AUGUST 2007 £3.

00

HIS DARK MATERIALS

Philip Pullman on his Moral Compass
Max Egremont at the Front
9 770144 436041

David Gilmour on Partition

The Last Thousand Days of Empire
Pugin’s Revival ★ Pepys’s Nemesis
Conrad’s Masks ★ Grass’s Memoirs
The July Monarchy ★ The Nixon Presidency
08

The Birth of Italy

Jane Ridley salutes the Spinsters
Locke’s Laundry ★ Mrs Woolf ’s Staff
Too Posh to Wash?
FICTION: Hari Kunzru ★ Amy Bloom ★ Robert Edric ★ Gary Shteyngart ...
 FROM THE PULPIT
THE LIVING PAST exists only in our W ILLIAM P ALMER
memories and our records. Our own
memories are faulty and short-lived;
but the recording of ideas and events
has created an enormous communal
LOSING THE PAST
memory store that we can all consult
and learn from. Ah, you mean the Internet? Not quite. By
far the greatest source of knowledge of our past is con-
tained in the libraries of the world, which will soon face a
huge and possibly fatal challenge. They are not under direct
threat yet, but a new generation of librarians and managers
wishes to replace what they see as static and outmoded
sources of knowledge, ie books, with the flow of informa-
tion available on the Internet. As Thomas Mann, author of
The Oxford Guide to Library Research, points out, the trouble
with this is that library resources ‘allow avenues of subject
access that cannot be matched by “relevance ranked” key-
word searching’ and that ‘the Internet does not and cannot
contain more than a small fraction of everything discover-
able within library walls’. Some surprisingly famous
libraries are selling or dumping older books and ‘preserv-
ing’ others, if at all, only electronically. Given the fallibility Romantics, that children have an innate genius has now
and short-lived viability of software programs and computer
systems, this process could make the destruction of the
library at Alexandria look like a garden bonfire.
Already school libraries have been abandoned or lie
unused and university tutors complain that the only
source cited by new students is the Wikipedia. Students
no longer know how to use library catalogues or how to
consult an index or bibliography. More damagingly, they
come from school having no general knowledge of
mythology, history, religion, science or literature, and no
sense of historical perspective. The inhabitants of the
past – Plato, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, say – cannot be
placed in chronological order. Student essays often dis-
play an astonishingly patronising attitude to such
founders of our world, whose philosophy and poetry
and novels display such an ignorance of feminist theory
or post-colonial studies. The combination of the ‘bit-ifi-
cation’ of knowledge, modular teaching and modish
theories have led these students to be educated in a
common error of our times: that we have somehow
reached an apogee of achievement in the arts and sci-
ence and social organisation, and that we can now safely
ignore the past and what it thought. The past is dead.
What’s more, it is embarrassing and complicated and
hard to learn. How much better to store it all in the
machine and forget the dusty and irrelevant old books.
But surely Google, in scanning all the books in the
Bodleian, is opening up resources? Mann argues that it
will be ‘a wonderful supplement to a real library… but a
terrible substitute’. This is, he says, because a system of
searches simply by keywords is grossly inefficient and mil-
itates against the ‘understanding of texts as connected
wholes’. The important word here is ‘whole’. The com-
puter can provide information readily, but knowledge is
1
what we accumulate in our heads.
As early as 1978, Paul Copperman,
in The Literacy Hoax, pointed out that
the US school system had ‘replaced
items of long-term educational value
with items of short-term interest and
entertainment value’. And where America has boldly
gone, we are gamely limping after. Most American univer-
sities have already dropped Shakespeare from their courses,
and some of ours itch to do the same. Religious education
has become a vague mishmash of ecumenical tosh.
Hymns, including those by important poets such as
Vaughan and Herbert, are being filleted of such supposedly
offensive male terms as ‘man’, ‘King’, and ‘Lord’. The title
‘Professor of Education’ begins to take on a more literal
and farcical meaning when one reads articles by one or
other in the Times Higher Educational Supplement calling for
yet more ‘relevance’ and an end to ‘elitism’. The idiosyn-
cratic glory of the individual book and its place in a whole
system of knowledge is being junked for a sort of swirling
alphabet soup of ‘information’. The idea, promoted by the
been refined to a view of the brain of the child as an
incredibly delicate mechanism that will be irreparably
damaged by the intrusion of hard knowledge. The child
can be educated now, it seems, solely by having access to
the bright screen, obviating all need for memory or intel-
lectual curiosity. Perhaps those who advocate this single
source of knowledge should bear in mind a possible
Orwellian future in which it would be terrifyingly easy to
modify the information on the screen to fit in with
whatever were the prevailing political and moral fashions.
Wikipedia already shows the way that content can be
tampered with in some special interest.
As an instance of contemporary values affecting com-
mon sense, consider this from Henry Hitchens, in an
otherwise excellent book about Samuel Johnson: ‘The
Dictionary transmits an image of English and Englishness
which is not just predominately middle-class, but also
backward-looking, Anglocentric, and male.’ By his tone,
none of these adjectives is meant in praise, but surely, on
reflection, most people would ask what else a dictionary
recording English words, illustrated by past usages, and
assembled by an eighteenth-century man could possibly
be? Perhaps a future online version could provide suitable
glosses correcting the good Doctor’s political deficiencies?
It may be that I am being unduly pessimistic. I do not
think so. Living as we do in a ludicrously self-congratulatory
present, it cannot be long before the oratorios of Handel
are reckoned old-fashioned and inferior to those of Sir
Paul McCartney. I have a nightmare of the defining
moment of this future age, when Lord Blair is finally laid
to rest at his state funeral, with the choir and congregation
of Westminster Abbey joined in a rendition of ‘Yesterday’,
that most emotionally vapid and musically limp anthem
for our times.
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
William Palmer, novelist and poet.
He is the author of six novels, the
most recent being The India House
(Jonathan Cape). His latest collec-
tion of poems, The Island Rescue, is
published by The Melos Press.
DAVID GILMOUR is a biographer of
Lord Curzon and Rudyard Kipling.
His most recent book is The Ruling
Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj.
CAROLE ANGIER is a biographer of
Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. The
Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography is
available in paperback from Penguin.
R ICHARD O VERY ’s The Dictators:
Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia was
awarded the Wolfson Prize for
History 2005 and is available in
paperback from Penguin.
P AUL A DDISON is an Honorary
Fellow of the School of History and
Classics at the University of
Edinburgh. His most recent book is
Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (OUP).
DOMINIC SANDBROOK’s latest book,
A History of Britain in the Swinging
Sixties, is published by Little,
Brown. He is currently Senior
Fellow at the Rothermere Institute,
University of Oxford.
CLAUDIA FITZHERBERT is writing a
book about letters.
CHRISTOPHER COKER is Professor
of International Relations at the
London School of Economics and
author of several books on interna-
tional security.
D AVID S MITH ’s last book was
Hinduism and Modernity (Blackwell)
and he is now writing an explo-
ration of Hinduism and sexuality,
The Hindu Erotic, for IB Tauris.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 W ILLIAM P ALMER
HISTORY 4 MAX EGREMONT World War One: A Short History Norman
Stone Diary of a Dead Officer: Being the Posthumous Papers
of Arthur Graeme West Arthur Graeme West
6 R I C H A R D O V E R Y After the Reich: From the Liberation of
Vienna to the Berlin Airlift Giles MacDonogh Endgame
1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation David Stafford
8 E V A N M A W D S L E Y Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second
World War – A Modern History Chris Bellamy
9 S I M O N H E F F E R The Last Thousand Days of the British
Empire Peter Clarke
10 PAUL ADDISON A History of Modern Britain Andrew Marr
12 MICHAEL BURLEIGH The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy
Since 1796 Christopher Duggan
14 ALLAN MASSIE The Perilous Crown: Ruling France 1814–1848
Munro Price
15 DOMINIC SANDBROOK Barbarism and Civilisation: A History
of Europe in our Time Bernard Wasserstein
BIOGRAPHY 17 CHRISTOPHER COKER Nixon: The Invincible Quest Conrad
Black Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power Robert Dallek
18 PETER WASHINGTON Joseph Conrad: A Life Zdzislaw Najder
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad John Stape
20 A C GRAYLING Locke: A Biography Roger Woolhouse
22 JOHN MARTIN ROBINSON God’s Architect: Pugin and the
Building of Romantic Britain Rosemary Hill
23 ANDRO LINKLATER Suffer and Survive: Gas Attacks, Miners’
Canaries, Spacesuits and the Bends – The Extreme Life of Dr J S
Haldane Martin Goodman
24 ANDREW LYCETT Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s
Greatest Explorer Tim Jeal Dr Livingstone, I Presume?
Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire Claire Pettitt
25 HUGH MASSINGBERD Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled
Tim Heald
INTERVIEW 27 P HILIP P ULLMAN TALKS TO C LAUDIA F ITZ H ERBERT
MEMOIRS 30 CAROLE ANGIER Peeling the Onion Günter Grass
31 J ONATHAN M IRSKY A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of
Alice Herz-Sommer Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki
The Diary of Petr Ginz: 1941–1942 (Ed) Chava Pressburger
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Assistant Editor: PHILIP WOMACK
General Assistant: CASSIE BROWNE
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 346
2
 AUGUST 2007

INDIA 33 D A V I D G I L M O U R Indian Summer: The Secret History of the P ETER W ASHINGTON is General
End of an Empire Alex von Tunzelmann The Great Partition: Editor of the Everyman’s Library.
The Making of India and Pakistan Yasmin Khan
DAVID CESARANI is research professor
35 CHARLES ALLEN Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire in history at Royal Holloway,
Rajmohan Gandhi University of London. His most recent
36 SANKARSHAN THAKUR India After Gandhi: The History of the book is Eichman: His Life and Crimes.
World’s Largest Democracy Ramachandra Guha Holy Warriors: A
JANE RIDLEY is writing a biography
Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism Edna Fernandes
of King Edward VII, to be published
38 DAVID SMITH The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra by Chatto & Windus.
James McConnachie
MICHAEL BURLEIGH is gradually fin-
MOP & PAIL 39 L UCY L ETHBRIDGE Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The ishing a history of terrorism to be pub-
lished next year by HarperPress. He
Hidden Heart of Domestic Service Alison Light
has been visiting Italy for thirty years.
40 V IRGINIA I RONSIDE Clean: A History of Personal
Hygiene and Purity Virginia Smith M AX E GREMONT ’s biography of
Siegfried Sassoon was published in
GENERAL 42 JANE RIDLEY Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived 2005. He is now working on a book
about twentieth-century East Prussia.
Without Men After the First World War Virginia Nicholson
43 DAVID CESARANI The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn A C GRAYLING’s Towards the Light is
Evil Philip Zimbardo published in September by Bloomsbury.
45 J W M THOMPSON The Plot Against Pepys James Long and Ben Long
46 J AMES F LEMING ON F OUR B OOKS A BOUT T REES C HARLES A LLEN ’s India and the
Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865–
47 LEO MCKINSTRY The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Creation
1900 is published in November by
of the Modern World 1776 –1914 Gavin Weightman Little, Brown.
48 M ICHAEL C OREN Churchill’s Cigar: A Lifelong Love
Affair Through War and Peace Stephen McGinty FRANCIS KING has just published a
new novel, With My Little Eye
(Arcadia).
FICTION 49 S AM L EITH My Revolutions Hari Kunzru
50 J OHN D UGDALE Away Amy Bloom SANKARSHAN THAKUR is Executive
51 J OHN D E F ALBE The Kingdom of Ashes Robert Edric Editor of Tehelka, a Delhi-based
52 F RANCIS K ING Secrets of the Sea Nicholas Shakespeare newsweekly.
53 F RANCES W ILSON The Birthday Party Panos Karnezis
MICHAEL COREN is an author and
54 C HRISTOPHER H ART The Dig John Preston
broadcaster living in Canada.
55 M ATT T HORNE Absurdistan Gary Shteyngart
56 L INDY B URLEIGH The Sirens of Baghdad Yasmina Khadra ANDREW LYCETT has just completed
56 D AN G WYNNE -J ONES Coward on the Beach James Delingpole a biography of Sir Arthur Conan
58 S IMON B AKER ON F IRST N OVELS Doyle, which will be published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson next month.
SILENCED VOICES 59 L UCY P OPESCU E VAN M AWDSLEY is Professor of
CRIME 60 J ESSICA M ANN International History at the
POETRY 62 University of Glasgow. He is the
AUDIOBOOK 63 S USAN C ROSLAND author of Thunder in the East: The
Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (2005).
LETTERS 57 C ROSSWORD 44 B OOKSHOP 37 C LASSIFIEDS 64

