APRIL 2007 £3.

00

CONGRESS IN VIENNA
Christopher Clark on the Birth of Modern Europe

John Gray on Global Empires

9 770144 436041

Leslie Mitchell on the European Enlightenment

Simon Heffer on the English Civil War

Carole Angier reveres Primo Levi

Donald Rayfield regrets the Kulaks
Jonathan Mirsky recalls the Lady of Burma
04

FILTH ★ CANT ★ CHICKENS

Exiles of Spain ★ Ladies of Crimea

Naughty Mughal Emperors

FRIENDSHIPS in Power ★ FATWAS in Politics

 FROM THE PULPIT
IT IS UNLIKELY that even the P ETER WASHINGTON
erudite readers of the Literary
Review know much about
Nahum Tate (1652–1715),
one of our dimmer Poet
CLASSICS LITE
Laureates in a crowded field.
Historians remember Tate for a walk-on part in Pope’s
Dunciad, but he does have a better claim to fame – apart,
that is, from writing a poem about tea called Panacea. For
it was Nahum who had the bright idea of cheering up
King Lear by chopping out the difficult bits and allowing
Cordelia to survive and marry Edmund, in a version of
the play which held the stage for more than a century.
Mucking about with Shakespeare was something of a
national pastime in Tate’s day. It fell into disfavour with
readers when the Bard was canonised by Romantic poets,
but survives in the theatre, though there are now tacit
limits to what you can do: make Hamlet a dog or transfer
Othello to the Arctic by all means, but don’t meddle with
the words, however much you twist their meaning.
Yet, as everyone has noticed, even when you do med-
dle with the words, Shakespeare shows almost miracu-
lous powers of recovery. It has become part of his myth
that, mangle him as we may from China to Peru, we
keep rediscovering the original. That being the case,
does it actually matter what we do to his plays? Is it not
the definition of a classic that it can withstand any
amount of maltreatment, including butchery and
neglect? After all, King Lear survived Tate.
But would other writers survive this approach? This
month, the publishers of a new translation of War and
Peace certainly appear to think so. Their advertising copy
implies that this version is somehow sexier and cheerier
than the one we all know, not least because it is ‘free of
solemn philosophical wanderings’, whatever they may
be. The text is shorter; characters who die in the later
version survive in this one; and Tolstoy’s people ‘remain
central throughout’. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?
The only thing missing is a television phone-in to
choose your favourite bit.
In fact, the sales pitch is a bit of a con. This is not a about education or reading, let us stop pretending that
hatchet job by the Nahum Tate gang. Closer inspection
reveals that the ‘new version’ translates an early draft of
the novel suppressed by the author, interesting to Tolstoy
fans but not necessarily to anyone else. But the blurb does
raise an interesting question. Why on earth should the
publishers even try to sell their edition of War and Peace as books for all ages. There is an old saying about feeding
a walk in the park? Is it not possible that people interested babies with pap and adults with proper food. Let people
in such a book are serious enough not to need the perky
patter of advertising departments to brighten their day?
Apparently not. And Tolstoy is not the only one in for
a mass-market, reader-friendly makeover (you see, I am
catching the argot myself). Those nice people at Orion
have decided that Charlotte and Emily and Jane and
George also need a leg up. It seems they aren’t popular
1
enough already, so the
Orion-ites propose to issue
them next month in
Compact Editions (doesn’t
that sound cosy?) which will
see that the books are ‘sym-
pathetically edited’ (unlike cruel editions). And, although
reduced in length, they will nevertheless ‘retain all the
elements that made them a “classic” in the first place’.
It really makes you wonder why no one thought of this
wheeze before (or did they?). I mean, there have I been
wasting my time on Proust, Musil and the other boys
when the clever-clogs at Orion and Fourth Estate could
have saved me the time and effort. All the same, I have
been puzzling over how you can abridge a book while
simultaneously retaining ‘all the elements which make it a
classic’ because I don’t quite understand what they think
‘all the elements’ are. Don’t proportion, size, spaciousness
and temporality have something to do with it? Isn’t
Middlemarch long and leisurely for very good reasons? And
aren’t many classics difficult and even obscure by nature?
Not any longer, it seems. Exhausted by Tristram Shandy?
Finnegans Wake giving you a headache? Not to worry: the
Orionites will be along in a moment with a shorter, snap-
pier version which will have you on your feet in no time.
Some people will of course be annoyed about this
mauling of their favourite books. The accountants at
Orion and Fourth Estate certainly hope so, because
nothing sells like controversy. For myself, I couldn’t give
a hoot about what they do to Tolstoy and co for the rea-
son given above: part of the definition of a classic is that
it can survive any mauling. The question is, will an
intelligent reading public survive these constant assaults
on its virtue?
One of the disasters of our time is the obsession with
making life easier and the assumption that this is obviously
a good thing. Recent controversies about higher educa-
tion are typical. I have to admit that in this context words
such as ‘relevant’ and ‘accessible’ set my teeth on edge. I
am all for universal availability, but whether we are talking
such things are easy or inevitably desirable. Reading clas-
sics is not for everyone – and why should it be? There is
an audience for Jeffrey Archer and another for James Joyce:
making one more like the other or turning this distinction
into a value-judgement is a huge waste of time. Nor are all
read War and Peace if and when they are ready for it.
Otherwise leave them to their Danielle Steels.
And, by the way, why do you have to sex up
Wuthering Heights in the first place? Sales figures suggest
that there is already at least one copy in every home.
Surely these benevolent new publications aren’t just
gimmicks for selling more books? Perish the thought.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Peter Washington. He is General
Editor of the Everyman’s Library.
J OHN G RAY is Professor of
European Thought at the London
School of Economics. His next
book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion
and the Death of Utopia, is published
by Penguin in July.
CAROLE ANGIER is a biographer of
Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. The
Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography is
available in paperback from Penguin.
CHRISTOPHER CLARK is Reader in
Modern European History at St
Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He
is the author of Iron Kingdom: The
Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-
1947 (Penguin), which will shortly
be published in paperback.
W ILLIAM R EEVE is a former BBC
Afghanistan Correspondent, who won
an Emmy Award for his reporting of
the fall of the Taliban from Kabul.
FIAMMETTA ROCCO is the literary
editor of The Economist.
D AVID S TAFFORD is the author of
Churchill and Secret Service (John
Murray). His latest book, Endgame
1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation, will
be published by Little, Brown in June.
ELISABETH LUARD has just published a
book on Truffles (Frances Lincoln), an
appreciation of the subterranean tuber
and its ability to attract the amorous
interest of pigs, people and snails.
D ONALD R AYFIELD is Emeritus
Professor of Russian and Georgian at
Queen Mary University of London,
and author of Stalin and his Hangmen
(Penguin). He is editor-in-chief of A
Comprehensive Georgian-English
Dictionary (Garnett Press).
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 P ETER W ASHINGTON
HISTORY 4 J OHN G RAY After Tamerlane: The Global History of
Empire John Darwin
6 C H R I S T O P H E R C L A R K Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon
and the Congress of Vienna Adam Zamoyski
8 SIMON HEFFER The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
John Adamson
10 F E L I P E F E R N A N D E Z -A R M E S T O The Disinherited: The
Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture Henry Kamen
11 LESLIE MITCHELL The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815
Tim Blanning
13 FRANCES WILSON Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant 1789–1837
14 DONALD RAYFIELD The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of
Stalin’s Special Settlements Lynne Viola
15 CHARLES ALLEN A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of
the Taj Mahal Diana and Michael Preston The Mughal World:
India’s Tainted Paradise Abraham Eraly
16 CHRISTINE KELLY No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of
Women in the Crimean War Helen Rappaport
GRUB 18 CHRISTOPHER HART Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in
England, 1600–1770 Emily Cockayne
19 ELISABETH LUARD Planet Chicken: The Shameful Story of the Bird
on Your Plate Hattie Ellis The English at Table Digby Anderson
CONFLICT 21 ADRIAN WEALE The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing
the Peace Ali A Allawi
22 MICHAEL BURLEIGH Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical
Islam and the Duty to Jihad Shmuel Bar
FOREIGN PARTS 24 JONATHAN MIRSKY The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma
Thant Myint-U Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi
Justin Wintle
25 FIAMMETTA ROCCO Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal
Matthew Parker
28 SARA WHEELER The South American Diaries John Hopkins
LETTER FROM 29 IAIN KING MEETS A BOOKSELLER IN FREETOWN
FREETOWN
CHILDREN’S BOOKS 30 INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP REEVE
31 P HILIP W OMACK ON T HREE C HILDREN ’ S B OOKS
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Assistant Editor: PHILIP WOMACK
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 342
2
 APRIL 2007

ART & MUSIC 32 R UPERT C HRISTIANSEN Medusa: The Shipwreck, the ADRIAN WEALE is writing a history of
Scandal, the Masterpiece Jonathan Miles the SS for Little, Brown. In 2003 he
was recalled to the British Army and
33 P A T R I C K O’C O N N O R Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian
served as Chief of Staff for the Coalition
Opera Philip Gossett Start-up at the Met: The Metropolitan Provisional Authority in the Iraqi
Opera Broadcasts 1966–1976 Paul Jackson province of Dhi Qar for six months.
34 I AN W HITCOMB Tearing down the Wall of Sound: The Rise
and Fall of Phil Spector Mick Brown F ELIPE F ERNANDEZ -A RMESTO
is Visiting Professor of Global
Environmental History at Queen
BIOGRAPHY & 36 A C GRAYLING Shakespeare the Thinker A D Nuttall Mary, University of London and
MEMOIRS Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography René Weiss Principe de Asturias Chair in
37 WILLIAM PALMER Family Romance: A Memoir John Lanchester Spanish Culture and Civilization at
38 CHANDAK SENGOOPTA Digging up the Dead: The Life and Tufts University.
Times of Astley Cooper, An Extraordinary Surgeon Druin Burch
LESLIE MITCHELL is Emeritus Fellow
39 V IRGINIA I RONSIDE The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and of University College, Oxford.
Times of Willie Donaldson Terence Blacker
CHRISTINE KELLY is the editor of
SECOND WORLD WAR 40 D AVID S TAFFORD Thirty Secret Years:A G Denniston’s Mrs Duberly’s War: Journal and Letters
from the Crimea, 1854-1856, recently
Work in Signals Intelligence 1914–1944 Robin Denniston
published by OUP.
41 F REDERICK T AYLOR Bomber Boys Patrick Bishop
42 D AVID C ESARANI The Lost: A Search for Six of Six DAVID CESARANI is research profes-
Million David Mendelsohn sor in History at Royal Holloway.
The American edition of his latest
book, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes,
GENERAL 44 J W M THOMPSON Friendship and Betrayal Graham Stewart
has just won the National Jewish
45 ALLAN MASSIE Inner Workings: Essays 2000–2005 J M Coetzee Book Award for History.
46 T HOMAS H ODGKINSON The Eye Simon Ings
47 D AN J ONES ON F IGHTING SIMON HEFFER’s The Great British
Speeches will be published by
Quercus in May.
FICTION 48 CAROLE ANGIER A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories Primo Levi
49 GILL HORNBY South of the River Blake Morrison CHRISTOPHER HART’s first volume of
50 SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE Measuring the World Daniel Kehlmann his blockbuster Attila trilogy, written
51 D J TAYLOR Tomorrow Graham Swift under the pseudonym William
52 MATT THORNE The Unknown Terrorist Richard Flanagan Napier, is now available in paperback.
53 SAM LEITH Dancing with Eva Alan Judd
F REDERICK T AYLOR ’s two most
54 FRANCIS KING Skin Lane Neil Bartlett recent books are Dresden, Tuesday
54 RICHARD GODWIN Hospital Toby Litt 13th February 1945 and The Berlin
55 P AMELA N ORRIS Seizure Erica Wagner Wall, both published by Bloomsbury.
56 M ARTYN B EDFORD Day A L Kennedy
PHILIP WOMACK’S children’s novel,
57 T OM F LEMING Gold Dan Rhodes
The Other Book, will be published by
58 S IMON B AKER ON F IRST N OVELS Bloomsbury in January 2008.
SILENCED VOICES 59 LUCY POPESCU
CRIME 60 JESSICA MANN IAIN KING is co-author of Peace at
POETRY 62 Any Price: How the World Failed
Kosovo (Hurst).
CLASSIFIEDS 64 BOOKSHOP 27 LETTERS 35 CROSSWORD 20

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3
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
“Brooks treats his subject with much subtlety,
solid scholarship, and flexibility of mind.”
—Victor Brombert, author of Trains of Thought
J OHN G RAY
Henry James
Goes to Paris
PETER BROOKS
The Great Game
“Under the guise of simply
‘telling a story’ about the
young Henry James’s stay
Goes on
in Paris in 1875–76, A FTER TAMERLANE : T HE G LOBAL H ISTORY
Peter Brooks describes OF E MPIRE
the progressive emergence ★
of the whole of novelistic By John Darwin
modernity during the (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 592pp £25)
turn from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century. HALFORD MACKINDER IS not much read these days. The
You have to be, like
British geographer and imperialist’s emphasis on the
Brooks, both historian
and theorist, a scholar
enduring strategic and political importance of the earth’s
both of things French physical features and resources pricked the complacency
and American, to so of his Edwardian contemporaries, and his ideas had a cer-
masterfully carry out tain vogue in the interwar years. Notoriously, the Nazis
this project.” adopted a crude version of his view that whoever controls
—Philippe Hamon, Professor Emeritus, La Sorbonne Nouvelle Eurasia – the ‘world island’ stretching from the Volga to
Cloth $24.95 £15.95 978-0-691-12954-9 Due April the Yangtze – controls the world. In the aftermath of the
Second World War it was widely assumed that geopolitics
of this kind was obsolete. Values of democracy and
“Lee’s immensely enjoyable study . . . should become human rights rather than the distribution of resources
essential reading for aficionados of literary biography.” would shape the future. In fact the struggle for control of
—Publishers Weekly natural resources did not abate. An Anglo-American coup
removed the democratically elected government of
New in paperback Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and re-estab-
lished Western control of the country’s resources, while
Virginia Woolf ’s the Gulf War of 1990–91 aimed solely to secure global oil
Nose supplies. Mackinder’s ideas may have been rejected, but
Essays on Biography the geopolitical facts on which they were based continued
HERMIONE LEE to shape international relations.
John Darwin does not subscribe to any simple version
“Lee’s tales of the battles of geopolitics. Yet Mackinder’s observation that the
of the biographers are ‘Columbian epoch’ in which the world was ruled by
gripping and vivid. . . .
European sea power was only an interlude in history
The nose is a funny thing
anyway; stick it on to
might serve as an epigraph to After Tamerlane. Rightly,
‘Virginia Woolf’ or any
Darwin rejects the Whigg ish nar rative in which
other of the illustrious Europe’s r ise to pre-eminence and decline was a
names Lee discusses, and moment in the long-term rise of the ‘West’. Europe’s
you are bound to bring ascent was an incident in the history of Eurasia: ‘we
them down a peg. All part must set Europe’s age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian
of the biographer’s power context’, he writes, and recognise ‘the central importance
to make or unmake, sniff of Europe’s connections with other Old World civiliza-
out or sniff at, which Lee so tions and states in Asia, North Africa and the Middle
engagingly shows us.” East’. There was nothing foreordained about Europe’s
—Rachel Bowlby, Financial Times rise or its fall, nor were its empires different in kind from
Paper $12.95 £8.50 978-0-691-13044-6 Due April those of other times and places. The view that empire is
Not available from Princeton in the Commonwealth, except Canada ‘the original sin of European peoples, who corrupted an
innocent word’ is a commonplace in the developing
world and in the United States; but, as Darwin points
Princeton University Press out, the true origins of empire are to be found in
(0800) 243407 U.K. • 800-777-4726 U.S.
Read excerpts online at press.princeton.edu

LITERARY REVIEW April 2007

 HISTORY
processes of exchange and the accumulation of power
that are practically universal. In order to understand
empire one must understand not only the experiences of
Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Germany and Britain – themselves hugely diverse. The
histories of the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, the
Manchus, the Russians and the Soviets, the Japanese and
the Nazis must also be examined. There is nothing
peculiarly European, or Western, about imperialism.
Empire is normal, and the intense hostility it arouses
comes from the fact that post-colonial states base their
legitimacy on a vision of it as an unnatural and alien
institution – a vision that continues to sustain them even
when they become imperialists themselves.
Starting in 1405 with the death of Tamerlane, the last of
the ‘world-conquerors’ who was able to bring the whole
of Eurasia under a single rule, Darwin presents an eagle’s-
eye view of the role of empire in the creation of the mod-
ern world. An astonishingly comprehensive, arrestingly
fresh and vivid history of the forces that underlie the world
we live in today, After Tamerlane sets aside ideologies in
which European power – sometimes seen as liberating and
at others as diabolically oppressive – is the driving force of
modern development. A global economy was not created
by ‘the Promethean touch of merchants from Europe’ – it
already existed, flourishing in the maritime commerce
pioneered by Asians that linked China, Japan, India, the
Persian Gulf and East Africa. The powerful resurgence of
Asia that is now under way only re-establishes these older
patterns of trade and power. What we now call ‘globalisa-
tion’ has never been only a European or Western phe-
nomenon. The Columbian era of European hegemony,
always partly unreal, is now definitely over.
One of the lasting impressions left by Darwin’s
account is how geopolitical realities resist and survive
the most profound historical transformations. The last
few decades have included the collapse of Soviet power
and the seeming establishment of an American-centred
world order. Yet these large changes have not relegated
geopolitics to the past, as liberal and neoconservative
bien-pensants like to imagine. The Great Game has not
faded away, any more than Eurasia has ceased to be at
the heart of global conflicts. There are new players –
China and India are active protagonists, and Russia,
having been unwisely written off as one of history’s
has-beens, has re-emerged as the pivotal power in the
new rivalry for energy. The site of the most intense
struggles is not Central Asia as it was around the end of
the nineteenth century, but the Persian Gulf. While
these changes have altered the pattern of geopolitical
conflict, they do not make it less pervasive or less prone
to erupt into war. The Gulf War of 1990–91 is likely to
go down as only the first of a series of resource wars.
No doubt these conflicts will have many dimensions,
including savage intra-Islamic enmities. They will still
5
be struggles of a kind Mackinder would find familiar.
Towards the end of After Tamerlane, Darwin considers
the events that led to Europe’s loss of global primacy. In
1919 the British Empire extended over a quarter of the
world; thirty years later it was falling apart. In the early
1950s the former Soviet Union – always a European-
style empire rather than a type of oriental despotism –
was the world’s second naval power. Thirty years on, it
was a military-industrial rustbelt. Darwin locates the
decisive moments in Europe’s decline in the run-up to
the Second World War. The inability of the League of
Nations to prevent the Italian invasion of Abyssinia
‘marked the brutal collapse of the last Europe-centred
experiment maintaining global order’, and Europe was
consumed in the ‘vast Eurasian war’ of 1942. No doubt
Europe’s collapse reflected long-term processes, but
when it came it was sudden and devastating. Despite the
efforts of the Continent’s post-war elites, no ‘European
project’ could reverse this catastrophic decline.
Referring to the breakdown that occurred during the
interwar period, Darwin observes: ‘The appropriate
imagery is not of rivers or tides, but of earthquakes and
floods.’ One cannot help wondering what upheavals are
in store for us. After reading this masterpiece of historical
writing, one thing is clear. The world has not seen the
last empire.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
C HRISTOPHER C LARK
SEX & SUMMITRY
R ITES OF P EACE : T HE FALL OF N APOLEON
AND THE C ONGRESS OF V IENNA
★ pieces, telling anecdotes and poignant individual portraits.
By Adam Zamoyski
(Harper Press 616pp £25)
A new Europe was born at the Congress of Vienna. A
Dutch–Belgian composite state, the United Kingdom of
the Netherlands, appeared in the north-west. Norway was
transferred from Denmark to Sweden. Austria relinquished
forever its foothold in the Netherlands and struck deep
inroads into Italy with the acquisition of Lombardy-
Venetia and the installation of Habsburg dynasts on the
thrones of Tuscany, Modena and Parma. The kingdom of
Prussia became a colossus that stretched across the north of
Germany, broken only by one gap, forty kilometres wide
at its narrowest point. Of the 300-odd principalities and
statelets that had inhabited the old Holy Roman Empire,
only thirty-nine German territories remained. The bor-
ders of the Russian Empire, redrawn to encompass the
bulk of eastern and central Poland, extended further west-
wards than at any time in European history.
The implications of this comprehensive restructuring
were momentous. Prussia replaced Austria as the fore-
most German power. Piedmont-Sardinia emerged as the
pre-eminent territory in the Italian peninsula. The Poles
seethed for a century under a triple
regime of occupation. The fear of
the threat posed by a resurgent
France sufficed, more or less, to
hold the allies of 1815 together,
until it was overshadowed by the
fear of Russia. It would be going
too far to say that the Vienna set-
tlement ‘caused’ the wars of 1848,
1854, 1864, 1866, 1870–71 and
1914–18, but it certainly accounts
to a great extent for the conflicts
and coalitions that shaped their
course and outcome.
In this sophisticated, panoramic
account of Europe’s transition from
war to peace in 1815, Adam
Zamoyski revisits the elaborate
sequence of summit negotiations
that culminated in the Congress of
Vienna. This has never been an easy
story to tell. The list of dramatis
personae extends into the hundreds,
and the scenery constantly changes Wilhelmina: seven times a day
6
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
as the centre of political gravity moves from the mobile
military headquarters of the 1813 campaigns to Paris,
London and Vienna. Yet Zamoyski succeeds brilliantly,
balancing the many strands of his narrative with intelli-
gence and grace. Lucid overviews of high politics –
sketched out against the background of some of the largest
battles in human history – are interspersed with vivid set-
Zamoyski weaves his high-political narrative into an
account of the world of travel, consumption, sociability
and sex that surrounded the summiteers. He is especially
good on the infrastructure of the conferences – the vari-
able cost and quality of apartments and carriages, the
inconveniences of travel, and the dangers faced by diplo-
mats making their way across areas that had only recent-
ly been battlefields, where they were tempting prey for
gangs of Cossacks, or bands of wandering deserters. The
protagonists of Zamoyski’s account are forever arriving
and departing in mud-spattered carriages, recovering
from sea-sickness, searching for furniture to fill empty
apartments, and coping with the insolence of unfamiliar
servants. Like today’s diplomats, the summiteers spent
much of their time shopping on behalf of loved ones at
home. There were the usual culture clashes: the British
delegation were heard to complain that nobody served
proper tea in Vienna, the Russians tended to trash their
apartments, the British ambassador Sir Charles Stewart
was forced to sell his hounds because he could find no
one in Austria who would hunt foxes with him.
Women loom large in this book, mainly in their famil-
iar Congress roles as mistresses and prostitutes, but also as
wives (though not necessarily faithful
ones). King Frederick of Denmark
took up with the twenty-year-old
Caroline Petronelle Seufert, a ‘young
woman of the working class, blonde
and pink, a pretty grisette’. The two
were so attached to each other dur-
ing the King’s stay that she became
known on the streets of Vienna as
the ‘Queen of Denmark’. Frederick
William III of Prussia, still slightly
numb from the death of his wife
Queen Louise in 1810, fell hopelessly
in love with Countess Julie Zichy
and ‘followed her about like a
spaniel’. While Emperor Alexander
pursued young women with reckless
abandon, his wife renewed an earlier
passionate affair with the Polish
statesman Czartoryski. The German
diplomat Gentz confided to his diary
one evening that he had ‘passed an
hour with Suzette, a very beautiful
woman bequeathed to me by
 HISTORY
[Wilhelm von] Humboldt’. It seems to have been easy for
even quite junior members of the delegations to pick up
female Congress groupies from the streets of Vienna.
There were also liaisons of a more ser ious kind.
Wilhelmina de Biron, Princess of Sagan, became one of
the great loves of Metternich’s life, though he later ruefully
admitted that she ‘sinned seven times a day and loved as
often as others dine’. These liaisons helped to compensate
for the ritualised tedium of the official occasions, but they
could be functional in a political sense: Sir Charles
Stewart and his junior colleague Frederick Lamb both
secretly shared Wilhelmina with Metternich for a time,
using her to acquire information about the Austrian, all of
which was dutifully passed to London.
There are many memorable portraits in this book, but
Talleyrand emerges with particular clarity. We encounter
him first in the hands of his valets in Paris, entertaining
morning callers, his face scarcely visible for ‘an enormous
assemblage of flannel, felt, fustian, percale [in] a mass of
white’. ‘Amongst the more remarkable elements of his
toilette’, the Russian minister Nesselrode reported, ‘was
one so curious as to overcome one’s disgust in observing
it. It involved the consumption of one or two large glasses
of tepid water, which he sucked in through the nostrils
and then ejected, more or less like an elephant, through
his nose.’ To embrace Talleyrand, Nesselrode recalled, was
to be covered in powder. Later we meet the wily French
statesman at the height of his powers, skilfully exploiting
tensions among the allies over the fate of Saxony and
Poland to open up opportunities for France and exasper-
ating his power-obsessed interlocutors with the buzz-
words ‘public law’, ‘international order’ and ‘legitimacy’.
Zamoyski’s narrative moves briskly and he writes with
a light touch. But his account is not without reflective
depth. Inlaid into the narrative are many insights into the
braggadocio and mutual paranoia that underpinned
much of the politicking, and astute accounts of how the
various summiteers conceptualised their role in the
negotiation process. The book also has much to say
about the performative aspects of diplomacy – the
importance of clothing, dancing and flattery, the feigning
of indignation or anger in the conference chamber. It
was essential, the Earl of Abercorn told Lord Castlereagh,
as the latter prepared to leave England, that an ambas-
sador adopt an air of ‘undisguised personal and national
haughtiness (with a sweet sauce of studied, unremitting,
ceremonious, condescending politeness and attention)’.
Zamoyski shows us how a statesman can be led astray by
the deceptive simplicity of maps: when Castlereagh drew
up the projected frontiers for the new Dutch state, he
seized upon the River Meuse as a convenient boundary
and thus drew a neat line right through the middle of a
cultural and economic community that had thrived on
both sides of the water since the sixteenth century.
Only once does Zamoyski, it seems to me, strike a
7
slightly off note: his handling of Wilhelm von Humboldt,
the Prussian ambassador in Vienna, is unaccountably hos-
tile. We are told that Humboldt liberally indulged ‘a seedy
taste for preferably fat lower-class girls, whom he could
treat like objects, while writing curiously high-minded
letters to his wife Caroline’. Later Zamoyski touches again
on Humboldt’s ‘taste for raddled whores and fat lower-
class women’. But there is surely more than this to be said
for Humboldt, the classical scholar, inventor of the mod-
ern humanist university, champion of Jewish emancipation
and the most consistently liberal minister of the Prussian
reform era. Humboldt’s sexual adventures and his porous
ethical standards were hardly unusual, as Zamoyski’s own
highly coloured account of these matters demonstrates.
Rites of Peace is a fine example of narrative history, ele-
gant, sketched on a broad canvas, and sound on factual
detail. Zamoyski has a sharp eye for the vanity of promi-
nent men and for the discrepancies between intention
and outcome. His deft use of contemporary diaries,
diplomatic reports and memoirs ensures authenticity of
tone and atmosphere. Vienna, he concludes, may have
given birth to a new kind of politics, centred on summit-
ry, consultation and a consensual acceptance – in princi-
ple – of the inviolability of sovereign states. But it also set
the parameters for a chain of wars and national struggles
that would shake Europe for more than a century.
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
S IMON H EFFER
KING V PARLIAMENT
T HE N OBLE R EVOLT: T HE OVERTHROW OF
C HARLES I
★ The earls of Bedford and Warwick were the two main
By John Adamson
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 576pp £25)
IT IS A question thousands of examinees have had to
answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the
English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their
customary abandon, depict it in nakedly class terms: the
Commons, on behalf of the people of England, rose up
against a weak but absolutist King who, supported by an
effete aristocracy, was no match for popular force and
sentiment. This is the contention that John Adamson, in
this immensely scholarly and beautifully written book,
sets out to disprove: and, without doubt, he succeeds.
Adamson has trawled every imaginable archive to
reconstruct the events between May 1640 and January
1642 that led, inevitably, to the confrontation between
the King and Parliament. The story begins with the
Scottish covenanters’ invasion of England, alarmed at
their absentee King’s drift towards popery. There were
many in England who shared their doubts about the
security of the Reformation, and about the ‘personal’
rule of Charles I – his determination, for the preceding
decade, to rule without recourse to Parliament. Charles
had also surrounded himself with
ecclesiastical figures who dined, at
best, à la carte from the prescriptions
of the Reformation: notable among
these was Archbishop Laud. But
countering the invasion of England
required an army, and that required
money, of which the King was by
now decidedly short.
The need to call a parliament gave
an opportunity not just to the
Commons, but to the Lords as well,
to air their grievances about the per-
sonal rule. As the title of this book
suggests, it was the nobility who actu-
ally played the leading role in gal-
vanising opinion against the King.
There was a political sense that went
hand-in-hand with the religious revo-
lution of the preceding century. It
argued against the divine right of
kings, and for what Adamson terms
the ‘Venetianisation’ of the state: the
politicians of 1640 wanted what we Earl of Strafford: the man the Junto feared opponents would spare Strafford’s
8
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
now know as the constitutional monarchy, with
Parliament playing a key role in the nation’s affairs and
acting as a brake on the caprice of the sovereign. Charles
I, who believed ‘what we have, we hold’, did not much
like this: but over the succeeding eighteen months he
was to be given an object lesson in the limitation of his
powers from which he was distressingly slow to learn.
motivators of this change of opinion, and the leaders of
a group of opponents of the King that came to be
known as the Junto. Bedford, who died (apparently of
smallpox) in May 1641, was the more conciliatory of the
two. Warwick, from his country home of Leez Priory in
Essex, was more of an intriguer, and better versed in
brinkmanship. Plotters and their tame ecclesiastics met
at Leez to try to chart a way forward. They succeeded,
but with an enormous amount of help from the King.
It was not merely that Charles resented having his pre-
rogatives chiselled away: he could not spare himself from
over-reacting when he sensed they were, or from trying,
by underhand means as well as by open ones, to get his
own back. In this way he inevitably made things worse
than they needed to be. One of the main targets of the
King’s opponents was his friend and chief hatchet-man
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland. When the King began to fear
attacks from within, Strafford was said to have promised
to bring his army over from Ireland to set about the
unruly English. This remark – and it is not entirely clear
whether or not it was made – was to prove Strafford’s
and, to an extent, the King’s undoing. The newly con-
vened Parliament, determined to
exercise its authority over the sover-
eign, had Strafford impeached and
put on trial for treason. A lengthy
process of bargaining between
Parliament and the King on
Strafford’s behalf ensued. Strafford at
first could hardly believe there was a
coherent case against him (and in
that he was not entirely wrong), but
he was too much the symbol of
Charles’s despotism to be spared. He
made mincemeat of his prosecutors,
deploying wit and superior intellect
to illustrate how little of a case they
had against him. When it seemed a
conviction for treason was in doubt,
the Commons simply passed a Bill of
Attainder against Strafford, which
did the same job. It was then
believed – not least by the King and
by Strafford – that further conces-
sions granted by the King to his
 HISTORY

life, and have him merely imprisoned or cast into exile.

