korps was a formi-
dable fighting machine, and just as Wavell had to try to
concentrate on countering it in the Western Desert,
enormous demands were made upon him in other
theatres by London, including Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia,
Iraq, Crete and Greece.
His resources were stretched far too thin, and the
British and Dominion forces started tasting defeat,
especially at Halfaya Pass in May 1941. Playing
backgammon against Hermione Ranfurly, Wavell com-
mented plaintively: ‘You seem to be the only enemy I
can be sure of defeating
these days.’ General
Freyberg could only be
spared twenty thousand
men with which to hold
Crete in the face of a full-
scale German invasion. At
one point Wavell even had
to draw up a ‘Worst
Possible Case’ plan for
withdrawing the British
Ar my from Egypt alto-
gether, to Churchill’s utter
fury. ‘Wavell has 400,000
men,’ the prime minister
fumed. ‘If they lose Egypt,
blood will flow. I will
have firing parties to shoot
the generals.’
Wavell never tried to shift the blame onto other shoul-
ders; when finally he was sacked on 22 June 1941 he
bore the humiliation stoically, perhaps even welcoming
it, and agreed with Churchill’s telegram saying that ‘a
new hand and a new eye’, in the shape of General
Auchinleck, were required. Wavell may have been
out-fought by the greatest German general of the
Second World War, but there is no dishonour in that.
One of the (very few) deficiencies of this book is that
this vital period in Wavell’s life between June 1940 and
June 1941 is covered in a mere sixty-three pages of a
511-page book, whereas it ought to have formed the
majority of the text, since the Middle Eastern command
is primarily why Wavell is known to history. The author
has written eight books on Pakistan and India, and has
devoted far more space to Wavell’s arguably less impor-
tant period as commander-in-chief in India and then as
her penultimate viceroy. There is, therefore, still shelf-
room for another biography of Wavell that concentrates
on his period in the Western Desert, Near East and
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 WARRIORS
Mediterranean campaigns.
Wavell was sacked as viceroy in 1947 after four years
of showing limitless patience in seeking a constitutional
settlement to the problems of partition and the transfer
of power. Although his successor, Lord Mountbatten,
claimed in a letter to Wavell of 18 February 1947 to
have been ‘absolutely staggered when [Clement Attlee]
told me that the Cabinet wanted me to succeed you’, in
fact, according to this book, Mountbatten had been
working since 18 December 1946 – two whole months
– with Attlee on ways ‘to orchestrate Wavell’s resigna-
tion’. Mountbatten thereupon ditched Wavell’s
‘Breakdown Plan’ of a properly staged Br itish
withdrawal from the subcontinent, replacing it with his
own breakneck plan which eventually led to around
three-quarters of a million deaths in Northern India in
1947–48.
The accusation that Wavell was homosexual gets
deservedly short shrift from this book. That he enjoyed
the social company of Chips Channon and Peter Coats,
and edited a book of poetry entitled Other Men’s Flowers,
does not render him gay. Completely unsubstantiated
bitchy wartime Cairo gossip, related by the historian
Robert Rhodes James to the travel writer Patrick
French, is also not enough to call into question the sex-
uality of someone who this book shows to have been a
fine servant of the Empire.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 40
34
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
J USTIN M AROZZI
He on Honey-Dew
Hath Fed...
K UBLAI K HAN : F ROM X ANADU
TO S UPERPOWER
★
By John Man
(Bantam Press 383pp £20)
O N A PROGRAMME on political diar ists the other
evening on Radio 4, it was remarked that in a century
or so people will only know Cabinet ministers like
Geoffrey Howe through the prism of Alan Clark’s
diaries. The priapic fancier of Margaret Thatcher’s
ankles might have been a smaller man politically, but
history – through the longevity of his diaries – will
judge him a greater man.
There are parallels, though slightly different, with
Kublai Khan, a man whose name instantly evokes
Coleridge and one of the most famous poems in the
English language:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
I bet those two lines would represent the sum total of
what most educated people know about the thirteenth-
century Mongol emperor. They might, at a push, know
he was Mongol. Judging by my exper ience with
Tamerlane, a similarly and undeservedly obscure histori-
cal tyrant, they probably wouldn’t know he hails from
the thirteenth century.
We shouldn’t criticise Coleridge unduly for this, but
he didn’t provide much else on Kublai Khan that is of
historical value. Alas, there was no sacred river Alph in
Kublai’s world-spanning empire, no caverns measureless
to man, and as for the deep romantic chasm, forget
about it. Put it down to the opium.
If it is to Coleridge we owe our distinctly limited
knowledge of Kublai Khan in the modern age, it was
from Marco Polo that the West first learned of this fabu-
lously powerful eastern monarch. Polo is a fascinating
but by no means unimpeachable source. He has never
escaped the strong suspicion that he made up a good
deal of his sensational Travels.
Enter John Man into the fray. With recent biographies
of Genghis Khan and Attila behind him, Man was fast
accumulating a reputation as a historian with a penchant
for despots. His subject here is well chosen. Kublai Khan
is long overdue an accessible biography and this is
exactly what the author has provided: a cogent historical
narrative, enlivened with snatches of travel-writing
 WARRIORS

infor med by Man’s expertise through the complexities of

in remote corners of Mongolia Buddhism, Taoism and
and China. Confucianism. They were
Kublai was born in 1215. Man known as the Golden Lotus
begins by making a case for him Advisor y Group. He was an
as ‘the most powerful man who enlightened patron of the arts, a
ever lived’, with an empire shrewd and hugely talented
stretching more or less from the administrator, a believer in a jus-
Pacific to southern Russia. Of tice system that was both lenient
course, being Genghis Khan’s and effective, and a keen student
grandson wasn’t the worst start of economics and the benefits of
to life in a society with an trade. In other words, he was no
almost obsessive interest in the slash-and-burn barbarian. Things
Genghisid bloodline. had moved on from his grandfa-
That is not to say that there ther’s time.
were no formidable challenges for In later years he lost his mili-
him to overcome, the succession tary form, quite why it is not
high among them. After the one- entirely clear. He was defeated in
man show that was Genghis, the Japan, took two campaigns to
Mongol princes of the royal line subdue Burma and was embar-
ever after displayed the all too Khan, swathed in ermine rassed in Vietnam – militar y
predictable tendency to feud and shortcomings which perhaps have
fight among themselves, and it was no different during helped condemn him to unwarranted obscurity in the
Kublai’s early career. West. Following in the footsteps, so to speak, of Polo
He came from a junior branch of the family and was and Coleridge, Man has struck another valuable blow
only able to assume supreme power – and the title of for the posterity of this extraordinary man.
Great Khan – through the guile of his mother and his To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
own diplomatic and military acumen. It was the
extremely fortunate – for Kublai – deaths of his brothers
in more
ReadComfort
Ariq, Hulagu, Berke and Alghu within the space of a
few months from 1264 that cleared the way for him to
consolidate and then expand his power in the East. This
natural wastage of sibling rivals, together with his high
birth, should, I think, be borne in mind when judging By the age of sixty, you will
him against the top trio of world conquerors, namely need about three times as
Alexander, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Their record much light to read as you did
in your youth.
puts him out of contention for a bronze medal in the
Olympic tyrant stakes. THE RIGHT SOLUTION
An Alex Light will bathe your
This is not to downplay Kublai’s stunning achieve- page in a personal pool of high
ments. The conquest of China and its superbly managed quality light. It will restore better
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you can read and concentrate in
be sneezed at. In 1263, only seven years after laying the more comfort, for longer, and
foundations of his first capital at Xanadu, Kublai moved with less eyestrain.
his political base to Beijing, where he set about a truly A dedicated reading light
monumental building spree that gave birth to the amounts to a lifetime investment
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Imperial City. Beijing’s rulers may not be keen to admit pence a day. Alex Lights are the
it, but it is to this Mongolian foreigner that China owes “It really does make reading lights of choice for the
its present-day borders. His conquest of Tibet has it easier to read for Chelsea Pensioners. They are
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35
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 WARRIORS
C HARLES W HEELER
AFTER THE BOMB
AMERICAN SHOGUN: MACARTHUR, HIROHITO
AND THE A MERICAN D UEL WITH JAPAN
★ But while Hirohito was genuinely troubled by the
By Robert Harvey
(John Murray 480pp £25)
ACCORDING TO THE author, American Shogun is an
attempt to weave the lives of two leaders, General
Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito of Japan, into
a single narrative ‘told from both sides’. Readers, he says,
should judge whether he has succeeded. It was never likely
to be an easy assignment. MacArthur left behind him a
long trail of heavy footprints and Robert Harvey’s book is
primarily a cradle-to-grave biography of America’s most
controversial soldier, covering his many
heroic campaigns, his clashes with
Roosevelt and Truman, and his remark-
ably enlightened treatment of the
Japanese as supreme commander of the
occupation. What makes the narrative
unbalanced is the impossibility of giving
anything like equal exposure to the self-
effacing, tentative Hirohito, who – in
this account at least – seems to have tip-
toed through life in a state of bemuse-
ment, habitually expressing his wishes in
bursts of ambiguous verse.
The two men met only rarely. The
Emperor made the first move, visiting
the General two weeks after Japan’s sur-
render. In MacArthur’s terse account,
he was deeply moved when Hirohito
took sole responsibility for every politi-
cal and military decision and action of
his people in the conduct of war.
Others thought it a gambit – an
attempt by the Emperor to persuade The General and the Emperor
the Americans that if he were given
immunity from prosecution it would be difficult to
convict his subordinates.
In Washington, and also among America’s allies, there
were many who wanted Hirohito deposed, tried as a
war criminal and executed. MacArthur vehemently
disagreed: he told the chiefs of staff that he could not
govern against the Emperor, only through him as a
constitutional monarch. He added that if the Emperor
were hanged he would need at least a million American
troops to police Japan, and with that he found himself
preaching to the rapidly converted.
In the same message MacArthur tried to relieve
36
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
Hirohito of responsibility for the attack at Pearl Harbour.
His own impression, he wrote, was that the Emperor’s
‘connection with affairs of state up to the end of the war
was largely ministerial and automatically responsive to
the advice of his counsellors’. Here MacArthur was surely
stretching a point. The Meiji Constitution did require
the Emperor to follow the advice of his Prime Minister.
excesses of the military-industrial coalition that dominated
Japan’s governments during the Thirties, he never used
the imperial ‘rescript’, or decree, to restrain the armed
forces in Manchuria and China. Each of these wars was a
case of naked aggression, sanctioned by the highest
authorities in government, albeit reluctantly by the
Emperor himself.
When Japan made its move into Indochina in the
summer of 1941 (only a month after Hitler attacked
Russia), Hirohito again worried about the conse-
quences. However, the transcript of a conversation with
his chief adviser, Marquis Kido, sug-
gests that the Emperor’s caution was
overridden by greed – the prospect of
a rich haul of raw materials to be
gained from expansion into South
East Asia:
I am not at all pleased when we act
on our own and take advantage of
the other side’s weakness like a thief
at a fire. However, in order to deal
with the unsettled conditions we
find in the world today, it would
not do to be beaten because we
failed to attack when we had the
chance. ... I only hope you will
show prudence in the execution of
your plans.
The author believes that by the
autumn of 1941 the Emperor had
changed his mind in favour of war. It
is likely that he was persuaded by
what he saw as the obduracy of
Roosevelt, who had raised the stakes
by demanding a Japanese withdrawal
from China as well as from South East Asia. Early in
November Hirohito was joining his chiefs of staff in
operational planning for war against the US. He was
aware of the date and location of the strike against Pearl
Harbor. At a meeting on 2 December Hirohito was told
that Sunday 8 December would provide the best oppor-
tunity for a surprise attack since the Americans would
be resting, with their ships in port.
So, how harshly should history judge Hirohito?
Robert Harvey’s view is that, given what had gone
before (his repeated endorsement of a policy of imperial
expansion at the expense of Japan’s neighbours), his
 WARRIORS

choice of war against the Western powers was the only

logical one to make. But there is another question to be
answered. Had he tried, could Hirohito have averted
what began in Hawaii and ended with Hiroshima?
Enter General Tojo, War Minister, Prime Minister and
executed war criminal. At his trial Tojo stated that
Hirohito had assented, though reluctantly, to the war.
Had he not done so, he added, ‘none of us would have
dared to act against the Emperor’s will’. This was
a bombshell, subsequently altered in translation to
conform with MacArthur’s instructions not to drag the
Emperor into war-crimes proceedings.
Having saved him from possible execution MacArthur
appears to have lost interest in Hirohito. His only pur-
pose, in his own words, was to use his absolute authority
to turn Japan into a modern, democratic state. The
general turned out to be an imaginative and highly
competent administrator. Within weeks of his arrival in
Japan he had set up a working executive, had averted
mass starvation by seizing food stockpiled by the US
army, and had organised the return of more than eight
million Japanese stranded in their now collapsed Empire.
Instead of governing the country directly, as the allies
were doing with mixed success in occupied Germany,
MacArthur decided to run Japan through the governing
machine that had been in place throughout the war, set-
ting up a parallel administration to issue directives.
His instructions from Washington were these:
First, destroy military power. Punish war criminals.
Build representative government. Modernise the
constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the
women. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labour
movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish
police oppression. Develop a free and responsible
press. Liberalise education. Decentralise political
power. Separate church from state.
In his memoirs MacArthur claimed that all these tasks
were eventually accomplished, some easily, some with dif-
ficulty. The author disagrees. Within two years, he writes,
his reforms were being undermined by the Japanese gov-
ernment, which had most of the direct responsibility for
implementing them. On the most crucial issue – the
dissolution of the zaibatsu (industrial combines) by the
end of the occupation – no progress had been made at all.
In his introduction Robert Harvey says that
MacArthur’s handling of the American occupation of
Japan ‘contains immense lessons for the American occu-
pations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the skill with which this
remarkable man worked alongside and through existing
Japanese institutions should have been an object lesson
in Iraq and for American intervention abroad generally’.
Given his conclusion that MacArthur was crushed by an
unholy alliance of entrenched Japanese interests, this
seems like an analogy too far.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 40

LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

 WARRIORS
A LLAN M ALLINSON
Despatches from
the Front
D USTY WARRIORS : M ODERN S OLDIERS
AT WAR
★ Holmes makes no bones about how good he believes
By Richard Holmes
(HarperCollins 385pp £20)
RICHARD HOLMES’S POPULAR histories of the British
army – Redcoat, Tommy, and Sahib – and his television
War Walks, in which he recounts with enthusiasm and
wryness the army’s battles, have established him, along-
side the cerebral Sir John Keegan and Oxford’s Professor
Hew Strachan, as one of the country’s leading military
historians. As a military historian, however, he has sin-
gular credentials. He has combined his academic career
with that of an officer in the Territorial Army, rising to
command of a TA infantry battalion, and subsequently
becoming director of reserve forces. After retiring from
the TA he was appointed honorary colonel of a regular
infantry regiment, the Pr incess of Wales’s Royal
Regiment (PWRR), one of whose soldiers in Iraq,
Private Johnson Beharry, became the first recipient of
the Victoria Cross since the Falklands War. Dusty
Warriors is an account of a six-month tour of duty in
Iraq by one of the battalions of that regiment. Holmes
thereby perfectly combines his two hats – commentator
and practitioner – though he is far too modest to claim
the latter title, notwithstanding that the honorary
colonelcy of any regiment, especially these days when
the army is so heavily committed to operations, is no
sinecure. The book is not so much history in the usual
Holmes sense, however, rather the journalistic ‘first
rough draft of history’; but it would not be possible to
write that first draft without a profound understanding
of the historical context, for the army is a product of its
own history. Holmes not only describes the PWRR as
it was in Iraq in 2004, but also explains why it was.
Dusty Warriors is two things. First, it is a description of
the dangerous and complex enterprise that is becoming
known as ‘post-modern warfare’, and the way a British
regiment goes about it – the equipment, organisation,
tactics, techniques. Secondly, it is an insight into the
twenty-first century world of the British soldier. And
curiously, though not surprisingly to anyone who has
made a point of studying the enduring human factors of
soldiering, that world looks at times remarkably like
those described in Redcoat, Tommy, and Sahib. Indeed,
one of the most striking things that emerge from the
38
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
pages of Dusty Warriors is the importance of the regi-
ment and its subdivisions in inculcating and sustaining
the sense of comradeship that gets a man to do what
otherwise he might find impossible – something that
would at once be familiar to one of the Duke of
Wellington’s own officers. As Holmes puts it, ‘The
bonds of mateship linking men in the back of a Warrior
[armoured infantry fighting vehicle] were adamantine.
Private soldiers wanted to tell me just how good their
mates were.’
the soldiers are. ‘If I can begin to persuade you’, he
writes in his pungent introduction, ‘how good he is,
how durable and enduring…’ He is biased, of course:
any colonel of a regiment would be inclined to the same
view; and at times he is as sentimental as Kipling about
the private soldier. But the evidence in this book – the
words and the deeds, recounted frequently at first hand
– is so compelling that there is hardly need for an advo-
cate. Holmes writes that ‘few of my countrymen seemed
to have the least idea of what British soldiers were
actually doing in Iraq’. The accusations of torture and
brutality in the eighteen months since the PWRR’s tour
of duty, with the rush to judgement for and against the
army, have thrown that nescience into greater relief.
This book goes a long way to redressing that perilous
state of affairs, and is all the more credible for its warts-
and-all approach. As to the big issue – whether the army
should be in Iraq at all – Holmes takes the professional’s
stance: as one of the PWRR’s officers puts it, the atti-
tude to the task is ‘apolitical – not amoral’. In fact the
soldiers themselves are critical of the government not so
much for sending troops to Iraq in the first place as for
paying insufficient attention to the complex require-
ments of this new kind of operation. New but not
unpredictable (far from it, indeed). Holmes himself at
one point talks of the regiment’s pathetic ‘attempts at
G5 [civil affairs]… to overcome the massive shortfall in
the planning’.
Just so. The strength of the British army, which is in
truth the strength of the regimental system, is that it can
rescue an ill-conceived operation by the application of
sheer stubborn pride, which itself derives from a feeling
of connection with something bigger than just the men
who answer the roll call on a particular day – the powerful
sense of history, that the regiment has always done its
duty. That, and in the end, the vital importance of your
mates. Read the dedication at the beginning of Dusty
Warriors for the nicknames of some of these post-mod-
ern mates: it alone paints a terrific picture. And then the
poignancy of the dedication’s last sentence: ‘But above
all to Ray, Lee and Little Steve, who didn’t make it.’
This is Holmes at his best. There isn’t a better book
about soldiering today.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
 POETS
P ETER M C D ONALD
THE CLUTCH OF EARTH
D ISTRICT AND C IRCLE
★ District and Circle is its writing
By Seamus Heaney
(Faber & Faber 78pp £12.99)
FOR A LONG time now, the poet Seamus Heaney has been
obliged to make terms with the admiring consensus about
his own poetry. This could be seen as a happy position, a
problem, or, more accurately, a combination of both. The
poetry audience, like that more general readership into
which Heaney (almost uniquely among modern poets)
crosses over, believes that what oft was well expressed can-
not be too often thought; and for someone of Heaney’s
stature, this makes originality harder.
District and Circle comes five years after Heaney’s last vol-
ume, Electric Light, and in many ways it is the work of an
altogether fresher, more inventive poet. While no book by
Heaney is ever without its share of outstanding poems,
Electric Light had a preponderance of dutiful and unsurprising
verse. As had been the case too often since the mid 1980s,
the sources of Heaney’s inspiration suffered from the poet’s
over-insistent inspection of them in the light of his own pub-
lic literary profile. ‘The hiding-places of my power’,
Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude, ‘Seem open, I approach,
and then they close’. Heaney’s understanding of this lesson
from his most important poetic influence has not always led
him to pay sufficient heed to it in his own writing.
Where Electric Light saw Heaney resting on his laurels,
District and Circle shows him getting his skates on.
Indeed, Heaney contrives to get Wordsworth’s skates on,
in a nine-line poem where those museum items, ‘top-
pled / In dust in a display case’, are rejected in favour of
the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.
Writing like this carries no excess baggage: what reels
and flashes here is both Wordsworth’s life and Heaney’s
imagination, while ‘the clutch of earth’ is something
both acknowledged and overcome in the word ‘scored’
– a musical as well as a physical act of inscription.
All through the new volume, physical sensation
becomes a mode of transcendence. This may not be
exactly new for Heaney, but here it is newly conceived.
A sledgehammer’s ‘gathered force’ is realised in a blow
‘so unanswerably landed / The staked earth quailed and
shivered in the handle’ (‘A Shiver’). On the London
Underground in the title poem, Heaney experiences
the jolt and one-off treble
Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal
Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.
39
Again, the language works
hard here, hauling and drag-
ging its speaker in two direc-
tions, both away from and
deeper into ‘earth’s clutch’.
One great achievement of
on childhood. This is power-
ful in a new way for Heaney,
if only because now, in his
sixties, he is able to see his Heaney: back on form
own childhood in the light of
age. The book contains marvellous prose-poems on the
peopled landscapes of his schooldays, along with sonnets –
seemingly effortless in their sheer fluency, but memorably
tough and intent – like ‘A Clip’, which remembers
Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors,
The strong-armed chair, the plain mysteriousness
Of your sheeted self inside that neck-tied cope ...
The physical directness of the steel and scissors underpins
Heaney’s phrase ‘plain mysteriousness’: the abstraction is
earned, and made good. In ‘Senior Infants’, when a
schoolmate is encountered after many decades, now
walking with a stick, it is the physical memory of anoth-
er, chastising stick which unites the two men:
‘Well, for Jesus’ sake,’ cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
‘For Jesus’ sake! D’you mind the sally rod?’
The Northern Irish ‘mind’ (for remember) is perfectly
judged, and anything but casual. Childhood, Heaney
makes us feel, is something lodged in the body’s memo-
ry as well as that of the remembering mind.
Heaney has the gift of integrating a personal, physically
acute voice with an awareness – necessarily a troubled
one – of the world in whose threatening midst the poet
finds himself. In the past, approaching this as an official-
feeling, private/public dilemma, Heaney has risked too
often the bathos of celebrity self-awareness. Now, some-
thing much more valuable has come to replace Heaney’s
more dutiful versifying on the subject of history and the
poet. The shades of 9/11 that fall across a poem about
an American fireman’s helmet also give depth to a trans-
lation of Horace (‘Anything Can Happen’), where
The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
In one poem (part of a fine sequence revisiting his own
‘Tollund Man’ of more than thirty years ago) Heaney quotes
a remark about the late Czeslaw Milosz, that ‘the soul exceeds
its circumstances’. District and Circle shows how this can be
imagined; it shows, too, how genuinely new poetry can
escape from the clutch even of the poet’s own reputation, to
become original, moving, and necessary all over again.
To order this book at £10.40, see LR Bookshop on page 40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 POETS

A NDRO L INKLATER

ORKNEY’S LAUREATE
G EORGE M ACKAY B ROWN : T HE L IFE
★
By Maggie Fergusson
(John Murray 363pp £25)

YOU MIGHT NOT expect much from a biography of a

man who spent most of his life living with his mother
and the rest of it alone in a two-roomed council flat,
rarely stirring far from either home. It helps of course
that he had the sort of Blakeian imagination that saw a
graveyard as a honeycomb full of anguished bees or ‘a
green wave full of fish’, but the focus of his extravagant
inner eye hardly ever broadened beyond the shoreline of
a remote island off the north coast of Scotland. From
this unpromising hank of material, however, Maggie
Fergusson has fashioned an affectionate and enlightening
life of the poet George Mackay Brown.
Names mislead. In this book the poet is referred to
simply as ‘George’, as he was throughout Orkney. But
George conjures up someone solid, jowly, Hanoverian,
whereas this George’s face was an inverted triangle,
topped with bushy black hair, narrowing through
hollow cheeks to a sharp, undershot jaw, and illuminated
by deep-set blue eyes. Wary, wounded and private were
its qualities.
Fame came late. He was in his mid-forties when The
Year of the Whale, his third volume of poetry, was
published and added his name to the list of others who
suddenly appeared to ring the country in the 1960s –
Ted Hughes in Cornwall, Seamus Heaney in Northern
Ireland, Norman MacCaig in eastern Scotland. Yet
George’s work was particularly difficult to place. The
others travelled, and wrote of the contemporary world.
From his birth in 1921 to his death seventy-five years
later, George spent barely six years away from Orkney,
and rarely wrote of anything but the elements that make
its green, treeless whaleback islands a place of conflict:
between land and sea, between the certainties of what
he called the slow golden harvest of farming and the
chanciness of fishing’s quick silver harvest.
Some critics mistook him for a modern John Clare, a
peasant poet naively at one with nature. What removed
him from the category was his view of the natural world
as the outer appearance of a much larger conflict:
between life and death, and (what increasingly seemed
to George to be a battle of still greater concern)
between the grace of God’s purpose and the randomness
of fate’s working.
George first made this apparent in ‘Thorfinn’, a 1956
poem based on the real-life tragedy of a boy, notorious

LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

 POETS

as a hen-thief, who escaped his troubles by going out in apparent in his

his boat to catch lobsters: short stories – and
Whether it chanced, the Owner of these lobsters, late in life a fertile
Grown sour at Thorfinn, as any bristling poultry man, collaboration with
Turned a salt key in his last door of light; the composer
Or whether Love, abroad in a seeking wave, Peter Maxwell
Lifted him from the creaking rowlocks of time Davies gave rise to
And flung a glad ghost on a wingless shore: a stream of stories,
No one can tell. plays and the
A crofter at early light annual St Magnus
Found an empty boat stuttering on the rocks Festival.
And dawn-cold cocks cheering along the links. N eve r t h e l e s s ,
To his peers, it was this intimacy of the immediate and the instinct that Mackay Brown: double vision
other-worldly in his poetry that marked him out. Forty- kept him islanded
five years later Ted Hughes still remembered how the from love, society and other entanglements was a sure
poem ‘really went into me. I can see all sorts of hints one. In his last years he gave himself up with growing
and suggestions in this piece that I’ve taken myself,’ and conviction to his Catholic faith, and duly paid a price
Seamus Heaney wrote in tribute, ‘His vision has some- for its consoling embrace. As its certainties invaded
thing of the skaldic poet’s consciousness of inevitable his wr iting, the mag ic faded and tur ned to
ordeal, something of the haiku master’s susceptibility to cloying piety. Even so the poet’s double vision never
the delicate and momentary.’ entirely deserted him. On his death-bed he spoke of the
The great achievement of this biography is to show sensation of life departing, and once more the vision
how the fusion occurred within the poet himself. and the island coincided. His last mortal words were,
Crippled by childhood tuberculosis, and dogged by ‘I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of
depression and drink (to George a whisky bottle was the harbour.’
‘the smiler with the knife’), imagination became not an To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 40
escape but the only tolerable place to be. By staying still,
he could let his eye pass through the surface of the out-
side world – Heaney thought ‘George had only to look
out over the boats in the harbour at Stromness for the
magic to begin to work’ – so that he saw both places at
once, the real and the visionary. Orkney’s long history
provided his gateway, from the 5,000-year-old ruins of
Maeshowe, by way of the 850-year-old martyrdom of
the Viking saint Magnus, to the sempiternal gossip of
fishermen, tinkers and farmers’ wives.
Yet it was a lonely business. In a much-anthologised
work, The Poet, George wrote of the distraction, and attrac-
tion, of putting on a front for one’s social life, but then
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside,
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of silence.
Fergusson does not attempt to analyse George’s poems,
but the emotional context she provides through copious
quotation from his huge correspondence is revealing.
Although George never married, it is clear that he hun-
gered constantly for maternal love, and aroused it in many
women, but invariably retreated into icy isolation once it
was won. By no coincidence, some of his best work in A
Calendar of Love, and Fishermen with Ploughs, was produced
while he was caught up in a long but unconsummated
love affair with generous-hearted alcoholic Stella
Cartwright, muse and pillow-mate to what seems like
most of Scotland’s poets in the Sixties and Seventies. He
felt more at ease with friends – a conviviality particularly