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3
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY

M AX E GREMONT before 1914, dominated by a sinister military caste –

Stone dwells only briefly. The facts are that not only did

TERROR OF THE TRENCHES Britain have treaty obligations to neutral Belgium,

which the Germans invaded, but Germany, partly
through the hysterical rhetoric of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
WORLD WAR O NE : A S HORT H ISTORY had forfeited enough trust to make reasonable calcula-
★ tion of its behaviour impossible. Although admirable in
By Norman Stone its education system, culture, scientific achievement and
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 186pp £16.99) humane attitude to its industrial workers, German poli-
cy was much influenced by a military high command.
D IARY OF A D EAD O FFICER : B EING THE The Generals feared that the burgeoning economic
P OSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF strength of Russia could thwart German ambitions to be
A RTHUR G RAEME W EST a great, perhaps the greatest, world power.
★ It was this military dominance, and aggressive German
By Arthur Graeme West rearmament, that created a ridiculous state of affairs – a
Introduction by Nigel Jones British preference for an alliance with absolutist, politically
(Greenhill Books 192pp £19.99) backward Czarist Russia against what was, in many ways,
the most progressive state in Europe. On the German side,
DO WE NEED another history of the First World War? as if to show this absurdity, there were last-minute doubts.
The answer in the case of Norman Stone’s short book is, The Kaiser panicked and Bethmann-Hollweg, the
yes – because of its opinionated freshness and the unusu- German Chancellor, gave orders that slow-growing elms
al, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel. How good to should not be planted on his Brandenburg estate because
learn, for instance, that the taxi drivers who took French the Russians would profit from these when they eventually
troops to the front in the crisis of September 1914 – the took possession of it, as they did in 1945.
famous taxis of the Marne – kept their meters running At the start the British could send only a small
and that the German commander Hindenburg, depen- Expeditionary Force to join the huge conscripted
dent on his staff, thought he had European ar mies, because
so much time on his hands in Britain had no national service.
August 1918 that he asked his The main British contribution
wife to send him various classics was to be the Royal Navy,
of Ger man literature. Such which imposed an economic
zooming into close-up lets par- blockade on the enemy. Stone
ticular incidents illustrate lasting doubts the effectiveness of this,
truths, like the self-serving saying that it encouraged indus-
venality of Parisian taxi drivers, trial productivity in Germany.
a foretaste of Vichy, and the But he cannot avoid the so-
essentially symbolic role of the called tur nip winter of
vain, lazy Field Marshal who, 1916–17, when many Germans
when President of Germany in and Austr ians went hung r y.
1933, allowed himself to be This he tur ns slightly to
manipulated into appointing Ger many’s advantage, saying
Hitler as Chancellor. British gas-masked machine-gun unit on the Somme, 1916 that it became a powerful pro-
Norman Stone must be tired paganda weapon, inducing
of being compared to the late A J P Taylor. But he hatred of the enemy, like the bombing of the German
shares that master of narrative history’s eye for the key cities in the Second World War.
detail and propensity for short sentences, without It was the Germans who mastered the tactics of the
Taylor’s irritating, and sometimes frivolous, obsession new mechanised warfare first. They had startling military
with paradox or admiration for the old Soviet Union. successes, even early on, in August 1914 against the
Like Taylor, Stone keeps things moving, encapsulating Russians in East Prussia and in 1917 against the Italians at
the First World War in 157 pages. He does not concen- Caporetto. In March 1918 they momentarily broke the
trate too much on the western front but gives welcome deadlock on the western front. The British fared less well.
attention to what happened in the east, with the Neither Gallipoli nor the Somme nor Passchendaele can
Russians and (his particular expertise) the Turks. be dressed up as great victories, even by Winston
On two much-discussed questions – whether Britain Churchill’s or Douglas Haig’s greatest admirers. Haig,
should have stayed out and whether Germany was, admittedly, had to cope with thousands of completely

4
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY

untrained volunteers and, later, with conscripted raw

troops, along with the urgent need to take pressure off the
French, which took decisions over timing out of his
hands. But there were few solid British successes before
the summer of 1918 when, at last, Haig and his generals
perfected the technique of the creeping barrage. Even the
supposedly invincible Royal Navy took more losses than
the Germans at Jutland, the greatest naval battle of the
war. The French army learnt more quickly than the
British, after a disastrous beginning.
Britain was badly prepared. Before 1914, she saw her-
self as an imperial power, dependent on the navy for
protection, holding aloof from European commitments.
By engaging in an unofficial entente with France before
1914, without accompanying it with adequate military
preparations, and by failing to take a tougher line over
German sabre-rattling, politicians like Asquith and his
foreign minister Grey were arguably as responsible as the
Generals for the slaughter that followed. What saved the
allies was German blundering: the unrestricted subma-
r ine warfare and the Zimmer mann telegram that
brought an infuriated United States into the war.
Once that happened, the result was inevitable, even
after the Russian Revolution and the German victory in
the east. What makes Norman Stone’s book so successful
is not any startling variation on a familiar story but the
way he tells it, with wit and unfamiliar anecdote, all the
way to the wretched end as the peacemakers assembled
in Paris. For Germany still had not been obviously
defeated in the field and lay open to the myth, disastrous-
ly exploited by Hitler, that the politicians had betrayed
her armed forces.
Of the discovering of war poets, there is no end, or so
it sometimes seems. The latest to be published, or re-
published, is Arthur Graeme West, who also kept a diary
of his time on the western front before he was killed in
1917. Comparable in some ways to Siegfried Sassoon
(although not as remarkable a writer), West felt elation at
the war’s start, then disillusion, then rebelliousness, urged
on by the philosopher C E M Joad, his pacifist friend. It
was Joad who supervised the initial posthumous publica-
tion, seeing West’s story as an aid to the anti-war cause.
This edition has a good introduction by Nigel Jones
and, as with almost everything to do with the First War,
is often moving. One wishes, however, that West had not
allowed his observation of other people and situations to
be blunted so much by his own fierce feelings. The
poems are bitter, sometimes violent, yet, unlike Sassoon,
seem dated through archaic language. But it is the
archaisms, coupled with an intense, emotional awkward-
ness, that show the dislocation which that generation –
especially those, like West, who were fresh out of narrow
Edwardian public schools – suffered when their pre-1914
ideals collided with the terrible reality of the trenches.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

 HISTORY

R ICHARD O VERY important and remarkable episode in its own right, but
whether it can bear the weight of two more 600-page

The Fury that books remains to be seen.

The two books here are siblings rather than twins.
Stafford focuses on the last weeks of the war and the first
Followed the Fall weeks of peace, and his geographical range expands as
far as the area occupied by the British Commonwealth
and American armies in Western and Central Europe.
A FTER THE R EICH : F ROM THE L IBERATION MacDonogh takes up the story from German defeat and
OF V IENNA TO THE B ERLIN A IRLIFT carries it through to the Berlin airlift and the founding
★ of the two separate German states in 1949. His account
By Giles MacDonogh complements Stafford’s by focusing much more on the
(John Murray 618pp £25) areas that were overrun by the Soviet armies. Between
them they construct an all-too-vivid account of life lived
E NDGAME 1945: V ICTORY, in the shadow of Europe’s worst war, in which forty
R ETRIBUTION, L IBERATION millions lost their lives and millions more suffered vio-
★ lence, maiming, dispossession, and hunger. For popula-
By David Stafford tions living in the Axis-occupied territories this had
(Little, Brown 608pp £20) been the experience of the war years; for millions of
German-speakers spread out across Europe it was the
NO ONE CAN be in any doubt after watching Downfall experience of the post-war years.
that the end of Hitler’s Germany was bleak almost It is this part of the story that is the least familiar to a
beyond imagining, the crazed puppeteer in Berlin British audience. After the war no one was going to
pulling the few remaining threadbare strings at his dis- shed many tears for what happened to the ‘master race’
posal before they finally snapped, leaving the German in defeat; the coming of Communist regimes in Eastern
people not as masters of Europe but the antithesis: pow- Europe produced a policy of official silence (which has
erless onlookers in the hands of in some cases survived the fall of
those their leaders had sought to the Soviet bloc in 1990). But
subjugate. Germany in 1945 was over the past decade or so,
a nightmare of flattened cities, much more has been unearthed
endless trails of refugees and the about the harsh treatment
dispossessed, the sorry detritus of meted out to anyone with a
the vicious camp system (wire, Ger man name (including, as
bar racks and bodies) and a MacDonogh shows, German-
numbed population among speaking Jews, who had already
whom the hardened party hacks been victimised by the
– those who did not choose sui- Germans) in the lands between
cide as the way out – tried to the USSR and Ger many.
hide away. Around 13 million were forced
It is hard to decide why any- to leave the region and ended
one would willingly choose to up mainly in what became West
chronicle such a barren story, Germany. Estimates as to the
but David Stafford and Giles Victory in sight: Nuremberg, April 1945 loss of life vary a great deal, but
MacDonogh are treading what is MacDonogh opts for the official
by now a well-worn historical path. Over the past five figure of 2.25 million. Like so many of the statistics of
years German historians in particular have gone back to wartime deaths there is a good deal of room for argu-
poke around in the dying embers of the Reich, partly to ment, but there is no contesting the fact that in the
remind the wider world that ordinary Germans were months following German defeat the former subjects of
victims too, partly to recapture a period in Germany’s the New Order turned on their former tormentors with
tortured recent past that an earlier generation simply a terr ible rage. MacDonogh cites Heinr ich Böll’s
wanted to forget. Of course out of the ashes grew a gloomy aphorism ‘the devil possesses all the power in
workable and prosperous new German democracy – this world’ in explaining how corrupting unlimited
though not for that unlucky quarter of the German power over defenceless and vulnerable victims can be. It
people who ended up behind the Iron Curtain, trading is good to have Stafford’s account of some of the abom-
one dictatorship for another. This transformation is an inable things the SS and Gestapo did to their prisoners