An attempt to spring him from the Tower of London as
part of a coup put paid to that, and he was duly execut-
ed on Tower Hill before a vast, cheering crowd.
The botched coup was typical of the cack-handedness
with which the King’s party conducted its defence of
itself and of the King’s prerogatives. The almost simulta-
neous death of Bedford spelt the end of any sense of
moderation among the King’s opponents, who had
already been busy securing the right to triennial parlia-
ments, and to vote on their dissolution. Charles’s next
plan to claw back his status entailed visiting Scotland,
where he gave support to a coup that would have had
murdered all the Junto’s political allies in that country,
and allowed him to reassert himself from Edinburgh.
That coup, too, went wrong, and Charles was forced to
return to London in the late autumn of 1641 in a state
approaching ignominy. The first stirrings of rebellion in
Ireland, in support of him but against his increasingly
aggressive Protestant parliament, seemed to provide
another opportunity. Desperate to seize the initiative, the
King dismissed the Constable of the Tower of London
and appointed a placeman in his stead – the Tower had
enough gunpowder to blow London to smithereens, so
was more than just a symbolic possession.
However, the monarch overreached himself when he
ordered the arrest of five MPs and a peer for their trea-
sonous behaviour towards him. Marching into the
Commons with a phalanx of soldiery behind him, he
demanded that the men be handed over to him: but
they were not there, having fled some time beforehand,
and the King had made a fool of himself. Now it was
Parliament’s turn to assert its authority. Fearing for his
personal safety, the King and his family left by barge for
Hampton Court, and battle lines were drawn up.
As Adamson recounts, the King, his wife and their
three children all had to sleep in the same bed at
Hampton Court on their first night there, such was the
state of unreadiness of the palace: there would be far
worse than that to come over the next seven years,
before the King saw Westminster again.
It is not the least of Adamson’s achievements that he
takes what for many might be a familiar story and tells it
with brio and real interest; and that is because of the
wealth of new or unfamiliar material that he has managed
to find. He fleshes out his characters well, and has a com-
plete understanding of Caroline London and England.
This is one of the most original and thought-provoking
books on the Civil War I have yet read, although the first
shot in that conflict has yet to be fired when the book
concludes. It is to be hoped that Adamson will apply his
considerable powers of investigation and exposition to
telling the story up to the Restoration, for his command
of this period and this subject is unparalleled.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27

LITERARY REVIEW April 2007

 HISTORY
F ELIPE F ERNANDEZ -A RMESTO
THE ALCHEMY OF EXILE
T HE D ISINHERITED : T HE E XILES W HO
C REATED S PANISH C ULTURE
★ Puerto Rico’s place in the history of Spanish exile are
By Henry Kamen
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 508pp £30)
HOME THOUGHTS ARE best from abroad. Memory is a
better nurse of patriotism than experience, generally
because memory is more easily deluded, and distance
lends enchantment. Love for Jerusalem flows by the
waters of Babylon. Improbably but convincingly,
Macaulay’s Jacobite preferred Scargill to Florence. Almost
the only poem all Dutch people know is Denkend aan
Holland – a heart-wringing evocation of flat landscape
and cloud-filled skies. It was written in Sweden. To
imagine England, go to some corner of a foreign field.
The Return of the King is a genuine theme of the
founding-myths of countless dynasties. Many modern
nations took shape in exiles’ dreams. Venezuela hardly
existed even as an administrative unit of the Spanish Empire
until Miranda went to London and Bolívar to Haiti and
Kingston. Most other post-colonial nationalism followed
the pattern they established. Garibaldi, who was not even
born in Italy, planned his revolution in Brazil. Kossuth’s
visit to the USA inspired his plan for Hungary. The
Filipino nationalist movement was founded in Barcelona.
Gandhi conceived India in South Africa. Ho Chi Minh
thought of Vietnam while waiting at Parisian tables. Israel is
a land largely populated by ‘returnees’, who think of them-
selves as the children of a millennia-old diaspora. Noraid
got critically important funds for its struggle from Boston.
There can hardly be a community in the world whose
identity or art or music or literature is unaffected by images
projected from a distance. The alchemy of exile is universal,
partly because of the transmutative stimulus homesickness
imparts to imagination, and partly because, wherever the
stranger goes, his hosts modify his self-image. A Hakka in
eighteenth-century Borneo got used to being labelled
‘Chinese’. Slavery turned members of mutually ignorant or
mutually hostile people into self-conscious ‘Africans’. It
was easier for migrants from Sicily and Emilia, say, to think
of themselves as Italian on Ellis Island than at home.
Still, some places may be more affected than others,
especially if they are peculiarly productive of emigrants. So
argues Henry Kamen of Spain. No country – except per-
haps Russia, he concedes – has generated so many
expulsees, refugees, and economic migrants, in proportion
to the size of the population. He points to successive waves
that lap every century and almost every generation of
modern history: the Jews, the Moors, the Protestants, the
10
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
Jesuits, the settlers of the empire, the alternating flights of
liberals and reactionaries, the refugees from the Republic,
the foes of Franco, the Gastarbeiter movement that supplied
miners and waiters for so many foreign economies. It is an
impressive list, skilfully handled. The idea of putting Jesuits
and Jews into a single category of Spanish history is daz-
zlingly original and brilliantly revealing. Kamen’s pages on
powerful enough to change thinking about Puerto Rico,
if not about Spain. No other book is so genuinely even-
handed in dealing with the fears and experiences of atroci-
ties among both sides’ civil-war victims.
Kamen’s outstanding gifts as an historian are evident
on every page. He sifts evidence with a vivid yet critical
eye; his thinking is unfettered. He writes total history,
mastering every kind of source material, weaving a
comprehensive vision of Spanish culture that includes
art, science, thought, politics and everyday experience.
He handles language beautifully and economically. He is
unseduced by political correctness and undeceived by
partisan traditions. He deals dispassionately with such
delicate topics as Jewish apostasy and republican terror-
ism. The result is an alternative history of Spain from a
perspective never before attempted.
So it is a good book, even a great book, but is it right?
I see three problems with the argument.
First, the concepts on which it relies are disturbingly
vague. Kamen never decides what he means by exile.
Expulsees are different from refugees; conquistadores are
not the same as economic migrants. It is surely exaggerated
to say that Spaniards have always accepted ‘exile as a norm
of political life’. Only a small minority of leading figures
has emerged from exile, even in the twentieth century. At
times, in a strained effort to show that ‘dispossession’ affect-
ed everything important in Spanish identity, Kamen
includes travellers or tourists or students abroad (Velázquez
and Victoria, who spent almost their entire lives in Spain,
make it into this dubious category), while neglecting pro-
fessionals whose responsibilities took them from home –
such as diplomats or journalists, who have also exercised
enormous influence. When he wants to include Spaniards
who stayed in Spain, he talks loosely of internal or psycho-
logical exile, which is not exile at all. Yet he ignores the
real phenomenon of internal exile, which makes – for
instance – Andalusians in Catalonia invest fiercely in
Spanish unity, or Galicians in Madrid more passionately
separatist than fellow countrymen back home. Kamen’s
vagueness about culture matches his vagueness about exile.
He says exiles ‘defined’ Spain – but one of the mysteries,
perhaps tragedies, of Spanish history is that no one has ever
defined Spain successfully. Sometimes – especially in dis-
cussing the Sephardim – he includes expulsees’ fantasies
that never formed part of the mainstream. Sometimes he
includes Spanish reflections of foreigners’ perceptions.
He casually mentions influences that forged Spain more
 HISTORY
effectively than exile – such as ‘radio, the motor car, the
train and football’. Sometimes, he seems to make his
exiles irrelevant – abjurers of Spain in favour of ‘universal
civilization’, or celebrants of a narrowly local patria chica.
Secondly, Kamen realises that to sustain his case that
Spanish history is peculiarly shaped by exile he needs a
comparative framework. But he excuses himself from
providing it on practical grounds. So the reader is bound
to start enumerating comparable cases. Kamen’s honesty
as an historian helps undermine the argument. He cor-
rectly discards exaggerated traditions about the numbers
of expelled Jews and New World settlers – which makes
the phenomenon he describes seem less significant. And
his claim that Spain is unusual because the human traffic
– so to speak – was all one-way is surely mistaken. Spain
has been an important place of employment and educa-
tion for other people’s exiles, especially Catholic
refugees and mercenaries. That is why Spanish aristo-
crats today are called O’Donnell and O’Reilly, and uni-
versity buildings in Salamanca and Valladolid still bear
the names of English and Irish ‘nobles’.
Thirdly, Kamen’s thesis is strongly, worryingly excep-
tionalist. He repeatedly endorses the view that Spain is
‘different’ – a traditional claim which most historians have
now discarded and which Kamen’s own previous work has
done much to exclude. No historian, indeed, has done
more to challenge the notions that Spain was, in the early
modern period, intellectually isolated, economically back-
ward, mired in religious dogmatism, or condemned to
L ESLIE M ITCHELL
Fog in Channel:
Continent Cut Off
T HE P URSUIT OF G LORY: E UROPE
1648–1815
★ centre stage. No historian of the eighteenth century can
By Tim Blanning
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 708pp £30)
IN SOME WAYS, the medieval world finally came to an end
in the eighteenth century and the modern world began.
People stopped burning witches and watched kettles pro-
ducing steam-power instead. Inevitably, this change in
mood could not happen all at once. There had to be long
decades of ambiguity, in which old and new influences
locked horns. Professor Blanning is firmly of this belief,
styling his book ‘a dialectical encounter between a culture
of feeling and a culture of reason’. In what will undoubt-
edly become the standard text for grateful students for
11
early and precipitate ‘decline’. Yet all these notions seem,
in some measure, to have re-colonised his latest book,
where ‘that Spain was different’ becomes ‘the central reali-
ty’ of a country ‘cut off from Europe, mentally even more
than physically’. Yet in as far as such a thing as a typical
European modernity exists, Spain has had it: imperialism
and colonial conflicts; struggles between absolutism
and constitutionalism, authoritarianism and democracy,
Church and State, particularism and centralisation.
Industrialisation and de-industrialisation, secularisation and
consumerism have followed in Spain, as everywhere else.
There are always problems in organising a pioneering
work on a big and audacious theme, and there are stretch-
es in the book where Kamen succumbs to the temptation
to compile a sort of prosopographical dictionary of
Spaniards abroad. But he writes so well and tells the stories
so entertainingly that the scores of vignettes are a source of
pleasure rather than tedium. The sketch of Mendizábal is
more insightful than a biography. The pages on Melchor
de Macanaz – an eighteenth-century defender of the
Inquisition – introduce a fascinating character of whom
even specialists in the period know next to nothing.
Though these details are divine, there’s a devil in the argu-
ment – which is, perhaps, a protracted provocation. But
the book is essential for anyone who wants to understand
Spain. Even if the thesis is ultimately unpersuasive, Henry
Kamen has brought a new dimension to the subject,
which demands attention and repays reading.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 27
some time to come, he magnificently sets out the terms
of the debate.
The book has four sections: ‘Life and Death’, ‘Power’,
‘Religion and Culture’ and ‘War and Peace’. What might
be called old-style history is all safely tucked away in the last
of these. Here are the battles, treaties and dynastic alliances
that used to dominate the pages of the Cambridge History of
Modern Europe. Students of these topics will still be safely
led by the hand through a century and a half of diplomatic
contortions, but other historical preoccupations now have
ignore the wars, and rumours of wars, which crowd these
years, but it may be no accident that they now come last.
In 1784, Goethe confidently asserted that ‘enlighten-
ment marches forward with giant steps’. Blanning rather
agrees, although he might prefer ‘shuffling’ to describe
the progress. In his first section, he simply sets out to
prove that being alive in 1800 was a great deal more
agreeable than living a century earlier. More people could
travel and emigrate; local economies widened into
regional and even national markets; the countryside could
become an arena for leisure. There were still all kinds of
inhibition to movement, but no one who has suffered the
miseries of Heathrow should be too smug about this.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY

Similarly, there was less plague, safer good read. Disarmingly, he even
sex, less famine, and more to spend apologises when he simply has to
on the pursuit of happiness. Not a refer to ‘an enervating series of statis-
bad prospectus. tics’, or when some consideration of
Change always creates winners and the detail of Prussia’s administrative
losers. In the eighteenth century, arrangements proves unavoidable.
betterment came largely through the When pills have to be sugared, there
state and its agencies. There was new are picaresque moments and many a
status for bureaucrats, professors of good story. Blanning’s readers will
government and the tax-collector. never forget that the Saxon Court
The state may have been seen as a thought the tossing of foxes and bad-
good thing or a bad thing, but it was gers in a blanket the most pleasant of
certainly an inevitable thing. To dig- leisure activities, or that Philip V of
nify its new powers, to dress it in Spain was thought by contempo-
acceptable colours, new concepts of raries to be ‘wasting away through
sovereignty were developed, which the excessive use he makes of the
played with words like ‘people’ and queen’. Too much leaden history is
‘nation’ in ways that excited people wr itten. Blanning shows how it
to heroism and mass terror. Such should be done.
ideas were too often written down Fox-tossing in the Saxon Court Having welcomed this book with
in a mystical Ger man. Blanning well-deserved praise, a reviewer might
expounds them in clear English, and will thereby earn perhaps be allowed one moment of doubt. Blanning’s
the gratitude of many readers. account, as with Cambridge textbooks in the past, insists
The losers are just as easily identified. The eighteenth that England is part of Europe. There is a great deal of
century was, in many ways, a terrible time for God. England in this volume, if not of its Celtic appendages.
According to Frederick the Great, Rome was inhabited by Turkey is also beyond the pale. Cambridge’s vision of
elderly Popes, who were ‘reduced to the humiliating office Europe apparently begins at Milford Haven and ends
of exercising their sacerdotal functions, and hastily making somewhere near Belgrade. It is of course possible to argue
the fortunes of their relations and bastards’. Otherwise for hours about where Europe begins and ends. Politicians
they were ignored. Long before the French Revolution, in Brussels are still divided on the issue. But is it really
the Papacy had ceased to be represented at major peace helpful to include England in a book of this kind? True,
conferences. In varying degrees, people who mattered – the English spent a great deal of their time in the eigh-
like kings and queens, government ministers and salonards teenth century fighting nations on the Continent, if mostly
– had ceased to believe. Instead, doubt became fashion- by proxy. But they were also profoundly aware of the
able. Descartes once observed that ‘to place our knowl- differences between themselves and their neighbours. By
edge on foundations which are genuinely secure, we must chance and good fortune, their assumptions about gov-
doubt all our beliefs, retaining them only if they are gen- ernment and its institutions were thought superior to
uinely secure’. Of course, there was another eighteenth anything that existed in Europe. Equally, their kings and
century, which is peopled with monks and religious aristocrats governed on different terms. They had ‘liber-
revivalism, and Blanning does more than justice to this ties’, and no one else did. The list is endless. ‘Fog in
world. He is particularly kind to monks. But the genie was Channel: Continent cut off ’ is a headline that too many
out of the bottle, and from historians prefer to forget.
now on religion and the reli- This cavil aside, however,
gious would have to argue Tim Blanning’s book is to be
rather than command. warmly welcomed. It will do
To cover a period in which much to reactivate interest in
so much changed is no mean eighteenth-century Europe.
undertaking. It would have MA Degree in Biography Its mastery of the bibliogra-
Starting January 2007
been all too easy to have phy will leave no one in
become bogged down in Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or
two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first
doubt about the story so far.
remorseless detail. Somehow, postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. Above all, it is sympathetic
Blanning has not only man- Course director: Jane Ridley history-writing at its best.
aged to avoid this pitfall, but Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at One can hardly ask for more.
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
has instead produced what To order this book at £24, see
Tel: 01280 814080
can only be called a jolly LR Bookshop on page 27

12
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
F RANCES W ILSON
CUTTING THROUGH HUMBUG
D ECENCY AND D ISORDER : T HE AGE
OF C ANT 1789–1837
★ and waffle, but it had no regard for national quirks such
By Ben Wilson
(Faber & Faber 510pp £25)
CANT IS ONE of those kooky, quaint four-letter words
which have long since lost their power to offend. Like
‘culture’, the slipperiness of its meaning makes it almost
impossible to define, and much of Ben Wilson’s annoyingly
brilliant analysis of the period called by Byron ‘the age of
cant’ could serve as an appendix to Raymond Williams’s
Key Words. ‘To apply it to someone is to accuse them of
sloppy thinking, if you are being kind, or, at the very
worst, of a total lack of sincerity. In the former sense, cant
(or humbug) is a language of borrowed sentiments … It is
society’s clichés which infect the mind like the refrain of a
popular song and are repeated without reflection.’ To some
(such as Thomas Bowdler, whose expurgated edition of
Shakespeare delighted the nation), the word ‘cant’ was
simply a reminder to a foul-mouthed youth of the impor-
tance of politeness, or cleaning up the mess left after a
party, while to others cant was synonymous with insincer-
ity, hypocrisy, dogma, imposture, and jargon.
We have all been guilty of cant (hell, we are living in
the age of ‘spin’, cant’s babbling progeny), so why, Wilson
asks, was the word ‘virtually an expletive’ in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century? Or, as Byron put it,
why was cant ‘so much stronger than the cunt nowadays’?
Wilson recreates the age through focusing on attitudes to
cant itself. He suggests that it could be used as a term of
abuse only at a time when hypocrisy, like cheating at
cards, was still regarded as the worst of all evils.
The Victorians are to the Regency as Saffron is to Edina
in Absolutely Fabulous: the pious child of a libertarian par-
ent. Having nothing from which to rebel, the spawn of
those who lived through that revolutionary dawn – when,
as Wordsworth wrote, ‘to be young was very heaven’–
rebelled from freedom itself. In the words of Hazlitt,
another hater of cant: ‘If liberty produces ill-manners and
want of taste, she is a very excellent parent with two very
disagreeable daughters.’ Wilson documents this
parent–child relationship in awesome detail, adding to his
own authoritative and eloquent voice a mass of contem-
porary commentators in order to locate the moment when
the English changed from being producers of a vibrant,
inspired culture into passive observers of conformity.
Decency and Disorder is about how cant slid under the
doorways and slopped over the country like green slime
in a B movie, spreading itself around more or less every
13
thought or word it found indecorous until it formed the
amorphous, bland and censorious lump which we asso-
ciate with the Victorians. For Byron – whose comments
on cant could form a punchy little book of their own –
one of the things it managed to destroy was our pride in
matter-of-fact Englishness. Not only did it seek to
replace the virtues of coarse, plain speech with insincerity
as our appreciation of liberty and candour, our nurture
of mild eccentricity, our fondness of drinking ourselves
into oblivion, and the right to fart in our own hallways.
The image of the Englishman before cant got hold of
him was summed up by Punch, the wife-beating adul-
terer who, as an admiring German noted, ‘conquers
everything by his invincible merriment and humour,
laughs at the laws, at men, and at the devil himself ’.
By the time Victoria arrived, the wooden-hearted pup-
pet was no more the celebrated brother of John Bull than
the courtesan Harriette Wilson was his favourite lover.
Merry England, once a toby jug of frothing ale, could now
be dubbed ‘busy England’. Commuter trains chuffed in
and out of the suburbs and the nation harped on about
progress. ‘The English of the present day are not the
English of twenty years ago,’ wrote Edward Bulwer-Lytton
in 1833. ‘I miss the cheerful cries of London,’ said a dejected
journalist two years earlier, ‘the music, the ballad singers –
the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.’ The country
had been through a detox, and those Regency heroes who
didn’t fit into the brave new world, such as Byron himself,
were in exile. Don Juan, the greatest poem of the age, was a
source of embarrassment for its publisher because the
author, who had left his virtuous wife, mocked hypocrisy.
Edmund Kean, the greatest actor that had ever lived, whose
performances were described by Coleridge as ‘like reading
Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’, was now referred to in
The Times as ‘that obscene little personage’ because he slept
with prostitutes. ‘Better that men and women of supreme
talent be suppressed or ignored,’ is Wilson’s wry aside, ‘than
they offend the righteous.’
While other countries had revolutions, ‘autodidactic
Britons would remake the world from the classroom and
the lecture hall and the pages of improving magazines’.
Cant achieved the standardisation of values, the benchmark
of mediocrity. The values of Hazlitt and Cobbett, based on
serious, challenging, genuine thought, had been replaced
by the merits of ‘ambition’ and ‘profit’. Difference had
given way to sameness; compared to the previous genera-
tion, wrote John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, we now ‘read
the same things, listen to the same things, use the same
things, go to the same places … That so few now dare to
be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.’
Decency and Disorder is a lambasting attack on philistin-
ism, and Ben Wilson is to be credited with the dubious
merit of bringing ‘cant’ back into the language.
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
D ONALD R AYFIELD
THE KULAK TRAGEDY
T HE U NKNOWN G ULAG : T HE L OST WORLD
OF S TALIN ’ S S PECIAL S ETTLEMENTS
★ State Administration of Corrective-Labour Camps,
By Lynne Viola
(Oxford University Press 352pp £17.99)
THIS IS THE story of a holocaust, one that involves the
brutal liquidation not of a race but of a class: the kulaks,
the relatively prosperous Russian peasantry of the end of
the 1920s. If we compare it with the Holocaust, the
numbers of deaths and the amount of human suffering
are of the same horrendous order. In many ways, Stalin
(and many other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky) loathed
the peasantry with the same irrational intensity with
which the Nazis hated the Jews. The persecution of the
kulaks, like that of the Jews, had a logic: bringing out the
worst in human nature, it welded the rest of the popula-
tion to the state in a vindictive demonisation that con-
centrated the blame for all the nation’s privations onto
one easily identifiable group. Stalin’s logic was perhaps
more persuasive than Hitler’s. While the extermination
of the Jews wasted and diverted badly needed labour and
resources from the German war effort, the oppression of
the kulaks was intended to provide a pool of slave labour
that would modernise and urbanise the Soviet Union.
Like so much in Russia’s history, the effects of a brutal
policy were both tempered and worsened by its shambolic
execution. If the Nazis were clear on what a Jew was and
how they should be dealt with, the Soviet secret police
and their officials had little idea what a kulak was and
what use they could make of him. In theory, a kulak was
a peasant who farmed successfully enough that he hired
labour to help his family bring in the harvest; a farmer
who earned enough to pay taxes. In practice, any peasant
whose attitude the authorities disliked, or who could be
made to fit the target set for ‘dekulakisation’ in any par-
ticular district, was liable to deportation, expropriation or
execution. The deportees to the wilds of Siberia rarely
had barracks or employment ready for their reception:
about a sixth of them, especially children and the elderly,
died of starvation, cold or epidemics within months. The
death toll rose from hundreds of thousands to millions in
1932–33, when Stalin decided to remove from the coun-
tryside not just the best farmers but also their grain. The
extraction of the Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe left
the economies of the countries that had been ‘ethnically
cleansed’ apparently unaffected. In Russia, however, the
effects are only too visible: agriculture was wrecked,
probably for ever. Sainsbury’s in 1913 stocked Siberian
butter: it is unlikely ever to do so again.
14
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
Nobody is better qualified than Lynne Viola, who has
spent two decades doing research, to write this history.
To call the subject ‘unknown’ is, however, perhaps going
too far: nearly every recent history of the USSR or
biography of Stalin has devoted a chapter to these ghast-
ly events. Nor was it really a gulag: the organisation was
so improvised that it does not compare with that of the
which swallowed up so many millions of lives over the
twenty years that followed. The best title would be ‘The
Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside’, the title given to
the Russian four-volume 2,000-page collection of docu-
ments published by Rosspen in Moscow between 1999
and 2002, in whose publication Lynne Viola herself
played a leading role: and this book is in essence a con-
densation of that magnificent monument. Today in
Russia the TV screens are showing a forty-part series
presenting Stalin as a brave, healthy and infallible leader,
and under Putin’s regime no more monuments to his
crimes are likely to be published.
The history of the USSR is in part that of a war of the
cities against the countryside. Strangely enough, the
losers in this war are not as inarticulate as one might
think. The kulak was often fully literate and, by some
omission of OGPU, Soviet rural post offices as late as
1934 still allowed kulaks to write to relatives overseas –
in Argentina, Canada, China – and let them know what
had happened. The survivors were rehabilitated before
other victims of the terror; uniquely among victims of
Soviet oppression, they were sometimes allowed to
speak of their fate to historians.
The Nazi Holocaust occupies a special position in our
history because the survivors are among us and because
we share guilt in it: Jewish refugees were refused admit-
tance to safe countries, Auschwitz was not bombed.
Stalin’s holocausts seem at first sight to have been
processes with which no outside force could remonstrate
– the West bought grain taken from starving peasants in
exchange for industrial machinery, but never thought of
questioning the morality of such transactions.
Lynne Viola is astute in her selection of voices, not just
from among the victims but among the perpetrators, some
of whom were horrified, others thrilled, by what they
were doing. I would query only one omission. She rightly
singles out Genrikh Iagoda, the head of OGPU, as Stalin’s
proactive (if secretly reluctant) right-hand man. But she
does not mention Viacheslav Menzhinsky, the real satanic
head of OGPU: Menzhinsky, by 1930 a very sick man,
did not take much part in the day-to-day planning of
repression, but it was his opinions which Stalin sought out
and trusted. Even as a law student and decadent poet in
the 1890s and 1900s, Menzhinsky had written of the peas-
antry as a brake on modernity that had to be removed: the
liquidation of the kulaks was his lifelong dream.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 HISTORY
C HARLES A LLEN
What Did the Mughals
Ever Do for Us?
A T EARDROP ON THE C HEEK OF T IME : T HE
S TORY OF THE TAJ M AHAL
★
By Diana and Michael Preston
(Doubleday 354pp £16.99)
T HE M UGHAL WORLD : I NDIA ’ S
TAINTED PARADISE
★
By Abraham Eraly
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 420pp £25)
INEVITABLY WE JUDGE the past by the present, and the
more recent the past the more harshly we judge.
Britain’s Indian empire is a case in point. An institution
that was wound up over half a century ago continues to
be an object of vituperation in many quarters, not
because it was high on the scale of misgovernment or
displaced better local government but because it is still
remembered at first- and second-generation level as an
essentially racist institution that sought to impose its
own culture on others. It helps, of course, when an
empire keeps records, and in the case of the British
empire these records are extensive, accessible and often
self-critical. They allow historians to draw conclusions
that approach objectivity and, in the case of British
India, to conclude that its greatest crime was not being
beastly to the natives but economic despoliation:
Britain’s systematic dismantling of the local economy to
benefit its own.
When it comes to earlier empires, making judgements
becomes infinitely more complicated. Mughal rule in
India – beginning with Babur’s triumph at the killing
fields of Panipat in 1526 and ending with the deposition
of the drug-befuddled Bahadur Shah II by the British in
1857 – lasted twice as long as British company and
crown rule, and its impact was correspondingly greater.
Four of those rulers – Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jahan and
Aurabgzeb – bestrode Hindustan like colossi for one
hundred and fifty-one years between them. All
employed court historians to laud their achievements
and several dictated their own autobiographies, and yet
time and distance, to say nothing of present-day politics,
continue to cloud the issue.
Ever since the Elizabethan merchant-traveller Ralph
Fitch returned from the dead with tales of the court of
the Great Mogor at Agra, the Mughals have had an
15
Shah Jahan: callous brute
image problem, which can be summed up in the phrase
‘oriental despotism’. It is one that historian William
Dalrymple has recently sought to address in the belief
that Mughal rule in India is one of the ‘most … misrep-
resented periods of Indian history’. In White Mughals
Dalrymple demonstrated convincingly that the Mughal
impact on India was multi-layered and as much benign
as tyrannical, but then rather spoiled his case by quixoti-
cally defending the indefensibly foolish old emperor
Shah Bahadur in The Last Mughal. A good time then for
the publication of Diana and Michael Preston’s A
Teardrop on the Cheek of Time, an account of the building
of the Taj Mahal mausoleum and the two personalities
entombed within, and of Abraham Eraly’s The Mughal
World, a continuation of the dissection of Mughal India
he began with The Mughal Throne.
One of the curiosities of the British in India is the
way in which they set out to demonise their imperial
predecessors while at the same time regarding the Taj
Mahal with reverential awe. ‘It is as if the building had a
soul,’ wrote Lady Dufferin in her journal in 1885, ‘as if
it had been created and not made ... something unreal
and almost sacred.’ Her remarks echo those of other vis-
iting VIPs. Perhaps it had something to do with trophy-
hunting, for under the British the Taj quickly gained an
iconic status as the supreme achievement of the
Mughals. The Prestons tell the story engagingly and
well, providing a lucid narrative sweep that extends from
the arrival of the first Mughal invaders to the manner in
which Lord Curzon’s obsessive determination to pre-
serve India’s past ensured the restoration of the Taj and
much else besides. They bring the story up to date with
recent research showing that Shah Jahan clearly intended
to build a mirror image of his wife’s mausoleum, but in
black marble, on the other side of the river. They also
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 HISTORY
show the Taj was as much about self-glorification – one
of the besetting sins of the Mughal rulers – as it was a
memorial to a lost loved one.
Among the several canards the Prestons lay to rest is
the old one about a British Lieutenant-Governor, Lord
Bentinck, seeking to auction off the Taj piece by
marbled piece. This was a fabrication put about by his
enemies in London, based on his attempts to sell off an
old marble bath shipped to Calcutta some years earlier.
The story is still widely believed in India today and it is
disappointing to see it reported as fact by Eraly. The
Mughal World carries the subtitle, India’s Tainted Paradise,
which is a puzzle, since the book is in no way an exposé
of the darker side of Mughal India. Indeed, the pre-pub-
lication press release carries the quite different subtitle of
‘Life in India’s Last Golden Age’, which is a more accu-
rate description of the book and presumably what Eraly
intended before Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s editors inter-
vened. Whatever the case, this is a sound, stolid survey
by a sound, stolid historian who has the edge on many
of his contemporaries writing about Indian history in
that he is neither foreigner nor Hindu or Muslim.
C HRISTINE K ELLY
WOMEN AT THE FRONT
N O P LACE FOR L ADIES : T HE U NTOLD
S TORY OF WOMEN IN THE C RIMEAN WAR
★ more professional army of the early nineteenth century
By Helen Rappaport
(Aurum Press 272pp £18.99)
IN THE AUTUMN of 1854 Florence Nightingale, soon to
be enshrined as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’, arrived with a
party of nurses at the squalid hospital barracks in Scutari.
She was responding to the graphic accounts in The Times
of the sick and wounded British soldiers lying unattend-
ed there. The shortage of doctors and nurses meant that
even the most basic care and hygiene had been neglected
while 8,000 men, many still in their filthy uniforms,
some bloodstained from battle, suffered and died.
There were sights of equal, but unreported, horror in
the hospital basements. Some 300 women, lice-ridden
and starving, were living in the cellars in the most
wretched conditions. Many had taken to prostitution and
drink to survive. These were the forgotten victims of the
war, the soldiers’ wives who had been granted, by ballot,
the right to travel with their husbands on the strength of
the regiment but had been abandoned in Turkey as the
army embarked for the Crimea. Nothing reveals the
breakdown in army administration and foresight so clearly
as the plight of these unfortunate women.
16
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
History in India today is bedevilled by political and reli-
gious factionalism, so Eraly’s rather old-fashioned mar-
tialling of fact is a welcome contribution to the ongoing
debate over the pluses and minuses of Mughal rule. He
may not be a whizz when it comes to narrative and
pace, but Eraly’s text is comprehensive and stuffed with
plums and surprises – such as Akbar’s habit of hurling
from his battlements servants who nodded off or
dropped dishes.
Eraly’s final judgement is mixed, as it should be. In
unifying much of India the Mughals set new standards of
administration – and of revenue collection. Besides
monumental architecture, the arts and crafts and regional
centres thrived under imperial patronage. The downside
was that Mughal glory was built on high level corrup-
tion and economic exploitation in its harshest forms.
Under the builder of the Taj Mahal, writes Eraly, ‘over a
quarter of the gross national product of the empire was
appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of
the 120-odd million people of India lived on a dead
level of poverty’.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
Until the end of the Napoleonic Wars women had
been an integral part of army life. During active service
they had followed in the baggage train, cooking, washing
and nursing, and were reasonably paid for their labours.
Most were attached – by marriage lines or more infor-
mally – to men in the regiment they followed, and their
pay was an essential contribution to family life. But the
made a hard life worse for these women. No attempt was
made to formalise their contribution. Marriage for the
rank and file soldier was discouraged; permission to marry
had to be granted by the commanding officer. The few
wives allowed had to share a living space in the newly
built barracks with their husband’s fellows, huddling at
night behind a rough curtain at one end of the dormitory
for privacy. Fresh-faced young girls were brutalised by the
vulgarity and coarseness around them. Such hardship aged
them prematurely. There was a huge gulf between these
women of the regiment and the officers’ ladies.
With the outbreak of war against Russia in March
1854, British and French troops were deployed to sup-
port the Turks besieged in forts along the Danube.
Seven soldiers’ wives accompanied each British regiment
overseas, battened down below the waterline in the
troop ships and then straggling behind the magnificent
marching regiments as they landed at the Turkish ports.
It was ‘tramp, tramp, tramp for woman as well as man’,
recalled Elizabeth Evans, one of the few army wives to
have her memories recorded for her in later life. Few
memoirs exist since most wives were illiterate, but those
that do reveal a life of extraordinary hardship. No record
 HISTORY
was kept of their numbers, but it is probable that only a
quarter of the estimated 750 to 1,200 camp followers
survived to return to England. They died of cold, of
hunger, from typhoid and cholera and in childbirth.
From the start they were neglected. No tents were pro-
vided for them till late May and, worse still, no warm
clothing until December. ‘What are they here for?’ asked
the correspondents of The Times and the Daily News, a
question echoed by the French – were they nurses, like
their Sisters of Charity in their distinctive grey dresses and
white peasant caps, or cooks and sutlers like their chic can-
tinières with their regimental uniforms? Both these groups,
treated with respect and consideration by the troops and
the military authorities, did much to ensure the smooth
running and high morale of the French army throughout
the subsequent campaign. But the British army wives, in
their faded dresses and bat-
tered bonnets, had no such
official role and many senior
officers wanted them sent
home, feeling they were
nothing but an encumbrance.
Some of the more enterpris-
ing earned their keep by
working as washerwomen for
the troops or as maids to the
few officers’ wives present but
many, unpaid and living on
half-rations, were equally
keen to return to England.
No transport was available for
them, however, and they were
shipped off to Scutari to fend
for themselves.
Once the Russians with- Abandoned wives at Scutari Hospital
drew from the Danube and
the army moved on to the Crimea the number of aban-
doned women increased dramatically. There was so little
room on the transports that most of them were left weep-
ing on the quaysides. Some few persuaded the more soft-
hearted officers to let them slip on board, Elizabeth Evans
amongst them. She claims never to have seen another
woman during her entire two years in the Crimea.
The fate of most of those left behind is unknown,
although some 250 found their way to Scutari and joined
the other wives rotting in the cellars there. In the hospital
above them men lay dying in their own excrement, yet no
attempt was made to employ these women until the arrival
of Florence Nightingale. While she and her nurses started
work in the hospital, her friend Lady Alicia Blackwood set
up a laundry, employing all those still capable of work, and
a school for their children. Within months both the hospi-
tal and the women were transformed.
Meanwhile, just across the Bosphorus, many of the
accompanying officers’ wives (who were also refused
17
permission to embark for the Crimea) had installed
themselves, at great expense, in the comfortable Hôtel
d’Angleterre at Therapia. Most of them sat out the cam-
paign there, making no attempt to alleviate the harsh
conditions suffered by the soldiers’ wives. They were
joined by the lady tourists who came out from England
in the summer of 1855 on £5 round-trip tickets – visit-
ing the Parthenon and Constantinople en route before
the climax of their adventure, watching the bombard-
ment of Sevastopol while the regimental bands played to
entertain them.
Of the three officers’ wives who cajoled their way on
board ship and arrived in the Crimea, only one, the feisty,
formidable Fanny Duberly, remained throughout the cam-
paign. With the help of a sergeant’s wife she had disguised
herself in an old shawl and a feather boa, and slipped
under the officer’s scrutiny –
he was looking for a lady.
‘Laughing heartily,’ she
records in her journal, ‘the
worst was having to get up
the ship’s side by myself; not
being “Quality” I received
no assistance.’ Fanny’s jour-
nal, which caused a sensation
when it was published, pro-
vides a more infor med
account of the campaign
than the other women’s
memoirs. But together they
portray the privations suf-
fered at the front by women
of every class.
In most histories of the
Cr imean campaign little
mention is made of the part
that women (and ladies) played, both on the home front
and at the seat of war. They have been as invisible as they
were to contemporary military authorities. Helen
Rappaport, in her wide-ranging and informative book,
gives them the recognition they deserve. She brings
together material from many scattered sources to provide
a comprehensive and fascinating picture of the varied
roles they undertook. And she shows how the presence of
the few women at the front, working both in the regi-
mental hospitals and the cookhouses, brought home to
the authorities not just the effective role they could play
but the stabilising effect they had on an army far from
home. She cuts through the myth and soft-focus hagiog-
raphy that has built up around the two most famous
Crimean heroines, Florence Nightingale and Mary
Seacole, and restores them to what they must surely have
been – strong, determined women who could find a
place for themselves anywhere they wanted.
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 GRUB
C HRISTOPHER H ART
OFFAL & ORDURE
H UBBUB : F ILTH , N OISE AND S TENCH IN
E NGLAND, 1600–1770
★ the very graves of their ancestors. There were the disgust-
By Emily Cockayne
(Yale University Press 335pp £25)
THIS BOOK INHABITS a grubby and squalid world, truf-
fling out details that are vivid, colourful and sometimes
downright nauseous. It’s a veritable feast of filth and
foulness, and I loved every minute of it.
The chapter titles tell you immediately what to
expect: ‘Itchy’, ‘Mouldy’, ‘Noisy’, ‘Grotty’, ‘Dirty’.
They sound like a South West Trains service. It’s not the
benighted line to Yeovil Junction you’re on, however,
but a journey back into the past: specifically, the past of
an England where people still drank ale instead of tea for
breakfast, defecated in the streets as if it were the right
of every freeborn Englishman to do so, and hadn’t yet
dreamt of Methodism, Temperance, or the Lord’s Day
Observance Society. In other words, the emphatically
pre-Victorian England of ‘Beef and Liberty’ in all its
grimy, rumbustious, unapologetic vigour.
Emily Cockayne does not restrict herself to London,
also taking us to Stuart and Hanoverian Oxford and
Bath, as well as an overgrown village of some 2,000
inhabitants near the River Irwell, comprising no more
than a dozen streets surrounded by meadows and
orchards, called Manchester. Her study also delves into
an impressive array of diaries, letters and obscure pam-
phlets. She turns up one Edmund Harrold, a Mancunian
wig-maker who recorded his own sex life assiduously in
his private journal, boasting one day, for instance, that he
‘did wife 2 tymes couch & bed in an hour an[d] ? time’.
Note how the spelling of ‘time’ changes in a single sen-
tence. You can almost hear Harrold declaring in blunt
Lancastrian tones, ‘I’ll spell it any bloody way I please.’
And how astute of Cockayne to point out, regarding
another kind of personal liberty, that ‘Pepys was not the
sort of man to make too much of a fuss about being acci-
dentally spat on by a lady in the theatre – providing the
lady was pretty’. That tells you a lot about Pepys, but also
about Restoration London, where even the prettiest
ladies still openly expectorated when they felt the urge,
and no one had the right to tell them not to.
The personal liberty of every freeborn Englishman
and woman to spit, dump and defecate meant consider-
able misery for everyone. In the streets of London you
would stumble over ‘the disagreeable Objects of bleed-
ing Heads, Entrails of Beasts, Offals, raw Hides, and the
Kennels flowing with Blood and Nastiness’. I never
18
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
knew that ‘Mount Pleasant’, near Gray’s Inn, was actually
a bitterly ironic name for a huge man-made heap of the
most nauseous offal and ordure. It is now, of course,
home to the Guardian newspaper.
Nowhere was sacred. Westminster churchyard was
always full of offal too, local butchers blithely dumping the
‘soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses and hogstyes’ on
ing animal-fat by-products of the tanners and soap-boilers
also contributing to the ‘gungy pottage’ of the city streets.
To deal with it, there were whole teams of ‘Gounge fer-
mours’ (‘gunge farmers’) labouring to keep the streets of
the capital passable, taking away cartloads of ‘the most
Turpitudinous, Merdurinous, excrementall offals’.
Along with the more obvious sights and smells that
your historical imagination might well encompass, there
was a whole range of noises that are less likely to occur
to you. What about the ceaselessly irritating ‘ditties of
asparagus sellers’, or the even coarser cabbage sellers?
Jonathan Swift, in characteristically benevolent mood
towards his fellow man, wished on one of them that ‘his
largest cabbage was sticking in his throat’. And then
there were the itinerant knife-grinders, their grindstones
emitting ‘a skreeching noise’ which makes ‘a shivering
or horror in the body’. And the tinkers with their con-
stant ‘Twancking of a brass Kettle or Frying pan’.
Nor was air pollution an Industrial Revolution novelty.
English cities were already burning a lot of coal by this
time, even though wood was still preferred by gentlefolk.
Add to that the smoky emanations from the furnaces and
forges of the maltsters, brewers and hammersmiths, plus
the vile stench of the woad balls used by dyers, and you
have a heady and toxic mix in the heart of the city. Such
activities nowadays are all tidied away onto some distant
industrial estate, or better still, China.
All in all, they were colourful but not kindly times, and
to get some sense of what they must have been like to live
in, you could indeed go to some hell-on-earth megalopo-
lis in India or China today and see how it feels. Our
Health and Safety goons may be completely deranged
with power, but back then, every potter had ‘sallow, pale
skin due to lead poisoning’, while painters had withered
limbs and blackened teeth, if any. You may feel a certain
nostalgia for the sheer street liveliness and ebullience of
our past, so far removed from our own sterile and neurot-
ically manicured townscapes, infested with surveillance
cameras and ‘community support officers’: the open
prison that is contemporary England. On the other hand,
you can get some sense of what seventeenth-century
street life must have been like by trying to make your way
down Chandni Chowk in Delhi and breathe at the same
time. Almost impossible. England’s past, as so richly
revealed by Emily Cockayne, is a bit like that: interesting
to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GRUB
E LISABETH L UARD
What We Eat Is
What We Are
P LANET C HICKEN : T HE S HAMEFUL S TORY
OF THE B IRD ON YOUR P LATE
★ the commitment and energy to prepare it.’ You can’t put
By Hattie Ellis
(Sceptre 320pp £14.99)
T HE E NGLISH AT TABLE
★ of the aisle, by way of encouragement to shoppers, a
By Digby Anderson
(The Social Affairs Unit 151pp £16.99)
AT FIRST GLANCE one might think that Hattie Ellis,
author of this frightening tale of Man’s inhumanity to
bird, and Dr Digby Anderson, a fellow with a talent for
setting the fox among the chickens, are unlikely barnyard
companions. Yet both put broadly the same argument.
At issue is whether we, consumers of horrible food
produced in horrible ways, are prepared to change our
habits and pay decent money for food which tastes the
way it should. The case for chicken at the buy-one-get-
one-free level – ‘bogofs’ in supermarket-talk – is that
cheap meat is protein for the masses and anyone who
argues is a toff with more money than sense.
Anderson is a man for the rapier-thrust: ‘healthists’ are
dismissed for their disapproval of everything which actu-
ally tastes good (butter and so forth); ‘environmentalists’
for their desire to eliminate salt cod on the spurious
grounds that the cod fisheries are all fished-out, thereby
depriving gourmets of their brandade de morue; and, lest
we be in any doubt of the author’s carnivore credentials,
‘animal sentimentalists’ for their opposition to the
slaughter of veal calves, depriving diners of their right to
the ossi buchi.
Ellis, meanwhile, goes straight for the jugular: this is
what happens when poultry is reared on a diet of antibi-
otics and mulched-up don’t ask, and spends its short life
squatting on a bed of – well – chicken shit. The first
hundred-odd pages of Planet Chicken don’t make pleas-
ant reading. Necessary – certainly. Nice – not at all. But
don’t let this put you off. The story of the chicken’s
journey from junglefowl to battery hen is well and stir-
ringly told: as a metaphor for what ails the whole of our
food supply, it can scarcely be bettered.
For Anderson, it all started with the search for a black
olive in Margate in 1963, which led, in time, to his
long-running and splendidly objectionable Spectator col-
umn, ‘Imperative Cooking’ – not a word of which, as I
19
remember, was ever anything but true. The leopard
hasn’t changed his spots. ‘The state of English food has
nothing to do with the state of a few expensive restau-
rants ... Why are whole classes of food – offal and
extremities, 90 per cent of the fish in the sea – and a
large proportion of the techniques and recipes for
preparing them rejected?’ This rejection, he points out,
applies to those who buy and cook as well as those who
eat. ‘The main explanation of why the British reject
good food is that they have neither the competence nor
it more clearly than that.
Ellis’s road-to-Damascus moment came when the
scent of roast chicken reached her nostrils while she
walked along the rows of supermarket birds. At the end
photograph of an unnaturally brown-breasted bird ‘dis-
played in pornographic soft focus’ amid shards of
‘Kermit-green’ tarragon surrounded by ‘a moat of
uncooked lemon halves’. Most unnatural. And how
come we’re all so easily fooled? Because none of us
cook, is why. Which may or may not be a hangover
from the days when, for most of the year, there wasn’t
much worth cooking.
Blame it on the climate. This is precisely Anderson’s
point – one of them, anyway. In the old days, climate
dictated what we ate and how we cooked it: suet and
The British Academy
Spring Lectures
2007
Br itish Academy lectures are free and open to the general public
and ever yone is welcome. The lectures take place at 10 Carlton
House Ter race, London SW1 and beg in at 5.30pm and will be
followed by a reception at 6.30pm.
5.30pm, Monday 23 Apr il 2007
Shakespeare Lecture
Hamlet’s Two Fathers
Professor David Bevington, FBA University of Chicago
5.30pm, Thursday 26 Apr il 2007
Raleigh Lecture on Histor y
Byzantium and the Limits of Orthodoxy
Dame Aver il Cameron, DBE, FBA Keble College, Oxford
Further infor mation and abstracts are available at
www.br itac.ac.uk/events/2007
Meetings Department, The Br itish Academy
Telephone: 020 7969 5246 Fax: 020 7969 5228 Email: lec-
tures@br itac.ac.uk
Email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 GRUB