41
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 GENERAL
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
NO POINTY-HEADS HERE?
A BSENT M INDS : I NTELLECTUALS IN B RITAIN
★ Absent Minds certainly has all the technical appurte-
By Stefan Collini
(Oxford University Press 536pp £25)
STEFAN COLLINI IS what might be called ‘an academic’s
academic’, although he clearly aspires to a larger role in
‘the culture’. He has written a couple of moderately
diverting books on intellectual history, and a potted biog-
raphy of Matthew Arnold. These modest achievements
(and a lot of academic journalism) have enabled him to
clamber up the first few rungs of being what the
Americans call a ‘public intellectual’ while going through
the (relatively undemanding) hoops of an academic career
in a country where chairs are dished out like long-service
medals on the railways. To counter donnish accidie,
Collini pontificates about the state of British culture, or
the fitfully cognate plight of the nation’s universities, in
such journals as the LRB or Prospect. Judging by these
wordy efforts, there may be a bit of a climb ahead if he is
aiming for public recognition as distinct from the plaudits
of academe.
Collini is known, at any rate around Cambridge, to be
an elegant inserter of knives – some achievement in a uni-
versity where there are more bitches than in a dog pound.
Of course, as a representative of the ‘Left university’, he is
scrupulous over where he sticks his knives. Encounter – the
most impressive intellectual periodical in postwar Britain
– is predictably traduced for its CIA connections. The
Tory governments of the 1980s are blamed for the current
‘demoralisation’ of the universities, but Collini switches
into the passive voice when it comes to addressing the
changes in higher-education policy since 1997. It is under
New Labour that academia has been largely proletari-
anised, one of the many things Collini whines on about.
Speaking of whining, a recent Times Higher Education
Supplement, a useful source for establishing how ‘demor-
alised’ higher education has become under the ‘regime’
many dons voted for, reports that working in a British
university is apparently more stressful than being on duty
in a hospital Accident and Emergency ward. Compared
to staunching blood spurting out of arteries, grading a
few essays while producing four significant pieces of
‘research’ in seven years must be a terrible ordeal.
That cyclical output requirement, as some educational
bureaucrat probably calls it, seems to be the main inspi-
ration for Collini’s Absent Minds. He devotes over five
hundred pages of dull and humourless prose to refuting a
commonplace concerning Britain’s supposed lack of
intellectuals, a charge that is about as interesting as the
42
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
‘Continental’ claim that the British have hot-water
bottles rather than sex. The fact that there have been
‘anti-intellectual intellectuals’ seems to give Collini an
ontological shock. Is he so provincial that he has never
heard, for example, of self-hating Jews, or blacks who
don’t like being associated with ghetto rappers?
nances of scholarship, but just because it quacks like a
duck, it doesn’t mean it is a duck and not an old turkey.
As the author explains: ‘The book’s overall strategy has
seemed to me to call for literary tactics that are varied
and discrepant, even at times frankly opportunistic.’
Well, you said it, pal. The chapter on T S Eliot, which is
the best thing in it, seems to have wandered in from
some Festschr ift or other. Haven’t the Research
Assessment managers, of whom Collini seems to live in
dread, war ned about the dangers of recycling?
Incidentally, Eliot (and George Orwell, who gets the full
debunking treatment) were not ‘famous names’, but
writers of major significance in twentieth-century
Anglo-Saxon culture. A couple of chapters on A J Ayer
and A J P Taylor consist of little more than snide gossip,
with a few footnotes attached to give it the semblance of
belonging to some academic genre. The title of the
chapter on Taylor – ‘Nothing To Say’ – could well have
been the title of Collini’s book. The author does not
seem to grasp the point that Ayer and Taylor may have
immersed themselves, respectively, in metropolitan
bohemia and Fleet Street because they were bored
witless by people like Collini, for whom life seems to be
a never-ending seminar, not to speak of the soporific
torment of an Oxbridge High Table. ‘And what do you
do?’ ‘I study the glands in cows’ is pretty representative
of my experience, before the dons turn to bitching each
other up or announcing they are ‘tri-sexual’.
Throughout the book, Collini does not bother to dis-
guise his antipathy to Matthew d’Ancona, David Starkey,
Roger Scruton, or Paul Johnson, while he ‘strategically’
sucks up to his fellow academician, Eric Hobsbawm:
‘who has retained the high regard of fellow-scholars while
helping to orient his fellow-citizens by identifying a num-
ber of main patterns in the kaleidoscope of modern world
history’. Actually, I know many distinguished scholars
who think Hobsbawm is utterly appalling and not merely
because of his public nonchalance with regard to the 120
million victims of global Communism. No wonder stu-
dents (and their parents) are beginning to mutiny about
the biased content of so much ‘humanities’ teaching if
Collini’s lightly worn prejudices are anything to go by.
At a time when intellectuals are arguing about things
that matter to many – pre-emptive warfare, the legality
of rendition and torture – it seems all too fitting that a
British academic can find nothing better to write about
than whether or not Britain has intellectuals, and that he
should issue sententious warnings about the siren-like
 GENERAL
perils of journalism or media celebrity. Niall Ferguson,
David Starkey and Norman Stone should congratulate
themselves for causing so much panic in the academic
dovecotes. Collini seems to have no self-awareness as
regards the fact that so much of what passes for ‘scholar-
ship’ is utterly ephemeral, self-indulgent, solipsistic and
A BIGAIL G REEN
POLITICAL LANDSCAPING
T HE C ONQUEST OF N ATURE : WATER ,
L ANDSCAPE AND THE M AKING OF
M ODERN G ERMANY
★ But the Rhine in its natural state made a poor boundary.
By David Blackbourn
(Jonathan Cape 497pp £30)
THE GERMANS LIKE to see themselves as lovers of nature.
Ever since the hero of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous
painting bestrode the mountains in his frockcoat and
walking-stick, they have prided themselves on their
unique sensitivity to the landscape in which they live. At
the turn of the nineteenth century this love of nature
spawned a generation of conservation societies and hiking
fanatics. Thirty years later, the vegetarian Führer of the
Third Reich passed a series of ecologically motivated laws
that formed the basis of German
nature preservation for decades to
come. Even today, hikers sing the
praises of ‘Green forests, German
forests’ – and anyone who has
spent any time there will tell you
that German recycling is second to
none. David Blackbourn’s highly
original and thought-provoking
book turns this myth on its head.
He demonstrates that from the
1740s to the 1960s German history
was as much about the subjugation
of nature as it was about political The Rhine as it was
mastery and military might.
His story opens with the draining of the Oder Marshes,
an achievement that prompted Frederick the Great to
boast: ‘Here I have conquered a province in peace.’ It was
the first of many projects, which saw hundreds of thou-
sands of acres reclaimed from the wilderness of North
German wetlands to be settled by hordes of colonists
attracted by land, equipment and other perks. Like other
eighteenth-century princes, Frederick also promoted the
systematic culling of species that challenged men for
resources. Amazingly, the humble sparrow was his greatest
victim: some twelve million were killed over a thirty-year
period in Old March Brandenburg alone. At least the
43
trivial, not least when it is based on one lot of scribblers
scribbling about others, like his own book. As for his
triumphal claim that tax-funded academics will duly
monopolise the terrain on which a wider variety of
intellectuals operate, the only response is: God help us.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 40
sparrow survived. Rarer, more predatory beasts like the
lynx, the bear and the wolf found themselves on the road
to extinction pretty fast.
A hundred years later, Kaiser Wilhelm I followed in
the footsteps of his illustrious ancestor by approving a
proposal to reshape the Rhine. This had been on the
cards ever since the Napoleonic era, when French revo-
lutionaries saw the river as a natural political frontier.
Annual floods meant that an island which was French
one winter might be German the next, while the river
itself changed course two or three times a year. Even
after Napoleon, rulers of German states like Baden con-
tinued to toy with the idea, but the project only became
feasible after unification. The upshot was the largest civil
engineering project Germany had ever seen, as the
Upper Rhine lost almost a quarter of its original length
and some 2,200 islands vanished from the map.
Imperial Germany was a golden age for civil engineering.
The drowned landscape of Jade Bay in Oldenburg was
reconfigured as a Prussian naval base, while the state
promoted the colonisation of the
surrounding moorland, the con-
struction of a myriad of artificial
waterways, and the proliferation of
the ‘giant dam’. If Prussian military
ambition was the catalyst for the
Jade Bay project, then the hunger
for hydro-electric power and
drinking water in an age of indus-
try and mass urbanisation was the
driving force behind the new dams.
By now the landscape of
Germany had changed beyond all
recognition. And yet, for a century
and a half, only the nostalgic and
those who lost homes and livelihoods in the process
made much fuss. Then, in the 1930s, Hitler’s penchant
for nature fused with the anti-modernist preoccupations
and racialist assumptions of the conservation movement –
they were, after all, conservatives with a small ‘c’. At first,
nature came a poor second to military and economic
considerations. The bird-r ich wetlands of the
Westeunteich became a protected area in 1936, but the
natural-gas industry had destroyed all fifty acres by 1943.
Only the intoxicating conquest of large swathes of
Eastern Europe changed this equation.
With their new-found Lebensraum, Germans had room
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 GENERAL
to breathe. They indulged in racially inspired colonisation
fantasies in which the shaping of the Eastern landscape and
the process of Germanisation went hand in hand. Not for
nothing was Auschwitz built on the marshlands of Upper
Silesia. The ideas of race and land-reclamation were so
intertwined that even Heydrich rhapsodied about building
an ethnic dike to hold back ‘the storm floods of Asia’,
where a band of martial farmers would ‘slowly lay down
one German wall after another so that ... German people
of German blood can carry out German settlement.’
After the war, refugees from the German East cher-
ished memories of this lost landscape, while former
Nazis reinvented themselves as pillars of the conservation
movement. Not until the crumbling of the economic
miracle did Germans begin to question the relationship
between economic growth and reshaping the land.
Reunification even enabled them to discover the marshes
once drained by the great Frederick – now celebrated as
one of the last river wetlands in Eastern Europe, a place
where ‘nature is still intact’.
This startling account of the birth of moder n
Germany adds a new, profoundly physical dimension to
our understanding of modernity. It is environmental his-
tory, but with a twist. For Blackbourn never loses an
opportunity to remind us that landscape is ‘constructed’.
There is nothing natural about nature in the twenty-first
century, and the countryside we take for granted would
have been unrecognisable to those who lived there three
R ICHARD O VERY
The Case for
the Prosecution
A MONG THE D EAD C ITIES
★ forces which violated normative justice in pursuit of an
By A C Grayling
(Bloomsbury 361pp £20)
THIS IS UNUSUAL territory for an academic philosopher,
but one that deserves exploration. Anthony Grayling has
set out to answer squarely the awkward question, often
posed but seldom clearly confronted, about whether the
area bombing of German and Japanese cities in the Second
World War was immoral or not (or, to use the conceptually
ambiguous term employed here, a ‘moral crime’).
This is indeed an important question, not least because
there are ominous noises offstage at present about the
possibility or necessity of using nuclear weapons under
certain circumstances in the Middle East. The answer, or
‘judgement’ as Grayling rather grandly calls it, is unam-
biguous: area bombing was a crime then, is now, and
44
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
hundred years ago.
Nor would they have sympathised with our environ-
mental concerns. They had been building smaller dikes
and dams for centuries, during which their homes and
livelihoods were periodically washed away. But they also
learnt to adapt to this precarious situation. When the
drowned medieval villages of Jade Bay were finally
consigned to oblivion, their inhabitants claimed a new
future on the higher mounds. Every environmental
intervention saw winners and losers, the colonisers of
the reclaimed marshes set against the primitive fisher-
men whose way of life was utterly destroyed.
Is there anything specifically German about this story,
apart from the landscape? Blackbourn indicates that there
is. He concludes that the new ‘Green’ orthodoxy spells a
better future for all of us because ‘for most of the period
covered by this book ... the “conquest of nature” in
Germany was all too closely linked to the conquest of
others’. This association between the ruthless exploitation
of the environment and German foreign policy is rein-
forced by the photographs on the cover, which juxtapose
a peaceful romantic landscape and a picture of Hitler at
the head of his troops. Yet little besides the use of soldiers
in civil engineering and the popular imagery of the bat-
tlefield justifies the connection. If we think the Germans
were unique in their determination to reshape their
physical surroundings, we should probably think again.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 40
probably can be seen as such when set against the ‘general
moral standards’ of 2,000 years of Western history. This is
unexceptionable enough, even philosophically banal.
Who, sixty years on, when asked if dropping bombs on
enemy cities and killing 800,000 of their civilian inhabi-
tants was moral or not, would say it was?
Grayling insists that this is a judgement that needs to be
made because the victorious Allied populations have never
faced up to the reality of those things done by their armed
apparently just war. The bombing has been defended on
many grounds: retaliation for German bombing of Britain
based on a simple view of moral equivalence; military
necessity to speed up the end of the war and prevent fur-
ther deaths; the widespread belief that in a total war whole
societies became engaged in war-making and not just the
armed forces; and the assumption that if you stated that the
aim was to degrade the enemy’s economic and military
capability then that somehow made it legitimate regardless
of the cost to civilians. Morality in most of these cases is
relative; above all, it is usually argued, these are moral
choices made in the context of war, which are likely to be
relative from the very nature of conflict. When Churchill
enquired of the Free French leadership if they would toler-
ate the bombing of French targets prior to D-Day, given
that it would result in French civilian deaths, he won
 GENERAL
agreement because the liberation of France was seen as a
higher moral objective than saving thousands of civilian lives.
The retrospective argument that bombing was effective
in securing victory and thus by implication must have
been moral is also presented here (indeed this reviewer
finds himself involuntarily selected as one of its principal
protagonists). This is to confuse history and philosophy.
The historian asks a number of different questions, which
require different kinds of judgement. It is possible to argue
that something is effective without then arguing that it is
morally legitimate. I might object strongly to my neigh-
bour playing loud music and shoot him dead for doing so;
this would effectively end the nuisance but it could not
remotely be regarded as moral or proportionate. Historians
narrate and explain; if they spent
their whole time condemning the
past they would write bad history.
That is why they don’t write books
debating whether the Mongol sack
of Samarkand was moral or not.
This is only one of the historical
and philosophical confusions that
emerge from Grayling’s book. He
is at great pains to explain that only
area bombing of Ger man and
Japanese cities was a ‘moral crime’.
The reader must assume that the
Ger man bombing of Warsaw,
Minsk, Stalingrad, London and a
host of other places is to be regarded
a priori as a ‘moral crime’ like the
Japanese bombing of Shanghai. Yet
what of the Allied bombing of
Italian and French cities, which
resulted in the deaths of an esti-
mated 60,000–70,000 in each
state? Was it a cr ime to bomb
Italian cities up to 1943 and the fall of Mussolini, but
not thereafter because Italians in the area still occupied
by the Germans were being bombed in order that they
might be liberated? What sense would it make to a
French bombing victim to be told that his loss was a
regrettable by-product of military necessity but that
German civilian deaths were a crime? Not much.
The problem is one of principle. Grayling makes
much, at the start of his prosecution, of limiting his
interest only to area bombing, that is the deliberate attack
on civilian morale and residential amenities (and, of
course, on civilians) carried out between 1941 and 1945
by the RAF in Germany and in 1944–45 by the US air
forces against Japan. But where can the line be drawn?
Attacks on targets genuinely identifiable as military or
military-industrial also produced extensive civilian casu-
alty. American bombing in Europe, so long defended as
‘precision’ bombing, was, as Grayling shows, anything
45
but precise, though no one has yet computed the
number of dead caused by US air forces in the daylight
campaign. If Grayling’s principle is applied only to area
bombing, then other forms of bombing, must by impli-
cation be regarded as legitimate, though this is clearly not
what he means since much of the book is taken up with
the development of international legal instruments in the
twentieth century designed to outlaw all bomb attacks
that cause civilian deaths and destruction.
The logic of the case made here is that all bombing
from the air should be regarded as immoral unless it is
directed at the armed forces in the field. Intention is in
this case irrelevant. German historians have made much
recently of the distinction between the Luftwaffe and the
RAF, claiming that the German air
forces were directed only to attack
military and military-economic
targets. The result was the death of
40,000 civilians in the Blitz, a dis-
proportionate number but perhaps
legitimate if intention is what
counts. Clearly this will not do.
Any bombing of cities will involve
civilian casualties, dead, maimed,
dispossessed, traumatised. In this
sense, all bombing must be regarded
as immoral if any bombing is to be
regarded as immoral. Or perhaps
for Grayling the real issue is not
one of principle as such, but of
proportionality, which is once
again a complex and morally rela-
tive issue. If the RAF had killed
only the same number as the
Germans did in Britain, then per-
haps Grayling would not feel he
had a case to make.
The more pressing questions about the whole history
of bombing and its effects upon civilians remain unan-
swered. Why did only Britain and the United States –
leaders of the liberal West, committed to a set of liberal
moral principles, and actively arguing in the 1930s for
the bombing of civilians to be prohibited – engage in
such massive campaigns of destruction during the war,
culminating in the atrocious bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? And why, having realised that big questions
had to be answered after 1945 about the legitimacy of
bomb attack, did they continue to employ bombing
which resulted in civilian casualties right down to the
recent war in Iraq? This is a strategy of choice, and it is a
choice at odds with the whole drift of international law
since 1949 with the signing of the Geneva Convention.
This is a central paradox of the modern age, observed
more than a century ago by Dostoevsky, when the
gloomy anti-hero of Notes from Underground contrasts the
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 GENERAL
unthinking barbarian who ‘massacres with a clear con-
science’ and the civilised man who abominates slaughter
but engages in it ‘more than ever’.
Grayling’s book has already generated a good deal of
discussion. He has done what many people have shirked
doing for a long time. Bombing was not technically a
war crime in the Second World War (even today the use
of nuclear weapons is not formally illegal), though it
clearly violated the spirit of all attempts from the late
T IM H EALD
PLAIN TALES
R ETURN TO A KENFIELD : P ORTRAIT OF AN
E NGLISH V ILLAGE IN THE 21 ST C ENTURY
★ Horseshoes: ‘Our biggest seller is shepherd’s pie,’ says
By Craig Taylor
(Granta Books 288pp £14.99)
FORTY YEARS AGO, Ronald Blythe caught a Suffolk vil-
lage at a crucial moment in its history and immortalised
it in a classic piece of acutely-recorded oral history. Now
a young Canadian writer has returned to Akenfield –
actually a fictional composite of two neighbouring East
Anglian communities – to follow up the story and find
the octogenarian Blythe, who is still leading a solitary
secluded life nearby in a house with the single word
‘Mud’ written on a sign on his approaches. Blythe was
always down-to-earth in every respect.
The new book is as compelling and seductive as its
parent, and its format as simple – though, as in the earlier
instance, deceptively so. A flat description of the inter-
viewee is followed by a page or two of tape-recorded
soliloquy. This latter reads like genuine stream of con-
sciousness, but it is an effect that takes art and industry
to achieve. In real life people don’t talk like this – they
‘um’ and ‘er’ and leave sentences suspended in the air.
This doesn’t make the pieces in the book less ‘real’, but
it’s as well to remember that a 91-year-old former game-
keeper can’t actually produce vivid recollections and
anecdotes in a single seamless speech, any more than can
a former farm worker called ‘Shortie’, or Peggy, who
used to lay out the village corpses.
The author, like Blythe himself, is an unobtrusive
presence, a sympathetic recorder, a shrewd prompter and
a clever editor. Unlike Blythe he is not, however, a
native East Anglian, but someone brought up in the vast
undulating prairies of western Canada. It’s therefore odd
but satisfying to find him so at home among the mostly
elderly villagers, the voles and the rabbits of rural
Suffolk, pedalling around on a borrowed bicycle, and
sufficiently in tune with his surroundings to turn his
headlight off when the moon gets bright.
46
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
nineteenth century onwards to limit the effects of war to
the battlefield and to protect civilians from victimisation.
But this will not get us very far. Two million protesters
in 2003 did not prevent Shock and Awe a few weeks
later. The apparently unambiguous judgement that area
bombing was immoral will do little to dent the strategic
hubris of today’s Western leaders. I would be a nervous
inhabitant of Tehran at the moment.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
Akenfield, bypassed by the B1078 (which was origi-
nally a Roman road, referred to by the villagers as a ‘bit
of straight’), seems like a pretty nothing sort of place –
wherein lies much of its attraction. There is a school: ‘If
you took the school out of the community there would
be another nice house,’ says the head teacher, ‘but there
would be a huge gap.’ There is a pub called The Three
Emma, the manageress – ‘Lasagne also goes mad.’ There
is a church: ‘Sometimes there will be five or six of us at
the eight-thirty communion,’ says the Reverend Betty.
‘Sometimes we get as many as twelve.’ And the church-
yard is tended by Ronnie: ‘Although I don’t go to
church now,’ he says, ‘I do believe in the church.’
Blythe himself says that when he wrote his original he
supposed he was seeing the last of the old rural way of
life ‘before the commuters and the telly and the new
farming methods’. Not, as he stresses, that his book was
sentimental. Quite the reverse. It was in some ways a
harsh book, evoking a hard, remorseless life, close to the
soil, with precious few rewards and constant insecurity.
Some of this survives, but the old orchards have all but
vanished and the new tractors have enclosed cabs with
stereo sound and air-con. Blythe himself doubts whether
there are now more than about a dozen in the entire
community of 400 who still work the land.
In this Akenfield is probably typical. Because it is
bypassed, and comparatively unlovely as well as fairly
remote, it is probably less gentrified than many of its
prettier, more accessible counterparts; but in many
respects what has happened to Akenfield is what has
happened to villages all over Britain. There is, therefore,
a sense of loss and sadness, though part of this may be
accounted for by the fact that so many of those Taylor
interviewed are old; two, in fact, died between interview
and publication. ‘Nothing too fancy,’ said a mourner at
one of the wakes. ‘Just a pleasant way to be remembered.’
You could make a similar claim for this book. It’s not
fancy; it is pleasant. As a portrait it is convincing, and
while it is very much a picture of a particular place at a
particular time it is also, in a sense, an example of some-
thing typical that most of us would recognise within
seconds of entering the public bar or walking down the
nave of the empty church.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 40
 GENERAL
L UCY L ETHBRIDGE
OF BARONS AND BUTCHERS
T HE S UNLIGHT ON THE G ARDEN : A FAMILY
IN L OVE , WAR AND M ADNESS
★ ‘the genes for mental illness appeared to have passed her
By Elizabeth Speller
(Granta Books 240pp £14.99)
THE HAZY BLACK-AND-WHITE photograph of a pair of
imposing gateposts which adorns the dustjacket of
Elizabeth Speller’s memoir of her family suggests that the
gardens of her childhood were rather grand. This turns
out, intriguingly, to be only half-true: in among the usual
middle-class British family tree peopled by characters spi-
ralling up and down the social scale, there was a startlingly
unusual connection. In the 1880s and 1890s Gerald
Richard Howard – wealthy son of Lady Fanny Cavendish
and her husband Frederick Howard MP, and nephew of
the Duke of Devonshire – lived with Ada Curtis, a for-
mer maid and daughter of a Lincolnshire butcher; the
couple produced eight children, including the author’s
grandmother. The Howards and Cavendishes are the
‘grand gates’ aspect of Speller’s family, but there are also
affluent shopkeepers from the 1920s, a fashionable screen-
writing uncle in the 1960s, and a missionary great-aunt in
Bulawayo. Speller’s grandmother had a passionate liaison
with a Polish soldier during the War, and her great-aunt
Gwynneth travelled the South of France with a companion,
Sidney, who had dyed red hair and wore make-up.