6
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY
“Brooks treats his subject with much subtlety,
solid scholarship, and flexibility of mind.”
—Victor Brombert, author of Trains of Thought
in the last weeks of war to be reminded that violence to
Germans did not happen in a vacuum. Hatred was
intoxicating for both sides. It was also spasmodic and
Henry James
arbitrary. As the war drew to a close some of the Goes to Paris
German security forces gave up, while others engaged in PETER BROOKS
a final orgy of mindless savagery. By the same token the “Under the guise of simply
violence of the Czechs or Poles in 1945 came in waves, ‘telling a story’ about the
but began to ebb away once the first major spasm was young Henry James’s stay
past, to be revived here and there when opportunity in Paris in 1875–76,
presented itself. Peter Brooks describes
Stafford’s account follows a number of individuals the progressive emergence
from different backgrounds – soldiers, reporters, aid of the whole of novelistic
workers, and so on – through the weeks of defeat and modernity during the
liberation. The device works reasonably well in evoking turn from the nineteenth
the grimy milieu of war’s end, and there are nice to the twentieth century.
You have to be, like
vignettes to remind readers that amidst the grimmest of
Brooks, both historian
moral landscapes small pockets of humanity poked and theorist, a scholar
through. But most of the stories are remorselessly both of things French
unpleasant. In Buchenwald the reporter Robert Reid and American, to so
finds a few SOE men still alive, but discovers that the masterfully carry out
rest were hanged on meathooks jabbed under their this project.”
chins, for easy disposal to the nearby crematorium. In —Philippe Hamon, Professor Emeritus, La Sorbonne Nouvelle
the Netherlands the Canadian army, obeying orders, Cloth $24.95 £15.95 978-0-691-12954-9 Due April
handed over former German deserters to the German
commanders, who then ordered them shot until the dis-
gust of local Canadian officers brought the grotesque “Lee’s immensely enjoyable study . . . should become
charade to a halt. Allied troops everywhere found that essential reading for aficionados of literary biography.”
sex could be bought for a few cigarettes, and seem to —Publishers Weekly
have had few moral qualms about such uneven trade.
Neither of these books tries to explain the horrors, New in paperback
which speak for themselves. MacDonogh goes into the
macabre detail of rape, torture and brutality to an extent Virginia Woolf ’s
that most readers will find repellent. No one would Nose
expect a historian to tiptoe around the truth, but there are Essays on Biography
limits to what needs to be told. Otherwise the response HERMIONE LEE
will be to tar all the Czechs and Poles and Russians who
perpetrated these barbarisms with the same brush applied “Lee’s tales of the battles
to their former German persecutors. These things of the biographers are
gripping and vivid. . . .
certainly happened, but the people who committed them
The nose is a funny thing
would never have done so in circumstances where nation- anyway; stick it on to
al sovereignty and the rule of law had not been torn up ‘Virginia Woolf’ or any
by German expansion. What was so hideous about this other of the illustrious
war was the way it reduced so many to a moral primi- names Lee discusses, and
tivism, turning ordinary people into criminals on both you are bound to bring
sides. The message would be uniformly bleak were it them down a peg. All part
not for the knowledge that Central and Eastern Europe of the biographer’s power
stabilised by the 1950s and a new Germany emerged from to make or unmake, sniff
the devastation, leaving thousands of survivors with bitter out or sniff at, which Lee so
recollections that no one wanted to hear. engagingly shows us.”
These two books will force anyone bold enough to —Rachel Bowlby, Financial Times
read them to recognise just what modern war does to Paper $12.95 £8.50 978-0-691-13044-6 Due April
people. It is impossible not to think of Iraq. But will Not available from Princeton in the Commonwealth, except Canada
British historians in sixty years’ time be writing of the
Endgame in Baghdad?
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37 Princeton University Press
(0800) 243407 U.K. • 800-777-4726 U.S.
Read excerpts online at press.princeton.edu