the boiling pot being intrinsic parts of
the national gastronomic habit. These
days, with central heating removing the
need for fattening foods and everything
under the sun available all year, we don’t
know what to do with it and can’t even
tell the good stuff from the bad. Nor are
we capable, says Anderson, of discussing
food intelligently in our magazines and
cookbooks. This has led to the national
inability to recognise proper cooking in
the way that the French do, and to our
vulnerability to having the wool pulled
over our eyes, metaphorically speaking,
when shopping, eating in restaurants, or
cooking at home. And if we can’t rely
on our own taste buds we have no
choice but to follow the opinions of
others who are, in the main, as ignorant
as we.
This leads us back to Ellis’s point: that A bird in the hand
we need to understand how our food is
produced if we’re going to do anything to change it. And
once we have the information (and it’s all pretty scary),
we need to decide if we’re prepared to pay not double but
four times as much for poultry which has
been respectfully reared. The result of our
willingness to foot the bill would be the
return of the roasting chicken to its previ-
ous status as an occasional treat rather
than the cheapest meat on the shelf, while
the elderly laying hen which has led its
life in conditions that allow it to behave
like a bird and not simply an orifice for
eggs can reclaim its position as the boiling
hen. As the basis for our national reper-
toire of excellent soups and pies, the old
boiler is an excellent resource.
In Digby Anderson’s slender volume
(rude but short), cartoons by Michael
Heath sugar the pill. In Planet Chicken
(long but passionate) the tension is
relieved in the second act when Hattie
Ellis switches from the bad news to the
good. We are what we eat, and if what
we eat is rubbish – then so are we. Read
these books in tandem. You may be
depressed or stimulated or both, but you won’t regret
the experience.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27

P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D ACROSS
1 On The Beach author in film, we hear (5)
1 2 3 4 5 6 Attila, say, needing lock for Diana? (8)
Sponsored by 7 English poet making church figurehead? (4)
6
Bloomsbury 9 Herb found in French street (3)
10 Austrian composer making plea to cross river (4)
7 8 9 10 11
12 Firearm for a follower of Falstaff (6)
13 Spirited racehorse the French make fit for farming
12 13 14
(6)
15 Capture partner almost making comeback (6)
17 Excellent prize returned to university in novel (6)
15 16 17
18 Kitty rejected ring (4)
20 No hospital drama in Japanese (3)
18 19 20 21
21 Aide’s awful notion (4)
22 Crazy person’s torment put succinctly in here (8)
23 Picture sometimes linked to finish (5)
22

23 DOWN
1 Friends given lift on horseback need flour for hearty
feast? (4-2,4)
Bloomsbury have generously decided to sponsor the prizes for this month’s cross- 2 Weighty book given to yours truly (4)
word. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles received by noon on 3 Hiding place for light unused herbal mixture? (5,1,6)
15 April 2007. Each will receive a copy of The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple, 4 Peninsula’s origin of 1001 tales (6)
which recently won the Duff Cooper Prize. 5 Sailor captures southern ruler (4)
The winners of our March competition are Barbara Oakham of Cheltenham, Anthony Weston of 6 Playwright to hire Portland mixture (6,6)
Langford, Mary Flude of Leicestershire, John Jolliffe of Alnwick, and Denis Price in France.
8 Put forward mail I gathered (5)
Each will receive a copy of the The Writer’s Handbook, published by Macmillan.
11 Reclusive actress to grab gear when harassed (5,5)
Solution to the March puzzle:
14 One walking upright makes offer to take games (5)
ACROSS: 1 Bunyan, 4 Spill, 9 Romance, 10 Rumba, 11 Lucretius, 12 Rare, 13 Lucid, 16 Amos, 19
Wood nymph, 21 Miami, 22 Erudite, 23 Stage, 24 Vermin. 16 Father interrupts nap for meal (6)
DOWN: 1 Barber, 2 Number, 3 Annal, 5 Portend, 6 Limpid, 7 Beachcomber, 8 Waist, 13 Landing, 14 19 Responsibility of bishop to leave gratuity (4)
Swamp, 15 Bogart, 17 Medium, 18 Severn, 20 House. 21 Small measure in church (4)

LITERARY REVIEW April 2007

 CONFLICT

A DRIAN W EALE protégé Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National

Congress, or Britain’s man, Iyad Allawi, leader of the

An Occupation MI6-sponsored Iraqi National Accord. In reality, and by

in Pieces
T HE O CCUPATION OF I RAQ : W INNING THE
WAR , L OSING THE P EACE
★ the exclusion of the Sunni Arabs (the Kurds of Iraq are
By Ali A Allawi
(Yale University Press 518pp £18.99)
ALI ALLAWI’S CREDENTIALS for writing The Occupation of
Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace are unimpeach-
able. Born an Iraqi Shi’a, Allawi spent most of his life in
exile from his native country, pursuing careers in bank-
ing and academia (paralleled by his role as a leader of the
Iraqi exile community), before his return to Iraq in
2003, some months after the United States – with a little
help from their British ally – had swept through Iraq and
deposed Saddam Hussein’s brutal totalitarian regime.
After his return, he joined the Iraqi Governing
Council, the body created by the US as the nucleus for a
future sovereign government of Iraq, where he held the
Trade and Defence portfolios. From 2005 to 2006 he
was Finance Minister in the Iraqi ‘Transitional National
Government’. In effect, if he wasn’t actually at the cen-
tre of events, he was always close enough to them to
understand their dynamics.
This makes for some fairly hefty insights. The
strength of Allawi’s book is his profound knowledge
and understanding of the currents which have carried
us to the situation which now prevails in Iraq. The
coterie of civilian conservative radicals in Donald
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s office of the
Vice-President hoped to substitute a liberal, secular
regime for Saddam’s vicious totalitarian dictatorship.
They got it wrong, not least because, with what history
may come to judge as culpable negligence, they didn’t
have a properly resourced
a large majority, the Iraqi Shi’a have supported the Shi’a
Islamist parties: Da’wa; the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and the slightly puzzling
Moqtada Al Sadr.
So what? As Allawi explains, with political power
concentrated in the hands of the Shi’a Islamists, after
hundreds of years of Sunni rule, the inevitable result is
also largely Sunni, but as an ethnic minority were also
excluded from power by successive governments); and
the result of that has been the insurgency. The Sunnis of
Iraq can see little to be gained from the current Shi’a
Islamist dispensation, although whether the terrorism of
the insurgents will win them any worthwhile gains is
debatable: at least it means they can’t be ignored.
Why were these mistakes made? Interestingly, Allawi
suggests that one reason was that the officials driving US
policy were as much focused on improving Israel’s secu-
rity as they were on stabilising Iraq; but a constant and
justifiable theme of this book is the incompetence of the
US-led occupation government and the shoals of carpet-
baggers and crooks that swam around it. Neither the
retired US General Jay Garner – originally nominated to
head up the occupation administration – nor George W
Bush’s proconsul, L Paul Bremer, come out of this
account well. Gar ner’s relatively tiny ‘Office for
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance’ was never
likely to be up to the job; and Bremer’s bloated
‘Coalition Provisional Authority’ was mired in incompe-
tence at all levels (many of the staff were young,
Republican interns recruited from think-tanks and
politicians’ back offices in Washington DC) and became
a source of rich pickings for the corrupt minority who
worked for and with it. Indeed, amongst Bremer’s first
edicts as administrator of the CPA were two measures,
dictated from Washington, to disband the Iraqi Army and
to ‘de-Ba’ath-ify’ the Iraqi public services, both of which
contributed greatly to the chaos which now prevails.
If the strength of Allawi’s

NEW AUTHORS
plan for the post-conflict book is his detailed insight
transformation. Almost as into the dynamics of Iraqi
importantly, American war- PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED politics at the highest level,
planners failed to under- Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena its weakness is in the scant
stand the consequences of Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first coverage he gives to what
offering ‘democratic’ power time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing was happening ‘on the
to the previously disenfran- houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. ground’. He rightly alludes
chised Iraqi Shi’a. Too much We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary to the vacuum created by
hope was invested in the and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic, the collapse of the central
fantasy that the oppressed spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others. Ministr ies following the
Shi’a of Iraq would support Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS CPA’s disastrous de-Ba’athi-
the Westernised exiled Iraqi QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK. fication edicts, but there is
e-mail: info@athenapress.com www.athenapress.com
opposition, like the US not much sense of what this

21
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 CONFLICT
meant. The reality was a miasma of failure: children
were not taught in schools because their teachers had
been dismissed; animals were not inoculated on farms
because nobody in the Agriculture Ministry was order-
ing or distributing vaccines; rubbish was not being col-
lected because no spare parts were available to repair the
garbage trucks. Lives which had been made miserable
enough by Saddam’s regime and years of economic
sanctions were made worse because even the limited
services provided by Saddam were no longer there; and
there can be little doubt that this did nearly as much to
fuel the raging insurgency as the Iraqi Sunnis’ fear of a
Shi’a hegemony. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 destroyed
the old Iraqi state but has failed to build anything
worthwhile in its place.
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
THE LONG WAR
WARRANT FOR T ERROR : T HE FATWAS OF
R ADICAL I SLAM AND THE D UTY TO J IHAD
★ ideas’ with terrorists who can be variously described
By Shmuel Bar
(Rowman & Littlefield 152pp $21.95)
WORDS ASSUME AN enormous significance in warfare.
The First and Second World Wars or the Cold War each
got right what was at stake, in a way that ‘war on terror’
doesn’t. At present, many policymakers are desperately
searching for an alternative since ‘terror’ is a tactic, and
many of the activities we routinely place in that category
– such as assassination – probably do not belong there.
As realists, some US military people prefer the term ‘the
long war’, which although depressingly accurate as a
description of the next fifty years, does not appeal to
politicians who need to lift our eyes to sunlit uplands.
It’s not easy, this word business: the ‘new wars’, ‘the
Second Battle of Britain’, ‘the struggle for liberty’, ‘the
wars of religions’; what on
earth does one call what our
generation is experiencing?
Answers on a postcard to
George W Bush.
Many military people will
explain that there is no mil-
itary solution to our present
problems when dealing
with a mindset that is doing www.lifelinespress.co.uk
the work of Allah. One Turning your memoirs into family heirlooms
might think that the “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents
prospect of killing most of
the Palestinians with the
22
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
What next? Allawi has called for a federal solution in
Iraq, with an entirely new structure to implement
reconstruction and security. This may be a practical pos-
sibility if the broad spectrum of Shi’a groups and the
moderate Sunnis can be brought on board, but I’m not
holding my breath. The current reality is that Iraq is on
the brink of civil war and disintegration, and moderate,
altruistic politicians like Ali Allawi hold little sway.
It will be years before a definitive history of the Iraq
imbroglio can be written, but Ali Allawi’s book is a
sober, sensible primer as to how we’ve achieved the cur-
rent disastrous state of affairs, and should be essential
reading for any world leaders thinking of effecting casual
regime change in ‘rogue’ states.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 27
bomb President Ahmadinejad would like to drop on
Israel might cause the former sleepless nights, had they
not cheered from their rooftops every time one of
Saddam’s Scud missiles – or Hizbollah’s Iranian-sup-
plied Fajr 3 and 5 rockets – plunged down on Israel
from southern Lebanon.
Most politicians say that we are engaged in a ‘war of
as ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’, ‘jihadist’ or, when seeking to con-
nect them to our own histor ical nightmares,
‘Islamobolsheviks’ or ‘Islamofascists’. Notwithstanding
the obvious common denominator linking all of these
terms, Westerners persist in the delusion that this will all
go away if we simply eradicate the ‘underlying’ socio-
economic causes, conveniently overlooking the fact that
the Chinese occupation of Tibet is far more onerous
than the Israeli occupation of Gaza or the West Bank,
yet the world is not quaking under the threat of interna-
tional Buddhist terrorism. Sleep soundly, you have noth-
ing to fear from Richard Gere.
Even if politically correct Westerners do not like to
admit it, our adversaries see this as a religious war, its
peculiar dynamics derived from the culture, mores and
legal thought of Islam. This is the extremely important
subject matter of Israeli
Middle Easter n expert
Shmuel Bar’s elegant and
well-informed book on the
role of Muslim religious
injunctions in licensing and
shaping Islamic terrorism.
Readers of the Literary
Review will be most familiar
with the 1989 fatwa
which the Iranian Ayatollah
Khomeini pronounced
against the writer Salman
Rushdie. Fatwas are legal
 CONFLICT