JUT
ZPVS
MJGF
All promises well, then, for a book full of the rich
muddle of family history and with some vignettes that
are highly coloured by historical details. But The Sunlight
on the Garden does not deliver what its subtitle promises:
characters appear, are barely introduced, and then vanish
with bewildering rapidity (a hastily sketched family tree
at the beginning of the book hardly helps, as it is full of
figures who are not mentioned at all in the text, and
stops a generation short of most of those who are); and
the themes of love and war are so elliptically presented as
to be entirely obscured. Certain concrete details emerge
from the general haze – 1950s television programmes, or
books and clothes (the author has an uncannily accurate
memory for things like buttons and colours) – but some-
how, as its title rather wearyingly forebodes, the warm
summer days of childhood memory seem all too similar
to those summer days that appear in other memoirs of
happy youthful holidays. The one theme that seems to
absorb Speller’s full attention is that of madness; but
although the book purports to be about tracing a family’s
mental instability through the generations, it is her own
experience that interests her most. At one point she
describes herself as ‘endlessly introspective’, but she does
47
not seem have stopped to consider whether this intro-
spection, like describing one’s dreams or passing round
holiday snaps, might not be rather boring for her reader.
Speller believes that ‘madness’ is an indication of a higher
order of creativity; she says of her admirable and intelli-
gent-sounding therapist mother (for whom she seems to
display a quite unexamined resentment and hostility),
by, as had any literary or artistic ability’. Furthermore,
she makes only the most cursory attempt to examine the
genetic legacy of madness, eventually finding that there is
‘no line of lunacy shrieking through the generations’.
This conclusion only makes one wonder what the book
has all been about, with its portentous hints at family
secrets and dark mysteries of the creative mind.
The interesting story is the one that never gets a real
telling: the story of Ada Curtis and Gerald Howard.
Apart from a brief mention at the beginning of the
book, we have to wait until page 221 (of 240 pages) till
we meet them again – and then they make a momentary
appearance. Speller dashes off to Lincolnshire (or, as she
puts it, ‘A few years after I had left Lincolnshire never to
return, I went back’), meets some Curtis cousins (still
butchers in the town where Ada grew up), then dashes
back home to the safe labyrinth of her own psyche.
What a waste – to have that story and to squander it!
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 40
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 GENERAL
C RISPIN T ICKELL
CUTTING OUT CARBON
T HE W EATHER M AKERS : T HE H ISTORY AND
F UTURE I MPACT OF C LIMATE C HANGE
★ grown and is still growing.
By Tim Flannery
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 341pp £20)
OVER THE LAST thirty years issues of climate change
have crossed the bridge between theory, history and
science on one side and public awareness and interna-
tional politics on the other. Can the activities of one
small animal species really be affecting the chemistry of
the sky and the vagaries of the weather?
The answer is that they can and are. According to recent
polls, most people in Britain are concerned about climate
change, although divided over what should be done about
it. To many it is just too big a problem. In any case, greater
warmth seems more desirable than greater cold: hence less
enthusiasm to take the issue seriously. In the United States
and Australia (two industrial countries whose governments
refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse-gas
emissions) public awareness is low, but it is certainly grow-
ing. Throughout the rest of the world there are somewhat
unequal debates of varying magnitude between those
whose short-term interests seem threatened, and those
whose concern is long-term damage to current modes of
life on Earth and more directly to human society.
Into this debate comes an Australian zoologist, Tim
Flannery, with a book to pull these exceedingly complex
issues together: as well as the human impact on the
climate, they include pressures on human population
growth, current economics, resource depletion and waste
disposal, the changing geography of land and sea, and the
effects of change on the organisms in and around us on
which we totally depend. From the beginning he links
the physical and biological environments which sustain
life on Earth, and stresses their essential inter-connected-
ness. Earth-systems science, or Gaia theory, is fundamental
to his case, and throughout he acknowledges an intellec-
tual debt to James Lovelock, whose recently published
The Revenge of Gaia highlights the perils we now face.
Climate is, of course, changing all the time. For the
last 11,000 years or so we have been living in a warm
intermission between Pleistocene ice ages. All human
society of the kind we know has arisen in this instant of
geological time: hence our evolution from small hunter-
gatherer groups to communities based on farming, and
then to builders of towns and cities and the social hierar-
chies needed to run them. On top of natural climatic
fluctuations affected by the relationship of the Earth to
the Sun has come a growing human impact. Whether or
48
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
not it began with deforestation and the introduction
of agriculture some 8,000 years ago is an interesting
academic controversy arising from the work of William
Ruddiman. But there can be no doubt that from the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which brought
about reliance on fossil-fuel energy (whether coal, oil or
gas), the human impact on the climate has steadily
This impact is well illustrated by the rise of carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere. During the ice ages
they were at about 190 to 200 parts per million. For
each intervening warm period they were between 250
and 275 parts per million. But at the last reckoning they
stood at almost 380 parts per million, representing the
highest concentration in the last 650,000 years.
The effects of such changes now and in the future reach
every country in the world. They include impacts on
natural ecosystems, water resources, agriculture, human
health, population movements, business and industry,
transport systems, insurance and banking, and even build-
ing and architecture. As a zoologist, Flannery is particularly
interesting on the changes already evident in forest species
in the Amazon, coral reefs (as oceans warm), and the
distribution of krill at the bottom of the food chain off
Antarctica. He also shows how droughts in East Africa
since the 1960s may be connected with the warming of
the Indian Ocean and changing patterns of monsoons.
A vital area of study is to identify the main tipping
points or thresholds of change with the many uncertain-
ties arising from them. Among such tipping points are
the state of the Amazonian rainforest, the direction of the
North Atlantic conveyor current, changes in the atmos-
pheric ozone layer, the release of methane from the
tundra and ocean bed, the frequency and intensity of El
Niño and of La Niña current-systems in the Pacific, and
the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic icesheets.
The biggest question is what to do about it all. In politi-
cal terms there has been progress, however limited and
ineffective. President Bush signed up to a text at the G8
Summit at Gleneagles which accepted the need to slow,
stop and then reverse the flow of greenhouse gases. He has
since spoken of the need for the United States to correct its
addiction to oil. US business and industry also has the mes-
sage. Research is proceeding on a variety of non-renewable
energy sources. Within the US a number of states are
taking action on their own, and at the last count 206
mayors in 38 states (accounting for 42 million Americans)
were implementing measures to limit carbon emissions.
In some quarters there is a continuing faith in technical
solutions to the problem, including carbon sequestration
and coal gasification. There is an agreement between the
United States, Australia, Japan, India, China and South
Korea to promote work of this kind. But Flannery rightly
concludes that there is no genuine alternative to decar-
bonising our society and switching to renewable energy
 GENERAL
systems as soon as possible. We need not only to mitigate
what we now do, but also to adapt ourselves to changes
which are in some respects inevitable.
Flannery writes easily and well, and his scientific analysis
is interesting and persuasive throughout. He is less sure of
S ARA W HEELER
SHAGATHON
THE FOUNDING OF ARVON: A MEMOIR OF THE
EARLY YEARS OF THE ARVON FOUNDATION
★ rience, which is,
By John Moat
(Frances Lincoln 128pp £12.99)
A RVON IS B RITAIN ’ S leading foundation for the
provision of residential writing-courses, and we should
be grateful for it. Brilliantly run and guided throughout
its twenty-five year history by a series of inspired and
inspirational figures, it has set many writers, young and
old, on the gilded path to publication.
In this slim volume, Arvon co-founder John Moat tells
the story of rickety and idealistic beginnings. He pinpoints
the moment Arvon came into being – it was in 1968, and
‘there was a whiff of cordite, hot from the barricades’. He
and John Fairfax were ‘two young poets on the run from
fiscal reality’. In devising a new and creative way of
guiding people to write, they were reacting against what
they considered a staid, dogmatic approach to teaching
poetry. Five years later, their vision of a charitable writing
foundation became a reality. As Moat points out, it was an
innovatory idea: there are fifty degree courses in creative
writing in the UK now, but there weren’t any then.
This is a book written from the heart: an affectionate and
nostalgic memoir. Moat lovingly describes the first ever
course (teaching poetry-writing to Devon schoolchildren),
the first tranche of Arts Council funding, the first dedicated
Arvon centre. Much of the information will be of less inter-
est to readers than it is to Moat himself – the Arvon annual
report and accounts for 1972–73, for example, which he
includes as one of his appendices. His prose, in addition, is
giddy and convoluted. ‘I was detailed a group’, he writes,
‘by a blitzed teacher who clearly saw here an opportunity to
draw breath.’ As for the relentlessly self-congratulatory tone
– well, John Moat can justifiably congratulate himself.
These days Arvon covers a range of subjects including
playwriting, starting to write, and writing for radio.
Courses generally run from Monday evening to Saturday
morning and involve individual and group tuition with
professional, published writers. It all takes place at one of
the four centres across the UK, Ted Hughes’s lovely old
house Lumb Bank, near Heptonstall in West Yorkshire
(Hughes was in on Arvon almost from the outset).
49
the politics, and there are a number of small editorial mis-
takes which should be corrected in future editions. But this
is an excellent as well as comprehensively alarming book
about the human prospect, and I warmly commend it.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 40
I have tutored
on Arvon cours-
es, as have most
wr iters in my
acquaintance. It
is almost always a
rewarding expe-
presumably, why
most of us return
to teach again. France and Wheeler keeping the students at bay
Of course, there
can be difficulties. The writing community has more than
its fair share of neurotics, a fact invariably reflected at
Arvon. The first time I led a course, students and tutors
gathered on the Monday evening for an introductory
session. I asked each student to say something about why
they were on the course. ‘My social worker suggested I
come,’ said the first man. Someone once got so flustered
trying to park at Lumb Bank that he stormed off before
the course had even begun. And at a recent lyric-writing
course a student had to be carted off by the police. Dea
Birkett has been at both ends of the process: many years
ago as an aspiring writer, and, more recently, as a successful
author invited to tutor. ‘The danger comes when a course
is perceived as group therapy,’ she says. ‘When I was an
attendee the opening words of one student, as we sat
round in a circle on the first night, were, “I never did like
my mother.”’
Miranda France, with whom I have co-tutored,
reminded me of a black comedy that once unfurled when
a student casually announced to us his intention to write
a novel about a writing course in which the two female
tutors would be murdered. He wanted, he said, ‘to gather
material’. Miranda and I slept the whole week with chairs
wedged under the door handles. I’ve heard that they have
since installed locks in tutors’ rooms. Students are warned
in advance that tutors will only be able to read a small
selection of their work in progress during the week, but a
few are so determined to get their break that they stop at
nothing. I once had a manuscript pushed under the bath-
room door chapter by chapter while I was in the tub.
One final thing. As with any conference or residential
course, students and tutors alike enter a separate moral
universe when they arrive at an Arvon centre. ‘My
week’, one former tutor who preferred to remain
anonymous told me, ‘ended up as a shagathon.’ Do I
hear you all rushing off to book a place?
To order this book at £10.40, see LR Bookshop on page 40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 GENERAL
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
The Legion that
Never was ’Listed
P ENGUINS S TOPPED P LAY: E LEVEN V ILLAGE
C RICKETERS TAKE O N THE WORLD
★ by the ‘constant hilarity’ with which the anarchic
By Harry Thompson
(John Murray 242pp £16.99)
CRICKET – AS MY old boss E W Swanton never tired of
pointing out to us hacks who toiled away at his encyclo-
pedia of the game – holds up a mirror to character. It is
also not a bad metaphor for life. In a moving afterword
to this funny and inspiring book by the late Harry
Thompson – television producer (Have I Got News For
You, Harry Enfield and Chums, They Think It’s All Over,
etc), biographer of Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook,
and prize-winning novelist (This Thing of Darkness) – his
widow Lisa describes how at his burial in Brompton
Cemetery someone tossed a cricket ball into the grave.
Cricket and long-distance travel were Thompson’s
two chief passions. They are celebrated here to good
effect in an account of the Captain Scott Invitation XI’s
remarkable world tour, wr itten shortly before
Thompson’s death from lung cancer in November 2005,
at the age of forty-five. (Incidentally, for the benefit of
bossyboots politicians, Thompson points out that he
never smoked a single cigarette in his life.)
In his essay on cricket eccentrics in Swanton’s encyclope-
dia, Benny Green divided them up into the Expert-
Technical, the Inept-Aspiring, and the Dotty-Idolatrous.
Thompson belonged to the second category. His cricketing
ability ‘roughly approximated to that of Mother Teresa of
Calcutta’. Denied the chance to play the game both at
school (Highgate) and at his Oxford college (Brasenose), he
and a group of like-minded friends determined to start
their own cricket team: ‘We would play fantasy village-
green cricket against horny-handed blacksmiths, not spotty,
serious-minded student cricket.’ The team was named after
Captain Scott because ‘he came second, and because he did
so in the right spirit’. (Some biographers of Scott have
rather cast doubt on this, but never mind.) The Scotties’
blue-and-yellow caps were emblazoned with Modo Egredior,
a loose Latin translation of Captain Oates’s famous last
words, ‘I’m just going outside’. Another of the team’s
founding inspirations was Captain Valentine Todd, who
had insisted on continuing to play cricket during the Siege
of Ladysmith, and had been killed by a shell while running
in to bowl; the umpires, unable to prize the ball from his
lifeless grasp, declared both ball and bowler ‘dead’.
50
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
The book’s title is derived from an impromptu match
in Antarctica, in which Thompson was able to run four