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

 HISTORY
E VAN M AWDSLEY
EASTERN FRONT
ABSOLUTE WAR: SOVIET RUSSIA IN THE
SECOND WORLD WAR – A MODERN HISTORY
★ Stalin’s Wars (2006) by Geoffrey Roberts, now the definitive
By Chris Bellamy
(Macmillan 813pp £30)
CHRIS BELLAMY IS uniquely qualified to write a readable
and authoritative account of the ‘Russian war’. A professor
of military science at Cranfield University, he has pro-
duced important works on security affairs, a number of
them on the Russian military, past and present. He has a
professional grasp of the theory and technology of warfare.
Finally, unlike most historians of his generation, Bellamy
has a personal experience of armed conflict; in the 1990s
he worked as a journalist for The Independent in the Middle
East, the Balkans and, most notably, Chechnya.
After a long discussion (seven chapters) of the prelude to
the June 1941 invasion, Bellamy proceeds to lay out in
detail the campaigns of 1941 and 1942. He explains effec-
tively both why the Red Army was caught by surprise and
how it fought back. He discusses ‘conventional’ combat at
the front as well as the often neglected security situation
in the rear. The treatment avoids over-detailed battlefield
narrative, and is broken up into manageable sections. The
many maps for these campaigns are really outstanding.
So far so good, but there are also significant missed
opportunities. Although the book is thoroughly footnoted
and makes extensive use of Russian-language material, the
source base is limited. It is difficult to do archival research
in the Russian Federation, and for such a vast topic such
research is scarcely practical. But the use of published
archival documents here is also more selective than it need
have been. Much use is made of the six-volume collection
of NKVD documents, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti
SSSR v Velikoi otechestvennoi voine (1995–2002), and of
some smaller collections, notably on the Battle of Moscow
and the Blockade of Leningrad. But citation of the
extremely important two-volume collection of documents
on the start of the war, 1941 god (1996), apparently comes
only second-hand through Constantine Pleshakov’s mono-
graph, Stalin’s Folly (2005). There is no use (or mention)
of what is now an indispensable source, the collection of
command and other documents published in the series
Russkii arkhiv in the 1990s. This collection comprises some
twenty volumes, each 500 pages long, including, for
example, five volumes relating to Stalin’s Stavka. Also miss-
ing are important new collections of diplomatic discus-
sions, notably those edited by Oleg Rzheshevskii on
British–Soviet negotiations. The memoir material is only
dipped into, although effective use is made throughout the
8
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
book of the insightful recollections of the Soviet diplomat
V M Berezhkov (1994) and the unexpurgated version of
Marshal Rokossovskii’s account (2002).
The use of secondary sources is also quite selective. The
Romanian official history (in Romanian) is included in the
bibliography, but none of the Russian official histories. Also
missing are a number of recent Western books, such as
treatment of Soviet wartime diplomacy, or Zetterling and
Frankson’s important analytical study, Kursk 1943 (2000).
The other general problem with Absolute War, and one
that will be more evident to the non-specialist, is the
chronological coverage. This book has twenty chapters
and 687 pages of text excluding notes and bibliography.
The narrative does not get to the German invasion until
the start of Chapter 6. The next six chapters (7–12) cover
six months of 1941. After one chapter each on the
1941–44 blockade of Leningrad and on inter-Allied rela-
tions, there are two long chapters on 1942, and one on the
July 1943 Battle of Kursk. The period from the autumn of
1943 to May 1945 is squashed into two sketchy chapters
taking up a mere 75 pages. This is the time when the Red
Army defeated the Wehrmacht and drove it back across
western Russia and central Europe, establishing Soviet
hegemony for fifty years. A critical event like the collapse
of the Axis Romanian front in 1944, which opened a
whole new theatre in the Danube and Balkan regions, is
dealt with in less than a paragraph. To take another exam-
ple, there is virtually nothing about the huge campaign in
East Prussia in the winter of 1944–45, which was much
costlier for the Red Army than the ‘Berlin operation’;
Königsberg does not even appear in the index. If the aim
is really, as the author states, to know how the Soviet war
was ‘run’ as well as how it was ‘won’, then surely we have
to understand how the Red Army’s massive and long-
ranging mobile campaigns of 1943–45 developed.
The logarithmic approach of Absolute War may have
come about because the author, like the Wehrmacht, was
gradually worn down by the expanse of Russian front.
Bellamy states, at the very end, that the book ‘has con-
centrated on the critical years of 1941 and 1942, when
the very survival of Soviet Russia hung in the balance’.
After Kursk in 1943, ‘it was only a matter of time’. This
approach might have been good enough back in 1965 for
Alan Clark’s now antique Barbarossa. It will not do for a
book in 2007 that aspires (to quote the dust jacket) to be
‘the definitive history of this cruellest of conflicts’.
Overall, despite the reservations outlined, Chris
Bellamy’s book has much to recommend it, certainly for
the first two years of the war (and for the lead-up to the
invasion). For this period even specialists will read it with
profit. Bellamy does not go in for broad judgements, but
the early idea of anchoring the book around Clausewitz’s
notion of ‘absolute war’ was an inspired one.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 HISTORY
S IMON H EFFER
DECLINE AND FALL
T HE L AST T HOUSAND DAYS OF THE
B RITISH E MPIRE
★ reference to the papers of the men concerned, growing
By Peter Clarke
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 559pp £25)
THE ENDLESS FASCINATION with the military events that
brought about the end of the Second World War has
perhaps disguised the importance of the diplomatic and
political ones that ran concurrent with them. Peter
Clarke’s book, as its title suggests, deals with one particu-
lar legacy of the denouement: how Britain’s empire
became not just politically untenable (there had been
plenty of signs of that in India for the preceding quarter-
century) but economically unviable. In a
way the title is misleading: there is much
less emphasis on the dismantling of
empire in the text than one might expect.
What is dealt with in much greater detail
are the international political processes
that drove the final nails into Britain’s cof-
fin as a leading world power, notably the
relations between the ‘Big Three’ of
Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. After
Clarke has told that particular story, the
decline of Britain as an imperial power
comes as no surprise at all.
By the autumn of 1944, when the nar-
rative starts (a thousand days before the
Union flag was run down over India for
the last time in August 1947), Britain is
proud, but broke. John Maynard Keynes
is in America negotiating, through per-
ilous illness, a postwar international Truman: the new MD
financial settlement that will not implode.
Stalin has recently shown his true colours by waiting for
the Warsaw uprising to be suppressed by the Nazis, with
a savagery breathtaking even by their standards, before
allowing the Red Army to proceed and engage the
Wehrmacht. Churchill, according to the diaries of those
who have to humour him, is steering a drink-fuelled and
orotund passage towards eventual victory. Roosevelt, in
the last months of life, is trying to let the British down
gently about the future of their empire (which America,
as part of its goal finally to supplant Britain as a super-
power, wishes to see wiped from the face of the earth),
and is on a course that even his own countrymen regard
as the appeasement of Stalin. On the battlefield in
Western Europe there are enormous tensions between
Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, and
9
Montgomery, the narcissistic, egomaniacal genius who is
the unchallenged hero of the British press. For Churchill,
his dealings with America are constantly dogged by what
he regards as the offensive suggestion that the Empire
might have to be downgraded as part of an acceptance of
the postwar realities, especially when the war in the Far
East is over. There is also, as Clarke illustrates with much
hostility in America in general towards the British.
Darting in and out of the narrative is the theme of how
much, in the end, it actually benefited America that, first,
Britain should have stood alone against the Nazis, and
then, that America should have expended much blood
and treasure on the salvation of Europe. Isolationism was
not, after all, a viable option for America even before
Pearl Harbor: had it lost export markets in a Nazi-domi-
nated Europe for perhaps decades, and had its own war
with Japan to deal with, what we call the postwar period
would have been very different. Certainly, as Clarke
points out, President Truman was happy
for victory to signal the liquidation of
Britain’s financial debt to America, on
the basis that we had all been in it
together: Congress was less so. Even
without the American debt, though,
Britain was still stuffed.
The popular idea that the Empire was
in some way enriching Britain, and that
the mother country was living off the
gains of exploitation in its colonies, is
shown by Clarke to be false. Australia
and New Zealand actually made money
out of the war from services rendered to
the Old Country. Churchill’s own com-
mitment to India was shaken in 1945
when he realised that we owed that
country £1,200 million in sterling bal-
ances for the help its soldiery had given
us in preventing them from being over-
run by the Japanese. There was, of
course, a strong political impulse to grant independence
to India, but that was a separate argument. Churchill
decided not to grant India dominion status on VE Day,
which merely postponed the inevitable by just two
years. When, after Attlee’s assumption of the post of
Prime Minister, the new government moved speedily to
grant independence, the act became a useful cover for
the fact that a country almost bankrupted by war, and
living on handouts, could hardly pretend to afford the
jewel in the crown. And, as power slipped away on the
subcontinent, so Clarke illustrates the parallel advance of
British impotence in the much smaller, but no less
intractable, theatre of postwar Palestine. With loss of
money, and loss of material power, came loss of will.
These weaknesses, so slowly apparent to the British people
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY
and even to some of their leaders, were spotted and fed
upon by Britain’s allies. Clarke illustrates, in his description
of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Churchill’s growing
inability to be the master of events. The conclusion to be
drawn from this, incidentally, is that the real villain of Yalta
– at which Churchill was trying to punch far above his
weight and was not always succeeding – was the declining
Roosevelt. In dictating the terms of the conference and,
ultimately, deciding to end it by choosing to leave,
Roosevelt had Churchill in particular reduced to the status
of observer, or even, at times, supplicant. Yalta, of course,
was not so much about the British Empire as about shap-
ing the regard in which Britain should have the right to be
held by the rest of the world. The most shameful act to
which Churchill put his name, and in which Roosevelt
seemed more than happy to participate, was the redrawing
of the boundaries of Poland. A huge tract of the east of the
country was swallowed up by Russia with the expectation
that Poland would be compensated by territory, at
Germany’s expense, in the west. There was no historical
justification for this, and it led to millions of Germans
being expelled from their country at a time when other
conditions made such a population movement almost
unsustainable. It also helped institutionalise a profoundly
undemocratic treatment of the Poles themselves, who had
learned several times during the preceding six years what
little reason they had to trust or love the Russians. When
the time came – when Russia had moved in and occupied
Eastern Germany – there was not even an apportionment
of land to the Poles in accordance with what had been
imagined at Yalta. Russia simply gave the Poles (who were
soon, of course, to be one of Russia’s clients) a vast slice of
Germany, which resulted in the displacement of even
more people than would otherwise have been the case.
As Clarke shows, Britain’s humiliation at Yalta was
P AUL A DDISON
A NATION OF SHOPPERS
A H ISTORY OF M ODERN B RITAIN
★ end, Elizabeth II was still there, an astonishing survivor
By Andrew Marr
(Macmillan 629pp £25)
H ISTORIANS USED TO think that Britain was trans-
formed by the great upheavals of the first half of the
twentieth century – the two world wars and the Slump.
Now they can see that the second half of the century
was even more disruptive than the first. Intact in 1945,
the British Empire had virtually disappeared by 1970.
National sovereignty was abandoned when Britain
entered the European Union, and the United Kingdom
itself began to break up. At home the postwar moral
10
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
hardly consistent with her status as an imperial power.
The Potsdam conference, convened in July 1945 just out-
side the ruins of Berlin, was in some respects even worse.
Churchill disappeared halfway through to be replaced by
Attlee, who (to Stalin’s shock) had become Prime
Minister. Truman – Roosevelt had died three months
earlier – and his delegation turned up determined to be
firmer with Stalin than America had previously had the
will to be, but found it was too late: Potsdam was to be
the overture to the Cold War. Britain’s power was
deemed to be so minimal by this stage that Churchill was
lucky to get an invitation: those close to Truman believed
that the only effective business that could be done would
be between what would now be the two superpowers,
America and Russia. The conference did, indeed, set the
tone for a postwar world one of whose realities would be
the absence of the British Empire. It is ironic that a victo-
rious power should come off so badly.
Clarke writes compellingly and with great wit. Without
being unduly opinionated he is no fence-sitter either, and
the conclusions he comes to in his epilogue are mostly
sound: though I fear he underestimates the force of
Correlli Barnett’s arguments about Britain’s self-inflicted
economic wounds after 1945. What Clarke calls the
‘transfers’ of money between rich and poor in Britain that
enabled the creation of a welfare state did come at an
opportunity cost. At a time when Britain had to earn
dollars through exporting, there was a remarkable reluc-
tance to invest effectively in the industrial modernisation
that would have improved productivity and competitive-
ness, and by the 1960s the cumulative effects of this had
put Britain way behind the powers it had defeated in
1945. Such cavils aside, Clarke tells a sad but inevitable
story – and tells it exceptionally well.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37
order was overthrown by the permissive society and the
postwar political settlement by Mrs Thatcher. An econ-
omy founded on manufacturing was displaced by an
economy based on services, a predominantly working-
class nation by a predominantly middle-class nation, a
white man’s country by a multicultural Britain. At the
from an earlier time. But her reputation was almost
overwhelmed by the celebrity cult of Princess Diana,
whom Andrew Marr describes as ‘a kind of Barbie of
the emotions, who could be dressed up in the private
pain of millions’. The outpouring of emotion that fol-
lowed her death was at odds with almost everything
that had been written about the English or British
national character in the Forties and Fifties. Were the
British losing their identity, or re-inventing it?
To cover all these topics in a single volume would be
a tall order. Andrew Marr takes his readers on some
very enjoyable excursions into economic, social and
 HISTORY
cultural themes (he is very good, for example, on
Ealing Studios, and the early history of British pop
music), but the core of his book, written to accompany
the BBC television series, consists of a political narra-
tive that begins with Churchill and Halifax arguing over
the merits of a compromise peace in May 1940, and
ends with Tony Blair’s supporters egging on David
Miliband to stand against Gordon Brown. It is a tale of
the rise and fall of ruling orthodoxies, punctuated by
crises at home and abroad, and populated by a political
class he observes with a broad scepticism, qualified by a
degree of respect for individuals with decent and sin-
cere convictions. Edward Heath and Neil Kinnock are
both in his good books. The
late Roy Jenkins, when asked
about his researches into the
life of Winston Churchill,
replied that he had not felt it
necessar y ‘to go gwubbing
about in the archives’. Andrew
Marr has not been ‘gwubbing
about’ either. In a strictly fac-
tual sense there is not much
here that is not to be found in
the work of other historians
and biographers. But as in the
days when he was the BBC’s
chief political editor, it is the
clarity of his judgements, the
arresting insights and the irre-
pressible wit that keep us hang-
ing on his words.
Among his other qualities,
Marr is the ideal history teacher
that most people never had at
school. I picture him, chalk in
hand, leaping around the class- How it all began...
room and making the Suez
affair or the ‘Winter of Discontent’ intelligible to the
most backward pupil. Up his sleeve he carries a fund of
funny stories and vivid metaphors to capture the atten-
tion of the class. Scotland, he writes, now feels more
distant from England than it used to be, and the two
countries are like ‘two pieces of pizza being gently
pulled apart, still together but now connected only by
strings of molten cheese’. Just so, and here he is on the
workings of a bafflingly technical topic, the Exchange
Rate Mechanism in the days of John Major:
Europe’s old currencies … were supposed to move in
close alignment, like a flight of mismatched aircraft
in tight formation. They would stick together against
outsider currencies, notably the US dollar, behaving
almost as if they were one currency. Speculators
would not be able to drive them apart. Eventually,
they would fuse and become one, which is where
11
the aircraft analogy falls down, because so would
the aircraft.
It is a measure of Marr’s professionalism that his judge-
ments inspire the kind of trust which Tony Blair and his
allies squandered through spin and outright lies. While
not acquitting Blair of his share of responsibility for a
disaster greater than Suez, Marr’s explanation of the
sequence of events that led him step by step from success
in Kosovo to the invasion of Iraq is notably fair-minded
and almost awakens our sympathy. As for his claim that
Frank Dobson, the first of Tony Blair’s Secretaries of
State for Health, was ‘a staunch traditionalist and the
man with the filthiest sense of humour in British poli-
tics’, who could doubt it? Not
that he treats us to any of
Dobson’s jokes. Marr is in fact
very discreet about the private
lives of politicians and only
refers to sexual escapades when
political history demands it.
‘This history’, Marr concludes
with a flourish, ‘has told the
story of the defeat of politics by
shopping.’ All the visions pro-
moted by the political elites,
from the socialism of the Attlee
governments to the modernising
rhetoric of Wilson and Heath,
the Victor ian values of Mrs
Thatcher, and the Blair ite
regime of bureaucratic centralism
in schools and hospitals, have
been rejected by a public that has
retreated from citizenship into
consumerism. With the role of
the state much diminished, and
conflicts over ideology and class
largely forgotten, there is little
now to connect the public and the politicians. It is doubt-
ful, of course, whether the British ever trusted their rulers
or ever took much more than a passing interest in politics.
But Marr is surely right to argue that challenges such as
climate change or the threat from militant Islam can only
be met by a country which takes its politics more seriously.
Sir John Reith, a pillar of the age of deference, would not
have approved of Marr’s more irreverent remarks at the
expense of the political elite and he might even have
objected to his tactful description of Cherie Blair as
‘unreasonably frightened of not having enough money’.
But he would surely have recognised in his fellow Scot
another ambitious Reithian with a mission to educate as
well as entertain. Seriousness has been out of fashion
under Tony Blair, but it may be coming back under
Gordon Brown, and not a moment too soon.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
FAILED STATES
T HE F ORCE OF D ESTINY: A H ISTORY OF
I TALY S INCE 1796
★ Vespers or the voyages of Columbus in red, white and
By Christopher Duggan
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 688pp £30)
AT THIS TIME of year many readers may be about to holi-
day in Italy. One indispensable item for the journey is
Christopher Duggan’s brilliant and monumental The
Force of Destiny, which deserves to be the standard history
of modern Italy for the foreseeable future. Leave a pair of
shoes at home and take Duggan instead.
His chronological starting point, when much of the
peninsula was overrun by Napoleonic armies, was
unpropitious. Before, and for decades after the
Risorgimento, Italy was merely the ‘geographical
expression’ which Metternich had spoken of in 1847.
The flat plains of the Po may have had good roads, but
only two led to Rome and they were unsafe. Two roads
snaked southwards, one through the malaria-ridden
Pontine Marshes, but they both terminated at Naples,
leaving Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria to their own
devices. These regions and Sicily itself were best