opinions issued by Islamic clerics and scholars as to

whether a given action is obligatory, permitted or forbid-
den in Islam. Bar confines his analysis to those emanating
from Sunni clerics, whether radicals from within the
international jihad or from more conservative institutions
in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Although not all violent
jihadists are motivated by religion, enough of them are to
make it rather important to ascertain who is providing
this spiritual justification for terrorism by claiming that
violence is a religious duty which will promote the
believer’s passage to paradise. Fatwas also govern the con-
duct of terrorist warfare in the sense that they are used to
justify the killing of non-combatant civilians by reconfig-
uring all taxpayers or voters as soldiers, as well as such
grisly modes of warfare as suicide bombing or beheading
captives and hostages. If one needs a reason why the radi-
cal clerics Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza and Sheikh Omar
Bakri Muhammed are regarded as extremely dangerous
men by our security services, then this book provides it,
and that is one of the reasons why it has become a stan-
dard text among global intelligence agencies.
Since anything resembling an Islamic Reformation or
Enlightenment belongs in the realm of wishful thinking,
especially if one thinks it will hail from Islamic minori-
ties in the West, Bar argues that we need to encourage
an opposing mainstream consensus to combat the
pronouncements of Islamic radicals. This is easier than it
sounds. Both mainstream and radicals are competing for
the same constituency, in political circumstances where
the mainstream clerics are easily caricatured as the lack-
eys of corrupt and despotic regimes. Radical Koranic
literalism can easily trump the ‘yes, but’ casuistry of
more subtle exegetes. Moreover, the House of Islam
does not like the ‘strife’ it ascribes to the western House
of War. Although so-called moderate Islamic regimes
have few difficulties in crushing Islamic radicals at home,
they also often turn a blind eye when that radicalism is
directed at us. It is not only London that labours under
the delusion of a ‘pact of security’.
Finally, Bar argues that mainstream Islam should be
encouraged to counter each radical fatwa legitimising
terrorism with another that declares the terrorists
heretics and anathematises them and their supporters as
heretics. In March 2005 Spanish Muslims issued just
such an anathema, describing supporters of Osama bin
Laden as ‘infidel heretics who permit the forbidden’.
This is the strongest denunciation of Islamic terrorism
issued anywhere to date. Western governments could
bolster such gestures by criminalising those who invoke
divine authority to kill not just their fellow citizens, but
the citizens of any country afflicted by terrorism, regard-
less of whatever view we take of its regime. This is an
important book, its limpid prose matching the authority
Bar brings to a subject about which we cannot afford to
be ignorant.
 FOREIGN PARTS
J ONATHAN M IRSKY
NO SILENCED VOICE
T HE R IVER OF L OST F OOTSTEPS :
H ISTORIES OF B URMA
★ rule in the late
By Thant Myint-U
(Faber & Faber 361pp £20)
P ERFECT H OSTAGE : A L IFE OF
AUNG S AN S UU K YI
★ War years of disorder,
By Justin Wintle
(Hutchinson 480pp £18.99)
I T IS A mark of the complexity and the tragedy of
Burma that Thant Myint-U devotes barely a dozen of
his 361 pages on the country to Aung San Suu Kyi,
almost the only Burman – Burmans are Burma’s ethnic
majority – of whom most people have ever heard. Justin
Wintle, on the other hand, has written 480 pages about
her – the person many Burmans refer to as the Lady. It
is a further mark of Burma’s political complexity that
neither author makes a case for the Nobel Peace Prize-
winner’s unyielding non-violence being anything more
than a sublime, but probably misguided, effort by a sin-
gle human being to reform her country.
Thant, a Cambridge-trained historian who ‘had large-
ly grown up outside Burma’, is the grandson of U
Thant, the UN’s Secretary General in the Sixties and the
only other Burman whose name is widely known.
Wintle, a professional writer, is the author of, among
other books, the enjoyable and informative Romancing
Vietnam. Both survey the same limited range of English-
language sources (many of them published decades ago),
together with some journalism, the best of it by Bertil
Lintner in the old Far Eastern Economic Review.
Wintle’s biography is comprehensively researched. He
has met everyone available who can recall Suu Kyi as a
little girl or at Oxford, where she was an indifferent
student. He relates her astounding bravery in the face of
Burmese soldiers itching to kill her and traces her
development from a reserved, private person who hated
confrontation to a charismatic orator to many thou-
sands. He examines and then demolishes allegations that
Suu Kyi’s egomania prevented her from flying to the
side of her dying husband.
However, Wintle sullies his book with a sprinkling of
vulgarisms. When he meets a very impressive woman he
says she ‘slew me most’. Then he suggests that President
Clinton’s Medal of Freedom for Suu Kyi had so little
effect on her captors that Clinton might as well have
‘zipped the presidential zip’. Is all taste fled from a major
24
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
publisher like
Hutchinson?
Thant’s histor y
starts hundreds of
years ago, but really
gets going with the
imposition of British
nineteenth century.
These pages are
invaluable: they set
the scene for Burma’s
post-Second World
Aung and her mother
civil war, ethnic
rivalry, foreign intrusion, longing for freedom, and
increasing domination by a vicious army. This army is in
great measure the creation of the Lady’s father, Aung
San. There is much irony here. Aung San was assassinat-
ed in 1947 (perhaps with the connivance of rogue
British officers), when his daughter was only two. She
has remained true to her idealised memory of him,
ignoring his violent early career which laid the founda-
tions of the modern ruthless Burmese army; its merciless
leader, Ne Win, was an old comrade of Aung San’s.
Thant is also plain-speaking about Aung San’s enthusias-
tic collaboration with the Japanese army during its
occupation of Burma. On the basis that ‘any enemy of the
Raj is my ally’ (a view he held in common with a number
of other Asian leaders), Aung San underwent Japanese
military training in Japan, wore a Japanese officer’s uni-
form, and raised and commanded troops often feared for
their brutality against the non-Burman peoples who had
sided with the British. He slid over to the British side just
in time to avoid death at the end of a noose, the fate of
many other traitors after the war (Wintle suggests that
Aung San’s collaboration was feigned).
Thant tackles a thorny dilemma. Burma, he shows
vividly, has been wracked by civil wars and upheavals
since the late Forties. Bloodstained and bloodthirsty, the
army is in total control and while deeply xenophobic is
eager to secure foreign weapons and investment (Burma
is a rich country) from countries as diverse as China and
Israel. Despite the uplifting example of Aung San Suu
Kyi, therefore, Thant emphasises that Western-imposed
isolation, presently implemented through sweeping eco-
nomic sanctions, will make ‘the Burmese army see
everything as a zero-sum game and any change as filled
with peril; isolation … has weakened institutions – the
ones on which any transition to democracy would
depend – to the point of collapse. Without isolation, the
status quo will be impossible to sustain.’
Wintle is equally gloomy, although he says, rightly,
that without self-sacrificing heroes like Aung San Suu
Kyi ‘we are all impoverished’. It may be true, as one of
 FOREIGN PARTS
her admirers says, that ‘Fifty years hence, there will be a
statue of her in every Burmese township’. Wintle por-
trays her as stubborn and governessy (‘a sort of oriental
Mary Poppins’), inspired and driven by the rose-tinted
image of the father she never knew, and charming and
elegant. Determined to be a good daughter to her
demanding mother, a champion of Gandhian non-vio-
lence, and a devoted wife and mother, but above all a
disciple of her father, she refused to leave Burma to care
for her sons after the death of her husband, the
renowned Oxford Tibetanist Michael Aris. She was
right to claim that SLORC, the junta, would never per-
mit her to return. I recall the patient agony of Michael
Aris as he showed me the virtual shrine to his wife in
their Oxford house. He assured me that he would always
support her decision to remain in Burma, despite the
toll it was taking on him and their sons. I was 95 per
cent convinced.
Sometimes she comes over as irrational. The Burmese
army has perpetrated massacres many times worse than
Tiananmen and many more times, some of them before
F IAMMETTA R OCCO
A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL
PANAMA F EVER : T HE B ATTLE
TO B UILD THE C ANAL
★ with changes in altitude. The heat, the humidity, the
By Matthew Parker
(Hutchinson 464pp £20)
ON 1 FEBRUARY 1881, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French
diplomat who had built the Suez Canal, read to a wait-
ing group of enthusiastic French reporters a telegram
containing only two words: ‘Travail commencé’.
The news that work had begun on de Lesseps’ next
project after Suez seemed at the time to herald the
beginning of the final chapter in a challenge that had
already lasted more than 400 years and fascinated a long
line of men from Christopher Columbus to Benjamin
Franklin: to cut a ship canal across the narrow waist of
South America, which would shorten the journey time
between New York and San Francisco by over a month
and offer a shorter passage to the East. Such was the
excitement generated by de Lesseps’ project, and not
only in France, that in no time a literary wag had turned
it into the longest palindrome in the English language: A
Man, A Plan, A Canal – Panama.
Excitement in France was one thing. But the reality on
the ground in Panama turned out to be quite another.
Few engineering projects in history can have been
launched with so much arrogance and so little preparation.
25
Suu Kyi’s eyes. Nonetheless, she insists, ‘I feel strong
attachment to the armed forces. Not only were they
built by my father; as a child I was cared for by soldiers.’
Well, yes. But that was then, and as Wintle himself
shows eloquently, those caring soldiers can kill widely
and irrationally because the army now is its own justifi-
cation. The Lady arouses love and devotion throughout
Burma and received the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her
single-minded pursuit of democratic reform despite
years of house arrest, threats, and the torture and execu-
tion of her closest followers.
In different words to Thant Myint-U’s, Justin Wintle
comes to a similarly bleak conclusion: Aung San Suu
Kyi, he writes, ‘has become the perfect hostage. Her
principled stand against a modern tyranny has been
adroitly turned against her by her unprincipled captors.
Kept in captivity, in part brought about by her own
intransigence, the divine songbird’s freedom has a price
that no one can, or any longer dares, pay. The latest
apostle of non-violence is imprisoned by her creed.’
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
Looking back, the audacity of it was breathtaking.
Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the
low-lying sands of Egypt, de Lesseps was determined,
without ever having set foot in Panama and after only the
vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through
the mountainous Central American isthmus would also
be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to help ships deal
insects, snakes and diseases were, said the director of the
engineering company contracted to do the work, ‘noth-
ing but an invention of the canal’s adversaries’.
The plan had the backing of the French government,
but it was financed mostly through public subscription,
the personal savings of thousands of ordinary French
people who regarded de Lesseps as a hero on a
Napoleonic scale.
In less than a decade, however, the scheme had col-
lapsed. De Lesseps’ insistence that the canal be built with-
out locks had led engineers to try and cut directly through
the rock. Yet in less than thirty miles between Colón and
Panama City there are six major geological faults, five sig-
nificant volcanic cores, and seventeen different kinds of
rock. By 1889, eight years after work began, only a third
of the canal had been excavated. So extensive were the
mudslides brought on by the heavy rains of the wet season
that in some years more mud and rock fell back into the
canal than had been taken out in the first place.
In the French cemetery lay the remains of more than
5,000 Frenchmen, many of them graduates of the coun-
try’s most prestigious engineering schools. Thousands
more Indian and Caribbean workers had succumbed to
the malaria and yellow fever that swept the isthmus during
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
the rainy season. More than 25,000 people died, 500 for
each mile of the canal. De Lesseps was ruined, his son
imprisoned for fraud. The French government that backed
the scheme had collapsed.
It would take another quarter of a century, the inter-
vention of America and nearly a decade of work by the
US Army Corps of Engineers before the Panama Canal
was officially opened, making the feat comparable in scale
and ambition to the pyramids of Egypt. Although much
shorter than the canal at Suez, it required three times the
excavation and ended up costing four times as much.
The tale of the French and American efforts to build
the Panama Canal has been told before, particularly by
David McCullough in his 1977 epic, The Path Between
the Seas. Matthew Parker retells the story with verve and
clarity, bringing to it a dimension that McCullough
ignored in favour of the wider geopolitical narrative.
Using a bottom-up approach to his research, as
opposed to McCullough’s top-down method of looking
at history, Parker has written the Panama story for a new
generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries
W ILLIAM R EEVE
AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
T HE P UNISHMENT OF V IRTUE
★ being a journalist
By Sarah Chayes
(Portobello Books 386pp £20)
AMERICAN JOURNALIST SARAH Chayes’s book is primarily
a tale of the raw life of Afghan power and politics in
Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. It begins
and ends with the murder of a police chief, Muhammad
Akrem Khakrezwal, at a mosque in Kandahar. For
Chayes, Khakrezwal was the one Afghan who could sort
out the country’s problems.
Chayes was a radio journalist with the American
National Public Radio (NPR). Soon after 9/11 she was
posted by NPR to the Pakistani town of Quetta, as close
as one could get to Kandahar, the southern Afghan city
which was then still the headquarters of the Taliban. Her
account of the final fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001
(put together using interviews with protagonists in the
months and years following the events) is riveting and
rings totally true – the best report of it that I have read.
During the fall of the Taliban, the American military
were helping one Afghan to power as governor in
Kandahar, but then supported another, former warlord
Gul Agha Shirzai, to fight against the first and take con-
trol. This baffled Chayes at the time, and she claims that
her stories were cut by her editors, who she says wanted
26
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And
it is their views on the conditions they lived and worked
in that are at the heart of what brings this book to life.
As Alfred Dottin, a West Indian worker, wrote:
Death was our constant companion. I shall never for-
get the trainloads of dead men being carted away
daily, as if they were just so much lumber. Malaria
with all its horrible meaning those days was just a
household word. I saw mosquitoes, I say this without
fear of exaggerating, by the thousands attack one
man. There were days that we could only work a few
hours because of the high fever racking our bodies –
it was a living hell.
Panama Fever should be required reading for anyone
interested in history and in the Panamanian govern-
ment’s plans for a $5.2 billion expansion scheme that
includes building a third pair of locks – one at each end
of the canal – to take ships that are more than twice as
big as those that can fit through it now. Timely and
thrillingly told, it is a history with lessons for the future.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
instead reports of
relieved Afghans
welcoming in the
American liberators
with open arms.
Chayes stopped
and returned to
Kandahar to run an
aid agency she set up
called Afghans for
Civil Society, with Khakrezwal: murdered
the help of one of
President Hamid Karzai’s brothers. But the meat of the
book is concerned with the power struggle between differ-
ent Afghans and Afghan groups in Kandahar and with how
the Americans have handled the problems there since 2001.
Chayes seizes on two key characters in order to explain
what has gone wrong. One is the policeman Khakrezwal,
who became her close friend until he was murdered, and
whom Chayes much respected, and wanted to see pro-
moted. The other is the former warlord Shirzai, whom
the author accuses of much corruption and wrongdoing.
She describes Shirzai, a firm opponent of Khakrezwal, as
running Kandahar by force of arms as his own private fief-
dom, becoming very unpopular with Kandaharis. But it
was Shirzai who she says was supported by the Americans.
And it is this that annoyed her so much. She spends much
of her book discussing how Shirzai should be fired from
his post. He was sacked, only to be reappointed.
Afghans, says Chayes,
want from their government what most Americans
 FOREIGN PARTS
Literary Review Bookshop
and Europeans want from theirs: roads they can drive
on, schools for their kids … a minimum of public
accountability, and security, law and order. And they
want to participate in some real way in the fashion-
ing of their nation’s destiny.
But Afghans were getting precious little of any of
that, thanks to warlords like Gul Agha Shirzai, whom
America was helping maintain in power. American
policy in Afghanistan was not imposing or even
encouraging democracy, as the US government
claimed it was. Instead, it was standing in the way of
democracy. It was institutionalizing violence.
It was against this background, says Chayes, that the
Taliban began to position itself in people’s minds as an
alternative, ‘not an attractive one by any means, but one
that was not exclusively hostile to the people’s interests
either’. And Chayes traces the increase of insecurity in
Kandahar, as the Taliban’s influence began to grow
again. She lays much blame for problems in Kandahar
on Pakistan.
As a Westerner, and especially as a woman, one special
characteristic of Chayes is that she chose to live in ordi-
nary mud-built houses in Kandahar among Afghans. As
a result she has wonderful descriptions of Afghan life
20% discount on all
and colour and of the city itself. She is also very clever at
describing her meetings with Afghans, not least with
President Karzai, with whom she is perhaps rather too
titles under review
direct, implying that she knows better how to run
Afghanistan than he does.
Chayes is not so clever when it comes to relating pas- Call our Order Hotline
sages of Afghanistan’s history. She relates it in a style that
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as though they were all rather stupid. The British Army
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say I found funny.
But there is one error that does merit mention.
Chayes refers to Osama bin Laden’s offering to return to By email:
Afghanistan in 1997. He didn’t come then, but arrived send your order to
by air in the spring of 1996 at Jalalabad Airport, where literaryreview@bertrams.com
he was welcomed not by the Taliban but by President
Rabbani’s government (the Taliban’s opposition), which By post:
later became better known as the Northern Alliance. send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to
Her error here is one that is often conveniently repeated ‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to:
by remnants of the Northern Alliance to journalists. Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams,
The book’s title is a play on the name of the organisa- 1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF
tion that became famous during the Taliban’s rule for
making sure that Afghans abided by their extreme set of
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provoking and salutary book, both for those who have
been involved with Afghanistan for many years and for £2.45 P & P
those who have never been there at all.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27 No matter how many books
you order!
 FOREIGN PARTS
S ARA W HEELER
CANOES & COCKFIGHTS
T HE S OUTH A MERICAN D IARIES
★ against the milky
By John Hopkins
(Arcadia Books 256pp £11.99)
A PRINCETON-EDUCATED WASP of the old school, John
Hopkins mostly writes novels, but The Tangier Diaries
1962–1979, published in 1998, is probably his best-
known work. Otherwise his books are more highly
praised, and sell better, in France than here in his adopted
homeland. So what of this latest volume? It is presented
as a kind of sequel to the earlier Diaries, though it
records a journey straddling 1972–3 – an interlude, in
other words, in the Tangier years.
Beginning in a bar in Mexicali, Mexico, the 34-year-
old author meanders through Central America and on
to Venezuela, Surinam, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay
and Uruguay. Funds are apparently abundant, and
Hopkins gets around by plane, bus, ship, colectivo taxi
(spelled wrongly throughout) – however he can. He is a
resourceful traveller, game for most things and instinc-
tively on the side of the underclass, of whom there are
many; he speaks Spanish (though not Portuguese); and
he already knows South America reasonably well.
In the first half of the book Hopkins travels with his
Dutch lover Madeleine, who smuggles her pet parrot
through various Customs posts under a haystack of
auburn hair. The pair had fallen in love when a lion
pissed on Hopkins at a North African circus (‘Maybe
the smell of lion turned her on’, the author speculates).
But even when Madeleine leaves South America to
nurse a dying uncle in Marrakesh, where she and
Hopkins were then based, her ghostly presence looms
between the lines of every page, for the love affair is
troubled, and complex (‘more emotional baggage than
we can lift’), and poor Hopkins is obsessed. To a certain
extent this is a book about that relationship – an epi-
logue relates its eventual disintegration, and Madeleine’s
untimely death.
Romantic preoccupations aside, the action is varied.
Hopkins enjoys a cockfight in Panama, canoes up the
Marowijne to visit the Bushnegro tribe dwelling in the
headwaters, and marvels, in Amazonia, at spider webs
broad as tennis nets. He catches jungle lice in Pucallpa,
watches A Cloc kwork Orange in Lima, and in
Concepción battles mosquitoes spawned in the lavatory
cistern. Prodigious quantities of alcohol lubricate the
proceedings. Hopkins is good on landscape, conjuring
‘the sun caught in a crotch of hills’, or the green
prairie of the Gran Chaco ‘unmarked as a billiard
28
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
table’, or Bahian
sailors sleeping
on sails spread on
the sand, their
bodies ‘forming
dark hieroglyphs
white cloth’. He
includes a gener-
ous sprinkling of
literar y quota-
tions, and judi- Hopkins: dashing
cious doses of
direct speech.
The diary format is endlessly beguiling for the travel
writer, obviating as it does the irritating requirement of
narrative structure. The Ur-text remains Robert Byron’s
The Road to Oxiana; Hopkins would have done better if
he’d applied Byron’s rigorous cutting techniques, as The
South American Diaries is burdened with rather too much
undigested or inconsequential detail. Part of the problem
is an absence of that essential characteristic of the diarist,
an ability to draw the line between the public and the
private. I would rather not have known about the ‘huge
quantities’ of phlegm Hopkins coughs up, or his choice
of laxative, or the fact that he counts ‘twenty or thirty’
hairs in the armpit of a woman asleep alongside him on
a train (‘South American Indians ... don’t have much
body hair’). This volume lacks the immediacy of The
Tangier Diaries. In that book, shorter entries bestow the
impressionistic spontaneity of the form at its best. More
importantly, Tangier benefits from a robust cast of walk-
on parts, notably Paul Bowles, and the heady whiff of
the Sixties drifts agreeably off its pages. At one point
Hopkins meets John Lennon and Paul McCartney (they
were lying on the floor at a party at Bowles’s place at the
time). The South American Diaries has nobody, really,
except Madeleine and the odd waiter.
‘I am counting on myself to harden up on this trip,’
Hopkins declares at the outset, ‘to begin to live strenu-
ously and romantically again, to trim excess fat from
body and mind.’ But, as he admits, he fails, all too often
felled by ennui. His spirits flag, his new novel (titled
‘Xenophobic Dogs’) remains unwritten. More than
once he states plainly that the journey has not been
enjoyable. The last third of the volume deteriorates into
a prolonged whine of self-pity as the miserable author
wonders why he is doing anything at all on a continent
that has ceased to interest him (‘Another random step
with no implication of progress’). ‘Why Paraguay and
not Italy?’, he asks himself in ir r itation. ‘Why
Concepción and not Paris? Why this sweltering land-
locked heat and not the breezy Med?’ The hapless reader
can only wonder, Why indeed?
To order this book at £9.59, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 LETTER FROM FREETOWN
IT TOOK SEVERAL seconds for the I AIN K ING MEETS A
hot glass to stop showering down
on my scalp. Poor manufacturing B OOKSELLER IN F REETOWN
wired up to an irregular electricity
supply had caused the small but disconcerting explosion.
It had been a light bulb.
This is Freetown, capital city of Sierra Leone. Clichés
of African poverty abound: people living in squalid shacks
made of corrugated iron, waifs scavenging through open
sewers, even the occasional pot-bellied child (a sight more
common in rural areas, apparently). But somehow this
desperate poverty is not so obvious. Indeed, the streets are
so busy and congested it’s hard to see how the economy
could progress without the traffic stopping completely.
Also, there is too much to distract you: minibuses
emblazoned with religious slogans, like ‘Have faith in
God’ and ‘God Bless Islam’; big white vehicles with
implausible number plates like ‘UN 007’; and the
Nicholas Parsons soundalike who seems to dominate all
the radio commercials. Various hawkers offer assorted
products: jeans, radio aerials, basic toiletries – an abun-
dance of colour and activity which exudes a cheap sort of
prosperity. And many sights contradict expectations: the
schoolgirls have immaculate uniforms and seem as confi-
dent as girls anywhere, and the picture posters which
warn of HIV and Aids seem remarkably optimistic.
The street names smack of nineteenth-century British
imperialism – ‘Waterloo Street’, ‘Wilberforce Road’,
‘Victoria Park’. Others recall the names of settlers –
Macdonald, Campbell, Smith – or their home towns:
Berwick, Bathurst, and Aberdeen. On one of these
streets, ‘Boston Lightfoot Street’, near the city centre,
the stalls are festooned with books. Most have a decid-
edly old design and fonts from the 1970s predominate.
Indeed, almost all the books have been used before. It’s
like a library with a ‘2 for 1’ policy – if you give them
two books, they’ll give you one back. Alternatively, you
buy them, although trade hardly seems brisk.
‘People don’t care about books here,’ complains 52-
year-old Donald Entin, who’s worked this patch for
more than thirty years. He explains how he set up one
of the first stalls in 1973, just as literacy was taking hold
among the general population. He built up most of his
stock by trading second-hand books, only occasionally
from imports (‘too expensive’). The titles he offers seem
randomly chosen, reflecting their eclectic origins.
‘Most days most of the year, I sell perhaps two books – if
I am lucky, three books,’ he explains. Titles generally sell
for about 4,000–5,000 Leones (80p–£1), ‘although a top
title, like a Jeffrey Archer, will sell for more’. With a mark-
up on most sales below 50 per cent, it means he’s earning
roughly the average national wage, less than a pound a day,
about the internationally accepted level of absolute pover-
ty. Only in August and September, when the new school
year begins, he can make significant sums, perhaps ten
29
times his usual earnings. It’s the
start of the school year, and sell-
ing schoolbooks to the parents of
students brings in ‘a mini bonan-
za’, he says. It is unfortunate that the beginning of the
school year coincides with the rainy season. ‘We cover
them with a plastic sheet’, explains Eric Yaruba, another
street seller, but he acknowledges they often get wet.
The academic market is the backbone of the publishing
trade here. Most titles are clearly aimed at students – New
General Mathematics for West Africa; New Practical English;
Junior Aptitude Tests and Exercises; although it’s intriguing to
wonder who’ll go for the copy of Quantitative Genetics
which takes a central place in the display.
Nowadays this steady ear ner is under threat.
‘Nigerians are photocopying the books and selling
straight to school principals. When a student is accepted
into a school, the parents are obliged to buy a full set of
books from the principal, who takes a cut,’ moans
Jonathan George, who describes his age as ‘44-plus’.
Several of the street sellers complain that the Nigerians
photocopy on sixty-gram paper, not the sturdy eighty-
gram they use. The photocopies are poorly bound, too,
and the ink rubs off. But they do serve a purpose: with
most of the main titles now out of print, it is the only
way to produce new copies, and, of course, they’re much
cheaper. The sellers know that their role as book suppliers
to the nation is being supplanted, but feel powerless to do
anything about it. ‘We cannot cut prices to compete.’
The new threat seems less worrying than the war. On
the night of 6 January 1999, a rebel militia from outside
the city rampaged through the streets, causing mayhem.
The street stalls were deliberately targeted and burnt
down, book collections and all. ‘Yes, I lost all my books,
and my stall – everything!’ says Donald. In the eight years
since, they’ve had to build up their stocks from scratch.
‘We got many books from our old customers, or people in
the countryside,’ he explains. ‘But it still took at least three
years to recover.’ He says he’s sold a few copies of the
Peace and Reconciliation Report, which came out a cou-
ple of years ago and was meant to draw a line under the
civil war and its complicated causes, but most people who
wanted to read it just bought a photocopy of the summary.
Many of the booksellers of Freetown will soon have to
find other work. Proper books will return to being a
luxury for Sierra Leone’s elite while photocopies
become the dominant printed medium. The streets will
lose a little colour, both from the departing sellers, who
are very engaging in conversation, and because the new
photocopied books are invariably produced in plain
black-and-white. Just like the local light bulbs, they are
barely capable of doing the function for which they
were produced, have a tendency to come apart in
Freetown’s testing conditions, and make you acutely
aware just how difficult it is to live here.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 CHILDREN’S BOOKS
P HILIP R EEVE IS a children’s P HILIP WOMACK MEETS
author who creates vast, absorb-
ing worlds. His ‘Mortal Engines’ P HILIP R EEVE ...
quartet takes place thousands of
years in the future, where moving ‘traction’ cities traverse mild, scholarly figure in a baggy brown suit. From a com-
the wasted plains. Most recently, Larklight took us to a prehensive school in Brighton, he came to writing via
Victorian age where space travel was possible. He has illustration and alternative comedy.
‘Mortal Engines’ is often put in the sci fi section. How do
you feel about the label, do you think it’s a derogatory term?
Well, for a long time I avoided it, but I’ve started to
embrace it because I’m quite proud to be considered a
sci fi author as it’s so unfashionable. It’s strange that peo-
ple worry about boys not reading, even though the one
genre that boys are most likely to be interested in is dis-
missed as garbage, often by the very same people. I think
it’s time to stand out and be counted. I also think sci fi
should be aware of its own absurdity.
Would you be a member of the Green Storm? [The funda-
mentalist ecological society in the ‘Mortal Engines’ series.]
No! I thought it was interesting to have a bunch of
villains who believe in the same thing that most of the
readers believe in – that mobile cities are a bad idea –
and yet they’re fascists. I’m scared of people who have a
lack of doubt – you see it in fundamentalist, religious
types, you see it in Richard Dawkins.
It is very frightening.
It can’t be long before the BNP start leaping on the
green bandwagon, saying it’s just not environmentally
friendly to have so many immigrants coming in, using up
electricity and that sort of thing. Just before Christmas,
actually, I heard a Labour backbencher on the radio saying
that Bonfire Night should be banned because all those
fireworks are terribly bad for the environment. It was a
Pythonesquely ludicrous argument, and at the first ques-
tion from the presenter he just collapsed; obviously he
comes from the Puritan wing of the Labour Party and he
just doesn’t like people having fireworks parties. He was
using the environmentalist argument to get on the radio.
What influences your style the most?
I don’t really know, it’s been built up over the years and
then you forget... I read a Raymond Chandler the other
day, and I haven’t read one since I was fourteen, and it’s
very much what I’m trying to do with its poetic quality.
Ballard, too, that way he has of using sci fi as a vehicle for
surrealism. I remember reading his stories when I was
younger and realising even then that he was leagues ahead
of the others, that there was something quite different
about him. They’re on a completely different plane of
writing. And Ballard really understands the romance of
the world in ruins, which has always appealed to me –
I’ve always enjoyed the remnants of industrial sites and
things like that. When I started the Arthur book I
thought it would be a change, but it’s still people grub-
bing about in the ruins of a superior civilisation, trying to
30
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
now turned his attention, in
Here Lies Arthur, to that most
fascinating of romances. I meet
him in his publisher’s office – a
get back what has been lost.
Why do you think ruins are so
attractive?
There’s a sort of melancholy that
appeals to me, that everything will
pass away. There are lots of indus-
trial ruins on Dartmoor, and grow-
ing up in Brighton I was always
attracted to the wildness of it. I
mean I love Brighton, but now it
just produces generations of art students emerging
unemployable. It’s a hideous parody of itself. I like to
destroy it in my books.
The Arthur story is one of the most potent British myths.
Why do you think it has such resonance?
It’s archetypal. A lot of much older stories have been
absorbed into it. I think what is attractive for writers is
that we don’t know anything. So little is known about
that period; and it’s a story that there isn’t really an origi-
nal of, so you can rewrite it endlessly without spoiling it.
There’s quite a bleak view of life in Here Lies Arthur, and
in a way it seemed like Malory without the spiritual aspect.
Well, that’s not because I particularly dislike the spiri-
tual aspect, it’s just that there’s been a lot of retellings of
the chivalry-and-magic version of Arthur and a lot of
them are very good – like Kevin Crossley-Holland’s ver-
sion, which has tidied it up for this generation. I don’t
think we need another one yet, so that’s what prompted
me to look to the other tradition, the Rosemary
Sutcliffe tradition of trying to write it historically.
Do you find that children respond to the bleakness of it?
I think you can be bleak in a children’s book, but it
does end on an image of hope, and that’s the important
thing to do. I found I had to get something that was sort
of a happy ending.
The character of Myrddin is a spinner of stories. As you
mentioned, Malory absorbs other stories and Myrddin absorbs
them too. Robert Graves in The White Goddess calls it
iconotropism, where an invading tribe takes the stories of the
old tribe and rejigs them to fit a certain doctrine.
Yes, it’s very much that kind of idea, like Christians
adopting pagan festivals. I wouldn’t suggest that someone
actually sat down and did it for Arthur. I suppose Myrddin
is a metaphor for what has happened to the Arthur story
over hundreds of years, he takes little bits of other stories
and gathers them around the figure of Arthur.
Here Lies Arthur is quite hard-hitting.
 CHILDREN’S BOOKS
I hope so. With something like Larklight I did con-
sciously think I wanted something for younger children
– it’s light and larky, as its name suggests – it’s meant to
be a joke. Mortal Engines I thought, with its machines
and explosions, is quite dark and violent, so I wanted to
do something that was happy and that’s where Larklight
comes from. I write just as I write, but I kept it a bit
safer and more cheerful. There is lots of adventure in
Mortal Engines, but there people end up shattered and
traumatised and morally compromised, whilst in
THERE IS A tendency for novelists ... A ND E NJOYS THREE
to focus on the way that a hero is
presented, rather than the hero H EROICAL C HILDREN ’ S B OOKS
himself; Achilles, they argue,
wasn’t really so much better than everyone else, he just
had a good PR agent. And in a way, they are right to do
so – a hero’s ‘kleos’, or ‘glorious reputation’, was all he
really had. It is fun to sling mud at heroes; but, if one
has grown up enthralled by the mystique of Achilles,
King Arthur et al, one can always return to that pristine
image, however much it has been damaged.
So it is that I found myself thoroughly enjoying Philip
Reeve’s new novel, Here Lies Arthur (Scholastic 304pp
£12.99), despite the fact that it shows King Arthur as a
macho, muscle-bound boor with no thought in his
blowsy head except for power. The resourceful heroine is
twelve-year-old Gwyna, who, when her village is razed
to the ground, is adopted by Myrddin, King Arthur’s
spin doctor. Myrddin sees the potential in Gwyna as a
tool for his propaganda campaign: he arranges for her to
hide in a lake and give Arthur a sword, thus causing the
myth of the Lady of the Lake to seem real; he dresses her
up as a boy and uses her as a spy to seed disinformation
and uphold Arthur’s ‘kleos’. But Gwyna feels constrained
by her role, and, when she falls in love with a knight
called Peredur – who, brought up as a girl in order to
avoid conscription, fits as uncomfortably with conven-
tion as she does – aims to break free.
There is a lot of dirt, sweat and (inexplicit) sex, and
sometimes the ‘Celtic’ overtones can feel a little con-
trived; but there are many fine similes, and the stark,
spare nature of the prose is particularly suited to the sub-
ject matter. The book also roars along like a charging
cohort of Saxon soldiers, and will leave older children
thrilling in its wake.
Another ‘warts and all’ retelling is Snakehead by Ann
Halam (Orion 224pp £9.99). Where Reeve eschews
mysticism, Halam revels in it. She imagines Perseus as a
teenager, living with his mother Danae on an island.
They work in a taverna owned by a deposed king, and
are revered by the populace of the town as being ‘god-
touched’. The ‘Supernaturals’ stalk the earth – Perseus,
since he is the son of the greatest of them all, can see
31
Larklight it’s all jolly good fun.
I hope you continue it.
Yes, there will be more of those for sure, like Asterix
always having wild boar for a feast at the end of his
adventures, except in Larklight they’ll all end up having a
nice cup of tea and a muffin. You know I’m amazed
that, what with televisions and so on, children read at
all. I try to avoid didacticism. I think it’s the worst thing
you can do in a novel – I just leave a message lying
around and hope that someone might pick it up.
them in every hollow, lurking in
every tree. One day Andromeda
comes into their life ‘like smoke
blown from a distant fire’. She is
on the run from her family who, as was the custom at
the time, are being forced to sacrifice her to a sea mon-
ster. Perseus, meanwhile, is challenged by the king of his
island to find the Medusa and the two set off on an
adventure which has more meaning than either of them
can hope to realise. Halam is brilliant at evoking this
‘never-been’ Greece with sly anachronistic touches – the
taverna is haunted by gap-year kids; the book is littered
with phrases like ‘Human sacrifice was Taki’s idea of an
efficient, modern solution.’
When Perseus sees Medusa, he achieves a sense of
unity with the world that is moving and convincing:
‘Oh Great All, it was Athini herself – It was Athini her-
self, looking out from inside of me – I was Athini. I was
the monster. I had to kill the monster, so I could be
Athini.’ Andromeda speaks of ‘veils upon veils’, senses
that behind the gods there is something greater; her task
is to ‘open the springs’, and I will not spoil what is a
finely written and intelligent novel for teenagers by
explaining what that means.
A more modern hero is our friend Young Bond. This,
Charlie Higson’s third, Double or Die (Puffin 400pp
£6.99), is not quite as good as the first two, but still a
cut above the vast majority of children’s books. A beak
goes missing from Eton, and sends a coded message to
the school crossword club. Higson sets this adventure
over a few short days, during which James comes under
suspicion of murder, endures a car chase and a vicious
crash, wins a lot of money at a casino, is poisoned by gin
and – of course – saves the day (and gets the girl, in suit-
ably chaste fashion). Higson is deft and surprising – the
only fault is the preposterously unvillainous villain,
Charnage (good name though), whom, one feels, even
the pastiest, snottiest third-former could get the better
of, let alone the glamorous and daring young Bond. The
most terrifying person appears only towards the end –
but escapes unharmed, thankfully leaving the option for
more wide open.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 ART & MUSIC

R UPERT C HRISTIANSEN What followed was a gigantic cover-up of Dreyfus-like

proportions, in which vested conservative interests

A SHAMEFUL EPISODE
M EDUSA : T HE S HIPWRECK , T HE S CANDAL ,
T HE M ASTERPIECE
★ sensational exposé, which became an instant bestseller.
By Jonathan Miles
(Jonathan Cape 352pp £17.99)
I N The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault portrayed ‘the
shipwreck of France’: Jonathan Miles’s absorbing and
intelligent book takes up a theme first sounded by Jules
Michelet over a hundred and fifty years ago. This is a
work of art history in the broadest sense, with little to
say about the painting’s aesthetic qualities but much
fascinating information about the complexities of its
political hinterland.
The Medusa was the flagship of an inept expedition to
repossess the colony of Senegal from the British, part of
a strategy through which the dismally corrupt and
mediocre post-Napoleonic
regime attempted a revival
of national dignity. An
antiquated frigate, typical
of France’s depleted navy, it
set sail in 1816 under the
incompetent leadership of
Hugues de Chaumareys, an
émigré lackey of the ancien
régime who hadn’t com-
manded a vessel for over
twenty-five years.
Owing to his refusal to
follow procedures and take
proper navigational advice,
the Medusa foundered on a
sandbank in notor iously
dangerous and uncharted
waters off the West African coast. The subsequent evac-
uation was a fiasco, and Chaumareys saved his own skin
by cutting the towrope which linked his lifeboat to a
makeshift raft on which 147 of the 400 crew and passen-
gers had been chaotically dumped.
In appalling weather conditions, bolstered by only
minimal provisions and equipment, the raft drifted for
nearly two weeks on open sea, reducing a ragbag of
humanity to unimaginable extremes of barbarity and
heroism. An insurrection left sixty slaughtered; others
drowned, went mad or committed suicide. As starvation
set in, the survivors slaughtered the dying and resorted
to cannibalism. By the time another ship of the expedi-
tion came to the rescue, only fifteen remained alive, five
of whom died shortly afterwards.
ensured that Chaumareys was let off the hook, embar-
rassing questions were suppressed and compensation left
unpaid. The affair was blown open when two of the
survivors, a ship’s surgeon named Henri Savigny and an
engineer named Alexandre Corréard, collaborated on a
Corréard struck up with Théodore Géricault, an ambi-
tious young artist in search of a subject that would bring
him fame and fortune. Although devastated by complica-
tions in his personal life (he had just fathered a son on his
uncle’s young wife), Géricault seized upon Corréard’s
tale as the vehicle for an immense canvas which would
dramatise the climactic moment when the rescuing ship
appeared on the horizon. Géricault shaved off his hair
and for the best part of a year became a virtual recluse in
his Paris studio as he devoted himself to creating an
image of majestic grandeur that was both meticulously
accurate and profoundly imaginative, as well as an
implicit endorsement of Corréard and Savigny’s version
of events. ‘Bolstered by his researches, which had secured
an emotional depth and
integrity,’ writes Miles,
Géricault ‘dared to depart
from the literal truth in his
expression of a more pro-
found meaning.’
To mollify the authori-
ties, the painting was dis-
played at the Salon of 1819
under the title The Scene of
the Shipwreck, but the
anonymity fooled nobody.
Its overwhelming visual
impact – Miles notes the
revolutionary use of the
close-up, not a feature of
academic history painting
– made it a cause célèbre, but
the critics generally deplored its dark-toned coloration and
flouting of neoclassical rules. It was much more admired
when it travelled to London, drawing some 50,000 visitors
to a gallery in Piccadilly – the English, suggests Miles,
were delighted by anything which suggested the incompe-
tence of the French.
The book follows the unhappy lives of Géricault and
Corréard after the scandal of the Medusa had waned.
Corréard became a professional agitator and pamphleteer,
constantly on the attack against any number of targets:
Miles’s account makes him sound like one of those all too
familiar left-wing rebels, unhinged to the point of paranoia
by his hatred of officialdom and desire for revenge and rec-
ompense. He and Géricault planned another collaboration
on a painting which would illustrate the horrors of the