while the long-leg fieldsman attempted to fight off a
gigantic seabird, a skua, which had attacked him.
Eventually play had to be abandoned after a mass pitch
invasion by penguins.
For all the team’s determination not to take things
seriously, games became pointless unless the rules (Laws
in this case) are strictly followed and everyone does their
best. Thompson admits that he was sometimes dispirited
‘layabout’ element in the team sought to sabotage any
hint of seriousness. As he observes after a large crowd
disperses when one ‘celebrity’ game descends into farce,
‘people like to watch real contests’.
The odd famous name does crop up in the narrative –
Ian Hislop, Hugh Grant, Hugh Laurie, Geoffrey Boycott,
David Gower, Tim Rice – but the book’s strength is its
portrayal of what Kipling called the ‘Legion that never
was ’listed’, the illustrious obscure club cricketers whose
dedicated enthusiasm for the game is strangely touching.
Thompson writes with a novelist’s sympathy about a
wonderfully mixed bunch of characters – from the
‘gobby’ O’Herlihy brothers, Irish-Malaysian lawyers, to
an Old Etonian model for ‘Tim Nice-But-Dim’. When a
fellow-player told the Etonian that a fr iend from
Lancashire was having trouble finding an affordable room
for rent in Stockwell, he received the puzzled reply: ‘So…
why doesn’t he just buy a flat in Kensington?’
The portraits are generally affectionate – none more
so than of the charming Cie, a Kenyan Asian by birth,
who devoted his life to playing cricket seven days a
week and eventually died from a heart attack at the
crease. A rare exception is the odious Australian wicket-
keeper, Greg, who constantly ‘sledges’ his own side. At
the end of the tour, Thompson writes witheringly:
‘None of us ever saw Greg again.’
Although the travelogue and the descriptions of the
games can occasionally become slightly wearisome,
Thompson usually comes to the rescue with a lively turn
of phrase. His obiter dicta also hit the mark. The stages of
being a ‘cricket widow’ (ending with ‘You and your fuck-
ing cricket’) are wittily delineated. The difficulties of
developing talent in the domestic game are attributed to
Labour governments’ making competition in school
sport a dirty word, while the Tories ‘flogged off all the
school playing fields to be turned into sausage factories’.
Happily, one’s abiding impression is the exuberant
camaraderie and the author’s love for ‘this stupid bunch
of deadbeats’. Lisa Thompson remarks that though a few
people at the funeral looked shocked when the cricket
ball was thrown into the grave, Harry himself would
have liked it. Besides, she adds, ‘it would go with the
cricket bat I had placed in his hands’.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 40
 FICTION
P AMELA N ORRIS
THE ART OF INTROSPECTION
T HE OTHER S IDE OF YOU
★ and patient, the missing link
By Salley Vickers
(Fourth Estate 292pp £14.99)
‘THERE IS NO cure for being alive.’ This is the conundrum
with which Dr David McBride, the psychiatrist at the
centre of Salley Vickers’ new novel, attempts to win the
confidence of a reticent patient. After an almost
successful attempt at suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank has
been admitted to the private hospital where David works.
It is his task to persuade Elizabeth to share her troubled
history and to find, if not the remedy for her unhappi-
ness, at least the acceptance that will make life possible. In
finding the key to his patient’s despair, he is unexpectedly
brought face to face with his own childhood trauma. As
Elizabeth haltingly describes a love affair that ended in
tragedy, David ponders the influence of his brother’s
accidental death on the man he has become. Sharing
Elizabeth’s journey into self-awareness, her physician is
able to take the first steps towards healing himself.
Deceptively simple in form (Elizabeth’s story is explored
in one lengthy session in David’s consulting room), The
Other Side of You tackles huge and troubling questions
about human relationships. What is the nature of love?
Why is it so difficult to accept being loved? How can a
person live truthfully without damaging others? While
Vickers is not afraid of challenging her readers with such
knotty problems, she is also an adept and often witty
storyteller, who draws imaginatively on art and religion to
illuminate her quest for human authenticity. Her first
novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, found unexpected parallels
between the ancient tale of Tobias and the Archangel and
an ageing woman’s delighted discovery of Venice. In
Instances of the Number 3, after his sudden death in a car
crash, a man is granted a brief respite (like Hamlet’s father)
to watch over the wife and mistress coping with their loss.
God himself assumes human form in Mr Golightly’s
Holiday, taking a few weeks off in rural Devon to rewrite
his bestseller for the modern world, but also to question
his responsibility for the death of a beloved son. In each of
these novels, Vickers delves behind convention and senti-
mentality to explore the nature and possibilities of love.
The Other Side of You offers her typically rich mix of
art, life and the numinous. The catalyst that unseals
Elizabeth’s lips is David’s discovery of a mutual interest
in Caravaggio and in particular the paintings that record
the supper at Emmaus, when two grieving disciples
recognise that their fellow-traveller is the risen Christ.
This mysterious third person, the shadow who, in T S
51
Eliot’s The Waste Land
(which gives the novel its
title), walks alongside the
two companions, is the
essential component in the
encounter between analyst
whose interpretation enables
healing to begin. This motif
is explored with great skill
and sensitivity, and the
connection with Caravaggio
provides an excuse for
scenes set in Italy, a Vickers: challenging
thoughtful rummage
through the artist’s life and works, and an intriguing
subplot involving Thomas, Elizabeth’s art-historian
lover. Fascinating as all this is, Vickers at times over-eggs
the pudding, with an abundance of ideas fighting for the
reader’s attention.
Perhaps the challenge with this novel, and what makes
it rather different from Vickers’s previous work, is that the
story is largely told in the first person, through David’s
damaged perspective. Mr Golightly’s Holiday was remark-
able for its lyrical descriptions of nature, the exquisite
universe that Mr Golightly, its creator, was so particularly
well equipped to appreciate, and for Vickers’s marvellous
gift for comedy. Sadly, such delights rarely feature in
David’s measured vision of the world. By his own admis-
sion punctilious and obsessive, the kind of person who
rushes to put a mat under a glass of wine in order to
protect the furniture, David is cautious and joyless,
married to a woman he seems not to respect and deferen-
tial to a mentor, Gus, whose opinions he values over his
own. It is difficult to warm to Gus, who has an irritating
habit of referring to his fellow human beings as ‘baboons’.
His function in the novel is apparently to provide the
mellowness that David lacks (or perhaps to underline his
dependency on others). It is Gus who first introduces
David to Caravaggio, supplies his favourite aphorism, and
encourages him to face his deepest feelings, but he
remains sketchy and mannered, a bit of a baboon himself.
The novel really springs to life when Elizabeth tells her
story, and suddenly we are back in the familiar Vickers
territory of people struggling with wit, intelligence, com-
passion and pain to make sense of life’s terrible ironies.
For all David’s sometimes chilling self-consciousness,
The Other Side of You is a brave and unusual book, a
gripping read that offers the tantalisations and rewards of
a whodunit. As the perceptive Salley Vickers no doubt
intends us to recognise, it is the misfortune of the Davids
of this world that fear and anxiety are less attractive than
confidence and conviction. In the end, it is Thomas, for
whom to feel is to act, who lingers in the memory.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 FICTION
F RANCIS K ING
LIVING LEGEND
T HE WOMAN W HO WAITED
★ so more than any of them. As a result, a population made
By Andreï Makine
(Sceptre 192pp £12.99)
THE CUNNING OF its layout – wide margins, generous print
– cannot conceal the fact that, like so much of Andreï
Makine’s fiction, this book is remarkably short. In its poetic
conciseness, his work has always reminded me of the novel-
las that won Ivan Bunin the distinction, denied to Tolstoy
and Chekhov, of becoming (in 1933) the first Russian to
win the Nobel Prize. That Makine himself, a native
Russian now writing in French, will one day win that
prize is something that I have already predicted in print.
A certain type of woman, whose glamour, surviving
into middle age, derives in part at least from her mystery,
recurs in this author’s work. In what I regard as the finest
of his novels, the remarkable Requiem for the East, we are
introduced to the Frenchwoman Sasha. After the
Revolution she has opted to remain in the Soviet Union,
where she has had the courage and humanity to act as the
protector both of the narrator’s parents and of the narrator
himself – a character clearly based on Makine.
In the later, scarcely less remarkable The Earth and Sky
of Jacques Dorme, we go back to Sasha’s story. We learn
(among other things previously withheld from us) of
how, in 1942, while nursing wounded combatants
brought from the front to a Stalingrad railway yard, she
had a love affair, less than a week in duration, with a
French compatriot, a Communist aviator passing through
the city on his way to an Arctic airfield. The aviator then
vanished; but the memory of him continued to nourish
her desolate and emotionally deprived existence.
The heroine of this latest book is another variation of
that type – a fiercely independent, kindly, idealistic woman,
true through years of spiritual and sexual loneliness to the
memory of a lost love. Such a character clearly obsesses
Makine. Vera, now forty-seven, had a life-defining experi-
ence when only sixteen. Living in a remote settlement in
the far north of Russia, she briefly encountered a country-
boy soldier on his way to the front. The two fell instantly
in love. He promised to return to her, she promised to wait
for him. After that – nothing. An intelligent woman, she
spends some years in Moscow as a promising student. But,
haunted by her vow, she eventually returns to her lone vigil
in the narrow, impoverished community from which, she
recognises, she now will never escape.
It is in that community that the narrator, a journalist
on an unlikely commission to record the customs, habits
and folklore of the region, encounters her. Although she
52
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
is old enough to be his mother, she immediately fasci-
nates him. Capricious in his loyalties, he marvels at the
way in which she has turned a potentially adventurous,
vigorous and passionate life into an infinity of waiting.
The whole benighted community is, as Vera herself puts
it, ‘living not in the past but the pluperfect’. She is doing
up largely of old women widowed in the war see her, in
her unshakeable fidelity to a man who, it is now clear,
will never return, as a walking monument to their dead.
When not working at a small school, Vera spends much
of her time either caring for these old people while they
still cling on to life, or burying and mourning them.
Taming Vera’s mystery is the obsession of the narrator.
He covertly watches her as, thinking herself alone, she
emerges naked and desirable from the bathhouse. He
spies on her when she journeys to the nearest town, and
so comes to suspect that she goes there to meet a lover –
perhaps the stationmaster? Half in love with her himself,
he visits her in her small izba (log cabin). When in turn
she visits him, he senses that, despite her fidelity to a
man who after all these years must surely be dead, she
returns his desire.
There is much to admire and enjoy in this book.
Makine is masterly at evoking the dazzling, desolate, ice-
and-snow landscapes of an area that Stalin once attempted
to transform into a vast kolkhoz (collective farm) whose
inhabitants were to be serfs. Now that impossible dream,
doomed eventually to become a nightmare, has ended,
and most of the young have left for the precarious
opportunities and excitements of the big cities.
However, despite its many flashes of brilliance, for an
enthusiastic admirer of Makine such as myself this book
can only be disappointing. Vera apart, there is only one
other memorable character – not the narrator (always a
cipher) but a crude, boisterous Georgian who, having
been outlawed to this wasteland as a punishment for
crooked business dealings, is now a truck driver con-
stantly on the lecherous lookout for a pick-up.
Despite its shortness, The Woman Who Waited takes far
too long to make its twin points about the way in which
an isolated society can turn living people into myths and
the often unfathomable nature of fidelity. Near the
beginning, the contrast between the narrator’s life in St
Petersburg and in the frozen north is conveyed in a
nightclub scene so brashly and clumsily written that it
filled me with dread for what might follow.
Throughout my reading I kept sensing the weariness of
a writer who has become like an athlete pushing himself
on and on, with aching legs and failing lungs, in an
attempt yet again to win the event for which he is
famous. The writing, always felicitous in the other books,
is now crammed with adjectives and adverbs. I can only
pray for Makine’s return to his usual magnificent form.
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 FICTION
A NDREW B ARROW
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
W HITE B LOOD
★ How the sky matters to
By James Fleming
(Jonathan Cape 361pp £12.99)
THIS EXTREMELY WINTRY and hard-hitting adventure story
is set in provincial Russia. Most of the action takes place at
the end of the Great War and in a large snow-covered
country house near Smolensk. The Tsar has abdicated and
the ‘fabulous beast’ of Imperial Russia is ‘swaying’.
The narrator is a big, bold, half-likeable man called
Charlie Doig, who has a Russian mother and ‘proper
Russian balls that swing like the planets’. Now in his late
twenties, he has already had a wild life. The sudden death
of his Scottish father from the plague has inspired him to
avenge himself on the Xenopsylla cheops flea responsible
and driven him out on the road as a naturalist.
Charlie’s early adult life has been ‘buttered with luck’. In
a post office in western Burma he has captured an unbe-
lievably rare beetle with royal blue shoulders and greeny-
bronze undercarriage. From the roof of a mosque in
Bokhara, he has snatched an almost equally obscure white
swift. And, after months of celibacy, he has also had some
phenomenal sexual encounters. In a Burmese brothel, he
has taken on four women simultaneously and had a bowl-
ful of baby eels squirted up his bottom at the same time. ‘I
don’t know exactly what the little fellows were doing
inside me or where they’d got to, but I recommend it.’
But now, in the winter of 1916, his momentum is falter-
ing. Instead of going to war, he has retreated to a maternal
family mansion known as the Pink House, where the plot
and the snow thicken and the sky becomes ‘death-
coloured’. Charlie is now in love with his cousin Elizaveta,
who is betrothed to a rich Pole he wishes were dead.
Told in an intimate, chatty style, and in prose of great
originality – and angularity – this is a historical evoca-
tion at times as powerful as the account of pre-1914
Berlin that the late, great Sybille Bedford gave us in A
Legacy. From its opening pages onwards, the narrator
shows a desperate, obsessional quality which brings out
the full, bloody, sensual brutality of his situation.
And its intellectual charms. Has any author besides
James Fleming pointed out ‘the ominous bundle of con-
sonants’ contained in the word ‘truth’? Or described
birds as ‘natural conversationalists’? Or God as ‘the greatest
naturalist of them all’? A naturalist’s eye or ear informs
almost every paragraph of this novel. The narrator tells us
a wren is no heavier than a muscatel grape, and unsquea-
mishly celebrates the ‘pink primed pear-drop keyhole’ of
a donkey on heat. Fate, he tells us, has got him by the