reached by sea. East-west travel across the Apennines
was virtually impossible. By the 1840s, by which time a
few Italian states had managed to construct 620 kilome-
tres of railway track, Britain had 10,000, Germany
6,000 and France 3,000 kilometres respectively.
Apparently there was a problem with tunnels; the
Catholic Church thought darkness encouraged
immorality. Since trade mostly went abroad from the
ports, a national internal market evolved very slowly.
Another major obstacle to communication was lan-
guage, a problem common across nineteenth-century
Europe. In 1861 only 10 per cent of the population
spoke Italian, the vernacular Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch
and Boccaccio, while only a further 20 per cent could
understand and read it, without speaking or writing it
well. Eighty per cent of people spoke dialect. When
two Milanese aristocrats visited Sicily’s mountainous
interior in 1853, the inhabitants thought they were
Englishmen. When Camillo Cavour visited the South
after unification, he was always relieved to encounter
priests, since they were the only locals who spoke
Italian, a language that came less easily on paper to the
Piedmontese statesman than French. All of which is to
say that the peoples of Italy’s cities and villages had
intense local attachments, of which the strongest was
the ‘amoral familism’ that corrupted a Catholic virtue
into a chauvinistic clannishness. The only exceptions to
12
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
this rule were the tiny minorities who pursued the
utopian vision of a united Italy. They initially operated
through successive conspiracies, often propagated and
commemorated via literature, painting and song, sub-
jects to which Duggan brings expert ears and eyes.
Much of this product recalled vanished glories, or
retouched epic events like the Crusades, the Sicilian
green. Patriotic opera-goers imposed their own mean-
ings on works of Bellini and Verdi, shouting ‘Yes, Yes’
when the Druids shrieked ‘War, War’ in Norma, even
though the Druids’ oppressors were Romans rather
than the Austrians who ruled northern Italy.
This reviewer is not going to quibble with the modish
concept underlying most of the central chapters of the
book. Duggan is a firm believer, so to speak, in the
process whereby political movements sublimate religion
(obviously Catholicism in this case), although he tends to
assume, rather than prove, how that process of metastasis
operates. Here we need a bit more empirical political
science and less vivid anecdotage. The political religion
of Italian nationalism was actively preached as a gospel by
people who saw themselves as apostles or missionaries,
for the only precedent for such a mass conversion was
the propagation of Christianity by the early Church, and
the northerly pools of heightened religiosity that resulted
from the Counter-Reformation. The national movement
was instrumentalised in the service of the colder-eyed
ambitions of the Piedmontese state. As the author of a
major biography of the politician Francesco Crispi,
Duggan is extremely good on the mechanisms of post-
Unification nation-building, through primary education,
military conscription into the armed forces, the saintly
cults of Cavour and Garibaldi and so on, all areas in
which Crispi played a leading role.
But Duggan also highlights the manifold weaknesses of
what resulted. The Catholic Church was unreconciled to
the outcome for decades, instructing Catholics not to
stand for office or to vote. There was a monarchy, but the
King, Vittorio Emmanuele, could hardly bring himself to
visit Rome. There was a parliament, at Montecitorio, but
this was so poorly attended that there was often no
quorum, while politics as such became a byword for
clientelism and pork-barrel corruption in which railway
lines were built in the middle of nowhere to assuage some
shady interest. A system called ‘transformism’ became
normative. It was almost worthy of Gordon Brown, in
the sense that nominal opponents were ‘transformed’ into
members of a vaguely progressive centrist government
bloc, the leading practitioner of this being the liberal
Giovanni Giolitti, a real political survivor.
Leading intellectuals like Gaetano Mosca and Roberto
Michels inveighed against such a system in which an
ideational legal Italy was imperfectly imposed on the
myriad squalors of the real place. Alliances with Austria
 HISTORY
and Germany covered an aggressive foreign policy in the
Horn of Africa which resulted in slaughter at the hands
of Ethiopian tribesmen at Adua (or Adowa). This Italian
defeat poisoned the political atmosphere, giving rise to a
clamorous nationalist movement responsible for military
intervention in Libya in 1911 and Italy’s belated decision
to join the Entente side in 1915. Duggan gives a moving
account of the fate of peasant boys dragooned into the
hopeless battles of the Isonzo, and the mounting rage
that accompanied the mutilated peace which resulted.
The fanatic Left made the Allende-type mistake of
indulging in a gestural rural and municipal socialism in
the ‘red biennial’ which elicited the Fascist backlash
orchestrated by the maverick former socialist Mussolini.
Italy’s imperfect democracy was dismantled by the mid-
1920s and replaced by a Fascist police state whose
oppressive weight was felt
more by the souther n
Mafia than by political
opponents, who were
quarantined in remote
souther n villages. The
regime executed all of
twenty-five people.
Mussolini also sought a
moral and physical revo-
lution, from which would
spr ing a martial ‘new
man’, who foreigners
would no longer confuse
with clowns, organ
grinders and waiters. This
failed to come about,
despite the propagation of
manliness, the adoption
of the goose-stepping
passo romano and the Springing into action: Mussolini’s New Men
Roman salute. ‘Oi voi’,
so to speak, for the formal ‘Lei’, was abandoned as too
bourgeois. For the first time in the eighty-year history
of the unified Italian state, ancient Rome became exem-
plary, while war was used to forge a sense of Fascist
nationhood. Ironically, much of central Rome was
ruined to bring this vision about. Barbaric imperial
campaigns were launched in Libya and Ethiopia, reliant
upon concentration camps, mass executions and, to
secure rapid victory, at Mussolini’s express insistence,
bombing with mustard and arsine gas to wipe out resis-
tance. Like the ancient Romans at Carthage, the Fascists
made a desert and called it civilisation. Intervention in
Spain cemented the fateful alliance with Hitler, and a
final disastrous war. By 1943–45 this had also become an
Italian civil war in which 44,000 resistance fighters lost
their lives.
The chapters on postwar and contemporary Italy are
13
relatively disappointing. An allegedly inspiring anti-
Fascist vision among resisters gave way to the machine
politics of Christian Democrats and Communists, while
few steps were taken to purge Italy of former Fascists or
to hold war-crimes trials. There is an interesting account
of the consequences of internal migration, with some
nine million southerners (and islanders) going to Milan
and Turin, and of how Italians opted for the rampant
consumerism of New York rather than Moscow, even
though those who had named their kids Uliano or
Vladimiro also shed a fond tear on the death of Stalin.
Marshal Aid and membership of the EEC transformed
Italy into a prosperous place. The state remained the
main problem. Duggan incisively criticises the Christian
Democrats, who, leaving ‘ethics’ to a Church they
pulled away from, colonised the machinery of the state
so as to pack the hugely
bloated public sector
with their own clients.
In one Catania hospital,
where everyone from
the surgeons to the
cleaners was a Christian
Democrat, the CD
Senator director bussed
in extra patients to
boost his party’s vote.
Finally, readers get per-
functory accounts of the
implosion of the politi-
cal system in the wake
of ‘Br ibesville’, Red
Brigade and neo-Fascist
terrorism in the 1970s
and 1980s, the struggle
against the Comor ra
and Mafia, and the rise
of the Northern League,
National Alliance, Forza Italia and so forth.
The last parts of the book read as if 9/11 had not
happened. Duggan’s Italy is very white, albeit with a
fetching tan, as if Arab and African refugees are not
rowing there each day. There is no mention either of
Milan as a major centre of Islamist radicalism, notably
the sinister role of its Islamic Cultural Institute in several
major Al Qaeda or North African terror cells, or the
sterling work done by the Italian police and secret
service in crushing this. These chapters lack the sure-
footedness and verve of what went before. So Duggan’s
book may not explain much of what you see around
you on your Tuscan holiday – the posters, the press, the
books, the Africans selling trinkets or themselves in
Florence – but it is an impressive and essential guide to
how Italy was shaped by the last two hundred years.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 37
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY
A LLAN M ASSIE
THE JULY MONARCHY
T HE P ERILOUS C ROWN : RULING F RANCE ,
1814–1848
★ the Revolution in its early days, and was thought to
By Munro Price
(Macmillan 480pp £20)
A FEW YEARS ago I happened on a strange bar in the Rue
de Rivoli. A haunt of taxi drivers and people buying tick-
ets for the tiercé and lottery, it is also dedicated to the cause
of Royalism, and, if you enquire, you will be given a
pamphlet explaining why France needs a king. On one
visit I even found a Royalist conclave in session, and on
my last, earlier this year, there was a huge bouquet of lilies
by the portrait of Louis XVI, sent, on the anniversary of
his execution, by the faithful Royalists of Nîmes.
However, it’s not merely a Royalist bar, but a Legitimist
one, scorning the Orleanist claimant, the Comte de Paris,
and professing allegiance to a handsome young prince of
the House of Bourbon-Parma, known to his adherents as
Louis XX. There isn’t of course the slightest possibility of
a Restoration, though the previous Comte de Paris
nursed for a long time the fond hope that de Gaulle
would name him his successor. But there are still tiny
groups of Royalists, who, like the fringe parties of the
Left, exchange bitter words with each other.
The division between the two branches of the French
royal family dates back to the Revolution of 1789.
Louis XVI, passive and dutiful, accepted the
Revolution, however reluctantly, until in 1792 he tried
to escape. His brothers, the Comte de Provence and
Comte d’Artois, had already emigrated. In contrast,
their cousin, the immensely r ich Philippe, Duc
d’Orléans, a liberal progressive and Anglophile (also a
debauchee and alcoholic), welcomed the Revolution,
perhaps (as his enemies believed) because he hoped to
replace Louis. However, when titles were abolished and
that hope was dashed, he became Citizen Egalité, and it
was as a member of the Assembly that he voted for his
cousin’s execution. He may have done so in a state of
confusion – his son Louis-Philippe, serving with the
Revolutionary army, had urged him to absent himself.
It did him little good; he followed the King to the guil-
lotine a few months later, by which time Louis-Philippe
and such members of his family as he could arrange for
had prudently joined the emigration.
When, after Napoleon’s first abdication, the elder
branch of the Bourbons was restored, with the former
Comte de Provence as Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe also
returned to France, after many years of exile in England
and somewhat uncertain of his welcome. Munro Price,
14
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
the author of this scholarly, well-written and engaging
history of the Restoration, sometimes seems to suggest
that the distrust with which Louis XVIII regarded his
cousin was ill-founded. Yet it was surely natural enough.
The shadow of Egalité and his vote for the death penalty
at Louis XVI’s trial hung over them, souring relations.
Besides, Louis-Philippe never retracted his support for
have the same ambition to supplant the senior branch of
the family as his father. The relationship couldn’t have
been anything but uneasy. Curiously, Louis-Philippe was
on better terms with the Comte d’Artois (who would
succeed his brother in 1824 as Charles X) even though
Artois was well to the right of Louis XVIII.
The Bourbons made a mess of things. Everyone
knows that Talleyrand is supposed to have said that they
had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Actually, it
would not have been so bad if they had forgotten noth-
ing; the trouble was that Charles X and his ministers
seemed to have forgotten the most important thing:
that the Revolution had led to a Republic, and that
their position was therefore precarious. Sure enough,
their failure to remember this provoked another
Revolution on 30 July 1830. This time, however, the
moderates kept control. Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans,
was named First Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom
and then King himself. To demonstrate that he was a
different sort of king, he took the title King of the
French, rather than of France. In short, he was King by
the grace of the People, rather than the Grace of God –
even if the particular people who made his accession
possible were an elite rather than the mob.
The elder branch had failed to make a constitutional
monarchy work, because they resented, and were thought
eager to subvert, the Charter they had felt compelled to
grant. Louis-Philippe, in contrast, was genuinely deter-
mined to abide by the Constitution; he would be a
monarch in the British style, for his years of exile had
made him a warm admirer of England – and indeed, as
Price observes, the July Monarchy would be better dis-
posed towards Britain than perhaps any other French
regime. Louis-Philippe may be called the first bourgeois
monarch; his support rested on the upper bourgeoisie and
he presented himself as a Citizen-King (title of a biography
by T E B Howarth published in 1961). Intelligent and
well-meaning, informal in manner and endlessly loqua-
cious, he presented a marked contrast to his predecessors.
Price lays great emphasis on the support he had from his
devoted unmarried sister Adelaide, Madame d’Orléans;
her influence, generally good, was such that he sees her as
the King’s closest aide and even his partner in government.
For eighteen years France enjoyed stability and mostly
peace (though it was in his reign that the Algerian adven-
ture, which was to mean so much to France and end so
bitterly, was launched). Unlike Charles X, Louis-Philippe
 HISTORY
followed the British example and chose his ministers from
the party or grouping that could command a majority in
the Chamber. He sought reconciliation within France,
persuading the British Government to allow Napoleon’s
remains to be brought back from St Helena to be
entombed in the Invalides, a mission carried out by one of
his sons. Until its last days the regime seemed well-estab-
lished, all the more so because the succession was secure.
And yet in February 1848 it crumbled within a few
days. There were, as always, long-term and immediate
reasons for its failure. It had never enjoyed a sufficiently
broad base of support. On the Right it was resented by
the displaced Legitimists. On the Left it could not satisfy
the republicans, who felt cheated by the outcome of the
July Revolution. Then the franchise was too restricted,
excluding many who in other circumstances would have
been natural supporters of order; and Louis-Philippe,
ever mindful of how the liberals of 1789 had lost control
of their Revolution and been submerged by the popular
tide, hesitated to extend it. He set his face against further
reform until it was too late. Consequently when the
republican movement gathered strength and demonstra-
tions in Paris turned into armed conflict, he found he
could not rely on the National Guard in the capital, for
even many members of that bourgeois force were denied
the vote and had therefore no stake in the regime. The
Army was reliable, but the King could not bring himself
to order it to act vigorously to disperse the mob. Perhaps
he was too humane; perhaps his nerve failed – he was
already seventy-eight.
When, a few months after his abdication, the new
republican government suppressed a mass rising of Paris
workers, Louis-Philippe, again an exile in England,
remarked sardonically: ‘Republics are lucky; they can shoot
people.’ The Third Republic would do so, even more
ruthlessly when it crushed the Communards in 1871.
Munro Price speculates whether Adelaide’s death in
1847 contributed to the monarchy’s fall the next year.
More sympathetic to reform than the brother she
adored, she might have persuaded him to nip unrest in
the bud by offering a further measure of parliamentary
reform before it was too late. He admits, however, that
this must be an open question.
The July Monarchy ended then as a failure. Yet it pro-
vided a term of necessary stability, and in the long run it
may even seem to have won, for the Fifth Republic which
de Gaulle created resembles the July Monarchy more than
any of the regimes in between. It too combines a strong
executive controlled by a President whose powers are very
similar to those enjoyed by Louis-Philippe; the President
may indeed be called a directly elected constitutional
monarch. Which, if good for France, is not enough for
my friends in the Bar des Templiers who hold hard to the
Legitimist cause, hopeless though it is.
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15
D OMINIC S ANDBROOK
DARK CONTINENT
B ARBARISM AND C IVILISATION : A H ISTORY
OF E UROPE IN O UR T IME
★
By Bernard Wasserstein
(Oxford University Press 901pp £25)
THE THESIS OF Bernard Wasserstein’s huge new history
of modern Europe is all there in the title. Two themes
underlie this grandest of narratives: on the one hand, the
astonishing advance of European science, technology
and culture, accompanied by a great boom in living
standards, life expectations and imaginative horizons; on
the other, the appalling depths of sadism and depravity
to which Europeans sank in history’s bloodiest century.
It is an arresting argument, but not a particularly new
one. Nine years ago, Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent
offered what, at the time, was the most radical rereading
of European history for a generation, emphasising the
desperate fragility of democracy and civility since the
dawn of the century. For Mazower – writing in the
shadow of the war in Bosnia – ethnic hatred and geno-
cide were not anomalies; they were embedded in
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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 HISTORY
European life as deeply as Beethoven or Shakespeare.
Other historians followed suit. Niall Ferguson, for
example, struck a similar pose in last year’s The War of the
World, another chronicle of twentieth-century brutality,
although on a global scale; again ethnicity, not class con-
flict, played the central role.
Since Wasserstein generally follows the same line
(blaming ‘not class … but ethnicity’ for the outbreak of
the Great War, for instance), his argument is not quite as
fresh and exciting as his publisher’s blurb would have it.
Even so, this is a very impressive historical synthesis, as
sure-footed on the Edwardian peasantry as it is on the
consumer boom of the 1990s. The book is pretty enor-
mous, mind you, but it would be a shame if that put
readers off, because Wasserstein has a lovely brisk, dry
style that keeps the pages turning. He is also a fine sto-
ryteller: his accounts of the great military and diplomatic
set-pieces are not just well researched and thoughtful but
fast-moving and exciting. As narrative histories of the
last century go, this is as good as it gets.
War, of course, dominates the book, and Wasserstein
proves a masterful guide to the two great conflagrations
of the century: his summary of the causes of the Great
War, in particular, is a model of nuance and precision.
Unlike Ferguson, he makes no effort to present the two
world wars as a single conflict: instead, he emphasises
the relative peacefulness and stability of the interval
between 1923 and 1929. On the other hand, he is no
slave to the conventions of schoolroom chronology.
Rather than confining the Great War to a single chapter
on the period 1914–18, he takes 1917 as a key turning
point and therefore stretches the war out until 1921,
incorporating the Russian Civil War, the Polish–Soviet
War and the various nasty border conflicts, notably that
between Greece and Turkey – all of which seems emi-
nently sensible.
The revolutionary year of 1917, in fact, is probably
the pivotal moment in the entire book. Although
Wasserstein is unsparing in his dissection of the corrupt,
repressive Tsarist regime, he proves a justly harsh critic
of the Bolshevik ideologues whose revolution overshad-
owed the rest of the century. As he shows, terrorism and
brutality were built into the Bolshevik regime from the
very beginning: he quotes, for example, a terrifying
directive from Lenin in August 1918, ordering the pub-
lic hanging in Penza province of ‘no fewer than one hun-
dred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’. For good
measure, Lenin added: ‘Do it in such a fashion that for
hundreds of kilometres around the people might see,
tremble, know, shout: they are
strangling and will strangle to death
the bloodsucking kulaks.’
visit Literary
Fr ightening stuff , and as
Wasserstein points out, fear of www.literaryreview.co.uk
Communism, just as much as faith
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
in its revolutionary possibilities, was a guiding force of
much twentieth-century history. He is a pithy and sensi-
ble guide to the horrors of Nazism, drawing on Ian
Kershaw in particular, but he warns against a ‘false paral-
lelism’ between the two creeds. Nazism, he argues, was
inherently reactionary, anti-intellectual, imbued with
‘the spurious solidarity of the street gang’. By contrast,
Communism was not some ‘manic delusion’ but ‘a
modern transformation of the utopian chiliasm of the
most enlightened elements in European thought since