32
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 ART & MUSIC
African slave trade, but although some tantalising prepara-
tory drawings were made, Géricault’s declining health put
paid to the project. He died in 1824 at the age of thirty-
two, a tragically disappointed man.
Miles doesn’t quite manage to bring this evasive
genius to life, and the analysis of his painting is not very
sophisticated or detailed: this is a book to be read for
historical narrative rather than critical insights. It ends
P ATRICK O’C ONNOR
THE RIGHT NOTES
D IVAS AND S CHOLARS : P ERFORMING
I TALIAN O PERA
★ culminating in the shocking phrase in which she calls her
By Philip Gossett
(University of Chicago Press 675pp £22.50)
S TART- UP AT THE N EW M ET: T HE
M ETROPOLITAN O PERA B ROADCASTS
1966–1976
★ When Maria Malibran showed an interest in singing
By Paul Jackson
(Amadeus Press 640pp $49.95)
A FEW YEARS ago I heard Philip Gossett deliver a lecture
on Rossini’s songs. The venue was Mandel Hall, the
impressive gothic forum at Chicago University. Gossett’s
assistant, there to demonstrate how the
songs should be sung, was Cecilia
Bartoli. With gentle good humour,
Gossett guided us through the compli-
cated history of some of the pieces, to
which Rossini had sometimes returned
three or four times, making new set-
tings. He played examples at the piano
while talking. This was musicology
brought to life in the most vivid way.
Having dealt with all the songs, Bartoli
then proceeded to wow the public with
a few big arias, just to end the evening.
Outside it was sub-zero, but my abiding
memory is of the elegance of Gossett’s
use of his scholarship and enthusiasm.
The same goes for his new book, a
very personal and wide-ranging study
of the great nineteenth-century Italian
composers, and the problems and chal-
lenges facing those who decide to study
their music beyond the available print-
ed scores. As anyone with even a slight
knowledge of opera history knows, the Anna Moffo: ‘a shocking state of disrepair’ Italian theatre during the 1830s or 40s
33
with a report of the discovery of the wreckage of the
Medusa in 1980 and a useful tip: if you want to see
Géricault’s masterpiece in all its pristine glory, you will
be better off looking at the mid-nineteenth-century
full-scale copy that hangs in the Museé de Picardie
in Amiens than at the sadly deteriorated original in
the Louvre.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
work was often in progress for quite a while after each
first night. The forces of censorship, the availability or
not of particular singers, and the resources of individual
theatres, all led to alterations, additions, cuts and rewrites.
For instance, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, based on Schiller’s
play, contains the famous ‘Dialogo delle due Regine’, in
which Mary, Queen of Scots, hurls insults at Elizabeth I,
cousin ‘Vil bastarda’. This was eventually staged in Milan
in 1835, as the composer had written it, but, at its
Naples premiere the year before, the opera ‘was born
under circumstances that challenged its integrity’. There
it was transformed into something called Buendelmonte,
all traces of the two queens removed.
the role of Elvira in Bellini’s I puritani, the composer set
about rearranging the whole work to accommodate her.
In the event, she backed out of the production, but there
still exists, sometimes performed, the ‘Malibran’ Puritani.
As Gossett writes, ‘Some scholars construct schemes in
which every tonal choice throughout an opera is assigned
deeper meaning.’ As he demonstrates
in his chapter called ‘Higher and
Lower’, this was frequently a matter of
necessity, depending on the voices of
the singers engaged.
The depth and scope of Gossett’s
book, on which he has been working
for over twenty years, makes it one
that will be of immense value to any-
one approaching the subject of opera
in the so-called age of belcanto.
Although the minute detail of some of
the individual music examples he
chooses may be beyond even the
informed opera aficionado, he writes
so clearly, and with such vigour, that
the arguments about transpositions,
cuts, translations and interpolations
take on something of the feel of
detective work. The overture to
Rossini’s William Tell, for instance,
was never heard in Italy as the com-
poser intended, since ‘not a single
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 ART & MUSIC
had ten resident cellos’.
Gossett uses the work he has undertaken on several
operas to make individual critical editions, which
describe the problems and choices facing editors, con-
ductors and singers. Rossini’s Semiramide, Verdi’s Un
vendetta in domino (which eventually became Un ballo in
maschera), Bellini’s Norma and I puritani, are all put
under the microscope. His account of Riccardo Muti’s
attempt to offer the Viennese public an ‘authentic’
Rigoletto is both funny and sad. If you want to know
what an ‘Aria di baule’, an ‘Aria di sorbetto’ or a ‘Ranz
des vaches’ is, there is an excellent glossary of terms to
help one along. ‘In performing Italian opera,’ Gossett
writes, ‘it is not enough to sing the right notes, they
must be sung with authority.’
Not everyone would choose to spend years of their
lives listening to tapes of old radio broadcasts. Paul
Jackson, in the third volume of his history of the
Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinées, continues his
Herculean task. Coming nearer to our own time and
moving on from the ‘old’ Met, he now addresses the
first ten years of the company at Lincoln Center. The
New Met opened in 1966 with a problem-beset world
premiere, that of Samuel Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra.
These years saw the end of Rudolf Bing’s tenure as gen-
eral manager, and also the last performances of several
long-term favourites, who bowed out or passed away.
Renata Tebaldi, Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill,
Dorothy Kirsten and Franco Corelli all made their final
appearances with the company.
I AN W HITCOMB
TYCOON OF TEEN
T EARING D OWN THE WALL OF S OUND : T HE
R ISE AND FALL OF P HIL S PECTOR
★ smash-hit mushes like ‘Da
By Mick Brown
(Bloomsbury 512pp £18.99)
T HE CAREER OF this legendary record producer has
already been covered in many books, so do we need
another? I myself have written about the eccentric self-
styled ‘genius’ who, in the twilight before Beatle sunshine,
conjured up a mighty tsunami of sound to be enjoyed on
cheap phonographs and car radios by adolescents of body
or brain.
‘Little symphonies for the kids’, he said he was making.
He called on his arrangers to throw in a little Strauss here
and some Wagner there while pushing his engineers to
up the volume till stomachs turned and eardrums burst.
Somewhere in the swell were girlie-cute black voices,
34
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
If there is anyone in the world today who writes better
about opera singers’ voices, I haven’t read him. Jackson
seems always to be able to find the right word to sum-
mon up just what the performance is like. A few exam-
ples must suffice: on Richard Tucker’s entrance in Simon
Boccanegra (19 January 1974), ‘The offstage serenade is
only slightly brushed with the blemish of age, for its line
is neatly sculpted without exaggeration.’ On Shirley
Verrett’s Cassandre in Les Troyens: ‘The voice is marked
by timbral darkness that is both beautiful and evocative.
Its haunting quality breathes an aura of other times.’ On
Franco Corelli’s last Calaf in Turandot: ‘The voice
throughout its range retains its famously dark, glamorous
cast, a cur ious combination of plushy velvet and
resounding steel.’
These years saw the gradual rise of Domingo and
Pavarotti to their superstar status, and Jackson is both
benign and sensible about their considerable merits and
occasional lapses. When he has to take off the critical
gloves, it is with some reticence. Considering the late
Anna Moffo’s Nedda in Pagliacci, ‘Her voice is in a
shocking state of disrepair … a ghastly wobble infects
many tones … sustained notes are clipped short at the
end of phrases.’
While considering the individual broadcasts, Jackson
also takes into consideration the history of the company,
and the careers of the artists involved on a broader scale.
There are many fine illustrations. Above all, there is that
air of affection and gratitude which is felt by so many
people who tune in to these events.
but none amounted to much.
The Ronettes, the Crystals,
Bob B Soxx & the Blue Jeans
– interchangeable groups, and
dispensable, too. Spector was
the star, the control freak, the
rock Svengali producing
Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Be My
Baby’, captivating, like a
teenage crush, the likes of
Beach Boy, Beatle, Stone,
and this writer.
The magic touch lasted from
the early 1960s, the age of the Spectral vision
snappy single, to the coming of
the Great Thinkers like Dylan and Lennon, individuals
averse to taking orders. The little kids deserted as the acid
spread and the concept album squashed the dreamy teen
scene. The Wall of Sound formula came tumbling down.
Spector went on to work for hire for the Beatles,
Leonard Cohen, and the Ramones, but he was no
longer the Tycoon of Teen, as Tom Wolfe had crowned
 ART & MUSIC
him in a 1965 article. So he holed up behind stone walls
– mansions first, and finally a castle in Alhambra, near
Los Angeles.
As a neighbour and fellow rocker I was included in a
party of sycophants invited to a soirée at his home.
Wearing shoulder-length fright wig, blue shades, frilly
shirt, raucous tweed jacket and 4-inch Cuban heels, our
host offered us midget sandwiches and a rambling lec-
ture on pop history. When I dared to correct him he
locked us all in and went rummaging for weaponry.
‘He’s kidding,’ explained a bodyguard.
Mick Brown, a good sleuth, has added to the Spector
library by building a scary portrait of a psychopath,
based on extensive interviews with fellow workers and
civilians. Guns are waved, pointed, even pressed against
the skulls of those who crossed Spector. Leonard Cohen
experienced the cold steel. My own violinist, an Iwo
Jima veteran, was threatened with death after he snick-
ered at the drunken producer.
Was this the result of trauma in his childhood? Spector
was a Jewish nerd with a domineering mother and a
father who killed himself; goyim toughs urinated on
him after a performance, as a Teddy Bear, of ‘To Know
Him Is To Love Him’, which was the epitaph on his
father’s grave. Part of the answer is revealed in the four-
hour interview granted to Brown, a coup that spins this
circular book so that we begin and end with the inter-
LETTERS
CATILINE CONSOLES
Dear Sir,
After reading Peter Jones’ review, in which he mentions
the ‘Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank you Letter’ (LR,
March), I thought that readers may like to know that
model letters were prevalent in the ancient world, reaching
even the highest levels: a recent anthology placed a letter
of the conspirator Catiline, in which he aims to clear his
name, next to a model letter of consolation. Comparing
the two, Catiline’s words begin to look positively empty –
just as empty as our dear Nigel Molesworth’s.
Yours faithfully,
John Hetherington, London SW3
BALANCING THE BOOKS
Dear Sir,
I must protest at Richard Overy’s review in your March
number. There is much more that Overy should have
said to balance his references to the fearful suffering of
German civilians under Allied air attack. In particular,
he failed to mention the heavy and very destructive
German bombing of British cities in 1940/41 – of
which, as a boy of sixteen in Bristol, I had some direct
and terrifying experience. This, I am afraid, made
35
view: ‘I have devils inside that fight me … I’m not
happy unless I’m not happy … In a world where car-
penters get resurrected, anything is possible.’ His only
sanctuary had been the recording studio – now gone for
ever – because there he felt ‘reasonable’ and ‘comfort-
able’. Had he been a good person? ‘Reasonably good. I
mean I haven’t done anything...’ Silence.
At dawn two days after the interview was published in
the Telegraph magazine, Spector appeared at the back door
of his Alhambra castle with a gun in his hand and blood
on his body to inform his waiting chauffeur: ‘I think
I killed somebody.’ Slumped in a chair in the foyer was the
dead body of Lana Clarkson, a statuesque erstwhile B-
picture star. Broken teeth were scattered about. She had
been shot through the mouth. ‘She kissed the gun,’ Spector
later explained. And, he said, her last words were ‘Da Doo
Ron Ron’. How dare she kill herself in his castle!
The authorities felt otherwise and so, four years and a
string of celebrity lawyers later, the man who brought
majestic moments of grandeur to the tinsel world of pop
will be leaving a legacy of bloodstains and broken teeth.
He is charged with murder. ‘Ye shall reap as ye shall
sow’, said one of his discarded girl group singers. But as
Raymond Chandler wrote, ‘The law is where you buy it
in this town.’ This is a timely and well-researched piece
of journalism. All it needs is closure.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 27
British retaliation more or less inevitable.
Yours faithfully,
Russell Barratt, Tenterden, Kent
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
Dear Sir,
Richard Overy has it quite wrong (LR, March). Churchill did
indeed plan to use biological warfare against German cities in
the summer of 1944. He had bombers specifically fitted to
drop anthrax which was to be supplied by the Americans.
This was revealed recently from the British archives.
As it turned out, the plan was abandoned because the
rapid advances the Allies made in France rendered the
plan unnecessary. So Churchill’s reason for this was not
that he feared the Germans would retaliate but rather
that it was no longer required.
As far as orders given to Allied air crews to shoot
German civilians on the ground, this is well documented
by Chuck Yeager. He was a P-51 pilot flying missions
with the US 8th Air Force stationed in England. In his
memoirs he specifically states that he and his fellow fight-
er pilots had received such orders from their superiors.
Yours faithfully,
Michael L Reisch, Carlisle Ma. USA
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
A C G RAYLING
PASSION & POSSIBILITY
S HAKESPEARE THE T HINKER
★ in so many of his neighbours, relations and friends, plus
By A D Nuttall
(Yale University Press 428pp £19.99)
S HAKESPEARE R EVEALED : A B IOGRAPHY
★ ‘indifference’ has its literal and positive meaning to
By René Weis
(John Murray 444pp £25)
IT IS OFTEN enough observed how mysterious is the
phenomenon of genius, even if we no longer think the
word denotes a creature who sits on poets’ shoulders and
whispers messages from the Muses into their ears. It is
one thing to accept that some people can be stunningly
inventive and clever, another to fathom the nature of the
gifts that make them so. But in the case of Shakespeare,
familiarly, all resources fail: here was an individual whose
capacities and achievement literally transcend explanation.
Some perhaps grow weary of the pieties collectively
indulged about Shakespeare, until they re-read him and
are electrified all over again by the language he uses, the
insights it conveys, the universality of understanding and
sympathy that informs the insights, and the vaulting
power of imagination that drives all. But what this won-
derfully illuminating study by A D Nuttall does is to
take the fact of genius as given, and respond to some-
thing else: Shakespeare’s intelligence.
The late and very much lamented Anthony Nuttall was
as much a philosopher as a literary critic. Unusually
among critics he was well read in Anglophone analytic
philosophy, understood it well, and applied it judiciously.
He did not have much time for the intellectual posturings
of theory, and maintained a clear-eyed independence of
thought about what most moved him and mattered to
him in literature, especially in Shakespeare. He preferred
the recent shift to historicism over the fashions for post-
structuralism and deconstruction in theory, but against all
he asserted the claims of authorial intention, not least in
so alert, profound and deliberate a mind as Shakespeare’s.
Nuttall makes use of two interesting points in establish-
ing his approach: the way that the death by drowning in
the Avon of a young woman, followed by an inquest
which left a faint question-mark as to whether the
drowning was a suicide, transformed itself in the play-
wright’s mind into Ophelia’s death; and the degree to
which the Shakespeare family, and in particular William
himself, was caught up in the grim affair of the recusancy,
in which Jesuit secret agents sought to unsettle the state.
The second matter is all the more interesting because
36
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
Shakespeare set all the plays in a pre-Reformation past that
made reference to friars and hermits’ cells and attending
the Mass entirely natural. There is no hint otherwise of his
taking sides on the burning (literally) question of the time;
rather, he writes as if above it. But the Catholic references,
jointly with the widespread lingering attachment to Rome
gossip (‘he died a Papist’, wrote one near-contemporary),
have been fertile in generating speculation.
For Nuttall, Shakespeare’s detachment in handling this
question is a mark of his conscious indifference, where
denote an encompassing, universalising neutrality of
viewpoint among the possibilities and passions that all
human affairs involve. Whatever Shakespeare personally
thought about anything, in the plays all sides of those
thoughts are given sympathetic articulation; he repre-
sented the total picture, as if he looked down from the
clouds (and with X-ray vision), exemplifying the French
saying that to comprehend all is to forgive all.
The accidental or suicidal drowning in the Avon that
stuck in Shakespeare’s memory supports Nuttall’s case
against the historicists that writers are not merely the con-
duits of the influences of their time, but conscious respon-
ders to them. To those unhampered by theory the point
seems clear: in the alembic of the imagination the partic-
ular takes on universal significance, and lends itself to
transmutations that serve the author’s chosen point. But
Nuttall applies this in his analysis of Shakespeare as ‘the
philosopher of human possibility’, by drawing out the way
Shakespeare goes beyond the given in his sources, and well
beyond his memory and influences, to venture into an
exploration of how things can be, and might have been, for
people in the circumstances in which his dramas place them.
For Nuttall this makes Shakespeare’s dramatic universe ‘a
forest of flourishing but imperilled “might-be”s or a web of
provisional essays’. He was, Nuttall says, ‘too intelligent to
be able to persuade himself that the problems [addressed in
the plays] are completely solved’, but he went further than
anyone else in portraying how they felt to those experienc-
ing them, and why they tried to solve them as they did.
René Weis has joined the brave company of those who
search for Shakespeare the elusive human individual in the
now available vast wealth of minutely combed-over cir-
cumstantial detail concerning everything related to his
home town, neighbours, fellow players, people known to
be connected to him, people possibly connected to him,
the history and politics of the time, and a million other
facts, clues, hints, possibilities, suggestions and supposi-
tions, very few of which definitely and conclusively settle
the questions that wrap Shakespeare the man in thick veils.
Weis displays a masterly command of these minutiae, and
has taken an interesting tack through them: he assumes
that the plays richly reflect details of Shakespeare’s early life
in Stratford-on-Avon, which can therefore be explored as
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
if it were a pointer to his whole life and mind.
The idea is ingenious, and not without merit. But in
some ways it serves to deepen rather than dispel the
mystery that is the man, for the more one learns of the
recusancy of so many of his neighbours, and the danger
of the ‘cold’ religious war that beset England in his for-
mative years, the more surprising is the realisation that
his work simply ignores the fact of the Reformation and
the subsequent religious strife altogether.
Weis gives an extremely detailed picture of the setting of
Shakespeare’s life, and a judicious one; there is no falling for
the more speculative romances that have Shakespeare hiding
with fellow Catholics in Lancashire in fear for his life, or
being part of an alleged Arden plot to murder the Queen. It
is no criticism to say that, even so, the result is no diminution
W ILLIAM P ALMER
HIDDEN LIVES
FAMILY ROMANCE : A M EMOIR
★ Julia left on the point of taking
By John Lanchester
(Faber & Faber 394pp £16.99)
THE TITLE OF John Lanchester’s new book makes a wel-
come change in the recent rush of family memoirs and
all the assorted thuggery and buggery inflicted on their
poor authors by alcoholic or insane mothers, fathers,
siblings, aunts and uncles. Lanchester even admits, ‘I had
a happy childhood.’
He was born in 1962 and ‘by the time I was three years
old, I’d lived at ten different addresses in six different
countries’. Novelists, and Lanchester is a very good one,
often have a dislocated start in life. Indeed, his whole life
has a rather older, anachronistic feel to it than you would
expect from someone only in his mid-forties. His parents
came from two worlds which seem immeasurably far
away now: his mother was from the priest-ridden Ireland
of the Twenties, and his father, born in Cape Town, spent
most of his life in Far Eastern outposts of the British
Empire. Lanchester’s book is a recreation of his parents’
lives and an expression of love. But it is also an investiga-
tion of family secrets and lies – not many sons discover
that their mother had been a nun, not once, but twice,
and that she was, quite literally, not who she said she was.
The book falls into three parts, and of these the most
fascinating is the first: the extraordinary story of
Lanchester’s mother. Born Julia Gunnigan in 1920 (the
date takes on a crucial and mysterious resonance in her
story), she came from a family of poor farmers. It was a
hard life, and for an intelligent girl ‘the only route out was
education’. Julia went to convent school and then joined
the Sisters of the Good Shepherd as a postulant at the age
37
of the usual ‘must haves’, ‘could haves’ and ‘probablys’ that
always litter every page of every Shakespeare biography. A
slight tweeness of tone betrays a forgivable affection for the
subject: no doubt Weis’s total familiarity with every inch
of the poet’s home town has engendered a feeling of
familiarity with Shakespeare’s ghost that few others share.
Interestingly, Nuttall took some of the same walks in
Stratford and its neighbourhood as Weis, and had some of
the same sensations of closeness: he remembers seeing a
line of hills in the dusk which Shakespeare certainly saw,
offering one of the definites in a sea of possibilities about
him. It is a striking thought that as the philosopher of pos-
sibility, what we know of Shakespeare the individual is
itself a congeries of possibility and no more.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
of sixteen. This was a harsh
order and the one that adminis-
tered the infamous Magdalene
asylums for girls judged to be
immoral or simply uppity. It was
felt as a family disgrace when
her vows. She returned home
and ‘was treated as if she did not
exist’. During the war she Julia and John
worked as a nurse and, strangely,
disappeared from the sight of her family for two and a half
years. Lanchester has been unable to find out anything at
all about these years. In 1946 she entered another holy
order, became Sister Eucharia, and ended up as head of a
training college in India. How she met and married John’s
father Bill is another twist in her remarkable tale.
Bill lived his own childhood in what Lanchester calls ‘a
colonial bubble’. England may have been home, but he
did not see it for many years, working in banking jobs in
the Far East. By the time of his retirement his world had
long been a global business bubble: he was the last of a
generation of young men who were committed to ser-
vice, rather than self-service. As Lanchester says of his
father, ‘he grew up in a culture in which duty and reti-
cence and honour and lack of ostentation were regarded
as forms of goodness… No one celebrates them any
more, or even admits that they were once seen, and not
so long ago, as virtues’. His father’s attempt to explain sex
to the young John is both funny and touching.
John Lanchester himself does not appear until the last
third of the book. He has relied on the memories of rela-
tives and family letters to tell the story of his mother and
father, and the sense of minor detail can become oppressive
– like looking through a strange family photograph album
while someone over your shoulder points out long-dead
aunts and uncles. More than once, Lanchester wonders if
he should be ‘writing a novel rather than a memoir’. But
he has chosen the correct form. Our parents are, to us,
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
astonishing, chimerical creatures; the fact that they were
once children, then young people, perhaps took other
lovers, is quite extraordinary. After death, their lives are
hidden under censored memories and the few scraps of
paper they leave behind. Real life is curiously resistant to
the techniques of fiction: it has to be either heightened or
subdued. The most important thing in someone’s life may
be experienced alone and in a few moments of time; it
may never be known to others. These moments are what
C HANDAK S ENGOOPTA
HERO OF THE HERNIA
DIGGING UP THE DEAD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
ASTLEY COOPER, AN EXTRAORDINARY SURGEON
★ A passionate radical in his youth, Cooper spent his
By Druin Burch
(Chatto & Windus 278pp £20)
SURGERY TODAY MAY not always be safe, but it is no
longer the bloody, insanitary and excruciating business it
was two hundred years ago. Before the coming of anaes-
thesia and aseptic techniques, an operation often
amounted to a death sentence on the patient. Complex
internal operations were unimaginable in such unsani-
tary circumstances, and even the technically simpler
forms of surgery could often be fatal because of shock
and blood-loss. If the patient survived the operation, he
was often killed by a post-operative infection.
In the eighteenth century surgery was anything but a
learned profession – one could not even rely on a sur-
geon’s knowledge of human anatomy. Although all
aspiring surgeons received some anatomical training, the
teaching was superficial, and often hampered by a scarci-
ty of cadavers for dissection. And learning on the job
was hardly practicable – one couldn’t take one’s time to
explore the innards of an unanaesthetised patient, and
the best surgeons prided themselves on the speed with
which they finished their operations. Dismissed by
physicians as vulgar craftsmen and inhibited by the con-
ditions under which they had to operate, surgeons
would have been astounded to see how their profession
has been transformed over the subsequent centuries.
Of course, not all surgeons were ignorant or intellectually
unambitious. One of the exceptions is the subject of this
book. The name of Astley Cooper (1768–1841) may not
be familiar today, but he was a leading surgeon of the time
and constantly eager to improve the scientific foundations
of his craft. Trained in part by the celebrated John Hunter,
Cooper was a passionate dissector and began every day by
cutting into the corpse of pretty much any creature that he
could find. Because of legal and religious restrictions, indi-
vidual surgeons could obtain human bodies only through
38
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
novelists deal in. The best we can do with real life is to try
to get down what we can before it disappears for ever.
John Lanchester tells us how he did not feel liberated as a
writer until his father died. But his most movingly
expressed debt is to his mother: ‘More than anything else
what made me a writer was the way she left me reaching
for the one thing I could never quite have, even when she
was alive, and which I now can never have: her attention.’
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 27
grave-robbers (the resurrectionists), and Cooper was one of
their most loyal clients. His lifelong passion for dissection
enabled him not only to refine his own operations but to
develop new ones – he particularly excelled in vascular
surgery and the repair of hernias. He also made several last-
ing contributions to anatomical knowledge, and a few
parts of the body are still named after him.
honeymoon in revolutionary Paris, but later became a
staunch upholder of the status quo. He was to be richly
rewarded for his apostasy. A charismatic lecturer and
popular surgeon, he served twice as the President of the
Royal College of Surgeons and was also sergeant surgeon
to George IV, William IV, and the young Victoria. He
earned enormous sums, received many honours at home
and abroad, and after his death in 1841 a medical journal
commented: ‘we think it indisputable that no surgeon, in
this or any other country, ever realised such a fortune, or
acquired such widespread fame, as Sir Astley Cooper’.
Druin Burch has written a detailed and deeply felt
biography of this colourful figure. A medical man him-
self, Burch concentrates on Cooper’s surgical exploits
and innovations. Operations are described with a gusto
that might trouble squeamish readers, and the rivalries
and machinations of surgeons are recounted at length.
Burch is rather less successful, however, in integrating his
own medical experiences with his biographical narrative.
The book begins with his own first glimpse of a dead
man, and the reader is periodically regaled with reminis-
cences of his life as a medical student and young doctor.
These passages are probably meant to be reflective, but
they are in fact quite pallid and pretentious.
Although Burch confesses to being ‘lingeringly fond’ of
Cooper, his book is not the kind of rhapsodic tribute that
doctor-historians often churn out about their professional
heroes. Burch brings out Cooper’s talents and his heroic
qualities but does not whitewash his many failures and fail-
ings. He calls him a ‘vain, egotistical, nepotistic and rather
wonderful old man’ and his book presents him as a whole,
warts and all. More importantly, Burch never views
Cooper in isolation from his age. Digging Up the Dead is
not simply the biography of a great surgeon, but a brilliant
portrait of surgical life before the coming of anaesthesia,
antisepsis, antibiotics, and professional regulations.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
V IRGINIA I RONSIDE
WHAT A CHARACTER, EH!
YOU CANNOT L IVE AS I H AVE L IVED AND
N OT E ND U P L IKE T HIS : T HE T HOROUGHLY
D ISGRACEFUL L IFE AND T IMES OF
W ILLIE D ONALDSON
★ and good manners of strangers
By Terence Blacker
(Ebury Press 342pp £12.99)
EVEN THOUGH I was around in London in the Sixties at
the same time as Willie Donaldson, I never actually met
him. I know of him only by reputation – for the
moment when he took up a show at the Edinburgh
Fringe starring my soon-to-be husband and brought it,
with co-producer Michael White, to the West End.
In a masterstroke of self-destruction, he insisted it be
called ‘****’. Naturally, because this was completely
unpronounceable (Fuck? Cunt? Cock? Shit? – every
swear word was represented by four stars in those censo-
rious days), it only ran for a week.
Terence Blacker’s excellent book charts Donaldson’s
rise and fall, though to be honest there was never that
much of a rise, just a series of accidental bumps and pits.
Born in Sunningdale in 1935 and saddled with the terri-
ble disadvantage of being sent to Winchester, he went
on to Cambridge, where he started out promisingly,
launching a high-class literary magazine called Gemini.
Before long he had found Beyond the Fringe and pro-
duced the show in London and, shortly after, discovered
Bob Dylan and brought him for a brief performance to
the Establishment Club.
So far so good. But then he seems to have fallen on
hard times, mostly of his own making. One particular
musical that he launched was called Lie Down, I Think I
Love You, about which a reviewer wrote: ‘Get up I think
I hate you.’ It lasted for one night.
It seems there was a series of debts, near bankruptcies,
disasters, the making of several enemies, a string of
unlikely girlfriends (from Carly Simon to Sarah Miles),
and a fairly seedy existence in a camelhair coat, always
then the sign of a bounder.
After a disastrous marriage, and several of what he
described, charmingly, as ‘toilet books’ (‘I don’t know
about you, but when I’m invited to write a book these
days, I always go to my shelves to check that I haven’t
already written it’), he found himself in a grisly flat in
Elm Park Gardens in South Kensington, mouldering
away – until he struck gold in 1980 when he devised the
Henry Root letters. Posing as Root, a wildly right-wing
wet-fish merchant, Donaldson wrote to a variety of
political figures and celebrities, including senior police
39
officers, clergymen, actors –
people like Margaret Thatcher,
Esther Rantzen and even the
Queen. Very unfairly, in my
view, he published their replies.
The joke of the Henry Root
letters, like the one used by Sacha
Baron Cohen in Borat, relies on
taking the piss out of the kindness
Donaldson: flâneur
and I can’t understand the point,
but men particularly seem to find them hilarious. The book
was a huge hit, columns followed, and just before he died,
he produced a seminal work, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains &
Eccentrics: An A–Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages.
Everyone who knew him seemed to be incredibly
fond of the old boy. Claudia FitzHerbert, Evelyn
Waugh’s granddaughter, with whom he conducted a
rather creepy correspondence when she was at a convent
school, says: ‘It’s a marvellous world, I think, which
contains a man who writes as beautifully as this.’ ‘His
humour outlives him,’ wrote Craig Brown. ‘His humour
outlives us all.’ Auberon Waugh once extravagantly
referred to him as an English Nabokov.
But really? He was obsessed with rather bizarre sex,
loved going to brothels, and had a wild crush on a Page
Three girl called Rachel Varley, with whom he became
good friends. At the end of his life he was also obsessed
with drugs, crack cocaine in particular, to which he was
totally hooked from the Eighties onwards. ‘On crack you
know you’re happy,’ he said. ‘Nothing can go wrong. The
real world, the world of dry-cleaning and money-off, of
weddings in tents and pension plans, has, like a fat woman
in a pantomime, sat on a chair that isn’t there and is look-
ing very silly indeed. For the moment, you’re victorious.’
But he doesn’t come across as nice at all. His one-time
friend Peter Morgan said: ‘He became really vicious to
me. The kindness had gone. He sneered at me for what
he thought was my success. He was effectively a tramp,
sitting in the Goat and Boots, spitting hatred.’
Even Terence Blacker, who could not possibly do a
better job of portraying Donaldson as a blighted genius
eccentric, and brilliantly portrays the period in which he
thrived, was described by Donaldson as a pompous ass,
notoriously vain, old and bald. ‘I don’t like Blacker,
never have,’ he wrote in a column once. And yet Terence
Blacker couldn’t end his friendship with him because
ultimately it was a ‘valuable, intense, important thing’.
Sir Jonathan Miller appeared to have got his number
from the start. He regarded him as a confidence artist, a
crook. ‘He was a sort of idiotic, fly-by-night flâneur
who had some sort of pleasure at his own bad behaviour
and thought it was all rather charming and forgivable.
He was typical of the Sixties, really.’
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 SECOND WORLD WAR
D AVID S TAFFORD
A MAN WITH NO SIDE
T HIRTY S ECRET Y EARS : A G D ENNISTON ’ S
WORK IN S IGNALS I NTELLIGENCE 1914–1944
★ as that of Singapore which
By Robin Denniston
(Polperro Heritage Press 172pp £9.95)
FROM TIME TO time I attend informal meetings, some-
where in Whitehall, where academics and practitioners
get together to discuss matters of intelligence interest.
The items may be historic or current, and the participants
include elderly veterans from the Second World War as
well as far younger men and women who are always
charming but studiously evasive about their current jobs.
On my most recent visit I found myself sitting next to
a veteran of Bletchley Park, one of the rapidly diminish-
ing band of legendary code-breakers who cracked open
the ciphers of Nazi Germany and its allies, not to men-
tion those of neutral and friendly powers, and thus
helped shorten the war. The proper title for ‘BP’, as it’s
usually referred to by those who worked there, was the
Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS); for
the first twenty-two years of its life, beginning in 1919, it
was headed by Alastair Denniston, a Scottish one-time
schoolmaster and linguist from Greenock who had
worked on code-breaking in the Admiralty’s Room 40
during the First World War. But in February 1942 he
was abruptly demoted to running a much smaller diplo-
matic code-breaking unit in London. Amongst the
cognoscenti his removal still stirs passion and controversy.
So I ventured to ask the BP veteran what had gone
wrong, and what sort of man Alastair Denniston was.
He gazed at me for a moment, searching for the mot
juste, as I imagine he must have done since being firmly
indoctrinated some six decades ago into the absolute
secrecy that once blanketed the work of GC&CS.
‘Alastair was a man with no side,’ he said at last. What
this meant, he went on to explain, was that Denniston –
or ‘AGD’ as colleagues usually called him – had little
taste for office politics and still less aptitude for making
the tough organisational decisions that had become so
urgently needed for an operation that had grown expo-
nentially since 1939 (from 200 staff that year it grew to
10,000 by the end of the war).
Denniston himself never quite recovered from his
demotion, which affected not just him but his family.
His income took a sharp drop, he now drove a smaller
car, his wife had to learn how to cook, and his daughter
left school to go to secretarial college. When he died in
1961, after having returned for a while to schoolteach-
ing, he was still bitter about the whole affair. As was
40
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
usual at the time for denizens
of the Le Carré world, he
received not a single obituary.
His son Robin was also
affected. At Westminster
School at the time of his
father’s fall (in the same month
rocked even wider certainties),
he was luckier than his sister
because his fees were picked up
by the bounty of previous
Westminster benefactors. Yet
the episode also scarred him,
and over the last two decades Denniston: no taste for politics
he has made it a personal mis-
sion to rescue his father from historical oblivion. He’s
written articles in specialist journals, produced a book
about the diplomatic intercepts on which his father worked
in Berkeley Street after leaving BP, and now he’s gathered
the bits and pieces together in this work of filial piety.
Families are safe but can also be treacherous. One of
the many useful things to be had from this book is its
portrayal of how much GC&CS in its early days resem-
bled a family. It was small, everyone knew one another,
its members were recruited personally, and because of
the high level of secrecy its members tended to keep to
themselves both socially and professionally. So when
some of the family decided that ‘AGD’ was no longer
up to the job and schemed to have him removed, he felt
their betrayal acutely.
Not that he ever felt able to share any of his feelings
with his son. Denniston senior was a dour and reticent
golf-playing Scot with a craggy face and clipped quar-
ter-deck manner who himself was almost impossible to
decipher. It’s painful to read, for example, how he took
his son for several golfing weekends during the final
summer of peace in 1939, but spoke little of anything
else between rounds. ‘Neither of us was good at small
talk,’ confesses his son, ‘or conversation in general when
not on pre-arranged topics.’ Good for a spook, no
doubt, but surely hard on his son.
So to try and rescue his father from historical oblivion
could have been a recipe for disaster. Certainly, Robin
Denniston writes at times so closely to his subject that
for anyone unfamiliar with the Bletchley Park story it
will be hard to crack the code. Oddly for a former pub-
lisher, too, he organises his text somewhat confusingly –
perhaps this is another trait he inherited from his father.
Yet the effort pays off because he is as clear-eyed about
his father’s limitations as he is about his undoubted
achievements. He was not cut out, he admits, for the
high-profile leadership demanded at Bletchley Park by
1942, was so paranoid about security that it rendered him
unable to delegate, and did not get on with his immediate
 SECOND WORLD WAR
boss and fellow Scot, the Secret Intelligence Service chief
Sir Stewart Menzies. ‘His management skills’, admits his
son frankly, ‘were not up to his cryptanalytical abilities.’
On the plus side, however, ‘AGD’ recruited wisely and
creatively before the war to find brilliant cryptanalysts
such as Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, crucially
acquired vital information from Polish cryptanalysts about
F REDERICK TAYLOR
GRIM GALLANTRY
B OMBER B OYS : F IGHTING B ACK , 1940–1945
★ campaign against Germany during the Second World
By Patrick Bishop
(HarperPress 429pp £20)
T HE ROLE OF the RAF aircrew, who manned the
Bomber Command aircraft that inflicted indescribable
destruction on the cities of Hitler’s Germany, has been
highlighted by a wave of new books on the Second
World War in the air, many published to mark the sixti-
eth anniversary of that conflict’s end.
Most have been written in English, but an increasing
number have appeared in German. Chief, or perhaps most
notorious, among these German writers has been Jörg
Friedrich. The Fire (German: Der Brand), first published in
2002 and recently translated (see LR, March), is a thor-
ough and – when he stops beating the drum of victim-
hood – affecting account of the sufferings of Germany’s
civilians, around half a million of whom died as a result of
Allied bombing. The Fire is based on secondary sources
and oral history collections, often gathered years after the
war by local history groups. Almost all of this material had
been available in specialist and regional studies, but Herr
Friedrich did the general public a service by collecting it
into a single volume.
The trouble is that, perhaps at the behest of Bild-
Zeitung, the right-wing German newspaper (comparable
to the British Sun) which serialised his book and gave it a
decisive shove on the road to bestseller status, Friedrich
succumbed to the temptation of making attention-seizing
generalisations about the nature of air warfare.
Friedrich condemns the RAF’s campaign as futile in
military terms and almost exclusively aimed at slaughter-
ing non-combatant Germans and destroying their cultural
heritage. But he then goes much further, using the vocab-
ulary of the Holocaust to describe Bomber Command’s
raids over Germany. The attacks represent ‘mass-extermi-
nation’, air raid shelters become ‘crematoria’, victims
killed in the shelters by carbon monoxide are ‘gassed’,
bomber formations are Einsatzgruppen (‘task groups’),
which was the term used to describe the SS death squads
that murdered millions of Jews and other undesirables in
41
the German Enigma machine, and played a key role in
promoting full co-operation with the Americans against
some fairly high-placed opposition. It’s clear from all the
evidence, and not just his son’s wishes, that the Bletchley
Park that emerged from the war with such glory was built
on the firm foundations laid by Alastair Denniston.
Not bad, in the end, for someone with no side.
Poland and Russia – and so on.
His view of Britain’s wartime intentions, though
extreme and short on context, is fair comment. His use
of Holocaust vocabulary is downright creepy. There is,
however, a third point at issue. Herr Friedrich has con-
vinced himself that the rectitude of the RAF’s bombing
War represents a national sacred cow, which we British
are determined to defend to the death. Hence our
unjustified – in his eyes – criticism of The Fire.
This is, of course, ludicrous. Who can fail to be aware
of the profound and understandable disquiet with which
the British public, and especially its chattering and writ-
ing classes, views the wartime bombing of Germany? It
all began soon after VE-Day, when photographs were
published showing the horrific extent of the damage
done. By the Sixties, following the publication of David
Irving’s brilliant but flawed Destruction of Dresden, furtive
guilt had turned in many quarters into aggressive disgust.
Soon one could scarcely turn on the TV without see-
ing hapless RAF veterans subjected to accusations of
senseless mass murder by bien-pensant pundits in bright
kipper ties. After several decades of such experiences, so
punch-drunk were these aging warriors that, when I
requested interviews for my book on the bombing of
Dresden, many refused, unable to believe that a bearded,
Guardian-reading whippersnapper such as myself would
miss the opportunity to pillory them yet again.
Most relented in the end. And they have spoken to
Patrick Bishop too, for Bomber Boys. His previous book,
Fighter Boys, described the wartime lives of British fighter
pilots. The bulk of it amounted to a kind of oral history
of the Battle of Britain, following the fates of those who
risked and often lost their lives in man-to-man aerial
combat to save their country when it stood alone against
Hitler’s might. Such an account, however harrowing its
descriptions of death and suffering, could only celebrate
its subjects. Not a moral qualm in sight.
Not so with Bishop’s new book. Bomber Boys has a
similar format but tackles a grimmer story, set against
the backdrop of an altogether less hospitable ethical ter-
rain. If the ‘fighter boys’ were glamorous cavalrymen
hurling themselves at the enemy lines then returning at a
trot, the bomber crews were mud-and-bullets soldiers,
in for the wearying, often brutal long haul of a five-year
war of attrition. And, all too often, not returning at all.
Things get worse. Those nice young chaps from
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 SECOND WORLD WAR
Bomber Command, so polite and sen-
sitive-seeming (as Martha Gellhorn saw
them when she did her heart-melting
piece for Collier’s Magazine in 1943),
who took off in their Stirlings and
Halifaxes and Lancasters to brave the
night-fighters and the flak over
Germany, killed hundreds of thousands
of enemy civilians.
Drawing in many cases on inter-
views with veterans, Bishop paints a The boys: lives in the air
frank and unsentimental picture of
their lives, in the air and on the ground. Neither does he
flinch from describing what happened to ordinary
Germans after the boys dropped their bombs, though this
is not the main theme of his book. His aim is to show
who these young flyers were, how they felt about the risks
they took and the towns they bombed, how they lived and
– sadly – how their young lives ended.
More than 55,000 bomber aircrew died, 44 per cent
of all those who served. Bomber Command suffered the
worst attrition rate of all except the navy’s submarine
branch. The tubes sliding under the sea and the tubes
flying through the sky became in near-equal measure
metal mausoleums of youth.
Bishop narrates with the combination of cool curiosity
and warm engagement common to the best foreign corre-
spondents (a category to which, of course, he belongs). He
gives a brisk summary of how the bomber weapon was
developed, before and during the war, and of the escalation
in the compulsive technology of destruction that would
GENERAL
D AVID C ESARANI
RETURN TO BOLECHOW
THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION
★ the more he senses that the
By Daniel Mendelsohn
(HarperPress 512pp £25)
DANIEL M ENDELSOHN ’ S AWARD - WINNING book is a
milestone in the transition from the memory to the his-
tory of Hitler’s genocide campaign against Europe’s Jews.
Although it ostensibly records the fate of one family at
the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, the
substance concerns the efforts of a young American sixty
years later, two generations and one continent away from
the events in question, to reconstruct what happened. To
this end Mendelsohn assiduously tracks down survivors
and eyewitnesses all over the world and assembles an
42
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
inflict on humanity the horrors first of
Warsaw, Coventry and Belgrade, then
later Hamburg (recently re-examined
in a skilfully-narrated account by
Keith Lowe), and Dresden.
However, his book is more social
than military history, and none the
worse for that. Its blessed lack of ana-
lytic flab and strategic mumbo-jumbo
is Bomber Boys’ strength. Bishop skil-
fully portrays that particular time and
that group of human beings and that
particular tragic situation. Above all, he reveals how
humanity stubbornly survives even within inhumanity.
The telling details are all here. The damp Nissen huts
on the flatlands of East Anglia, with their lumpy beds and
smoky stoves, where the boys slept and passed the time
between missions – and from where the kitbags and cases
of belongings would disappear when their owners failed
to come back. Here too are the snatched pleasures of vil-
lage pubs and dances, the girls who soon realised that
their beaux could be canoodling and joking one
moment, then just hours later incinerated in a burning
plane, 15,000 feet above Germany. Here are those who
somehow survived against the odds – to grant us their
recollections. None gloats over the destruction they
wrought. Few, however, regret it or judge it all in vain.
May Patrick Bishop’s moving, sensitively written
book gain many readers. May Herr Jörg Friedrich be
among them.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
archive of documents and
photographs. But his search
for direct recollection of
what happened to his rela-
tives ultimately proves disap-
pointing. The closer he gets,
truth will always elude him.
However much he wants to
repossess ‘the lost’ he realises
that ‘they had been specific
people with specific deaths,
and those lives and deaths Mendelsohn: searching
belonged to them, not me’.
Mendelsohn begins his odyssey with memories of his
own childhood in America during the 1960s, when
family gatherings were punctuated by the sighs and tears
of heavily accented elders about something that could
not be uttered, at least not in front of the Kinder. His
grandfather regaled him with stories of the old country,
 GENERAL
but when it came to the fate of the relatives who had
remained there he would only say ‘the Nazis killed
them’. The teenage Daniel wanted to know more and
started contacting aged relatives for information. In his
mid twenties he became more interested in his Jewish
identity and devoted time both to learning Hebrew and
travelling in search of his lost family. After a decade of
enquiries he knew about almost all of them except
Shmiel Jäger (his grandfather’s brother) and his family,
who had stayed in Bolechow, in Poland.
The death of Mendelsohn’s grandfather led to an
accretion of sources that provoked as many questions as
they answered. Daniel inherited the Yizkor Book of the
Bolechow Jews, a memorial volume assembled by sur-
vivors after the war to commemorate the destroyed com-
munity. He also obtained letters from Shmiel pleading for
help to get his family away from the ‘hell’ of Poland.
Why had the American branch not helped? He began to
interview survivors in the States, many of whom he had
known for years without realising their crucial status as
witnesses. Often by the time he discovered that someone
could help him it was too late: they had died. He travels
to Poland, where he visits Auschwitz-Birkenau, and L’viv
in Ukraine. Finally, he reaches Bolechow.
In the town, now called Bolekhiv, he meets old people
who vaguely remember Shmiel and his family. In the
Jewish cemetery he locates headstones of the Jäger family.
But his search to find out how they died gives way to a
preoccupation with how they lived and what sort of peo-
ple they were. Only other Jews, survivors, can shed light
on this. The subsequent trawl through the diaspora of
surviving Bolechow Jews takes him to Australia, Israel,
Sweden and Denmark. He encounters remarkable people
and thanks to their memories he pieces together the char-
acter of Shmiel, his wife Ester, and their four daughters.
He also discovers that one girl, who was hidden with her
father by Poles, was pregnant at the time they were dis-
covered and shot. Who was the father? Was it the Pole
who helped conceal them?
In the dramatic last stages of his quest, which produce
the best writing in the book, Mendelsohn retraces his
steps to Bolechow and chances on some locals who
knew about the Jewish fugitives, the courageous Polish
schoolteacher who hid them, and the gentile friend who
brought them food. He is even led to the tiny cellar in
which his relatives were hidden and, most poignantly,
the place where they were murdered. At this point the
pursuit seems to be over. But is it?
Mendelsohn now confronts the dilemma of all histori-
ans, which is that the nearer you get to your subject the
more it recedes. In some dubious passages he reconstructs
from the available evidence, that is to say he imagines,
what happened to hundreds of Jews, including members
of Shmiel’s family, murdered in a community hall in
October 1941 or jammed into cattle cars taking them to
43
Belzec death camp. But such specific experiences will
always escape the historian, and there are matters of
decency as well as professional humility that need to be
considered before even attempting to recapture them.
More pressing, perhaps, in a book of over 500 pages, is
the question of the subject. What should be centre stage:
the seeker or the sought? Is Mendelsohn’s journey of self-
discovery as important or as interesting as the fate of an
historic community? This genre began with Theo
Richmond’s Konin, published in 1996, but in Richmond’s
case the author played second fiddle to the community
that was being rescued from oblivion. The Lost is like
Konin crossed with Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish, a rambling
meditation on Jewish mourning rites that strings rabbinic
disquisitions along a personal journey of identity. Like
Wieseltier, whose family also hailed from Bolechow,
Mendelsohn interweaves his narrative with rabbinic exe-
gesis, but the effect is to pile distraction onto digression.
Perhaps in order to evoke the haphazard process of dis-
covery Mendelsohn employs a prolix, meandering style in
which data appear sporadically, in bits and pieces. The
result is unfortunately confusing. Too often he gets in the
way of his story, for example when exploring his relation-
ship with his brother. Nor does it help when he moans
about the rigours of research and such hardships as flying
business class to Australia. The travails experienced by the
relatives of Holocause victims coming to grips with histo-
ry are not without interest, but they pale by comparison
with the memories of those who were there.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
The Society of
Authors
Grants for Authors
The Society is offering grants to published
authors who need funding to assist in the
writing of their next book.
Writers of fiction, non-fiction and
poetry may apply.
The grants are provided by The Authors’
Foundation
and the K. Blundell Trust.
Closing date 30 April 2007.
For full details write with SAE to:
Awards Secretary, The Society of Authors,
84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SB.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 GENERAL
J W M T HOMPSON
AT DAGGERS DRAWN
F RIENDSHIP AND B ETRAYAL : A MBTION AND
THE L IMITS OF L OYALTY
★ Independence, but they fell out over tactics and strate-
By Graham Stewart
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 408pp £25)
THE SUBJECT OF this enjoyable book is the place of
friendship in public life. Some people would say friend-
ship has no real place there at all, and Graham Stewart
seems to acknowledge this cynical view by choosing as
his epigraph Harry Truman’s maxim, ‘If you want a
friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ But there is, as he
rightly indicates, more to the matter than that. The
paradox is that the life of politics, whether practised in
parliaments or courts, naturally encourages alliances that
can become close friendships – and then produces the
conflicts that destroy them. Destructive influences can
arise from a difference over principles (as with Edmund
Burke and Charles James Fox on the French
Revolution) or rivalry for power and position (Stewart
cites the personal antipathy between Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown, close allies in reforming the Labour
Party who later disagreed over who was to lead it). The
termination of a friendship between persons of power
can lead to highly emotional drama. There was a famous
scene in the House of Commons over the Fox–Burke
rupture. Both men were reduced to tears as their twen-
ty-five-year intimacy came to a painful and very public
end. Perhaps we should not expect anything at that
emotional pitch in these less demonstrative times, but, as
the title of the book implies, strong feelings are likely to
be aroused.
Such feelings were certainly involved in the various
episodes, drawn from several centuries, which are here
subjected to detailed and learned scrutiny. The bond
between Queen Anne and Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough, for example, involved a mutual passion so
intense that it provoked ribald comment in the unre-
strained press of the period. Much of the correspon-
dence that continually passed between the two (in
which they referred to each other as ‘Mrs Freeman’ and
uk ‘Mrs Morley’) reads like love letters. Marlborough’s met-
tlesome wife dominated her royal mistress to an extent
that was bound to cause trouble in that faction-ridden
court. Predictably, the friendship ended with Sarah,
worsted at last by a rival competing for affection and
power, quitting the scene in a storm of envy and disap-
pointment. The world of that uneasy, rather grubby late
Stuart court is evoked here with illuminating detail.
Readers not over-familiar with American history are
44
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
likely to learn quite a bit from another of Graham
Stewart’s case studies. Benjamin Franklin is no stranger,
partly because he was busy in many fields as well as
being a Founding Father of the United States; but of
his dear friend (and later enemy) Joseph Galloway, little
is now known. They were powerful influences in
the tempestuous events preceding Amer ican
gy and ultimately over where their duty lay. Their
friendship was strong enough to survive years of sepa-
ration, during which Franklin was representing the
American colonists in London or Paris and Galloway
was his ally and agent back home. Nevertheless, it
ended in great bitterness and even hatred. The contrast
between the f ates of the two men thereafter is
poignant. Franklin became a revered national hero;
Galloway died an impecunious exile and is buried in an
unmarked grave in Watford.
The most curious of the episodes discussed is this
book belongs to the final, dark days of Liberal England,
with H H Asquith, Prime Minister until December
1916, at the centre. Here Stewart has a rich store of
shattered friendships in elevated circles to ponder. When
Asquith, the lofty Balliol intellectual, was rudely evicted
from Downing Street by the upstart Lloyd George, it
was as wounding as any betrayal could be. But during
the Cabinet infighting while he tried to preserve his
place as Prime Minister, Asquith felt obliged to sack his
oldest friend Viscount Haldane, the Lord Chancellor,
who was no less bitter and resentful than his Prime
Minister became a little later. How highly these politi-
cians valued their personal positions, even as carnage
swept across the Western Front!
Extraordinarily, what probably hurt Asquith most of
all at this time was the ending of his infatuation with the
young Venetia Stanley, a friend of his daughter. The
affair is of course well known now and well document-
ed, because Asquith sent hundreds of billets-doux to
her, often several on one day, some of them written,
astonishingly, during Cabinet meetings at the height of
the Great War. When she decided to marry Edwin
Montagu, one of Asquith’s fellow Ministers and a trust-
ed friend, the double betrayal (as it must have seemed to
him) came to the ageing Prime Minister as a ‘death
blow’. It would have been even worse had he known
that his own wife, in self-defence, had secretly encour-
aged the match. Betrayal upon betrayal.
None of these episodes, narrated as they are with
impressive knowledge of their periods, can be said to
offer a notably uplifting lesson. They show that people
like to get their own way, are not too scrupulous
about how they do so, and generally put their own
interests first. Friendship, when it has to co-habit with
ambition and power, can be a fragile thing.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 GENERAL
A LLAN M ASSIE
A WRITERS’ CENTURY
I NNER WORKINGS : E SSAYS, 2000–2005
★ Coetzee is in most respects an
By J M Coetzee
(Harvill Secker 304pp £17.99)
ONE OF THE minor consequences of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature and of being a double Booker winner
is that your publishers will bring out a collection of your
book reviews and other articles, even though such things
are nowadays usually considered to be unmarketable.
This is actually the second collection of Coetzee’s essays
and reviews to have been published, the earlier one –
Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999 – followed his
first Booker Prize. The present book is made up princi-
pally of reviews for the New York Review of Books, with
also a few pieces written as introductions to new editions
of books such as Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
The essays in this collection fall into three groups. The
first deals with writers old enough to have experienced
the catastrophe of the 1914–18 war and the dislocation
and ideological ferment of the interwar years. Five of
them – Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz, Joseph
Roth, and Sándor Márai – were born subjects of the
Habsburg Empire. Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin
in 1892, a member of an assimilated Jewish family.
Robert Walser was Swiss, but lived in Berlin from 1905
to 1913; his first books were published there. He spent
his last years in a Swiss asylum for the mentally ill. ‘I’m
not here to write,’ he said, ‘I’m here to be mad.’
The second group of essays is concerned with four
writers whose life and work were shaped – one might
say, dominated – by their experience of the horror of
the 1939–45 war, the Nazi regime and the Holocaust:
Günter Grass, Hugo Claus, W G Sebald and Paul Celan.
The final group constitutes a very mixed bag: Greene,
Beckett, Whitman, Faulkner, Bellow, Philip Roth,
Nadine Gordimer, Márquez, Naipaul. Most of these are
reviews of individual books rather than overviews of a
lifetime’s work, as the earlier essays are. Finally there is a
piece about the John Huston–Arthur Miller film The
Misfits that has some interesting observations on the dis-
tinction between our awareness of ‘reality’ when reading a
book and when looking at photographs or watching a
movie. ‘Part of the reason why the debate on pornogra-
phy is still alive in respect of the photographic media
when it has all but died out in the case of print is that the
photograph is read, and justifiably so, as a record of some-
thing that really happened. What is represented on cellu-
loid was actually done at some time in the past by actual
people in front of a camera.’
45
Not surprisingly, perhaps the
more interesting of these essays
are to be found in the first two
groups, partly no doubt because
the distance in time makes it
easier to arrive at a judgement.
old-fashioned critic, with appar-
ently little interest in literary
theory (in this he is like most
practising novelists). His method
in these essays is straightforward. Coetzee: expository
He sketches his subjects’ biogra-
phies and describes some of their books. No doubt this
course was determined by the probability that the reader-
ship of the NYRB would not be familiar with the work of
the writers he is discussing.
Indeed the method is that of Johnson in the Lives of the
Poets, and Coetzee has many of Johnson’s virtues: lucidity,
good sense and generosity. Few will agree with all his
judgements – I think he underrates Sándor Márai’s Embers
for instance, and can’t agree that it ‘reads like a sometimes
clumsy narrative transcription of a stage play’. On the other
hand this essay, like most of the others, tells me things I did
not know. ‘Among Hungarians the consensus seems to be
that Márai will ultimately be remembered for his six vol-
umes of diaries’, which ‘are not yet available in English’.
Coetzee’s generosity is evident in the essay on Nadine
Gordimer, all the more so because she has herself been
severely critical of his reluctance to engage in his novels
with the political questions of their native South Africa
and of his subsequent removal to Australia. He admires
Gordimer’s devotion to the idea of justice, while making
the point that in her later fiction she is ‘sometimes con-
tent to gesture toward what she means rather than pin-
ning it down in words’. A nice reproof from one Nobel
prize winner to another.
The essay on Faulkner is disappointing, but this is
because it is chiefly concerned (as its title indicates) with
Faulkner and his biographers, a subject far less interesting
than the work of perhaps the greatest American writer of
the twentieth century. Moreover Coetzee, who has him-
self done time as an academic, thinks that ‘a position as
writer in residence on some quiet Southern college cam-
pus might have been the salvation of William Faulkner’ –
‘salvation’ that I can’t see he was in need of. Moreover,
dismissive of Faulkner’s stint in Hollywood (no worse
perhaps for a writer than academic life?), he declares that
he ‘had no gift for putting together snappy dialogue’.
What about To Have and Have Not, which Faulkner so
freely and brilliantly adapted from Hemingway’s novel?
The essay on Bellow, written as a review of the repub-
lication in the Library of America of his first three novels
– Dangling Man, The Victim and The Adventures of Augie
March – is particularly good. Though Coetzee nods to
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 GENERAL
conventional opinion in agreeing that Bellow’s ‘noon-
time stretches from the early 1950s (Augie March) to the
late 1970s (Humboldt’s Gift)’, his analysis of these early
novels actually brings this into question. He finds the first
two spare and well shaped; Augie March, which begins so
brilliantly, overblown and rhetorical, like – I would say –
the later novels hailed as masterpieces. Augie March, he
observes, was admired because ‘above all, it seemed to say
a great “Yes!” to America. Now, in retrospect that “Yes!”
can be seen to have come at a price: the price of critical
T HOMAS H ODGKINSON
NOW LOOK HERE
T HE E YE : A N ATURAL H ISTORY
★ known as ‘extramission’, retained its popularity for a
By Simon Ings
(Bloomsbury 336pp £17.99)
IN 1990 A former prostitute named Fatou Sarre was tried in
Alsace for the murder of her mother-in-law. Why, the pros-
ecutor wanted to know, had Fatou, after bludgeoning Odile
Gayean to death with a hammer, proceeded to gouge out
her eyeballs? Fatou’s reply was simple but surprising: she had
been afraid that the dead woman’s retinas would preserve an
image of her in the act of murder. The curious thing –
okay, one of the curious things – was that the origin of this
belief wasn’t traced to Fatou’s childhood in Senegal, but to
a Bollywood film she had happened to see, which itself had
borrowed the notion from nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century European fiction (by, among others, Jules Verne).
These novelists had been inspired in their turn by the
work of distinguished scientists, serious truth-seekers, most
notably Professor Wilhelm Kühne of the University of
Heidelberg, who devoted years of his life to exploring
whether ‘optograms’ might prove useful in crime investi-
gations. Police hunting for Jack the Ripper actually took
such pictures, photographing the victims’ retinas through
the aperture of their pupils. Would they reveal an image of
‘Eddy’, the Prince of Wales’s son, as some suspected? Alas,
not. The trouble was, first, that the area of focus in the
human eye is very small. Only about one degree of what
we see, at any given moment, is sharply defined. Secondly,
the retina doesn’t act like photographic paper, fixing an
image; the impression changes constantly, and isn’t frozen,
as it would have to be, at the moment of death.
The struggles of Kühne and his followers – described
here by Simon Ings with the clarity and concision that
make his book a pleasure to read – illustrate how far we
still had to go, a hundred years back, towards a compre-
hensive understanding of how the eye works. That said,
we had already come a long way. It wasn’t until relatively
recently that anyone realised light played a part.
46
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
consciousness.’ The novel set Bellow on the path he
would follow, one which led to novels in which the dis-
cursive essayistic passages dominate and eventually come
close to obliterating the true fictional elements.
All these essays throw up interesting questions; all are
enjoyable to read. Coetzee’s great merit is that he is an
expository critic, one who makes you want to turn away
and read the books he is discussing, whether for the first
time or not.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
The Greek Atomists held that objects emit ghostly holo-
grams of themselves, called ‘eidola’, which we catch in our
eyes. An absurd conjecture, according to Plato. What could
be more obvious than that our eyes themselves send out a
visual ray, which hits an object, before returning to us with
information about it? This kind of theory, which became
remarkably long time – until the former governor of Basra,
placed under house arrest by the psychotic Caliph in the
eleventh century AD, decided to make the most of his
twelve-year incarceration by conducting a series of experi-
ments into the properties of light. The resulting Kitab al
Manazir (Book of Optics) by Ibn al-Haythem made use of
the camera obscura, set out the laws of refraction, and
showed that its author realised, as many of his predecessors
had failed to do, that the business of seeing takes place
inside the eyeball, as opposed to on its surface. It remained
the authoritative work on the subject for centuries.
It must be said that, as this scientific strand of Ings’s book
approached the modern era, I found it increasingly hard to
follow; and conversely, in his Darwinian account of how
the eye evolved, it was the early stuff that left me feeling
bewildered. Apparently it all goes back to an unexpected
dimple. (Dimples resulted in the type of compound eyes
you find on insects.) I blame myself, not Ings, for these
difficulties. His prose style is excellent – remarkably lack-
ing in self-indulgence for a novelist – and he covers an
astonishing amount of ground in his 336 pages. If you
want to know the reason for tears, how to tell if someone
fancies you, and why the grass does, in fact, appear green-
er on the other side of the fence, all the answers are con-
tained inside the covers of this book. I’m still not clear on
why the moon looks white, despite the fact that its dust is
grey-black. There is no discussion, as I might have hoped
for, of how the infestation of CCTV cameras in our coun-
try fits into the zoologist Michael Chance’s theory of the
role of the eye in society. And I would have liked more on
the part played by visual stimuli in the development of the
brain (as a man with a lazy left eye, I have long suspected
that my brain is in some way defective as a consequence).
But I can see – if I use my right eye – that it’s churlish to
complain about the odd lack, when so much has been
provided, and in such a comparatively small space.
Incidentally, there is one documented case of optograms
 GENERAL
being used to secure a successful conviction. In 1925 Fritz
Angerstein, a resident of Limberg in Germany, was
charged with hacking to death eight members of his
household with the aid of a small hatchet. The police
announced to the courtroom that they had photographs
THE LAST LIVE wrestling match I DAN J ONES WRESTLES WITH
saw was at the Cambridge Corn
Exchange in 2002. The highlight T WO B OOKS ON F IGHTING
was a ‘Fatties Match’, in which
three men with a combined weight of nearly 100 stone
cavorted around the creaking ring. They were wearing
leotards and tiny pairs of underpants, and performed
numerous unlikely somersaults that did none of them
much physical damage, but made a thunderous noise.
According to the chronology of Marcus Trower’s new
book, The Last Wrestlers (Ebury 387pp £10.99), while I
was watching obese men tickle each other, he was in
Nigeria, tracking down proper fighters. Trower regards
modern Western wrestlers (from men like Big Daddy and
Giant Haystacks, to the stars of the American WWE
shows aired on Sky Sports) as frauds and freaks. As the
subtitle - ‘A Far-Flung Journey in
Search of a Manly Art’ – makes
clear, his book is an exploration of
those corners of the world where
wrestling is still considered manly.
First stop is India, where Trower
goes looking for a mystical, spiritual
dimension to wrestling. What actu-
ally happens is that he gets diarrhoea,
learns about a man who wrestled a
tiger, and discovers that the best
wrestlers have small penises. Some of
them claim to have shrunk their
penises so much (through the strict Mongolian wrestlers: punch drunk
celibacy necessary to training) that
they ejaculate through their feet.
Next up is Mongolia. Apparently in Mongolia wrestlers
have some of the status and many of the airs and graces of
English Premiership footballers. As in India, not a lot of
wrestling takes place, but there’s a great deal of vodka and
fermented mare’s milk drunk. Trower also discovers that
one great wrestling monk of Mongolian folklore was said
to have been capable of lifting up a camel. In Nigeria,
Trower’s third destination, he learns that not so long ago,
it was possible to marry the girl of your choice simply by
beating her brother in a wrestling match.
Finally, as the road-trip draws to an end, Trower sees
some proper action. He ventures to Brazil and observes
the rivalries between the mixed-martial-art gyms in Rio
de Janeiro. It’s a story with an interesting coda: back in
England, two rival Brazilian combatants fall out and
stage a bloody, half-hour fight on the end of Portsmouth
pier. The fight is the crowning set-piece and by far the
47
of the dead gardener’s retinas, which showed the accused
with the murder weapon raised in his clenched fist. At
this, Mr Angerstein threw in the towel, and confessed.
The aforementioned optograms were never produced.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
best sustained piece of writing
in the book.
Trower comes to see wrestling
as a primal test of male virility,
which in its modern guise is ‘descended from a form of
human rutting’. He laments the loss of its biological
function, even more so now that television has turned his
beloved sport into a ‘laughing stock’. The passages of
cod-anthropology in which he develops this theory at
times bog down the action. Perhaps Trower would have
been better off delving into the devil’s lair, and exploring
why it is that tens of thousands of American rednecks
have such a lust for watching steroid abusers slap each
other. Then again, maybe that sort of thing is best left to
professional wonk-chasers like Louis Theroux.
Either way, after last year’s glut of footballers’ ‘autobiogra-
phies’, it is splendid to read such an
accomplished book about sport.
Trower is clearly in thrall to his sub-
ject, and determined that the world
at large must learn about it. The
writing is fresh, free from cliché, and
passionate. This is a genuinely excit-
ing and entertaining book, and if it
doesn’t win Trower a sports-writing
gong of some sort, then I’ll change
my byline to Big Daddy.
In the epilogue to his book,
Trower admits a lifelong dislike of
punching people in the face. That’s
not a problem shared by the former
journeyman boxer Wayne McLennan, whose second
book, Tent Boxing (Granta 256pp £11.99), is a colourful
jaunt around small-town Australian fairgrounds. He lives
with a ragtag troupe of Maoris and Aborigines, who
travel the country fighting local hard-knocks for cash. At
least, that is what’s supposed to happen, but all most of
them seem to do is drink tins of lager and complain.
Unlike wrestling, boxing has a long and noble litera-
ture, rich in accounts of classic fights. So it’s a shame that
McLennan breezes past several match-ups that sound
genuinely enthralling, in particular one where the best
drunken black tent fighter is paired with a giant neo-
Nazi hick. Hazlitt would have had a field day with it.
McLennan has clearly found another exciting subject
– a journey into the unknown history of a mainstream
sport – but there’s too much of the dusty scenery, and
not enough of the unapologetic face-punching. Shame.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION
C AROLE A NGIER
THE INADEQUACY OF WORDS
A T RANQUIL S TAR : U NPUBLISHED S TORIES
★ possibly hell) must allot their deaths to people whose
By Primo Levi
(Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli)
(Penguin Classics 166pp £20)
THIS MONTH IT will be twenty years since Primo Levi
died. It’s hard to believe. But at least we will be getting a
new and (at last) complete translation into English of his
Collected Works, of which these stories are a sample. It
is a small but welcome consolation.
My main regret is that it is, of course, an American
publisher who has commissioned this, not a British one.
The American flavour of the text makes it feel as though
it is still written in a foreign language, left on our
doorstep like a foundling, instead of being laid sweetly
in our arms. Still, the foundling is worth it; and I aim
this complaint at the British publishers who did not take
on the project, rather than at the excellent American
publisher, Norton, who did.
A Tranquil Star is short, only 166 pages and seventeen
stories long. Seventeen is a decent number (though not
in Italy – Lilit had thirty-six), but there could surely
have been more. And I wonder what criterion Norton
used to pick this particular seventeen. In my view only
half a dozen are important, while another half dozen
equally important remain untranslated – stories that
explore Levi’s deepest themes, such as communication,
what it is to be human, and the difficulties and dangers
of love (eg ‘Quaestio de Centauris’ from Storie naturali, ‘I
sintetici’ from Vizio di forma and ‘Decodificazione’ from
Lilit). For the first new collection in seventeen years, my
choice would have been different.
Still, A Tranquil Star is mostly wonderful, and will per-
haps begin to change our understanding of Primo Levi.
In Britain in particular Levi is best known for his
Holocaust writings, which deliver a message of hope even
from the depths. But we did not know his reason: that if
you could not spread hope, it was better to remain silent.
And we did not know, or were only beginning to know,
that there was another, much darker, Primo Levi. That is
because we did not look into the places where he hid his
darker side: his poetry and – precisely – his stories.
Even the minor stories here are stamped with this
darker vision. ‘In the Park’ is the most light-hearted – a
jeu d’esprit about an autobiographer who enters the Park
of immortality reserved for literary characters, where
the weather is always spectacular, and there are no ordi-
nary people (for example, Levi jokes, no chemists), but
only ‘cops and robbers’, lovers and kings, and especially
48
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
prostitutes, ‘in a percentage absolutely disproportionate
to actual need’. But even here there is death and obliv-
ion, which in the Park are the same thing.
In ‘The Gladiators’, a couple attend an industrial ver-
sion of a bullfight, in which the bulls are replaced by cars;
in ‘Bureau of Vital Statistics’, a functionary in heaven (or
cards are piled on his desk every morning, until he rebels
over an eight-year-old child. In ‘The Sorcerers’, a pair of
Western anthropologists find themselves unable to repro-
duce a single item of their complex civilisation for their
hosts, who by contrast make their bows and arrows them-
selves. But just when we think that the Siriono represent
an ideal, we learn the opposite: they have forgotten all the
other skills they once possessed, and ‘teach us’, Levi
writes, ‘that not in every place and in every era is human-
ity destined to advance’.
The better and wittier the stories are, the darker they
grow. ‘Censorship in Bitinia’ describes the kind of Fascist
society Levi grew up in, in which the best citizens are the
stupidest – and the best censors, accordingly, barnyard
hens, one of whom stamps an approving claw-mark at the
end. ‘Buffet Dinner’ (like many of Levi’s poems) is told by
an animal, lost in a cruel and incomprehensible human
world. In ‘Knall’, young men dice with death with a new
toy, which kills cleanly at under a metre. But though ‘the
great majority of men feel the need … to kill their neigh-
bours or themselves,’ the narrator remarks with Swiftian
coolness, fortunately it is the shedding of blood they
desire. Consequently the knall has not so far become a
danger to society, ‘despite its obvious advantages’.
We are, clearly, at the opposite pole from the great
Holocaust writings. Levi’s self-imposed limitations there –
to observation, to the spreading of hope – have gone, and
the opposite has emerged: a teeming imagination, and a
deep despair. Both were so evident in his very first collec-
tion of stories that he published it under a pseudonym,
fearing, he said, to offend the readers of If This Is a Man
by offering them mere ‘entertainments’. And fearing even
more, he didn’t say, to undermine the message of hope in
the future that he determined, to the end, to spread.
The main mark of all the stories here – as in the knall,
the Park, the censoring hens – is Levi’s unleashed imagi-
nation, escaping like Innaminka the kangaroo from the
dinner party, ‘feeling his lungs fill effortlessly with air and
with joy’. And just occasionally Levi can remain, like
Innaminka, suspended, if not in joy, at least in air. ‘The
Fugitive’, for example, is about artistic imagination; and
though Pasquale’s best poem literally escapes him in the
end, he has been visited several times by the muse. And
‘The Girl in the Book’ is about another of Levi’s peren-
nial themes: the inadequacy of words, especially on the
page, to preserve real life, real memory, real people. This
is not a happy theme for a writer, especially a memorial
writer; but it is beautiful and true, and something he
 FICTION
emphasises in his Holocaust writing as well, when he says
that the whole story can never be told, because those
who knew it all died. In ‘Iron’ in The Periodic Table, for
instance, and here, in ‘The Girl in the Book’, he shows
that this is true not only of extreme experience, but of
everyone’s: all that is left of any of us is words.
That leaves the four darkest stories of all, which are also
the best, and the most inimitably Primo Levi. At the heart
of each lies a horror. The eeriest is ‘One Night’: a train
moves though a cold and empty landscape, until it meets a
fate I will not describe. Here the danger comes from the
outside, at least on the surface. In the other three stories the
horror is inner. In ‘The Magic Paint’, an experiment goes
horribly wrong when a man afflicted with an evil eye can
G ILL H ORNBY
BRIGHT BEGINNINGS
S OUTH OF THE R IVER
★ male role model, Uncle Jack – see above – violently
By Blake Morrison
(Chatto & Windus 528pp £17.99)
THE COMMON FOX may only have a walk-on part in
Blake Morrison’s new novel, but it does walk on rather
often. The urban, the rural, the fictional, the mythical
and the terrifying – the fox in all its different guises is
the sniffing, menacing leitmotif of this fictional explo-
ration of the social impact of the Blair years.
The action of South of the River actually takes place south
of two rivers: the Thames, of course, in that area to be
transformed by a dome, a railway and shedloads of city
cash; and the sleepier Waveney, on the Suffolk/Norfolk
border, where the deep-set traditions of country life are
suddenly under threat. The five main characters are all of
varying gender, colour and class, but they are connected by
both the social web and their regular brushes with a fox.
In the opening paragraph, set in the early light of that
new dawn that was 2 May 1997, Libby – bright, good-
looking advertising executive, married to a layabout –
watches an overgrown male fox wander proprietorially
through her South London garden as she ponders the
domestic chaos and professional challenges of the day
before her. The election is of little interest to her – it is
just ‘a boy thing, like football’. Nonetheless, during the
next five Blair years, her life is set to change.
From his agricultural business in Suffolk, sixty-year-old
Jack views the newly red Britain with gloom. He has just
lost an important contract, his wife keeps calling up to
moan and these New Labour upstarts are talking about
banning the one joy of his life – being Master of the local
Fox Hounds. If only he had a son to hand over the busi-
ness to, he could retire. But his only male descendant is
49
no longer turn his gaze outward. In ‘The Molecule’s
Defiance’, a batch of paint spoils and forms a disgusting,
glutinous mass – as sometimes happens, the chemist-narra-
tor tells us, for no reason: a symbol of the victory of ‘con-
fusion over order, and of unseemly death over life’. And
finally, in the title story, a ‘tranquil’ star explodes, and in ten
hours is reduced to vapour. Again the reason is mysterious.
‘Maybe,’ the story says, like the spoiled paint ‘it contained
in its heart an imbalance or an infection, as happens to
some of us’. In any case, those who had pondered the value
of the stars are left without an answer. ‘That was the answer,’
the story concludes. That is the message of Primo Levi’s
darkest tales. The answer is nothing. Not even words.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 27
his useless nephew Nat – who is also, coincidentally,
Libby’s layabout husband. Nat is posh, spoilt and cocky.
He calls himself A Writer, though his writings have never
made it into print, and he teaches creative writing to oth-
ers, part-time. He does have some excuses for his emo-
tional incompetence, among them the fact that his only
‘blooded’ him at a meet when he was twelve.
Nat does have a certain charm, or he wouldn’t still be
friends with Harry – a bright, black ex-pupil of Nat’s
now working as a reporter on a South London paper,
much to Nat’s derision. Harry spends the first morning
of Blair’s Britain interviewing a working-class dad who
is convinced an oversized fox attacked his sleeping tod-
dler in the garden. Harry fails to believe him, and then
is haunted by guilt. Guilt is a big thing with Harry – his
guilt about a son he fathered as a teenager has, Morrison
would like us to believe, kept him out of any sexual or
romantic entanglement for sixteen years. Yes, well.
Each chapter is presented from a different character’s
point of view, and Morrison’s authorial command is
stronger in some than others. He is generally happier in
the male skin – the nice old codger Jack and feckless Nat
are entirely convincing. With the weedy Anthea, though,
he comes rather unstuck. Anthea is a past pupil of Nat’s,
an aspiring writer currently working as a local council
Tree Officer (Assistant Grade). ‘“Don’t laugh,” Anthea said
to people when they asked her what she did.’ The reader is
given a fraction too much detail about local council
organisation for any danger of that. But her literary output
is much more comedic. She sends her ‘Book of Foxes’
(‘But vixen felt lonely. The rocks wouldn’t eat with her.
The wind wouldn’t sleep with her. The moon was cold
and distant.’) to her old tutor Nat. The old fraud first falls
for her literary prowess and then into bed with her.
Blake Morrison has restricted his story to the first five
years of the New Labour administration; if his characters are
his review of that time, it is a positive one. They live
through upheavals, they change direction, they face fear.
But no impending disasters – Nat drunk and unready for his
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION
first public lecture, Jack’s business crisis, Nat and Anthea’s
affair – turn out to be as bad as all that. By the end, every-
one is a bit richer financially, and no poorer emotionally.
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
TEUTONIC TITANS
M EASURING THE WORLD
★ choose some already distant past as his setting.’
By Daniel Kehlmann
(Quercus 292pp £12.99)
THIS NOVEL COMES freighted with high expectations. It
has sold a million copies in its native Germany and has
been hailed as the most successful German novel since
Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. At first glance it is hard to see
why. Measuring the World tells the story of two nine-
teenth-century scientists: Alexander von Humboldt, the
Prussian naturalist and explorer, and Professor Gauss, the
German mathematician and astronomer. We follow their
parallel lives as they set out to measure the world.
Humboldt, son of a Prussian aristocrat, discovers the
channel that links the Orinoco to the Amazon, collects
thousands of plants and hundreds of animals, inspects
natives for head lice, and documents every peak and
river in his path. Carl Gauss, the greatest mathematician
since Newton, invents the prime number theorem, pre-
dicts the orbit of the planet Ceres, believes that space
bends and writes a groundbreaking work of mathematics
at the age of twenty.
What saves this book from being a roll call of Teutonic
achievements is its subversive sense of humour. Humboldt
was the younger brother of Wilhelm and both siblings
were marked out for greatness from an early age. One
became a man of culture and the other a man of science.
In those respects they were much like the Attenborough
brothers of our day, but any similarities to Dickie and
David end there. In this novel Humboldt is portrayed as a
madcap Don Quixote whose eccentric behaviour includes
tying his arm behind his back for a week to accustom
himself to physical pain; he thinks nothing of electrocuting
himself to further human knowledge. En route to the
New World he hooks up with Bonpland, who becomes
his faithful sidekick. For all his experience, Humboldt can
be quite blinkered. He can’t see what’s in front of his own
eyes – be it cannibalism or human corruption.
Gauss’s genius also borders on the insane and the com-
ical. The child prodigy recites prime numbers when he
is nervous and jumps out of bed on his wedding night to
write down a mathematical formula. As an old man he
becomes a curmudgeon: he hates travelling, hates fic-
tion, hates theatre, and is forever cursing his stupid son.
So wrapped up is he in his own thoughts he hasn’t heard
50
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
There were once days before wars and honours scandals,
and South of the River is an entertaining reminder of them.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 27
of Napoleon. Books without numbers make him uneasy.
He thinks authors who tie their ‘fake inventions to the
names of real historical personages’ are ‘disgusting’. It is
a wry joke at the author’s own expense. Elsewhere
Humboldt comments: ‘It must be a foolish undertaking
for an author, as was becoming the fashion these days, to
The novel belies the German reputation for humour-
lessness and the author very much plays it for laughs
without demeaning his protagonists. What he conveys
so well is the presence of two extraordinary personali-
ties. They are egotistical to the point of solipsism and
determined to impose their order on the universe. The
schematic nature of the book should count against it but
oddly works in its favour. One travels the world, the
other stays at home. But who has travelled further in the
field of human knowledge? Gauss explores space and
time in his own head and his mind seems all-compre-
hending. He even has the uncanny habit of being able to
predict future technological developments.
It is hard to understand the significance of some of his
achievements as they are so abstract. At the age of nine-
teen, for example, he discovers a 17-sided figure. It is
part of Kehlmann’s in-joke with the reader that
Humboldt hasn’t got much of a clue about what Gauss
is talking about either.
Humboldt’s constant activity strikes his sister-in-law as
a form of madness, but his discoveries are easier to com-
prehend. The highlight of this book for me is
Humboldt’s climb up Chimborazo, the highest known
mountain in the world at the time. He and Bonpland
bleed from the gums and nostrils, vomit, and are racked
by hallucinations. It is eerily convincing and superbly
done. Their minds become unhinged during the ascent
as they are starved of oxygen. ‘Bonpland worked out that
he was apparently three people: one who was walking,
one who was watching the first one walking, and one
who kept up a running commentary in a totally incom-
prehensible language.’ The rest of the novel never quite
recaptures the intensity or high drama of this chapter.
Not much is known about Humboldt’s private life, as he
destroyed his private letters. This allows Kehlmann to take
certain liberties and there are inevitable hints about his
homosexuality. Gauss and Humboldt are both icons of the
German Enlightenment, which no doubt partially explains
the book’s astonishing success on the Continent. I am not
convinced that it will be such a bestseller here. If the book
were about Charles Babbage and David Livingstone, say,
that would be a different story. But it is a delightful read
and I, for one, will be glad to be proved wrong.
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 FICTION
D J TAYLOR
REVELATION BEFORE DAWN
TOMORROW
★ the case, reveals that she had an affair with the vet and
By Graham Swift
(Picador 248pp £16.99)
The Light of Day (2003), Graham Swift’s last outing, was a
singularly unhappy book. The unhappiness derived from
several sources: drab subject matter, drab treatment, but
most of all the feeling of an author weighed down and
made almost wretched by the very act of composition.
Seven years in the writing, the novel seemed to have had all
the meat stripped from its bones by the endless process of
revision to which it had clearly been subjected. Although
narrated by a private detective, and involving marital strife
and homicide, it had no mystery, as both crime and crimi-
nal were identified almost from the start. Worse, the trick
Swift had pulled off so successfully in the Booker-winning
Last Orders (1996) – assembling fragment upon fragment of
‘ordinary’ speech and extracting a genuine poetry from the
result – now seemed beyond him. The narrative voice in
The Light of Day was simply flat, and when it stopped being
flat it was because Swift had beautified it to the point
where it could no longer be associated with its narrator.
Tomorrow, while told by a woman and, in addition,
being a celebration of a happy marriage, turns out to be
a rather similar exercise. Most obviously, it takes the
form of a long, reminiscing monologue. Then again,
despite one or two exceedingly pink herrings trailed
over the early chapters, there is no mystery to it, as the
cat has been let out of the bag about half-way through.
Style-wise, it serves up repeated helpings of meat-and-
potatoes colloquial English in the assumption that a
fugitive poetry can be found lurking within. Finally,
there are the trademark South London locations – the
Putney domicile, the mention of Herne Hill and
Dulwich, all those dusty beats that Swift was prowling as
long ago as The Sweetshop Owner (1980). One knows –
how one knows – that as successful novelists grow older
they have a habit of writing novels that are like their ear-
lier books but more so, and yet the Picador blurb writer
who devised the phrase about ‘mapping new literary
territory’ seems to have come very late to the feast.
It is Midsummer 1995 and Paula – husband Mike
snoring beside her, twin teenage children asleep along
the corridor – is bracing herself for the revelations of the
approaching morning: Kate and Nick’s sixteenth birth-
day and the date on which their parents had long ago
settled for the unveiling of a particularly shocking secret.
Extra-mar ital affairs? Life-threatening illness?
Membership of the Conservative Party? Eyeing up the
51
successful quarter-century marriage and its proceeds
(Mike runs a popular science publishing company, Paula
is an art dealer), the reader rather thinks not.
Meanwhile, as the night crawls on, Paula reflects on the
beginnings of their relationship at the University of
Sussex, remembers various relatives with a bearing on
finally uncovers the secret: Mike has a non-existent
sperm count; the twins were conceived by way of artifi-
cial insemination; he is not their father.
Swift being Swift, and keener on cumulative effect than
on noisy climaxes, the moment of revelation never
comes: Tomorrow ends with Paula greeting the dawn,
inwardly inviting the twins to see just how far back the
ripples of family life can go. The reader may feel that this
is actually a cop-out, and that the children’s reactions
would have given the novel a moment or two of real, as
opposed to remembered, drama. With the suspense ele-
ment stoically extinguished, all that remains (as in The
Light of Day) is the voice. But Paula, though clearly an
agreeable sort, a loving wife and mother and just the kind
of person to have on the other side of the breakfast table
on a bleary morning in February, has great difficulty in
sustaining the 250 pages that Swift has put at her disposal.
It is not that she thinks in clichés – ‘Let me make one
thing absolutely clear’, ‘in case any doubt has entered
your mind’, ‘that wasn’t the point of the exercise’, all this
within a line or two – merely that Swift rarely manipu-
lates the drip of seemly platitude into anything effective.
There are several exceptions to this rule, in particular a
wonderful scene, towards the end, where Paula remem-
bers a Cornish holiday in which Mike saved the children
from drowning. In an atmosphere of high drama, her
motherly solicitude has an edge. Suddenly the writing
comes alive, takes on mysterious sheens and subtleties:
But there was a point when I knew, even before it
had actually quite happened, like a sudden flooding
current itself, fighting back a dreadful anti-current of
‘ifs’ and ‘might have beens’ and eternal anguish for
ever after, that my wonderful and adorable family, my
incomparable family, every precious member of it,
was going to be restored to me.
Meanwhile, the conundrum of Graham Swift’s career
remains: a novelist of absolutely scintillating brilliance – I
put down Waterland in 1983 thinking that it was one of the
most wonderful things I had ever read – who looks, for all
the incidental delight that his books continue to provide, to
have written himself into a corner so tight that he seems
barely able to move. There never was a writer yet who
liked being lectured on the books he ought to write, but
on this evidence the particular vein of South London
brooding in which he specialises is thoroughly exhausted.
It’s not merely Swift’s locales that begin to oppress; the real
drawback to the novels he currently writes is their form.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION
M ATT T HORNE
A SHOT OF ANXIETY
T HE U NKNOWN T ERRORIST
★ trated news-anchor Richard Cody (who believes that the
By Richard Flanagan
(Atlantic Books 336pp £14.99)
JOHN UPDIKE DECLARED in a recent interview that while
he was working on his last novel, Terrorist, his greatest fear
was that someone might use the title before him. Surely
there were dozens of authors, he argued, who’d want to
write a book with this title in the present climate. Well,
there was at least one: Richard Flanagan, author of Gould’s
Book of Fish, whose new novel The Unknown Terrorist takes
Updike’s cherished title and gives it an extra shot of anxiety.
The ‘unknown terrorist’ of the title is Gina Davies, a
26-year-old pole dancer at the Chairman’s Lounge club
in Sydney who likes to pretend she’s twenty-two. It’s
always worrying when a male author inhabits the char-
acter of a bisexual female stripper, but Flanagan’s cre-
ation is more than mere fantasy: her casual racism and
obsessive consumerism are well-observed character traits
and they make her feel real.
Flanagan was hugely successful in Australia with his sec-
ond novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, and his next
book, Gould’s Book of Fish, a beautifully produced volume
52
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
with marble end papers, fish paintings and several differ-
ent-coloured inks, was enormously admired by some.
This new book has little in common with its predecessor,
as if Flanagan has made a deliberate attempt to follow his
historical novel with something as contemporary as possi-
ble. Several of his characters, however, such as the frus-
Nazi swastika was ‘great branding’), his wife (who mouths
the words to TV advertisements as she watches them in
bed), and Jerry Mendes, his jargon-loving boss, seem like
characters better suited to a 1980s media satire than a
twenty-first-century one.
This may be deliberate. Flanagan seems to be suggesting
that his characters aren’t capable of coping with the way
the world has changed after 9/11, especially when terror-
ism comes to Australia. His characters make pompous
speeches about the security of their country and the glob-
al political situation, but realise even mid-rant that they
don’t know what they’re talking about. These scenes are
well observed, revealing how the media world struggles to
comprehend the actions of those who don’t share their
essentially liberal (but consumerist) values.
At the centre of Flanagan’s novel is a one-night stand
between his pole dancer and Tariq the suspected terror-
ist. The two snort cocaine from each other’s bodies, and
enjoy graphically rendered sex. Later she sees herself
with Tariq on the news described as the female accom-
plice of a man believed to have attempted to bomb the
Homebush Olympic stadium. The news reporter who,
days before, was paying her to allow him to conduct
gynaecological observations sets out to ruin her.
Flanagan enjoys reducing everything to financial trans-
actions. ‘Focus on the money,’ Gina tells herself, and it’s
advice Flanagan follows throughout. Gina strips for a
man named Frank Moretti who fills his house with
weapons and artefacts from famous atrocities. He makes
her strip to Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, in a scene
intended to emphasise that a man who pays a woman to
strip to classical music is no more sophisticated than
those who brave the repetitive R&B of the pole-dancing
club, except that for the woman dancing the classical
music can underline the wretchedness of the act: it’s one
of many attempts to inject poignancy into the deliber-
ately, relentlessly sordid narrative.
The Unknown Terrorist is too flippant and Flanagan’s
targets are too broad for the novel to be completely suc-
cessful in dissecting the anxieties of the present age, but
it’s never less than a ballsy, enjoyable read. Flanagan ends
by claiming that he owes his plot to Heinrich Böll’s
1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (he also
argues that it owes nothing to Paul Cox’s 1983 film Man
of Flowers, presumably a bigger concern in Australia than
it is here), but it’s really more like Showgirls as written by
Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
 FICTION
S AM L EITH
Memory is
the Key
DANCING WITH E VA
★ interrogator. Hans was captured by the Russians.
By Alan Judd
(Simon & Schuster 224pp £9.99)
AS A LITERARY editor, I often find myself staring in
despair at the latest pile of books silting the shelves of
my newspaper’s cupboard and wondering: will there
ever come a time when people get fed up with writing
books about the bloody Nazis? Not a week of the year
seems to pass without one: another historian picking
over the bones of the regime in the hope of finding a
microscopic scrap of factual meat neglected by other
scholars; or, more ambitiously (and questionably),
another novelist seeking either to inhabit and explain
atrocity or to borrow its gravity.
This is risky ground: banality and bad taste are the
least of the pitfalls. Look at how Norman Mailer just
came a cropper with The Castle in the Forest. Alan Judd’s
Dancing with Eva avoids bad taste, just about skirts banal-
ity, and is plainly and creditably interested in giving
moral and psychological life to the events it describes
rather than piggybacking on their horror. But it still, in
its polite way, overreaches, fetching up against the flinty
question of what a novelist relying for source material
on Fest, Kershaw, Trevor-Roper et al can offer to add to
them. I’m put in mind of Robert Lowell’s phrase:
‘heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact’.
Dancing with Eva is a slim, fastidiously and limpidly
written story about guilt, treachery and complicity. The
narrative is set in the present day, approximately. An
elderly widow, Edith, living in a somewhat dilapidated
manor house in Suffolk, has received a letter from an old
acquaintance. The hand-
wr iting of the letter is
Sütterlin (a defunct species
of Ger man copper plate).
The cor respondent, one
Hans Beck, wants to visit
her to talk about the past.
The novel is – with digres-
sions into memory – the
story of their conversation.
Hans and Edith are, as we
learn (I’m conscious of giv-
ing too much away, because
the facts of the story are
53
carefully, if not altogether unpredictably, unrolled in the
course of the narrative), possibly the two last people
alive to have been intimately involved in the last days of
the Führerbunker in Berlin. Edith was secretary and
companion to Eva Braun (an imaginary post, as Judd
notes in an afterword; there was no such person). Hans
was in charge of the Führer’s guards. Edith – escaping to
the British lines – was called upon to bear witness to the
death of Hitler, and eventually married her English
Hans and Edith are allowed – initially somewhat stiffly –
to dramatise two different moral or intellectual positions.
For Edith, the past is the past – there’s nothing you can do
about it. Forgiveness or expiation are impulses no more
meaningful than vengeance or guilt. Hans, by contrast, is
randy for the past. He tells Edith, once she (for reasons she
doesn’t quite understand) agrees to meet him, that he has
interviewed every survivor of the bunker he can find. It’s
not clear whether this is a form of pornography for him,
or of a need to be forgiven, or of – as he seems to suggest
– simple curiosity.
We do know that he does need to be forgiven. As they
circle each other, Judd hints that at the centre of their two
stories is a profound betrayal: of her, by him. The moment
of that betrayal is one that the two, in talking, shy from,
approach, and finally discuss. Unfortunately, such is the
build-up that the revelation can’t really seem shocking –
still less in the context of its historical background. A lot of
somewhat implausible expository dialogue sets the issues
up, but it dramatises an argument, not a relationship.
People don’t talk like this over tea: not even old Nazis.
‘The only way to recover one’s individuality is to
remember. Memory, no matter how false and unreli-
able, no matter that it is so often a construct to sustain
our contemporary survival, is the only key to what we
really are. Or rather, the only way of establishing
whether we really are anything at all.’ He put down
his cup. ‘I suspect that for you, Edith, the past is water
under the bridge. That is what you would say, yes?’
It’s the clunkier for Conrad’s Lord Jim being actually dis-
cussed in the novel at least eighty pages or so after this
reader had clocked it as a
reference point: that’s not
me patting myself on the
back, so much as pointing
out that the author need not
have elbowed me there
either.
I’m all for novels of ideas –
but it seems to me this gives
us too much in the way of
ideas, and too little in the
way of novel.
To order this book at £7.99,
see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION
F RANCIS K ING
TRADE SECRETS
S KIN L ANE
★ Bartlett conveys the reality of this arcane world in which
By Neil Bartlett
(Serpent’s Tail 344pp £10.99)
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY aspect of this extraordinary
novel is the vividness with which its author evokes a
small, secret pocket, long since demolished, of the City
of London as it used to be during the hot summer of
1967. Skin Lane, which provides the book with its
vaguely sinister title, is a fictional street that, like the
real-life Skinners Lane, is a turning off Garlick Hill. At
the time of the story, it is the heart of the fur trade, the
employers and proprietors of which are predominantly
Jewish. Now, when it often requires courage or defiance
to wear a fur coat, these establishments have vanished,
either closed down or, in a few cases, moved to places
with less ancient histories and lower rents.
In one of these then-prosperous businesses, 47-year-old
Mr Freeman, generally known as Mr F, has worked from
the age of fifteen at the delicate, demanding task of slicing
and stitching skins. His colleagues respect him for his skill
and dedication but he has little social contact with them.
Back in his Peckham Rye flat he is equally solitary, fol-
lowing a regime as rigid as that of his work. So far from
ever having been married, he has remained a virgin, and
his contact with his family is confined to occasional letters
between him and an older brother in Canada.
This existence of passionless detachment is disrupted by
an intermittently recurring dream of entering his bath-
room and, with horrified fascination, coming on a beauti-
ful young male body strung up by its heels above the
washbasin. After each of these visions, he finds himself not
merely dreading but also yearning for its repetition. One
day the boss’s pert, handsome nephew enters the firm and
Mr F is given the task of instructing him in the mysteries
of cutting the rare and therefore hugely expensive skins
that often seem still to retain the warmth of life when a
hand strokes them. Soon Mr F persuades himself that the
boy’s body is the one featuring in his dream.
The master becomes obsessed with the apprentice. As he
wields the dangerously sharp knives, one dreads that at any
moment he will lash out at the object of his tormented
desire. But in the event the only wound that he inflicts is
on his own hand. Eventually, he strikes a bargain with the
boy: he will rescue him from the predicament of having
got one of the girls in the business pregnant if in return
the boy submits to his sexual demands. It would spoil the
relentlessly created suspense to reveal what follows.
Mr F has his own name for the youth: ‘Beauty’. In his
54
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
childhood his favourite bedtime reading was Beauty and
the Beast. Throughout the book Bartlett draws compar-
isons between the old tale of a monster transformed by
the power of love into a handsome prince and his pre-
sent-day one of an ordinary man transformed by its
power into a monster. It is astonishing how persuasively
the sharp knives of the trade ‘look like the preparations
for some scene of torture’, and a porter under his bur-
den of exotic skins resembles ‘some hitherto unrecorded
species of beast … blunder ing hunch-backed and
wounded through the narrow city streets’. Such charac-
ters as the shrewd proprietor of the business, a rapacious
floozy whose married lover orders an extravagantly
beautiful fur coat for her, and the sombre woman who
presides over a gang of giggling, flirtatious girls in the
basement sewing-room, are all brilliantly portrayed.
I have only two criticisms. The first is that with drastic
cutting of superfluous repetitions, the story could have
been even tauter. The second is that I became irritated
by the way in which the author constantly nudges the
reader – ‘I am sure that you’re familiar with the phrase
He took my breath away’, ‘Look at him lying there’, ‘But I
get ahead of myself ’, and so on.
But original, disturbing and (some surprising gram-
matical solecisms apart) beautifully written, this is an
always fascinating work.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 27
R ICHARD G ODWIN
THE DARK SIDE OF ER
H OSPITAL
★
By Toby Litt
(Hamish Hamilton 511pp £14.99)
TOBY ‘ENGLISH’ LITT opens the eighth of his projected
twenty-six novels with a brilliant piece of defamiliarisa-
tion. He brings us in to land on the halogen-lit helipad
of Hospital in a Dauphin XTP 3000 piloted by Hank
‘Cowboy’ Smith; Bill ‘Zapper’ Billson unloads an
unidentified Caucasian male – plus a worried small boy
– into the waiting hands of Sir Reginald Saint-Hellier
and his trauma team. Electric doors shoom; strip lights
scroll. The language signifies science fiction – but it
takes a second reading to confirm that no detail Litt has
given us is especially futuristic, or inconceivable. In fact,
this is pretty standard modern medical procedure. But
isn’t it strange?
From Adventures in Capitalism alphabetically to his
more subdued Ghost Story, Litt has proved a master of the
strange. Hospital gets weird – voodoo porters dismember
 FICTION
one another, a nurse made of rubber buxomly stalks the
corridors on six-inch heels, Satanic rituals abound in the
chapel – but it begins, at least, in medical normality; it is
Litt’s understanding of the tension between normality
and fantasy that gives the novel its horrid chill.
Hospital is a monolithic, emblematic, labyrinthine
place: no definite article, no specified location. It is over
thirty storeys high and descends to at least six basement
floors. Our main point of contact is The Boy (who
seems to have arrived by accident), and as he tries to
escape, running about, naked, worrying about the apple
tree growing in his stomach (he swallowed a pip), we
begin to get a handle on the building.
Litt intersperses the boy’s panicky flight with one or two
page-long scenes from various departments, which gradu-
ally familiarise us with Hospital’s enormous cast of patients
and staff. There are dozens of overlapping storylines and
characters. On the one hand, we have the prostitute who
fakes an overdose to escape her pimps; the policeman who
once fell in love with her; the trauma nurse in love with
the surgeon; the surgeon in love with the anaesthesiolo-
gist; the birthing couple, etc. On the other, we have a
series of brilliantly named Haitian porters (Excellent
Excellent, Janvier Baptiste, Othniel Calixte); the kinky
Rubber Nurse; a terminally ill junior rebel called Chemo
Boy; Henderson MacVanish, Hospital’s chief obstetrical
consultant and absolutely the last person you would want
to leave your newborn child with.
Litt writes with a sort of impatient zip, peppered with
colloquial abbreviations as if he can’t wait to get on to
P AMELA N ORRIS
MOTHER’S MYTHS
S EIZURE
★ a child. The solicitor who
By Erica Wagner
(Faber & Faber 226pp £10.99)
SEIZURE BEGINS WITH hints of instability and violence. A
woman stands in front of a mirror, daubing her mouth
with an old, caked lipstick. In the room behind her,
there is a bloodstained knife and a man who may well be
dead. It could be a dream, or a vision of the future. Like
a folktale or ballad, or a lay by the medieval poet Marie
de France, the scene invites the reader to speculate about
powerful feelings. It also establishes the atmosphere of
this unsettling novel: poetic, passionate, and poised in
the hinterland between fantasy and real life.
The novel is set partly in England, partly in North
Amer ica. Its heroine is Janet, an attractive young
woman, director of a small arts centre, who lives in
London with a classical musician, Stephen. When she
55
the next bit. At times, it feels as if we are being given a
gurney-top tour of the building by some psychotic
porter. His matter-of-fact briskness can be hilarious:
‘The chaplain had said he didn’t mind the Chapel being
used for Devil worship, just so long as they cleaned up
afterwards. Then he’d confessed his bum-curiosity and
became an enthusiastic devotee; in return for a good hard
seeing-to, Sir Reginald got unrestricted access not only
to the Chapel but also to the communion wine and
wafers.’ Then, his momentary insights can be unexpect-
edly moving: ‘Case carried Nikki with surprising tender-
ness (yes, he quietly loved her) into the consulting room.’
Quite whether anyone needs 511 pages of this stuff is
another matter; Hospital is sprawling by design, but we
risk getting lost in its corridors, failing to distinguish
the cameos from the extras. Occasionally, Litt becomes
a little too pleased with his own undoubted cleverness,
and you admire rather than engage. The odd medical
error jars, too: you cannot defibrillate a flatline; you
must pump a flatline.
It is worth persevering, however. A spectacular climax
brings all together, amply repaying attention and crown-
ing Litt’s bizarre and original novel. This deserves to
multiply his following (though it might have the
unwanted side effect of doubling demand for home
births). More subtly, Hospital is also a heartfelt tribute to
the courage of ordinary medical staff. Albeit a very
twisted one. Now: I have an appointment with the
Rubber Nurse.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
learns that she has inherited
a small house from her
mother, she is bewildered
and incredulous. Janet had
always believed that her
mother died when she was
informs her of the bequest
is unable to provide further
information, and she sets
out alone to visit the house,
an old stone cottage many
miles to the north, beside Wagner: passionate
the sea. When she arrives,
she finds that the cottage is already inhabited by Tom,
an enigmatic young man with a curious halo of pale
hair. Tom refuses to leave and, despite her resistance,
exerts an eerie fascination over Janet, claiming her by
an act of love.
This is Erica Wagner’s first novel. In 1997, she pub-
lished a collection of accomplished short stories, and
some years later a biographical account of Ted Hughes’s
Birthday Letters, poems recalling the poet’s dead wife
Sylvia Plath. Wagner is herself a poet. These interests
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION
provide a context for her current work, in which stories,
poetic writing and a dead woman are all significant.
Seizure is a novel about storytelling, in particular the sto-
ries parents tell and their impact on children’s ideas and
behaviour. Janet’s father taught her to believe the myth
of a beautiful, lost mother. Tom’s mother entranced her
son with romances about sea-folk and their passions: a
woman who runs away with a demon-lover; a young
man who falls in love with a seal-woman and kidnaps
her to be his wife. In the novel, these stories are inter-
leaved with the present-day narrative, offering insight
into Tom’s imagination. Janet, who is an epileptic, has
her own secret place, the mental space she enters when
she has an attack. Alone in the cottage, cut off from
their everyday lives, Tom and Janet begin to explore
these private domains and the woman whose legacy has
brought them together.
Beautifully narrated by Wagner, Tom’s mother’s tales
evoke the atmosphere of yearning, hope and loss char-
acteristic of ballads and folksongs. The plot and setting
of Seizure similarly recall those of medieval romance.
Even so, Wagner keeps a firm grip on her material,
refusing to lapse into sentimentality. Although Tom
remains a little shadowy, Janet is provided with a biog-
raphy (in particular, her ambivalent relationship with
M ARTYN B EDFORD
IN EXTREMIS
DAY
★ mindset and into his story. We also come to accept that
By A L Kennedy
(Jonathan Cape 280pp £16.99)
WHAT IS IT about war that appeals to writers and readers
of fiction? Genuine storytelling drama, of course, has to
depend on more than bombs, bullets and bloody adven-
ture. Like most genres of novel-writing, war fiction
advances or retreats on the strength of its characters as
much as on the context.
A L Kennedy exemplifies this in her new novel. From its
single-word title (the hero’s surname) through the unfold-
ing of what is essentially an extended and elaborate internal
monologue, Day is a war story set inside its protagonist’s
head. That isn’t to say there is no ‘action’ (there is, and lots
of it), but since we witness it through Alfred Day’s eyes, it is
his war, and his drama, that we experience.
There are two main timeframes: in 1949, Alfred is in
Germany as an extra on a PoW film set; during the war
itself, he is a tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber. As the
story cuts back and forth between these periods, each
heavily populated by secondary characters, and with
additional flashbacks to Alfred’s troubled and abusive
56
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
Stephen) that defines her as a modern woman. Wagner’s
use of language is similarly up to date. She selects words
with precision, and her prose is intelligent and arresting.
A frightened woman feels cold run up ‘from her feet to
her heart, jarring on the rutted path of her spine’.
Heading towards the sea by starlight, Tom and Janet
walk ‘in the negative of a landscape, the world dropping
away into a silver print of itself ’.
The sea is the dominant motif in the novel, in the sto-
ries told by Tom’s mother and as background to the var-
ious journeys, meetings and partings that take place.
Another important idea is that of metal (the twin brass
keys to the cottage, the detritus Tom rescues from
dumps and the seashore, the taste in Janet’s throat when
a seizure begins). Wagner uses such themes to create a
sense of continuity between past and present. The result
is a novel that combines suspense with the pleasure of
good writing. It is also an unusual love story, a tale of
forbidden fruit, whose sources lie in the distant past, in
the songs circulated by minstrels and by women gossip-
ing around hearth or well. It is Wagner’s ability to evoke
this world, as well as the modern times of mobile
phones, brain scans and civilised cohabitation, that
makes Seizure such an interesting read.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 27
adolescence, it takes a while for the reader to become
orientated. Similarly confusing, at times, is the intermit-
tent switching from first, to second, to third person (all
from Alfred’s viewpoint), along with italicised snippets
of his unspoken thoughts. But, as we adjust to
Kennedy’s scheme, we are gradually drawn into Alfred’s
the organisation of the narrative is apt, indeed integral,
to the portrayal of a man who, though psychologically
and physically fragmented by war, is attempting to
reconstruct a sense of self.
Kennedy shifts gears with each change of viewpoint
and circumstance so that, instead of one consistent
voice, Alfred’s tonal range is as complex as the man him-
self. And, unfailingly, Kennedy’s prose (rich, and some-
times edging towards density) is a window on her hero’s
various mental states. Here he is preparing for another
mission: ‘he would practise seeing, scanning, quartering
the sky and he would breathe in the smell of his one
chosen home: the tight, exciting reek of working oil and
skin and his never-to-be washed flying suit and the good
metal and the brassy sting in his throat from ammuni-
tion, the choke from hot firing, his trade, himself.’
Kennedy is more convincing, and ultimately more
compelling, in taking us on Alfred’s inner journey than
she is in developing the subplots of his fractured domes-
tic relationships with his battered mother and violent
father, and with Joyce, the married woman he becomes
involved with during the war. The former seems overtly
 FICTION
functional in contextualising Alfred’s own latent capacity
for violence, while the latter is a somewhat thinly drawn
set-up for an element of love interest. When he is
among men, but alone with his troubles, the novel is at
its most potent: Alfred on flying missions with the
bomber crew; Alfred with the other extras on the film
shoot’s unsettlingly realistic prison-camp set. Here, the
camaraderie, tensions and conflicts of the male group are
laid bare in all their crudeness and subtlety.
In writing about war, once a male preserve, A L
Kennedy joins a growing list of women writers: Pat
T OM F LEMING
HOLY MACKEREL
G OLD
★ topic of the week:
By Dan Rhodes
(Canongate 198pp £9.99)
DAN RHODES WAS included in Granta’s Best of Young
British Novelists list in 2003. His funny, misanthropic first
novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, was ample justification
for it. He also famously wrote Anthropology, a collection
of 101 stories each 101 words long, which was a stylistic
achievement; but he hasn’t really yet matched the heights
of Timoleon Vieta. Gold is now his third novel (if you
count The Little White Car, written under the name
‘Danuta da Rhodes’).
Gold’s main character is Miyuki Woodward, a young
woman who takes annual two-week holidays in a small
seaside town in Wales in a bizarre rite of separation from
her long-term girlfriend, Grindl. Miyuki likes to ‘miss’
Grindl for two weeks so that for the rest of the year she
will appreciate her even more. This year, however,
Miyuki’s need to enliven the everyday is manifested in
another way. She runs into a spot of bother with the
locals when she gets caught spray-painting a large rock
on the beach entirely gold. Entranced by its occasional
golden appearance from way up on the cliff, all she
wanted to do was make sure that for a few days at least
this brilliant colour was down to more than a trick of
the light.
Miyuki’s story, despite forming the spine of the novel,
is unfortunately its weakest element too. Rhodes is more
impressive dealing with his supporting cast – The
Anchor’s quirky, provincial patrons – than with his lead-
ing lady. There’s Septic Barry, for one, with his mullet,
his monopoly of the town’s waste disposal business, and
his pub quiz team (and band), the Children from
Previous Relationships. To all intents and purposes he’s a
no-hoper, but when one woman spots ‘potential’ in him
and shares his caravan for longer than a summer, his
57
Barker, Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters and Helen
Dunmore spring to mind who have taken this as their
subject matter in recent years. The reason for such an
incursion into traditionally masculine literary territory is
worth an essay in its own right. But what Kennedy
brings to the genre, in Day, is a moving portrait of one
man’s fight (both internal and external) as well as an
affirmation that, if fiction is ‘about’ the human condi-
tion, war fiction isn’t really, or only, about war, but
about the human condition in extremis.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 27
quiet, confident realisation that he really does have more
to give is wonderfully portrayed. The other regulars
include short Mr Hughes, Mr Puw, and tall Mr Hughes
– the last being the resident pub bore. Rhodes captures
the subtleties of this familiar type well. We first
encounter him lecturing the others on alligators, his
‘It’s winter, you see,’ clarified tall Mr Hughes, his rich
baritone filling the room, ‘and they hibernate in the
winter…’ He stared at his drink for a while, and when
he spoke again his voice was quieter. ‘…do alligators.’
He lowered his heels, and reached for his drink.
There is also Mr Edwards, the landlord of The Anchor.
Here he is, in a brief sketch of the sort that Rhodes per-
fected in Anthropology:
‘Holy mackerel,’ said Mr Edwards. … [He] was a
man of few words, and most of these were holy and
mackerel. He could load the phrase in so many ways
… When Mr Puw’s daughter, his only child, had
died after years of illness, he had called Mr Edwards
from a pay phone at the hospital.
‘She’s gone, Tristan,’ said Mr Puw, abandoning
their affectation of addressing one another as Mr this
or Mr that.
‘Holy mackerel, Bryn,’ said Mr Edwards. ‘Holy
mackerel.’
There was more comfort in those words than in any
of the cards of condolence that followed, or any of the
expressions of sympathy from friends and relations.
Such moments as these are satisfying, and poignant, but
too infrequent. Rhodes seems content to let his trade-
mark deadpan tone of voice do all the work. Gold can
be funny, as all Rhodes’s fiction can, but mostly it feels
just inconsequential. Miyuki is not an interesting charac-
ter; her spray-painting of the rock is a laboured centre-
piece that has no dramatic, or thematic, weight; and
what happens to her at the end manages to feel both
predictable and forced. With the pub scenes Rhodes
occasionally hits home, but his lack of commitment to
his characters’ inner lives makes the book feel more like
an episode of Cheers than anything to rank alongside
Patrick Hamilton.
To order this book at £7.99, see LR Bookshop on page 27
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 FICTION