53
scruff of his neck ‘like
a new born kitten’ and the
walls of Elizaveta’s private
rooms in the Pink House
are the colour of ‘a parrot’s
poll, a northern sunset’.
Charlie Doig! When it is
not ‘the colour of an old
lion’s pelt’, it is in tatters
of ‘pink and pearl, salmon Fleming: naturalist’s eye
and its skin’. Wandering
through the garden with his beloved, he notes that the
night is ‘opening up its shop’. Later on, he rails against
the sun for its ‘empty offer of warmth and happiness’
and wishes he could shoot it down.
Strong stuff – but the humans involved in this toe-
tingling tale are never upstaged by the forces of nature.
Items of their clothing, whether a fellow naturalist’s
‘disgusting underpants’ or the ‘green and gold brocade
waistcoat’ in which a family friend is shot dead, are
depicted with zest, and Charlie goes to town when
describing his rich great-uncle Igor’s ivory enema
syringe, Astro-Daimler motor car and vast St Petersburg
palace. Here is this preposterous old character’s arrival at
a railway station where hundreds of miserable would-be
passengers have been waiting overnight:
To my astonishment there was the tall figure of my
Uncle Igor floating onto the concourse followed by his
steward and two footmen, each escorting a porter with
a heaped barrow of luggage. He was wearing a silk top
hat; a dark, close-fitting, ankle-length overcoat; full
make-up, tight black leather gloves and galoshes.
Round his neck was a silver fox, in his hand a cane.
And yet this wealth of detail does not slow down the
ensuing action: the assassination of Elizaveta’s fiancé and
Uncle Igor in the same coach, the subsequent marriage
of our hero and his heroine, the mustering of Bolsheviks
in the forest near the house, the death of everyone in it,
and our hero’s heroic attempt to get his immediate
revenge on the wily individual responsible. All these
head-spinning events are related with almost cinematic
force and tension.
As cruel old Russia crumbles and a new hell is forged, it
is often difficult to know whose side to be on. For much
of the book, Charlie Doig only wants to leave his stricken
mother country, and get to Chicago. But does he make it?
In a puzzling but unforgettable final scene, horse-drawn
cabs swerve around him as he dances with an imaginary
Elizaveta in the middle of the Nevsky Prospekt. And then
discovers his hands are empty. This extraordinary novel
may end on a sad note – ‘Goodbye love! Goodbye sorrow!
Goodbye Russia!’ – but readers will surely welcome its
author to the ranks of our greatest storytellers.
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 FICTION
D ONALD R AYFIELD
LAST EXIT TO UZBEKISTAN
T HE R AILWAY
★ ever corrupted and degraded, their own relationships and
By Hamid Ismailov
(Translated by Robert Chandler)
(Harvill Secker 290pp £12.99)
ONE REDEEMING FACT about the USSR was that, in order
to maintain the fiction of fifteen free republics and dozens
of autonomous regions, the Communist authorities saved a
number of languages from extinction by providing alpha-
bets, grammars, education and media services, and promoted
poetry and fiction by minority writers, who, if they
behaved themselves, could become famous and rich from
translation into Russian. To demonstrate the lack of
Russian chauvinism in the USSR, they were given more
rein than their Russian colleagues. As in every superannu-
ated empire from the Romans to the Soviets, while the
heartwood rotted, the remotest branches of the tree still
sprouted green leaves. Just as Naipaul, Walcott and Soyinka
write English literature more vigorously than, say, Anita
Brookner, so Russians found more stimulation in the
Abkhaz Fazil Iskander or the Kirgiz Chingiz Aitmatov than
in the big names of Moscow. Some non-Russians, like
Iskander, never even bothered to write in their native lan-
guage; others, like Aitmatov, began in Kirgiz but switched
to Russian to save themselves the trouble of translation.
Why write for a few hundred thousand readers when there
is a market for millions? Their non-Russian material and
their outlook, however, remained excitingly exotic.
With the collapse of the USSR, most ‘regional’ literatures
have vanished. Russians now read literature translated from
English, not from Kirgiz or Avar. Writing in Central Asia or
the North Caucasus is moribund, and there is even less free-
dom of expression than under the Soviets. The last thing that
the dictators who have taken over the empire want is litera-
ture. This is why Ismailov has not published his novel in
Uzbek, and why the English translation, not the Russian
version, promises to make him
famous. President Karimov
would happily reduce both
this book and its author to
pulp, should either appear in
Tashkent. The Russian version
of The Railway (which Hamid
Ismailov himself wrote) was
published nine years ago under
a pseudonym, on cheap paper,
with a pr int run of just
500 copies.
The Railway is an extra-
54
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
ordinarily rich chain of anecdotes, some as fanciful as an
Arabian Night, others pleasantly humorous, and a few
(notably a teenage rape and murder at the end) that even
Hugh Selby Junior might have hesitated to describe.
What emerge are strategies and tactics for survival of a
group of remote Uzbek townspeople who preserve, how-
values under Russian and Communist rule – symbolised
by the railway that is laid across the desert to their town –
so that their rulers haunt them but do not subdue them.
The Railway thus begs comparison with Fazil Iskander’s
Uncle Sandro from Chegem, which, in a more leisurely way,
uses a string of connected anecdotes to show how three
generations of Abkhaz contrive to remain unsubjugated
by Russian colonialism or Stalinist terror. Fazil Iskander’s
remains the greater novel (perhaps the greatest novel in
the Russian language in the last fifty years), but it is, for all
the bloodshed, an idyll compared with The Railway.
Hamid Ismailov has different talents: he has the capacity
of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque
realisation of history on the ground, and he is utterly free
from any patriotic illusions about his people. If Iskander’s
Abkhaz emerge from the novel as the last inhabitants of
the Golden Age led by a wise uncle, Ismailov’s townsmen
have no leaders and few ideals apart from securing immu-
nity from persecution, the freedom to piss on house walls,
and unrestricted access to mutton, vodka, tea and sex. To
compensate for this spiritual bleakness, Ismailov unleashes
improvised fantasies that make the reader devour the book
at a sitting, despite the enormous cast of improbable char-
acters, the apparent incoherence of the stories, and the
bizarre culture – superficially Islamic, profoundly supersti-
tious, and unshakeably egocentric – of his Uzbekistan.
The preference that Ismailov’s anti-heroes show for inac-
tivity and their refusal to believe in anything or anyone,
against the background of the Soviet work ethic and
Marxist cant, makes them, in the end, oddly sympathetic.
Robert Chandler, now that he is working with the
living and not the dead, has raised his role from translator
to virtual co-author. Not only has he worked closely with
Hamid Ismailov, but also with a wide sample of potential
readers. Possibly the unpublished Uzbek is better still,
but to my mind this English
version supersedes the Russian
text. Chandler’s preface is a
superb essay on the problems
of translation and the various
solutions he has employed,
while his endnotes give us
useful bearings in a world as
weird as Terry Pratchett’s but,
one fears, nearly as horrible as
twentieth-century Uzbekistan.
To order this book at £10.40,
see LR Bookshop on page 40
 FICTION
L INDY B URLEIGH
PORTRAIT OF A PAINTING
K EEPING THE WORLD AWAY
★ overly contrived. Upon acquiring the painting Charlotte
By Margaret Forster
(Chatto & Windus 338pp £16.99)
THE LIVES OF women, both extraordinary and ordinary, and,
in particular, the tension between domesticity and indepen-
dence are subjects frequently revisited in the work of the
novelist and biographer Margaret Forster. Her latest novel is a
variation on this theme and in it she explores women’s often
troubled relationship to creativity. In the prologue, Gillian, a
young art student and one of the protagonists, wonders
about ‘the lives of actual paintings’ as opposed to the lives of
painters, and Keeping the World Away is, in essence, a biogra-
phy of a picture. The work in question is an unsigned study
of an interior by Gwen John and the novel follows its history
over the course of a century, telling us how it comes to be in
the possession of a succession of women, connecting them
obliquely to each other and to the artist.
The painting is variously lost, stolen, discovered, sold and
inherited by five women, respectively Charlotte, Stella,
Lucasta, Ailsa, and Gillian. The narrative is structured
chronologically and each woman is the subject of a single
chapter. It begins with the painting’s inception and a fic-
tional portrait of the artist, Gwen, as a young woman. At
the end of the nineteenth century, women’s relationship to
artistic creation was almost always that of male artists’ mod-
els and muses. Some had aspirations to paint, but even if, in
the face of the sort of parental opposition that Gwen had to
surmount, they made it to the Slade, they were inevitably
interrupted soon after by love, marriage, and children.
Gwen’s resilience is thus as remarkable as her talent. Not
only does her coldly domineering father disown her but
she also has to grow as an artist in the shadow of her
brother, Augustus John. The freedoms and recognition he
enjoys in bohemian Paris, as compensation for starving in
a garret, are closed off to her because of her sex. Isolated
and alone, Gwen develops an overpowering passion for
the 64-year-old sculptor Rodin. When he rejects her she
withdraws from the world and becomes nun-like in her
devotion to her art. The painting originates from this peri-
od and its story starts when Gwen gives it to her friend
Ursula, who promptly loses it on the crossing to England.
The painting is of a corner of a room, empty except for
a table and chair, a bunch of primroses, a coat and a para-
sol. The parasol hints at an unseen feminine presence and
suggests a feminine author. Unprepossessing on first view-
ing, the picture is strangely powerful in its simplicity and
stillness, and while it evokes different emotions in all the
women who come to own it, it touches on a deep yearning
55
they all share for an actual and metaphorical room of their
own. Apparently indelibly infused with the spirit of
Gwen John, the painting inspires each woman to pursue a
space away from the world in which she can, presumably,
truly be herself (even if she can’t paint). This seems fanci-
ful and the plot or plots which stem from the premise feel
and Stella both abandon their artistic ambitions but find
the courage to be themselves. Lucasta, a successful portrait
painter, sacrifices her lover to preserve her independence
and gives the painting to him as a parting gift. The
betrayed wife, Ailsa, turns her back on the domesticity
which has absorbed her life and sells her home and its
contents, including the painting. The painting finally ends
up with Ailsa’s granddaughter Gillian, who is studying art
in Paris at the end of the twentieth century, and is set to
enjoy the kind of fulfilment in both her life and her work
that has been denied to earlier generations of women.
Gwen John and the fate of her painting sustain our interest
in what otherwise feels like a rather routine novel. Margaret
Forster, as an old-fashioned feminist, believes that some form
of artistic expression is what all women want, but she doesn’t
on this occasion offer any fresh insights into the subject. The
novel could have been more interesting if, for example, it
had something to say about the way in which the intensely
private nature of Gwen John’s painting has mutated into the
overtly confessional and public ‘art’ of a Tracy Emin. Both
are, however, self-obsessed and self-dramatising, which per-
haps has more to do with being an artist than a woman.
To order this book at £13.60, see LR Bookshop on page 40
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Continuing Education
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Literature
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Both part-time
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Tel: 01865 270369
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 FICTION
T RISTAN Q UINN
WORLDS OF HOPE
C HRONICLER OF THE W INDS
★ wonderful. He contrasts this
By Henning Mankell
(Harvill Secker 233pp £12.99)
ALTHOUGH A BLOODY shooting reverberates through this
novel, Chronicler of the Winds is not a crime story, unlike
the global bestsellers set in rural Sweden for which
Henning Mankell is best known. Instead, this lyrical
book relates the life and death of Nelio, a mythical street
kid leading a gang of urban urchins struggling to survive
in a fictional African country torn apart by civil war. It
begins with a moment of drama – Jose, a baker and the
book’s narrator, hears shots from a deserted theatre and
finds Nelio lying wounded on the empty spot-lit stage.
With a simple act of discovery Mankell begins an
elegant story about storytelling and what being told a
story can mean.
Refusing the offer of being taken to hospital, Nelio
asks Jose to take him up to the roof of the theatre. In the
cool night air he tells Jose: ‘Here I can dare release my
spirits.’ Over nine long nights, each forming a separate
chapter, Nelio tells Jose the story of his life as it ebbs
away high above the city. The act of telling his story
propels him, keeping him alive until he reaches its end.
He tells of the ‘catastrophe that came like an invisible
predator in the night’ – the murderous bandit attack that
destroyed his village and separated him from his family
when he was five years old. He tells of his escape after
shooting a hoodlum with squinty eyes and his strange
journey to the city. He encounters a white dwarf
dispensing folksy homilies, a wise lizard disguised as an
old woman and, at every turn, the spirits of the dead.
Mankell gives the Africa he has created an otherworldly
edge and a luminous sense of unfathomable depth. Up
on the roof Nelio appears to Jose to be both very young
and very old at the same time.
Beyond the deepening relationship between Jose and
Nelio, Mankell unpacks the history of his fictional
African country, exploring the link between storytelling
and nation-building. In his 1904 novel Nostromo, Joseph
Conrad created Sulaco, a ‘twilight country’, a South
American province of revolution and ‘events flowing
from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil’.
Here Mankell both echoes Conrad and goes further.
Before the revolution that led to civil war, Mankell’s
country was governed by Dom Joaquim, a colonial out-
sider and a storyteller of a political kind. Joaquim
imported statues from countries where the leaders they
represented had been swept away by change. He filed off
56
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
the old names and added
those of his ancestors, turning
fiction into history. Mankell’s
image of the city filling up
with fake statues and atro-
phying under their weight is
ersatz world-building with
Nelio’s more truthful and
radical acts of imagination.
Throughout his work Mankell: lyrical
Mankell comments on social
issues. He once explained how he writes thrillers: ‘I
begin with an issue and then fit a crime around it.’
Chronicler of the Winds is a slow-burning documentation
of the lives of street kids and the global isolation and
powerlessness of endlessly ravaged Africa. Jose tells us,
‘The world was no longer round; it had gone back to
being flat, and the city lay at the outermost edge.’ But
this fine novel is ultimately about the power of stories to
build worlds of hope. Nelio lives inside the statue of a
horse and leads the gang in acts of imaginative subversion
– breaking into the President’s palace to leave a lizard by
his bed, for example. His story builds to an extraordinary
performance in the deserted theatre, an evocatively artic-
ulated act of drama that reunites the living with the dead.
In Mankell’s world imagination conquers fear, driving
Jose to tell and re-tell Nelio’s story after his death.