the seventeenth century’. Like Nazism, it descended
into demented violence and horrendous bloodshed, but
it was always more sophisticated and coherent: that
explains why it lasted longer, and inspired so much gen-
uine passion among otherwise sensible people.
Given the enormous suffering of the Continent dur-
ing the twentieth century, it seems only right that war
and ideology play such key roles in Wasserstein’s
account. But he is not blind to the other side of the
coin, the civilisation promised in his title. It is arrest-
ing to be reminded that in 1900 most Europeans (four
out of five in Southern and Eastern Europe) were
rural peasants, often scratching a living in muddy little
villages without electricity or running water, clad in
filthy rags and subsisting on bread and gruel. Few
could have imagined how much their world would be
changed during the next hundred years: from motor
cars and paved roads to personal computers and
mobile phones. By any standards, this was an immense
achievement, and Wasserstein’s chapters on the chang-
ing patterns of daily life, interspersed every now and
then amidst the battles and diplomatic intrigues, are
fascinating and thorough.
Yet what lingers on in the mind after eight hundred
pages is not, after all, the civilisation, but the barbarism.
Passages on, say, the origins of the Swedish social model
make pleasant and interesting reading, but they pale by
comparison with the appalling savagery visited on mil-
lions of people, from the institutionalised genocide of the
Holocaust to the casual shooting of opposition politicians
in the early days of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.
And Wasserstein’s conclusion, perhaps appropriately,
could hardly be more pessimistic. The last century, he
argues, quoting Anna Akhmatova, was ‘worse than any
other’, but who can say that the next will be any better?
With organised religion in retreat and society in thrall to
vulgarised consumerism, he argues, the barriers protect-
ing us from renewed barbarism have already been weak-
ened. ‘Evil stalked the earth in this era,’ reads his last line,
‘moving men’s minds, ruling their
Review online actions, and begetting the lies,
greed, deceit and cruelty that are
the stuff of history in our time.’
To order this book at £20, see LR
Bookshop on page 37
16
 BIOGRAPHY
C HRISTOPHER C OKER
THEY DESERVED EACH OTHER
R ICHARD M ILHOUS N IXON : T HE
I NVINCIBLE Q UEST
★ relations took on a fairly positive life of their own.
By Conrad Black
(Quercus 1152pp £30)
N IXON AND K ISSINGER : PARTNERS IN P OWER
★ Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is an accomplished work
By Robert Dallek
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 740pp £30)
O N 14 F EBRUARY 1971 André Malraux visited the
President of the United States and his National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger, who was already secretly
planning the coup de théâtre of the Nixon presidency: the
visit to China. Malraux said absolutely nothing that
would be of any assistance to Nixon during his own
visit, but, in a manner cultivated by the French, spoke
mostly in allegory. Mao, he claimed, had had ‘a fantastic
destiny … You may think he will be addressing you,
but in truth he will be addressing Death … There’s
something of the sorcerer in him. He’s a man inhabited
by a vision, possessed by it … No one will know if you
succeed, Mr President, for at least fifty years. The
Chinese are very patient’. After Malraux left, Kissinger
flattered the President: ‘I thought your questions were
very intelligent.’ Nixon: ‘I tried to keep him going.’
Kissinger: ‘Well, you did it very beautifully.’ In Nixon’s
presence, Kissinger was invariably sycophantic.
Malraux had pitched it exactly right.
Both Nixon and Kissinger had an over-
inflated sense of China’s importance, as
well as of the mystique of Mao and
Chou En Lai, so desperate were they for
some new dimension in the Cold War.
They saw themselves as explorers in the
footsteps of Marco Polo (the code name
of the Kissinger visit); they fooled them-
selves that they were going to a magic
place, or another planet. Indeed Nixon
almost affected to be emulating the
astronauts he had sent to the moon two
years earlier.
In China’s eyes, both men cut a sorry
figure. Chou En Lai told his
Politbureau that the President had
‘eagerly presented himself like an over-
dressed whore at China’s door’. Mao
particularly disliked courtiers and was
suspicious of the Kissinger type. ‘Just a On mischief bent
17
funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves
every time he comes to see me.’ In the end, however, it
was Kissinger who was to do best from the China ven-
ture. He managed to convince the Americans that he
was an authority on the Middle Kingdom. He became a
flourishing China expert in the private sector, and to be
fair, it was through his efforts that Chinese–American
The China trip is one of many stories that Conrad
Black presents us with in another 900-plus-page biogra-
phy of an American president, coming hot on the heels
of his study of a much greater president (and man),
which is positive about its subject without being unnec-
essarily adulatory. There’s not much I can find to fault in
Black’s final conclusion that Nixon was treated unfairly
over Watergate in large part because he was so hated by
the Establishment. No one was hurt by the Watergate
affair (‘no one drowned in the Watergate’ was a fre-
quently seen bumper sticker, refer r ing to Teddy
Kennedy). History may treat him more kindly. He was
instrumental in taking the Republican Party away from
the isolationists and country-club plutocrats who had led
it to disaster again and again against Roosevelt and
Truman. And he, more than anyone else, engineered the
downfall of Joseph McCarthy as well as ‘outing’ Alger
Hiss, for which he was never forgiven by the liberal
intelligentsia (whom Spiro Agnew, his ghastly Vice
President, liked to call ‘the nabobs of negativism’).
Robert Dallek’s book is very different. It is a highly
illuminating study of one of the most remarkable foreign
policy partnerships of the twentieth century, a partnership
between two largely self-made men who were ruthless in
pursuit of their own ambition. A vast array of previously
untapped records has served his recon-
struction of their histories. The recent
opening of the bulk of these materials –
millions of pages of national security
files; 2,800 hours out of 3,700 hours
of Nixon tapes; and 20,000 pages
of Kissinger telephone transcr ipts
that were made by aides listening in
on the two men’s conversations –
makes yet another re-examination of
the men and their relationship both
timely and instructive.
Inevitably, perhaps, their similarities
made them rivals. In fact, Nixon dis-
trusted Kissinger from the moment he
appointed him as National Security
Advisor. He was far from deceived by
his constant flattery. His principal advi-
sor’s craving for the spotlight and too
obviously self-serving ambition made
him question his ultimate loyalty.
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
Distrustful of all intellectuals, he disliked Kissinger’s associ-
ations with the Georgetown elite and imagined him sitting
around at dinner tables telling his friends about the
President’s bumbling manner, for he was as socially awk-
ward as Gerald Ford. ‘Jew boy’, Nixon used to call
Kissinger behind his back, and occasionally to his face as a
way to keep him in his place. Kissinger reciprocated the
nastiness by privately referring to Nixon as ‘our drunken
friend’ and ‘the meatball mind’. The journalist Marvin
Kalb recalls numerous occasions on which Kissinger would
remark: ‘Marvin, you see him as the President of the
United States. I see him as a madman.’
The relationship rested not on trust but on deception
and even hostility to one another. Nixon was simultane-
ously happy to rely on his advisor’s diplomatic skills while
secretly resenting his emergence as a celebrity. Kissinger’s
insistent need for attention incensed the man he served
but his undoubted skill in dealing with the Chinese,
Russians, Vietnamese and later Arabs made it difficult to
fire him. Watergate made it impossible. Clemenceau may
well have claimed that ‘the cemeteries are full of indis-
pensable men’. In this case it was actually true.
Neither book adds very much to what we already know
of their foreign policy successes and failures. But both flesh
out some of the details about the men themselves. If there
is a villain in Dallek’s account, it is Kissinger. Historians,
he reminds us, tend to treat the partnership as a coalition
which enabled the US to end the Vietnam War, turn
China, and ease the tension with the Soviet Union
through détente. But what the hitherto untapped sources
confirm is what others have known or suspected, that the
personal flaws of both men had an impact on their making
of foreign policy. Nixon’s drive to win re-election, which
he equated with his bid for presidential greatness, and
Kissinger’s ambition to become the most memorable
National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history
(his only rival is Acheson) skewed their judgements and
produced some terrible decisions in Vietnam and Chile.
On every occasion, they put themselves first.
In Nixon’s case it ended in tragedy. There was an old
joke at the time of Watergate: ‘If Nixon were captain of
the Titanic, he would have told the passengers he’d stopped
the ship to take on ice.’ And there’s something of the
famous ship’s fate about Nixon, even if the icebergs were
of his own making: his excessive secrecy, paranoia and
complete inability to admit to his own mistakes. Kissinger’s
reputation survived his master’s fall but it is beginning to
wear rather thin. In the end, one must conclude that both
men deserved each other. At the beginning of one of his
chapters Dallek places an epigram from Kissinger’s mem-
oirs, Years of Renewal: ‘Deep down one could never be cer-
tain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might
not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within
oneself.’ Each offered a window into the other’s soul.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
18
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
P ETER WASHINGTON
OUT OF THE FOG
J OSEPH C ONRAD : A L IFE
★
By Zdzislaw Najder
(Translated by Halina Najder)
(Boydell & Brewer 745pp £30)
T HE S EVERAL L IVES OF J OSEPH C ONRAD
★
By John Stape
(William Heinemann 378pp £20)
IF EXILE AND alienation are the defining characteristics
of twentieth-century literature, Joseph Conrad is the
quintessential twentieth-century writer. From Roman
poets to modern playwrights, many have written well
in places and languages other than their own, but
Conrad was more deracinated than most. The man who
has been called the best French novelist in English (a
compliment also paid to Henry James and Ford Madox
Ford) was a Pole from what is now the Ukraine,
stripped by circumstance of his culture, his class, his
family, his language, his country, and even his name.
But against these blows of fate Conrad fought back in
original ways. Born in the landlocked backlands of
Central Europe, he made a living for nearly twenty
years working tramp steamers for the British merchant
navy. Schooled in a rough and ready way of life, he
changed tack at thirty-seven, started writing in English
and published his first novel at thirty-eight. Remaining
single until he was thirty-nine, he married a working-
class girl from London and became a family man, end-
ing his life as a rich and respected member of the
Establishment with a mansion in Kent which looks not
unlike a Polish manor-house. Quite a journey.
As usual with Conrad, this story – poor refugee unex-
pectedly makes good – is not quite what it seems.
Konrad Korzeniowski had small private means and some
connections to help him make his way in the world, not
the normal lot of a working man in the late nineteenth
century. He was the son of upper-middle-class parents
from the radical intelligentsia, so it could be argued that
the ordinary seaman who became a serious, politically
aware novelist with a country estate was not rising in the
world but returning to his proper milieu: socially and
intellectually his friend H G Wells made a far greater
leap, from the lower middle class to the elite.
The same consistency of purpose applies to his pri-
vate life. Given his background, Conrad’s marriage
might look like a solecism but, despite a botched pro-
posal, it seems to have been a result of the realism
 BIOGRAPHY
which coloured almost everything he did in maturity.
His wife later complained of his disorganisation in
domestic matters, and he was inclined to fretfulness and
hypochondria, but in the important affairs of life
Conrad chose wisely. His decision to write in English
rather than Polish or even French, sometimes supposed
to be a more natural medium for émigré Poles, reflects
inter alia practical good sense. Like any good sailor,
Conrad had a feeling for prevailing weather. Britain was
the only superpower in the second half of the nine-
teenth century. Its language and literature reached
round the world like no other. Were Conrad alive
today, he might well choose to become an American
for similar reasons.
Nevertheless, Conrad’s exotic background, his experi-
ence at sea (so far removed from the solitude and safety
of a writer’s desk), the curious trajectory of his career,
and the faint but persistent air of foreign-ness which
hangs about him and his work, can together make him
seem at times as mysterious and unfathomable as figures
in his own fiction. Unfriendly critics put this mystery
down to nothing more than Conrad’s opulent – they
would say portentous, unidiomatic and opaque – prose
style, so neatly skewered in Beerbohm’s Christmas
Garland parody. Biographers naturally focus instead on
their subject’s personal elusiveness; and it is true that
contemporar ies as diverse as James, Stevenson,
Maugham, Bennett, Wells, Kipling, Galsworthy, Woolf,
Joyce, Ford and Lawrence have for us
now the sharp edges of caricature com-
pared with Conrad’s misty outline, the
sense he gives, despite several published
memoirs and many biographies, of
unrevealed depths and unspoken
knowledge as wor r ying as Kurtz’s
unnameable horror in Heart of Darkness.
Perhaps such elusiveness should not
surprise. Circumspection is what we
might expect from someone with
Conrad’s difficult past. His troubles
started early. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that his parents died for their
beliefs: Joseph was barely out of infancy
when they were imprisoned and exiled
for participation in a Polish uprising
against the Russians. They soon
declined into ill health and died. Well
might their orphaned offspring – eight
when his mother died, twelve when his
father followed her – have the oppres-
sive sense we find in his novels that life
is complex, delusive, difficult, unjust
and precarious, hope turning easily to
defeat, enterprise to tragedy. He may
also have taken from the example of his The Conrads: poles apart
19
parents the supremely ambiguous lesson that without
principles there is no life worth living; with them, possi-
bly no life at all.
Despite fluctuations in popularity and critical esteem,
Conrad has been the subject of many serious studies
since his own time. Most have been English or
American, which is perhaps why Zdzislaw Najder’s
biography made such an impact when it first appeared in
1983. Here was someone looking at Conrad from the
inside. Professor Najder hails from the sort of Polish
intelligentsia that Conrad’s parents might have recog-
nised. Having experienced persecution and exile at the
hands of a Russian autocrat, he understands tyranny and
the moral obliquity it entails at every level, how it enters
into the souls of victims and tyrants alike, shaping their
vision of themselves, their sense of history and their
understanding of necessity. In this respect he identifies
with his subject and the identification is fruitful.
Though Najder specifically forswears literary criticism,
the way his account of Conrad bears on the novels is
clear enough. English by adoption, French by inclina-
tion, in Najder’s portrait Conrad remains to the end not
just a Pole but a child of the tragic 1860s. We are invited
to read the novels in the light of that time and the acute
sense their author took away from it of the chaos which
lies just below the surface of things.
Aware, perhaps, that in the wake of critics such as Leavis
and Zaubel, Anglophone readers think of Conrad primar-
ily as moralist and intellectual, Najder is
at pains to emphasise other qualities,
quoting the novelist’s grandmother at
the beginning and end of his book to
the effect that the boy would grow up
to be ‘a man of great heart’. The fram-
ing of the text with these words is
apposite, ‘heart’ here signifying not only
feeling but breadth of character. This
biography is not so much a ‘Life and
Works’ as the portrait of a remarkable
human being in his native milieu and
the story of how he adapted to a very
different environment. Najder’s Conrad
is a man of deep emotions under a mask
of circumspection – a mask which the
adopted manners of a cool English gen-
tleman supplied to perfection. In fact, as
friends noted, Conrad was sometimes
far from cool, relapsing in private into
the manner Englishmen associate with
excitable foreigners, even waving his
arms and jabbering. But the mask was
essential. Like the sea’s surface and its
depths, mask and reality coexisted in a
dynamic tensile relationship which bore
fruit in the novels.
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
Where Najder concentrates on building up a detailed
portrait of Conrad using every scrap of available infor-
mation, the new biography by John Stape is a much
slighter affair. At only a third of the length of Najder’s,
his book abjures thoroughness in favour of brisk narra-
tive. That said, what he loses in scope and detail he gains
in accessibility. The Mittel-Europa seriousness of Najder
gives way in Stape to a lighter touch which allows him
to cover the inevitable longueurs of a writer’s life more
fleetly than Najder, though it diminishes Conrad’s
stature by making us feel that, after all, he was just
another novelist with the usual worries about sales and
A C G RAYLING
LOCKE’S LAUNDRY
L OCKE : A B IOGRAPHY
★ lawyer father who was on Parliament’s side in the Civil
By Roger Woolhouse
(Cambridge University Press 528pp £25)
JOHN LOCKE IS one of the great figures of the modern
philosophical pantheon. No study of the history of
thought since the seventeenth century can ignore him.
In the close confines of university philosophy
departments his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding is read (in parts), or read
about, by students instructed to examine
his criticism of the doctrine of innate
ideas, or his theory of perception and
the correlative distinction between
primary and secondary qualities, or
his famous discussion of the prob-
lem of personal identity.
But in the real world Locke’s
writings have been even more sig-
nificant. His Two Treatises of
Government was quoted extensively
and verbatim in the documents of
the American and French revolutions,
and they, together with the Essay and
his wr itings on religious toleration,
made him one of the two heroes invoked
by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, the other being his friend
Isaac Newton. Lustrous Locke
Roger Woolhouse’s thorough, detailed
and very readable biography of Locke gives an account
of these works, in lucid expositions annexed to the
occasions in Locke’s life that prompted him to write
them. This is especially interesting given that Locke
lived through, and indeed played a part in, the fraught
history of the Glorious Revolution in England, and his
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
houses and fallow periods and troublesome children.
Najder’s Conrad is a grander figure altogether: he looms,
as James might have said. Stape’s is more recognisably the
workaday man of letters. Both have their truth. Najder’s
book has been extensively revised since its original
appearance to accommodate new research, but only
Conrad specialists are likely to notice the differences.
Anyone wanting a good brief introduction will be happy
with Stape’s life. Both biographers have avoided commen-
tary on the novels, so for detailed critical discussion you
will have to look elsewhere.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
political writings are justifications of the new order of
1688, overturning the doctrine of the Divine Right of
Kings and laying the foundations of a constitutional dis-
pensation which served as a model in the subsequent
history of Europe and America.
Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, in 1632 to a
War. Educated at Westminster School and Chr ist
Church, Oxford, where he was subsequently a Student
(a Fellow) for many years, Locke’s early interest was
medicine and science. He privately and intermittently
practised as a physician, but circumstances called his main
energies to political life as the secretary of the Earl of
Shaftesbury, who was increasingly drawn to
oppose the Catholicising tendencies of
Charles II and, even more, the Duke of
York, who became James II in 1685.
Shaftesbury died before the serious
matter of open rebellion against James
came to a head, but Locke had to flee
into exile in the Netherlands, where
he remained until William and
Mary replaced James. In increasing
ill-health thereafter, Locke lived
mainly in retirement, apart from a
spell as a Commissioner for Trade in
the new government, nursing his
asthma and bronchitis in the relative-
ly breathable air of Essex. He died in
1704, aged seventy-two.
Woolhouse tells this story in careful
and copious detail. Locke’s encounters
with other leading lights of the day, Newton
and Boyle chief among them, fall into
their due place in the stor y, and
Woolhouse describes with exemplary
clarity each stage in the development of Locke’s thought
by detailing successive drafts of his writings. The tumul-
tuous history of the time glimmers through the refract-
ing lens of Locke’s activities; Woolhouse does not step
aside to provide a full context, but – since his business is
with one man – honours the reader with the assumption
20
 BIOGRAPHY