AT THE BEGINNING of Phil S IMON B AKER CONSIDERS A light but well-structured and
LaMarche’s American Youth sympathetic novel answers that –
(Sceptre 225pp £12.99), a Q UARTET OF F IRST N OVELS but past events aren’t as clear-cut
teenager accidentally kills his as either had thought.
brother with a friend’s rifle. The question of blame seems Jane Feaver’s debut novel, According to Ruth (Harvill
straightforward; however, the friend, Ted, had loaded the Secker 217pp £12.99), is about a family which is breaking
rifle and left the brothers to mess around, despite knowing up. It is narrated for the most part by the title character, a
that they weren’t used to guns. Ted’s mother is sufficiently gauche fifteen-year-old uncomfortable in both adult and
concerned to insist that her son deny any involvement. childish worlds, although in the second half of the novel
This impressive book, set in a New England town, there are short chapters relating to specific individuals.
examines first Ted’s conscience. Ted is an essentially good Ruth is the oldest child of Lizzie, who is frustrated at hav-
sort who, although not saintly in behaviour, has a well- ing done little other than change nappies and cook for a
developed sense of morality which cannot smooth over the decade and a half, and John, an obnoxious, taciturn slob
lie he is forced to tell. He begins to suffer, and resorts to who insists that his children call the toilet ‘the bog’ and
self-harm in a quest for relief. Secondly, the novel examines who, entirely unbelievably (though not too problematical-
the conscience of Puritan-Republican America itself. ly), turns out to be an art critic. Ruth has a relationship of
‘American Youth’ is a group of schoolboys who reject mutual loathing with her sister Amelia and finds her other
drinking, drugs and sex in favour of ‘traditional’ values such siblings, Biddy and Jack, a burden as she often has to act as
as the rights to own a gun and not cushion the poor their surrogate mother.
through taxation. They embrace Ted as a cause célèbre, but Set during a vacation at the end of the 1970s at the
he is soon repelled by their violence and double standards. family’s tumbledown Northumberland cottage, the
Phil LaMarche sets his novel up brilliantly. The Youth novel is Ruth’s account of her parents’ waning relation-
are entertainingly sinister, the more so for the force of ship, alongside an account of her own waxing infatua-
their rhetoric, which in their mouths possesses a dis- tion with Robert, a local boy who lost his brother a
turbing plausibility until scrutinised. Just near the end couple of years before and whose family is still suffering
they fade from view slightly, and a novel which grasps a from the loss. Such is the unostentatious quality of the
big idea about an American underclass downsizes into a writing that one is only rarely conscious of how little
less ambitious novel about a boy, but American Youth is action is taking place.
nevertheless strong on its own terms and LaMarche Joe Treasure’s The Male Gaze (Picador 309pp £12.99)
promises much for the future. does not lend itself willingly to summary, but here goes:
Meanwhile, just as a separate ‘East Grinstead’ section David Parker is a Londoner trying to get used to Los
on my bookshelves had begun to seem unnecessary, Angeles, where he moved with his wife Rebecca. When
along comes Ruth Thomas’s Things to Make and Mend he should be quietly writing a school textbook on reli-
(Faber & Faber 356pp £12.99). Set in the West Sussex gion, he meets the vampish Astrid (with her ‘fuck-me-
town, the novel is about Sally and Rowena, childhood senseless hair’), and is drawn into a clique of neurotic
friends now middle-aged and long-since driven apart by types, one of whom kills herself. Appalled, David traces
a defining event. Sally remains in East Grinstead and the dead woman’s past until it leads to Max, the husband
works as a seamstress, repairing clothes by day and of Rebecca’s boss. It seems as though Max may somehow
embroidering as a hobby by night. Rowena has become be responsible for the woman’s decline – and, worse still
a respected academic in Paris. for David, may also have filmed himself having sex with
The narrative looks back at their relationship in a third- Rebecca. As David tries to hold life and marriage togeth-
person voice but from Sally’s perspective, with a smaller er, Max finds himself being threatened by terrorists.
number of first-person ‘Rowena’ sections offering a dif- The Male Gaze is more a collection of episodes, but
ferent viewpoint. The pair were inseparable, but soon the while it fails to give the reader enough to hang on to (or
cause of their split, aged fifteen, seems to present itself: believe in), it does have strengths. It starts with an
boy trouble – or rather, man trouble, since the beau in enjoyable set-piece party, and later features a witty scene
question is (rather creepily) in his twenties. Sally began with a Hitchens-like contrarian journalist; also, some of
dating a flash young executive, but then discovered that Treasure’s observations on relationships are acute.
Rowena – the prettier as well as the cleverer of the two – However, the narrative is just too diffuse, and the char-
had also slept with him. In the present day, the women acters act without convincing motivation and then drift
are now heading towards the same Edinburgh hotel, Sally to the margin of the story when no longer thematically
(having recently won an award for her embroidering) to useful. Perhaps regrettably, it ends with writing of real
speak at a conference, Rowena to say goodbye to her son, warmth which, if evident sooner, might have heated up
who is emigrating. The question, of course, is ‘Will they a somewhat cold, if occasionally admirable, work.
meet and resolve their differences?’ The conclusion of this To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 27