Mankell lives in Sweden and Mozambique, where he
works as a theatre director. Chronicler of the Winds is his
first non-crime novel to be published in English, and it
will certainly move readers here.
To order this book at £10.40, see LR Bookshop on page 40
P HILIP W OMACK
UNTYING THE KNOT
A B IT OF A M ARRIAGE
★
By Karina Mellinger
(Dedalus 226pp £9.99)
CHICK LIT IS a much derided genre, yet its snazzily
packaged offspring nestle comfortably at the top of the
charts. People accuse these books of being tired and
formulaic. But here is a new contender on the scene:
Karina Mellinger works within and subverts that formu-
la to depict the myriad nuances of marital breakdown,
and achieves something well sculpted, sharply written
and bitingly amusing.
The action is confined to a Saturday in the Denver-
Barrettes’ (‘Barrette with an e’) six-bedroomed mansion
on Cheyne Walk. Laura Denver-Barrette awakes next to
 FICTION
her distinguished lawyer husband David (‘blah blah judi-
cial review, blah blah Queen’s Bench writ’). Their
marriage is the envy of London. Laura is eye-wideningly
beautiful, David sick-makingly rich. But for Laura... well,
Laura ‘is a size 8 on a good day, and a 10 on a bad, so life
is always lived on a bit of a knife edge.’ Nothing is good
enough for Laura. She thinks she is an artist: ‘creating
beautiful life-enhancing paintings is more important for
the human psyche than doing legal blah-blah all day.’
Laura has yet to sell a painting. That evening they are
having the managing partner of an international law firm
round to supper to close a deal which will make them
even more money. But Laura makes a surprising decision:
If she is going to leave David, she needs a good rea-
son to do so ... There must be a reason why ... Now
she just has to find out what it is.
Mellinger initially draws our sympathies towards Laura
and her struggles with ‘silly David’. But as the day pro-
gresses, and other characters drift in, our view changes.
Laura’s mother, Lydia, is a crop-haired, leather-wearing,
alcoholic sixty-year-old sex therapist. Her cleaner,
Anoushka, is a greasy waif from Eastern Europe who
yearns for David. Her best friend, Louella, runs an
antique shop for the sole purpose of catching a rich
man. These three women play key roles as the rest of the
day passes in a series of hilarious and outlandish events.
The more Mellinger reveals, the more we feel a strange
mixture of pity and contempt for these characters trapped
in their weaknesses. Laura’s ten-point plan to marry
David is one of the funniest and saddest things I have read
in a while. This is a dark, toothy, elegant winner.
To order this book at £7.99, see LR Bookshop on page 40
FIRST NOVELS
T HE O BSERVATIONS
★ Just occasionally there’s a bit too much sermonising –
By Jane Harris
(Faber & Faber 415 pp £12.99)
THE renascent Victorian novel continues to inspire high-
quality imitations. Jane Harris is the latest of many authors
to engage seriously with the fireside fiction of watchful ser-
vants, swooning ladies and villainy afoot in crumbling man-
sions. Her debut novel, The Observations, is narrated by
Bessy, a young Irish maidservant and former child prostitute,
whose pimp also happened to be her mother. In a complex
voice which is at once irreverent and gentle, worldly and
naïve, Bessy tells of her escape from prostitution into the
home of an Englishwoman named Arabella, who lives in a
(but of course) crumbling mansion outside Edinburgh.
Arabella is an odd mistress, and questions soon arise. Why
does she waken Bessy in a rage in the middle of the night
57
and then act as though nothing is the matter? Why is she
obsessed with Nora, Bessy’s dead predecessor? Why does
she make Bessy write down her most intimate thoughts?
Harris packs a vast amount into a fairly straightforward
plot. With several twists, some thoughts on social class,
sanity and the position of women, and even a ghost, The
Observations is both intellectually stimulating and
immensely good fun.
D ISOBEDIENCE
★
By Naomi Alderman
(Viking 257pp £12.99)
IN AN ORTHODOX Jewish community in Hendon, two
friends, Ronit and Esti, once had a secret lesbian affair,
after which Ronit moved to New York and shrugged off
her religion, while Esti married Dovid, Ronit’s cousin.
This impressive debut novel, narrated alternately by the
ebullient Ronit and a more formal third-person voice,
begins with Ronit’s return to Hendon following the death
of her father, the community’s leader. Ronit discovers that
Esti still loves her. Meanwhile, in the background, Dovid,
the reluctant leader-elect, suffers from violent migraines
and a growing awareness of his wife’s preferences.
Naomi Alderman takes a sophisticated approach to her
subject matter. While she generally portrays the
Orthodox life as one of stifling rituals and misogyny, she
also allows Dovid, the most Orthodox of the main
characters, to emerge with immense dignity. Ronit,
meanwhile, for all her New World liberalism, is not
above deliberately ruining lives as payback for an unhappy
childhood. The writing is concise, forceful, and steeped
in the author’s vast Judaic knowledge; in particular, the
early episodes set in the synagogue – during which the
smell of burning incense seems almost to rise from the
pages – exude authenticity and control.
Alderman sometimes tells rather than shows the reader –
and the ending’s over-neatness arguably belies the inten-
sity that precedes it, but this is none the less a mature
and convincing work.
G IRAFFE
★
By J M Ledgard
(Jonathan Cape 324 pp £16.99)
IN 1975 the Czech secret police ordered the massacre of
forty-nine giraffes, which had until then been the
world’s largest herd in captivity. J M Ledgard’s debut
novel covers the horrific event, and the two years lead-
ing up to it, through a diversity of narrators, each of
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 FICTION
whom was in some way involved. Chief among these
are Emil, a haematologist, and Amina, a sleepwalking
factory girl who falls in love with the animals; most
chillingly, though, we also hear from one of the giraffes
themselves, and from the slaughterhouse man given the
job of liquidising the herd’s carcasses.
The author’s approach is an oblique one: this is a work
of imaginative fiction rather than of investigative
journalism, and if the truth comes out at all, it does so
gradually, via dense introspection and abstruse consider-
ations of mammalian blood-flow. In places the writing
lies at the junction between poetry and prose, with rem-
iniscences often beautifully written but telling us what
was sensed rather than what happened: ‘verges risen in
summer, wasps in autumn feeding on fallen pears,
wildcats leaping large across wintry bridle paths’.
Many of the voices do sound alike, but the prose is
mostly of a high quality, and in the end the discrete
narrative elements cohere as the dreadful spectacle of the
giraffes’ slaughter fascinates and appals.
A LL M Y F RIENDS A RE S UPERHEROES
★ much of this.
By Andrew Kaufman
(Telegram 111pp £7.99)
TOM is an ordinary guy living in a Canadian town full
of superheroes, some of whom have a useful power,
others a more eccentric one. Unfortunately, Tom has
been invisible to his wife, The Perfectionist, ever since
she was hypnotised by a superhero ex-boyfriend at the
wedding reception six months before.
All My Friends Are Superheroes begins with The
Perfectionist and Tom awaiting a flight to Vancouver,
she to start afresh, he to have one final attempt at
convincing her of his existence. The present-tense
account of the journey is interwoven with the couple’s
history and a number of stand-alone, one-paragraph
descriptions of other superheroes.
Kaufman’s slight novella (which is padded with several
blank pages) is decently written and makes a nice enough
skit if you can ignore the obvious fact that Tom could easi-
ly have shown his wife that he was not dead. However, its
early suggestion of depth is never truly realised, and its
whimsical superhero-descriptions, though often amusing
in themselves, together seem like undeveloped synopses
drafted in to fill space around a cute love story.
A MONG RUINS
★ arriving drunk, praises his own physical beauty which
By Harriet Vyner
(Faber & Faber 224 pp £10.99)
Laura’s idyllic childhood is shattered when her father
58
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
gambles away the family’s Northumberland seat and,
shortly after, she is sexually assaulted by a stranger. She
keeps quiet about the assault, and a troubled adolescence
follows, in which an unhealthy relationship with an
artist who is several years older than she is leads to a
heroin habit, which in turn leads to prison.
Among Ruins, which is set upon a background of
London art dealers and glamorously bored types, is
ultimately a frustrating read. Its rebuke of the traditional
stiff-upper-lip response to adversity is a smart one (Laura’s
downward plummet affirms well the idea that when trau-
mas are internalised, they tend to beget other, sometimes
nastier ones), but sadly, on the whole, a potentially fasci-
nating plot fails to ignite. Principally this is due to the
funereal pace of the narrative, but there are also problems
with the writing. Vyner strives for the crisp, elevated tone
of the country-house novel, but is undermined by careless
drafting. Participles are left regularly unattached, and
phrases sometimes run on into meaninglessness, as in, ‘he
felt in his feet the looming prospect of future conversa-
tions’, which evokes about as improbable a sensation as
one could imagine. Better editing would have improved
Round-up by Simon Baker
AUDIOBOOK
S YMPOSIUM
★
Plato
(Unabridged. Read by David Shaw-Parker with full cast)
(Naxos Audiobooks 2CDs £10.99)
‘WHAT IS LOVE?’ Ten aristocratic Athenian men gather at
a party in 405BC where initially they compare hangovers.
When Socrates arrives, they decide to hold a contest in
delivering well-turned speeches in praise of Eros. There is
more than one god of love: the one whom Socrates praises
is Heavenly Eros, who will inspire loyalty in both Lover
and Boy. Common Eros, however, will lead men to make
love to women. Many arguments apply today. For
instance, the Lover trying to seduce the Boy will put up
with humiliations which no slave would tolerate – sleep-
ing outside the door of the Boy, begging for mercy.
Another Lover will swear an oath of fidelity and as soon
as he gets what he wants from the Boy, he breaks his oath.
Gods and men alike give license to the Lover for behav-
iour they would denounce in anyone else. One guest can-
not deliver his speech because he has hiccoughs. Another,
Socrates, whom he adores, holds in contempt. Most men
desire Socrates sexually, no matter that he is famously
ugly. The cast of ten capture contrasting arguments with
vivacity and humour. Susan Crosland
 SILENCED VOICES
IN LR JULY 2004, I wrote about L UCY P OPESCU
the case of Adolfo Fernández
Saínz, one of thirty-five writers, N ORMANDO H ERNANDEZ G ONZALEZ suffered various spells in hospital
journalists and librarians sen-
tenced in April 2003 under laws governing the protec-
tion of the Cuban state. Another journalist, Normando
Hernández González, was also arrested as part of this
clampdown on alleged dissidents, in which seventy-five
people in total were detained and tried. Despite the
international outcry and numerous appeals, both writers
remain behind bars.
The prosecution focused on the alleged conspiratorial
dealings between the defendants and James Cason, the
chief of the US Interests Section in Havana. Shortly
before the crackdown, Cason had considerably stepped
up his contacts with Cubans who had voiced opposition
to Fidel Castro. All those detained were tried under
Article 91 of the Penal Code and/or Law 88. Article 91
deals with charges of acting against ‘the independence and
the territorial integrity of the state’, the maximum penal-
ty for which is death. Law 88 is a catch-all piece of legis-
lation that has been used as a means of sending writers
and journalists to prison. It allows for prison sentences of
up to twenty years for those found guilty of committing
‘acts that, in line with imperialist interests, are aimed at
subverting the internal order of the Nation and destroying
its political, economic, and social system’.
The one-day court hearings were held behind closed
doors, with insufficient time for the accused to put
together a cogent defence. Thirty-five-year-old
Her nández González, director of the Colegio de
Periodistas Independientes de Camagüey (Camagüey
College of Independent Journalists) and a journalist with
the Florida-based website CubaNet, was sentenced to
twenty-five years in prison.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the public
prosecutor accused Hernández González of ‘virulent and
feverish’ counter-revolutionary activity of a ‘socially very
dangerous’ nature. He quoted from the journalist’s writ-
ten contributions to the CubaNet website and his many
reports for Radio Martí, the US backed radio station that
transmits programmes to Cuba. The aim of all this activi-
ty, the prosecutor maintained, was ‘to create the necessary
conditions for the armed intervention of a foreign power’.
In Cuba, prisoners of conscience are frequently locked
up with common prisoners who are considered dangerous.
According to personal accounts, conditions are very poor.
They are allowed only minimal exercise, suffer appalling
food, and are often denied specialist medical help. Many are
forced to sleep on a concrete floor at the mercy of rodents
and insects. Hernández González has repeatedly been pun-
ished for demanding recognition as a political prisoner, and
has consequently spent months in solitary confinement.
These ‘death cells’ are described as completely inhumane,
with no windows, electric light or proper sanitation. It is
59
no surprise to learn that
Hernández González has also
and is currently very ill.
On 5 June 2003 Hernández González was reported to
be suffering from very high blood pressure, and two
months later he began a hunger strike in protest at
prison conditions. In January 2004 there were reports of
undiagnosed heart problems, and that the writer had
been assaulted by the prison’s Security Chief, Ramón
Beúne. The prison authorities apparently denied both
the attack and Hernández González’s illness.
Hernández González himself reported in February 2004
that he was held in appalling conditions and that his wife,
Yaraí Reyes Marín, had been stripped naked and interro-
gated by the prison authorities before being allowed to visit
him. On 7 May 2004 he was transferred to Block 8, a sec-
tion housing common criminals, and beaten by prison
guards for shouting anti-Castro slogans.
On 15 September, Hernández González was transferred
to a different cell-block containing common criminals.
Later in the month he was briefly hospitalised. On 22
November 2004 the pr ison author ities apparently
informed his wife that the journalist was suffering from
chronic diarrhoea. Reyes Marín reported in February
2005 that her husband had been moved to the Abel
Santamaría Hospital in Pinar del Río suffering from a
number of abdominal complaints. In Apr il 2005,
Hernández González finally underwent treatment for
tuberculosis and a gastric illness.
In June last year, Reyes Marín told Reporters Without
Borders that her husband was extremely weak and suf-
fering from compression of the vertebrae, which pre-
vented him from moving his head. The treatment that
the doctors had given him for his bone pain, combined
with the treatment for his tuberculosis, had inflamed his
stomach, causing chronic diarrhoea.
In spite of being cr itically ill, on 28 July 2005
Hernández González was transferred from hospital back
to his cell at the Kilo 51/2 Prison.
Out of the thirty-five detained in April 2003, twenty-
six writers, journalists and librarians remain in prison.
Since April 2004, a number of those sentenced have
been conditionally released, seemingly for health rea-
sons, so it is worth keeping up the pressure on the
Cuban authorities to release prisoners of conscience on
humanitarian grounds.
Readers can send appeals urging the Cuban authori-
ties to release Normando Hernández González and his
fellow writers sentenced in the 2003 clampdown to:
His Excellency Fidel Castro Ruz
President of Cuba
c/o Cuban Mission to the United Nations
New York, NY, USA
Fax: 001 212 779 1697
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 CRIME