NationalTheatre
that he or she knows the relevant history.
The picture of Locke that emerges is of a private,
clever, careful, occasionally timid man but with essen- TheHothouse
tially generous intellectual attitudes, as his writings on
toleration and government show. In this connection he
figures as the architect of liberalism, and as a high priest
of empiricism in philosophy and the natural sciences. It
HaroldPinter
is these two aspects of his work which place him so high At once chilling and deliriously
in the chronicles of the modern Western mind.
No doubt some critics of Woolhouse’s biography will
funny, Harold Pinter’s
say that it is too uniformly chronological, giving as The Hothouse was written
many pages to the less eventful stretches of Locke’s life as in 1958 just before
to the significant parts; he gives too much of the wrong The Caretaker.
kind of detail – numbers of shirts packed in the luggage,
having a hat cleaned – when the pages given to this
ought instead to have been reserved for further detail on
ideas, events and people, for example on the allegation
that much of Locke’s epistemology in the Essay came
(some say, plagiarised) directly from Hobbes, and on his
posthumous reputation in France. And they will say that
the exclusive focus on the years between Locke’s birth
and death leaves out any account of the larger story,
which is Locke’s influence on what happened after his
death, in the impact of his wr itings on the
Enlightenment and beyond, this being a major – perhaps FROM 11 JULY
the major – part of his biography.