58
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 SILENCED VOICES
A STATE OF emergency was L UCY P OPESCU
declared in Bangladesh on 11
January 2007. At least forty S ALAH U DDIN S HOAIB C HOUDHURY
people have been killed in
protests that began last year in
October, when the Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, ended
her five-year term and handed over power to an interim
government. The media are being heavily censored and
journalists are in the front line of fire, with many being
heavily censored or receiving death threats.
This is nothing new. Two years ago I wrote about the
case of Bangladeshi journalist Sumi Khan, who suffered a
horrific attack and death threats for her writings. There
continues to be an ongoing pattern of violence against
journalists in Bangladesh, and many are frequently threat-
ened and attacked with apparent impunity solely for the
practice of their profession. According to Reporters
Without Borders, last year alone three journalists were
killed and at least ninety-five were physically attacked.
Another journalist to suffer attacks for his writing, and
who currently faces the death sentence for planning to
attend a writers’ conference in Israel, is Salah Uddin
Shoaib Choudhury, editor of the tabloid weekly enter-
tainment magazine Blitz.
The case against Choudhury began in 2003, when he
was accused of spying for Israel on the basis of the text
of a speech he was to have given on the role of the
media in the dialogue between Muslims and Jews, and
the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh.
Choudhury had recently been named head of the
Bangladeshi branch of the International Forum for
Literature and Culture for Peace (IFLAC), which links
writers who campaign for peace.
The journalist was planning to address a writers’ sympo-
sium in Tel Aviv entitled ‘Bridges Through Culture’,
organised by the Hebrew Writers’ Association. Bangladesh
has no diplomatic relations with Israel and travel to Israel is
illegal for Bangladeshi citizens. According to information
received by PEN, the editor was arrested by security per-
sonnel at Zia International Airport, Dhaka, on 29
November 2003, whilst en route for Israel.
Intelligence forces claim that documents found in
Choudhury’s briefcase, including the text of his speech
and reports on the human rights situation in Bangladesh,
provide evidence to support the charges against him. He
is accused of having links to an Israeli intelligence
agency and is said to have been under surveillance for
several months. Choudhury is known for his work
towards improving relations between Muslim countries
and Israel. He has written articles against anti-Israeli atti-
tudes in the Muslim world and about the rise of al-
Qaeda in Bangladesh which reportedly sparked debate
in the Bangladeshi press and government prior to his
arrest. The charges carry a maximum penalty of death
or thirty years’ imprisonment.
59
Following his arrest, the
journalist was charged with
sedition and held in solitary
confinement for sixteen
months in a Dhaka prison.
Choudhury was repeatedly denied a hearing, before
finally being released on bail on 2 May 2005. This seems
to have been largely due to appeals by PEN USA, who
elected Choudhury as an honorary member, as well as
pressure from the US State Department and protests by
the Committee to Protect Journalists, amongst others.
PEN USA awarded the journalist their 2005 Freedom to
Write award.
Human rights groups continued to call for the case to
be dropped, but were further alarmed by reports that
Choudhury was attacked by a group of about thirty men
at the offices of his newspaper on 5 October 2006.
According to PEN, he was badly beaten in the attack,
and around 400,000 Taka (approx £2,910 / 4,400 euros)
and several cellphones were taken from the Blitz office.
His attackers branded him ‘an agent of the Jews’.
According to another report, when Choudhury report-
ed the assault to police, instead of offering him protec-
tion, they arrested him.
PEN and other organisations were horrified by the
attack and called on the Bangladeshi authorities to
Another Sky
In association with English PEN
Introduction by Tom Stoppard
Edited by Lucy Popescu and
Carole Seymour-Jones
An astonishing glimpse into the lives of the
courageous writers around the world who have
been imprisoned for their beliefs
‘Extraordinary stories ...
essential reading for anyone
who has ever been moved
by the written word. It jolts
and challenges our prejudices
and assumptions.’
Michael Palin
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 SILENCED VOICES