T HE PASSENGER J ESSICA M ANN become. Hewson’s very enjoyable

★ Italian mysteries are cleverly worked
By Chris Petit out and sharply written, and his take
(Simon & Schuster 388pp £12.99) on the secretive city is much more
Commissar io Brunetti and the uncomfortable and sinister than
21 DECEMBER 1988: Pan Am Flight Venetians whose parallel universe is Leon’s. In his hero’s eyes it is like ‘a
103 explodes in the sky over shown as virtually unconnected to bad yet familiar relative, dangerous to
Lockerbie. Seventeen years on, Chris the Venice of the tourist hordes. This know, difficult to let go’.
Petit analyses this infamous act of story begins with the political, at an
ter ror, descr ibing it through the environmental demo, and moves on T HE G RAVE TATTOO
grief-stricken, suspicious perception to the personal, with death in a ★
of a man whose own life was saved Murano glass factory. The murder By Val McDermid
by a chance, last-minute change of seems to be connected with the vic- (HarperCollins 480pp £17.99)
plan. But he had left his son to fly tim’s protests against the pollution of
on. He goes to Scotland to join the the lagoon and the damage to its MCDERMID’S work can sometimes
ghastly search, not only for remains unique, precar ious ecosystem. A be too explicitly sadistic for me, so I
but also for an explanation. leisurely investigation is carried out opened this book nervously. In fact,
Petit is a film director and novelist over long lunches and quiet drinks, in it is safe for the squeamish and even
whose expertise in provoking power- boats and alleys, while winter gives one of her best. The story of acade-
ful emotions makes his book more way to spr ing and the foreigners mic rivalry in East London and murder
painful than would a less well- return to join the uxorious Brunetti in the Lake District is based on an
written treatment of this atrocity. as he pauses on the way home for intriguing notion: a tattooed body
Anyone who was personally affected lunch, dinner and moral support, brought out of a bog was the Bounty
by the tragedy should steer clear, for admires the sights of his beloved city mutineer Fletcher Christian, who
even as an outsider I found the vivid, and dreads its demise. had somehow made his way home
immediate description of the disaster from Pitcairn, gone into hiding with
and its aftermath distressing, though T HE L IZARD ’ S B ITE his cousin William Wordsworth, and
horribly gripping. This mixture of ★ inspired a long, but also long-lost
fact and fiction, conspiracy theory By David Hewson poem. Historical information glides
and some real people – including, (Macmillan 360pp £12.99) seamlessly into invention. I just wish
most vividly, the CIA spymaster a footnote had been added, to mark
James Angleton – is an adventure AS often happens in this genre, syn- the join. Apparently Christian and
story but also a sophisticated, serious chronicity is at work: here is another Wordsworth really were related, but
‘think piece’ with multiple messages, death in a Murano glassworks and readers shouldn’t need to do their
all cynical, worldly and credible. more revelations about the life that own research to find that out.
visitors never see. This cop is
T HROUGH A G LASS, DARKLY Roman, not Venetian, and wants to T HE L IBRARY PARADOX
★ wrap his case up quickly and go back ★
By Donna Leon home. But the further he delves By Catherine Shaw
(Heinemann 256pp £15.99) behind Venice’s sparkling facade the (Allison & Busby 288pp £18.99)
more inscrutable the complications
N OT so much death in M ORE coincidence as
Venice, more the disintegra-
tion of Venice, for the first
JNANE TAMSNA LITERARY SALON another good writer builds
her fiction on historical fact.
in Marrakech
corpse is not until page 126 When a professor is found
and the crime is the threat to Four days and three nights of stimulation in a sumptuous dead his colleagues employ
the city’s survival with mur- Moroccan guesthouse. a private detective to sec-
der almost by the way. But Join Aminatta Forna (The Devil that Danced on the ond-guess the police. The
the popular ity of Donna Water, Ancestor Stones) for a 3-day sensory celebration of notion of a wife and mother
Leon’s long-running series literature in Morocco. being given that job in 1896
does not depend on conven- 22nd - 25th of June, 2006 takes some swallowing, but
For further information:
tional detection. It is due to http://www.jnanetamsna.com/jtlitsal.htm or contact Eleanor O’Keefe then the story goes down
the intimate portraiture of at eleanor@jnanetamsna.com or +33 6 88 68 68 98 smoothly, seasoned with wit
place and people. Readers The Jnane Tamsna Literary Salon is designed to celebrate the achievements of recognised authors while
promoting literacy and education in Morocco and beyond.
and intelligence and made
participate in the daily life of out of unusual and interesting

60
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

ingredients, including a careful dis-
cussion of anti-Semitism and ‘the
famous library paradox of Bertrand
Russell’. There is even a br ief
appearance by the famous philoso-
pher. The sedate university area of
Bloomsbury is cleverly contrasted
with an orthodox Jewish neighbour-
hood in East London and the factual
icing on this clever concoction is
a lucid account of one of history’s
most notoriously shocking miscar-
riages of justice, the Dreyfus case.
L ITTLE FACE
★ black sergeant whose boss fancies him,
By Sophie Hannah
(Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £18.99)
ANOTHER prize-winning poet turns
to crime with Sophie Hannah’s psy-
chological cliffhanger. Alice insists that
a changeling has been substituted for
her two-week-old daughter. Nobody
believes her until a police constable
begins to rethink and takes another
look at the ostensibly perfect set-up.
Alice lives with her husband, his son,
and his formidable mother. Though
neither the situation or solution seem
entirely convincing, the language and
atmosphere are high quality stuff, and
the portrait of a woman in the throes
of post-natal depression will be a reve-
lation to some, to others a reminder.
The lonely, guilty, unmanageable
emotions of a new mother are not
always attributable to hormones and
sleep deprivation. Sometimes they are
grounded in reason.
L IVING ON A P RAYER
★ bestsellers through word-of-mouth
By Sheila Quigley
(Century 384pp £9.99)
S HEILA Quigley was a 57-year-old
grandmother living on benefits in a
council house when she got a six-
figure deal for her first book, an up-
to-date and true Cinderella story
which seems incongruously fantastic
beside this hyper-realistic police pro-
cedural, the third in a series though
the first I have read. Its heroine is an
CRIME
overworked woman inspector
described by previous reviewers as
gritty and feisty. Her vocabulary seems
pretty tame to me and she is ungrittily
nice to the disturbed children and
inept recidivists who populate her
patch. The case begins with the appar-
ent suicide of the only adolescent for
miles around who was neither anorexic,
obese or carving himself up with a
knife, nor suffering from parental pae-
dophilia, drug-use and drink. Take
this authentic-seeming setting, throw
in suspicious cults, a stroppy young
woman constable and a gorgeous
and the mixture makes a good read.
But although no other word is printed
as dialect, ‘you’ is always written as
‘yer’ – an affectation infur iating
enough to be a book-spoiler.
B LUE S HOES AND H APPINESS
★ of the corpses.
By Alexander McCall Smith
(Polygon 224pp £12.99)
A happy seventh return to McCall
Smith’s Botswana and Mma
Ramotswe of the Ladies’ Detective
Agency. The stories are only tangen-
tially about detection, the crimes are
petty and in each successive episode
lessons on morals, manners and mutual
respect are delivered with less and less
disguise. Good people leading good
lives do not often feature in this col-
umn, nor do detectives whose only
equipment is insight and instinct, and
moralising novels usually end up on
my reject pile. But these books break
all rules. They became worldwide
recommendation, not big-budget
advertising; and they include details
which would seem impermissible in
other logic-based crime novels – for
example, Precious Ramotswe ‘senses’
evil and acts on her belief without any
of the evidence more conventional
mysteries have to include. This com-
bination of cautionary tale and com-
fort blanket, the ‘traditionally built’ (ie
fat) detective and the portrayal of the
‘old’ Botswana are a delight.
61
B LACK C AT B LACK D OG
★
By John Creed
(Faber & Faber 272pp £9.99)
CRIME fiction is a broad definition, so
Creed’s thriller does come in the same
category as McCall Smith’s gentle
tales, though they only share one
quality: good, intelligent writing.
Creed’s action-packed adventure set in
Norther n Ireland follows an ex-
spook, post-Bond loner who takes on
the part of established officialdom that
operates outside the law. The hero has
to foil his own former colleagues,
having discovered their dastardly plan
to plant a plane crammed with chem-
ical weapons in Iraq in order to prove
the illicit WMD really existed. The
commentary is acute and the narrative
gripping but too often ‘with one
bound Jack was free’, and I lost count
★
S INCE I was last a regular crime-
fiction critic the genre has changed.
The quality is far higher and more
books are published. But review
space remains limited. So as well as
this monthly mixture of old
favourites and new discoveries, also
recommended are:
F IRESALE
By Sara Paretsky
(Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £12.99)
Another of the self-sacrificing private
eye VI Warshawski’s adventures in
Chicago’s slums.
O NE M AN AND HIS B OMB
By H R F Keating
(Allison & Busby 288pp £18.99)
A good if sad story featuring Detective
Superintendent Harriet Martens.
A G AME OF S OLDIERS
By Stephen Miller
(HarperCollins 464pp £14.99)
A seriously clever and unusual histor-
ical thriller set in St Petersburg in the
last days of Tsarist peace.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
A LISON P RINCE was the deserved R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
winner this month, for her poem on
‘Ink’, and she will receive the £350 first prize which has running. Next month’s subject, to be interpreted in 24
kindly been provided by the Mail on Sunday.
This is a competition for poems that rhyme, scan and
FIRST PRIZE
INKWELL by Alison Prince
My grandmother came back from India
in a waft of sandalwood and rage,
bereft of servants, shocked from loss of sun
and punkah-wallah, baffled by the cage
of Surbiton, a tiger who alarmed
her neighbours, and whose London daughters groaned
at this exotic burden thrust on them.
There was a story with each thing she owned;
the parasol an elephant retrieved
and handed up to memsahib howdah-high,
the photos of a durbar on some lawn
with turbaned, white-clad bearers. She would sigh
and shake her head. No handsome captains came
to flirt with her at hazri any more,
no hand-clap served to fetch her Kashmir shawl,
no mongoose scuttled fast across the floor
in hopeful search of cobras. ‘The inkwell!’
I would prompt. The little beast could raise
the silver lid. She’d nod. ‘Ink everywhere –
it drove the sweepers mad.’ And her lost days
were back, just for a moment. She would touch
the cut-glass inkwell, dark-stained but long dry,
and smile. Penned words and paw-prints lived again,
bright as black crows across the Indian sky.
SECOND PRIZE
WRIT IN INK by D A Prince
His critics wrote in ink: they filled each page
in black attack, a solid slab of print
grown from the blotched response and scrawling rage
thrown down from pens that cut like sharpened flint.
They wrote indelibly, a spreading stain
beyond the year, not for their times alone;
posterity would find their views as plain
as if they’d writ in blood, or carved on stone.
Their ink was confident, assured and right
on all particulars: purposeful, strong.
It would outlast that fanciful delight
whose poetry would fade. They were not wrong.
They wrote; they died, as transient shadows die
while he, to whom these critics gave no quarter,
despite the last despair, disproves his lie
that Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
62
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006
make sense, and as such is possibly the
most subversive poetry competition
lines or less, is ‘Rebel’. Entries should arrive at these
offices by 26 April.
SEPPIA (a personal view) by Richard Charles
Penne alla Veneziana
Is nastier than you might think.
Penne alla Veneziana
Is cooked in cuttlefish ink.
I have never been known to be squeamish,
I have eaten all manner of muck.
In Périgord, I have been served with
Every part that there is of a duck.
I have eaten the brains of a monkey,
Drunk the blood of a freshly–killed snake,
Dined on crocodile, snail, frog and locust.
I have even consumed a McShake.
Cows’ lungs in a vinegar gravy
Will make a Bavarian smile.
Even testicles have their admirers,
But cuttlefish ink is vile.
Be entranced by the beauty of Venice,
In the evening, go out on the town,
But take care when reading a menu,
And never eat anything brown.
For if you try cuttlefish pasta,
You will not enjoy it one bit.
‘Speciality of the region’
Means ‘Nobody else eats this shit.’
A MEDITATION ON INKS by Noel Petty
Red is trouble, red’s not cool,
Red is See me after school,
Red is Oh? and Can do better,
Red is a final notice letter,
Red is deficits and losses,
Red is a warning from the bosses.
Green’s obsessive, beady-eyed,
Green is your dotty aunt in Ryde,
Green has theories, green has notions,
Green can harness the winds and oceans.
Green is infinite persistence,
Green is ominous. Keep your distance.
Black is parental heavy weather,
Black is Pull yourself together.
Black is men with sober faces,
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
Black is men in suits and braces,
Black is profits, hardly won,
Black’s efficient. Black’s no fun.
Blue’s a balanced, friendly ink,
Blue is Pop round for a drink,
Blue is Thanks, and how are you?
Blue is honest. Blue is blue.
Blue is open, wears no mask,
Blue’s what I use. Since you ask.
HAND-WRITTEN by Alanna Blake
A lot may be said for computers,
for typewriters, faxes and such,
but when we sit down to write letters
a pen gives the personal touch.
No ball-point, wherever it hailed from,
can give to one’s fingers the link
that comes with a pen that is filled from
a bottle of Permanent Quink.
There’s treasure in many odd corners:
in attics, in drawers or on shelves
the dead live again in the letters
they wrote to our much younger selves.
A page may turn brittle and yellow
but still it protects what is past,
and sentiments, ardent or mellow,
are there in the ink – where they last.
TO A CUTTLEFISH by J Garth Taylor
As did your relatives, the squid
And octopus, you often hid
From hungry predators amid
Your inky streams,
Quite confident that this outdid
Their deadly schemes.
You opted not for fight nor flight
But merely kept yourself from sight,
Convinced your instinct had it right,
And duly inked
In order to avoid the plight
Of the extinct.
But though our best-laid plans are nice
For saving species, none suffice
For all the members – men or mice
Or cuttlefish –
And now you lie there, stuffed with rice,
Upon my dish.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2006

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bedrooms, well-stocked book-
shelves, walks, log fires and
hot baths in winter; pool and
pergolas in summer.
Tel 01243 784806 or
www.casettadelbrinco.co.uk
TURKISH IDYLL
Lovely stone house in unspoilt
bay on the Cnidus Peninsula,
Turkey. Perfect for family
holidays - big swimming pool,
tennis court, 3-acre garden full
of magnificent old olive trees.
6 beds/6 baths. Cook and maid.
Beach 350m. Still available
June 9th-July 7th,
Sept 1st -15th.
Call 07765 255791 or
info@villakargi.com
HOLIDAY COURSES
Andalucia, Spain
UK Weekend Courses
Writing
Family History
Watercolour Painting
MALAGA WORKSHOPS
Tel: 01454 773579
email: root@malagaworkshops.co.uk
www.malagaworkshops.co.uk