provide Choudhury with effective police protection. As
well as the incident in October, the journalist had
reportedly received a death threat on 26 February 2006
from a militant Islamist leader for his writings, and the
offices of his newspaper were bombed in July 2006.
Fortunately the explosion caused only minor damage
and no injuries, while two other unexploded devices
were found inside the premises. These attacks were car-
ried out with impunity. Reporters With Borders note
that Mufti Noor Hussain Noorani, who heads the radi-
cal movement Khatmey Nabuat (KNM), threatened
Choudhury and the Weekly Blitz by telephone on 29
June after it ran an editorial criticising KNM’s attacks on
the Muslim group Ahamdiyya. Choudhury reported the
threats to the police, but the report was ‘mislaid’ and no
measures were taken to protect him.
The editor’s trial resumed in October 2006 and has
been subject to several postponements. On 22 January
this year Choudhury arrived at the court for the next
stage in his trial, but the government witnesses that were
to have testified did not show up. According to his
friend Dr Richard Benkin, owner and founder of the
Interfaith Strength website (which published the speech
he should have delivered), the judge appeared in the
courtroom only briefly, clearly embarrassed in front of
official observers from the US, UK and EU, and was
forced to set a later date for the hearing.
According to Dr Benkin, the Public Prosecutor told
Choudhury that he had no desire to continue the case as
he felt it had no foundation; it was only the radical judge,
known to be affiliated with radical Islamists, who was
keen on pursuing the journalist’s persecution. To that
end, on 28 February three witnesses showed up to testify
against the writer. Although there was no testimony, the
judge issued an order that the trial should continue on the
charges of ‘sedition, treason, and blasphemy’. On 8 March
five witnesses showed, but did not testify. The court was
adjourned and a new court date was set for 23 April.
Readers may like to send appeals to the High
Commissioner in London asking him to forward your
concerns to the government. Express serious fears for
the safety of journalist Salah Uddin Choudhury and call
for charges against the journalist to be dropped in accor-
dance with Article 19 of the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
HE Mr Sabihuddin Ahmed
High Commission for the People’s Republic of
Bangladesh
28 Queen’s Gate
London SW7 5JA
Fax: 00 44 207 225 2130
Email: bdesh.lon@dial.pipex.com

CRIME

T HE W INTER OF F RANKIE J ESSICA M ANN cards in the UK, it is interesting to

M ACHINE
★ amateur easily acquiring and altering
By Don Winslow
(William Heinemann 320pp £11.99)
E VERYBODY loves ‘Frank the bait
guy’. At sixty-something, he lives a
retired life in San Diego, combining
his fishing shop on the pier with three
other part-time jobs. He indulges his
student daughter, dotes on his gor-
geous girlfriend and is kind to his ex-
wife. A model citizen – except that
Frank Machianno is also a hit man
(retired) otherwise known as ‘Frankie
Machine’. The local Mafia boss calls
in a favour and Frank finds himself a
target. He takes a long walk through a
memory lane paved with the bodies
of his victims, and when he works out
who wants him dead he reciprocates
with gusto. The book is full of ten-
sion and black humour, and the story
is so cleverly told that you forget that
the charming hero is a brutal serial
murderer. In fact, in the end, every-
body loves Frankie Machine.
N IGHTLIFE
★ By Alex Gray
By Thomas Perry
(Quercus 384pp £12.99)
A not quite credible but undeniably
gripping story in which a young
woman makes her way across
America, taking on a new identity
with each new city and leaving a suc-
cession of lovers’ corpses behind her.
Meanwhile another young woman, a
police detective, is on the trail. With
all the current discussion of identity
read this convincing account of an
the equivalent American document. It
is through conventional, old fash-
ioned, hands-on-detection that the
good cop gets the bad girl in the end.
T HE R IVERMAN
★
(Sphere 320pp £18.99)
‘TARTAN noir’ is a trendy young cate-
gory of crime fiction, but seldom a
good advertisement for life in
Scotland. Alex Gray’s book is a wel-
come change from the urban under-
world. The Glasgow she describes was
always respectable and is becoming
exciting, a thriving city where firms of
professionals have international client
lists and the partners hang valuable

60
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007

modern art in their penthouse apart-
ments. The plot of this scrupulous
novel is based around the work of
accountants, which admittedly sounds
dry; it’s worth remembering that it
was exactly that boredom factor which
made Enron’s gigantic scams (referred
to several times here) possible. The
involvement in capital crimes of the
suspects and victims, all partners in a
respectable Scottish firm, becomes
positively probable. Not quite noir but
definitely tartan.
DARK H EARTS OF C HICAGO
★ Elizabeth George and Martha
By William Horwood & Helen Rappaport
(Hutchinson 320pp £16.99)
EMILY Strauss is a young and ambi-
tious reporter. It is 1893, the World’s
Fair is in full swing in Chicago, and
women are disappearing in broad
daylight. Emily bluffs her way into
the newspaper magnate Joseph
Pulitzer’s office, and bounces out of it
with an assignment: to find out what
happened to the missing women.
The razzmatazz of the Fair is colour-
ful, the feminist heroine attractive,
but this frontier-style town is brutal,
with a sickening contrast between the
immigrant poor and the arrogant,
newly rich and ruthless men who
control the pornography, prostitution,
and meat-packing industries. The
plot is over-melodramatic but the
description of nineteenth-century
Chicago is atmospher ic. William
Horwood’s previous books have been
a misery memoir and a series about
spiritual moles in an imaginary wood,
but collaboration with a historian has
resulted in an excellent, if unexpected
thriller.
WATER L IKE A S TONE
★ dealers can be shown as a relatively
By Deborah Crombie
(Macmillan 560pp £16.99)
By convenient coincidence
Superintendent Kincaid of Scotland
Yard has just arrived for a family
Christmas when his sister Juliet finds
CRIME
a mummified baby in an old barn she
is renovating. The mystery soon takes
in Juliet’s disintegrating marriage, her
husband’s creepy business partner
who has an even creepier son, while
a parallel plot involves narrow-boaters
on the Midland canals. The scene is
vividly set and the characters are con-
vincing and almost too absorbing – as
a newcomer to this series I was dis-
tracted from the plot by trying to
understand gnomic references to past
events in the life of Kincaid, his
police inspector wife, their respective
children and his family. Like
Grimes, Crombie is an American
whose view of Britain is rosy, if in
this case not overly romantic. Her
descriptions of Nantwich and the
area around it will delight the local
tourist board.
T HE OYSTER H OUSE S IEGE
★ pened, the story is a dotty, coinci-
By Jay Rayner
(Atlantic Books 304pp £10.99)
ONE night in 1975 a gang of crimi-
nals on the run burst into a restaurant
in Knightsbr idge called The
Spaghetti House, took staff and cus-
tomers hostage and remained there
under siege in the basement for six
days. Jay Rayner, who is a restaurant
critic, uses those facts as the basis for
a novel set on election night in 1983.
The great and the good are celebrat-
ing a Conservative victor y in a
Jermyn Street restaurant, the two
masked and ar med gunmen are
drug-dealers, the chef the heroine.
She keeps control of the situation by
cooking elaborate meals, using ingre-
dients sent in by the police. This
being a generation back, the drugs
are grass not smack, so one of the
sympathetic character who in the
course of several dramatic days dis-
covers the delights of cooking fine
food. Redemption through cooking
is a nice idea. But the combination
of fierce brutality with fine cuisine is
indigestible.
61
T HE A SSASSIN ’ S G ALLERY
★
By David L Robbins
(Orion 432pp £18.99)
I S history made by people or by
events? Can its course be changed by
the assassination of a single individual?
The Assassin’s Gallery begins with a
discussion of this question at a training
school for potential assassins in
Scotland in 1944. It is all just theoreti-
cal, of course – until the professor is
whisked off to Washington as the
improbable hunter of an unlikely
killer, the beautiful Judith who can use
any weapon, adopt many disguises,
and has been sent to kill the President.
Detectable by only one man, she
approaches her target via his col-
leagues, then his friends, and finally his
mistress. Apart from the fact that the
ailing F D Roosevelt did die in office,
and all the other events described hap-
dence-filled Modesty Blaise-style
caper dressed up in academic clothing
– an excellent combination. I loved it.
D OWN INTO DARKNESS
★
By David Lawrence
(Penguin 416pp £10.99)
I T would be surpr ising if David
Lawrence’s crime novels were not
written in precise, atmospheric prose
and if he had not created a taut, slight-
ly baroque plot for this book; for this
pen-name belongs to David Harsent, a
poet weighed down with literary
awards. He also wr ites television
screenplays, most recently for Midsomer
Murders, and there is a visual edginess
to the short snappy scenes and abrupt
cuts as the lens of attention darts
between the characters. Set in a vio-
lent, sinister London, this series fea-
tures a fashionably sensitive but tough
woman as detective. Having grown up
herself as a slum kid from the tower
block estate she now polices, she can
tell what’s going on, and who is doing
it and how they get away; and she
knows how to deal with it – and does.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
 N IGHT AND DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
THIS MONTH’S POEMS, on the subject R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
of ‘moon’, were an improvement. D A
Prince wins first prize and £300, Robert Jules Vincent
second prize and £150, and all others printed £10. I like should arrive by Wednesday 25th April and should rhyme,
these big old grandstanding themes, they seem to provoke scan, make sense and be no more than 24 lines long. To 44
the right mixture of cynicism and romanticism. Next
FIRST PRIZE
CITY MOON by D A Prince
Down high-rise mirrored-glass business streets
with thin trees whipping, stretching for some sky,
you catch the unexpected moon, as day meets
city dusk, and noise and glare and traffic try
to block out everything but here. It’s large,
this moon, much bigger than you remember,
and out of place among the rush-hour charge
to bars and pubs. Vague memory: September –
so is it Harvest? Hunter’s? Something green
and seasonal, and buried way way back
where you’d have known, once; half-know now. It’s
been
a generation since you took a track
over dark earth, or saw the moon oak-caught.
Old superstitions? – medieval fear
our century shrugs off as idle thought –
though that moon’s hanging dangerously near.
SECOND PRIZE
LUNAR ECLIPSED by Robert Jules Vincent
From early Spring, for people leaving work,
the village garden shop, each Friday, closed at eight.
One night, young Dick, their ever-helpful lad
leaves on his errands through the stockyard gate.
A scythe for old Ted Farmer, nursed with care;
Miss Millward’s weekly order to be checked.
A message for Jim Bowsher – keen on herbs;
the thyme he’d ordered, ready to collect.
The night so cold, Dick shrinks within his coat,
the moon shines silver on the blade he bore,
as down the garden path he winds his way
to knock upon the old man’s cottage door.
Behind a window, Jim’s face slow appears.
Dick shouts the message, leaning on the sill
then out the gate and up the lane he strides,
snug in his hooded jacket ’gainst the chill.
Next day the police are called and force the door,
the sergeant later said he was appalled.
Some terror on Jim’s face froze when he died
at just about the time the lad had called.
When questioned what he’d said that moonlit night,
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
month’s topic, though, has nothing to
do with either: ‘umbrella’. Entries,
with ‘umbrella’ written in the corner of the envelope,
Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW.
young Dick screwed up his eyes while looking glum
then brightened up, remembering and smiled.
He’d simply told old Jim his thyme had come.
COLD, COLD HEART by Richard Charles
The heart of the sun is a furnace,
It seethes in a primaeval strife,
The heart of a god in his fury,
The bringer of passion and life.
The heart of the earth is magnetic,
To endure for as long as it can,
And the wrath of the gods is deflected:
The earth has the heart of a man.
But my heart is cold and unmoving,
My heart is ashes and stone,
And I am a constant observer,
And I am completely alone.
My days are all sunny and cloudless,
My nights are all bitterly cold,
My deserts are silent and windless,
My heart is four billion years old.
And long, long ago, I stopped turning,
Forgot how to love, how to weep,
But the tides of the oceans still call me,
And I yearn, oh I yearn just to sleep.
And slowly, but slowly, I am falling,
To burn in the welcoming air,
My heart will awake for an instant,
Then nothing, nobody to care.
OF MYTH AND MOONLIGHT
by Frank Mc Donald
Seductress, you enticed Endymion
to sleep eternally, and Homer you held
captive under Grecian stars. You shone
in Ovid’s eyes, granting his world
a metamorphosis. Old Solomon
sang through your spell, and in Gethsamane
you witnessed the onset of an agony.
Chaldean, Hittite and Sumerian
flourished and died, believing you approved
their midnight deeds. The proud Egyptian
62
 N IGHT AND
must surely have marvelled at you as you moved
above him and below. The Carthaginian
sailed into darkness under your protectorate;
and all the while you watched, dispassionate.
Then mortals with prosaic footprints marched
over your divinity, your seas
revealed as dusty deserts, cold and parched,
leaving poets’ moonlight and your mysteries
open to ridicule. Humankind searched
for the secrets of the radiance you shed,
and in the end discovered gods are dead.
THE MOON OVER THE CREEK
by Nick Syrett
Pickering saw insect legions
Marching over lunar plains,
Marking continents and regions
With obscure, nomadic stains;
God bless you, Pickering, for trying,
To leave some shining filigree
Of expectation softly lying
Round each lapping lunar sea.
Crush Wells and Verne like moon-dust
With sympathetic smiles,
DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
From perigee to apogee
Is thirty thousand empty miles,
And regolith formations shine
With dead respectability;
Of course since nineteen fifty-nine,
We need not take these things on trust
Yet, as the moon goes through her quarters,
Preoccupied as any ghost
She hauls these shrinking tidal waters
Out to the accepting coast;
And moon-shadows the watching grasses
Onto shining sheets of mud,
A lapwing calls, the magic passes,
Lost to the dawn and in the flood.
MOONFIELDS by Alison Prince
You men in space-suits, treat the moon with care –
her dust grew sweet grass once, where lived a hare
who spun a thread connected to earth’s seas,
drawing them up then giving them release.
Jet-thrust and airlock, food-packs, radio –
a dull mythology. Better to know
the simple, ancient moonfields of the mind
and see the hare’s long line wind and unwind.
63
LITERARY REVIEW April 2007
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