Philistines
It has to be conceded that such critics will have a
point. But with the exception of the last charge I think
Woolhouse merits defence, because his thorough rela-
tion of the minutiae of Locke’s life – an almost daily
account, which Woolhouse has painstakingly recon-

MaximGorky
structed from every shred of available evidence – results
in a richly textured portrait that brings the quotidian
realities of life in the late seventeenth century into clear
outline. That sense of lived quality – Locke painfully and
asthmatically choking in the London smog; the rain and In a new version by Andrew Upton
cold wind of summer in Essex – is one of the services
biography is required to do, for a life is not just a list of
publications and an itinerary of travels.
Nor is it a criticism that Woolhouse is so cautious in Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Time Out
his surmises about the degree to which Locke was
party to the conspiracies that deposed James II and ‘A rich vein of black comedy...
brought William and Mary to the throne, and about
Locke’s private life, which on a couple of occasions a beautifully acted production.’
Independent
brought him into the orbit of marital possibilities, and
invited a contemporary charge of living in a ménage à
trois. Woolhouse’s caution is squarely based on the lack
of conclusiveness in the evidence; but we can make up
our own minds on the basis of what he tells us.
This is the definitive Locke biography. Short of a sur-
prising cache of papers coming to light there will not be
need of another, unless it aims to argue an interpretation UNTIL 18 AUGUST
of Locke’s doings that Woolhouse himself has not found
the evidence to support.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37 020 7452 3000 No booking fee

nationaltheatre.org.uk
 BIOGRAPHY
J OHN M ARTIN R OBINSON
BY RELIGIOUS DESIGN
G OD ’ S A RCHITECT: P UGIN AND THE
B UILDING OF ROMANTIC B RITAIN
★ Pugin term for things he did
By Rosemary Hill
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 601pp £30)
Pugin was an astonishing figure, and the most astonishing
thing about him, considering the scale of his achievement,
was the shortness of his life. By the time he was twenty-
one he had been shipwrecked, bankrupted and widowed.
He then became an architect, using his youthful training as
draughtsman and stage designer to recreate the Middle
Ages. In the next nineteen years, he transformed British
architecture, became a Catholic, designed twenty-two
churches, three cathedrals, numerous houses, a Cistercian
monastery and the interior of the Palace of Westminster –
down to inkwells and coat stands.
Even by the standards of Victorian achievers, his was a
barely credible story. Then he died insane, thrice mar-
ried, disillusioned, and aged only forty. Nobody was
more disappointed by Pugin than Pugin himself. ‘Those
who have found themselves at his churches in Dudley or
Stockton on a winter afternoon will fully sympathise’,
writes Rosemary Hill. And yet how brilliant, too, in the
House of Lords or St Giles’s, Cheadle.
It is a riveting story and has attracted many biographers,
but none has captured so well the fully-rounded Pugin –
his family background, his Catholicism, his architecture,
his role as a visionary and polemicist – until now. This
book is by far the best biography of Pugin. It is packed
with new information, drawn from unpublished letters
and documents. Moreover it is sympathetically and wittily
written, full of insight and delightful turns of phrase – ‘as
a pattern designer Pugin had a Mozartian facility’; he
lived ‘a long life in a short time’; he fell in love ‘easily and
often, somewhat more often than was in accordance with
his ideal of Christian married life’.
Pugin’s career is firmly rooted in his family background,
as the precocious, much-loved and spoilt son of an artistic
family with French connections on his father’s side and
established landed cousinage on his mother’s. Hill has pro-
duced here many new records about Pugin’s antecedents
and his upbringing in Islington and Bloomsbury. His father
was of a French Swiss family descended from mercenary
soldiers and had come to England from Paris at the
Revolution. His mother was a Welby, daughter of a lawyer
related to the Welbys of Denton in Lincolnshire. His child-
hood was pampered, affectionate, and responsible for his
precociousness, his self-confidence, and his natural authori-
ty, but also for a lifelong innocence and vulnerability.
22
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
Pugin senior was an artist
and engraver who also ran a
drawing school in the family
home. Pugin learnt more from
his father than from his brief
schooling at Christ’s Hospital,
which he found ‘dry’ – a
not like. At the age of fifteen,
he designed the furniture for
the gothic rooms at Windsor
Castle for George IV’s decora-
tors, Morel & Seddon, and Pugin: visionary
then designed stage scenery.
He married his first wife, Ann, as a teenager but she, and
his parents, died when he was twenty-one, and this sad
change of life sent him into new streams, towards the
interrelated worlds of Catholicism and Gothic Revival
architecture which everybody now recognises as
‘Puginian’. He made the decision in twelve months,
which took Newman twelve years. He wrote to his
friend Osmund, the Salisbury builder: ‘I can assure you
after a most close and impartial investigation, I feel per-
fectly convinced the Roman Catholick Church is the
only true one – and the only one in which the grand
sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored.’
The consequences are visible in history.
The greatness of Pugin, as this book so well demon-
strates, was however not merely architectural. His vision
was not just about buildings but was social. He pointed
to the Middle Ages as a model for architecture but also
for society, for a coherent Christian civic order where
the poor and sick were cared for and fed, and children
educated. He had been born in the Georgian Age, ‘the
England of Miss Austen’, and in the 1830s and 1840s
saw the world transformed by railways and Free Trade.
His response was his famous polemical publication
Contrasts. St Cross Winchester was better than the
Workhouse. All this prefigured Ruskin and William
Morris, and much that was good in late nineteenth-
century and early twentieth-century England, as well as
setting the main architectural trend of the Victorian era.
Looking back from an England with a huge, unedu-
cated underclass, hideous cities and moral and social
breakdown, Pugin’s response is hauntingly relevant.
That, too, makes this perceptive and brilliant biography
particularly worth reading. Pugin himself saw no dis-
tinction between his life and art. His importance is that
he inspired, transformed and reinvigorated architecture
and design, and stimulated social views that led in time
both to the preservation of historic buildings and
towards the Welfare State. This book depicts the whole
man – ‘tremendously hearty’ yet dejected, writer,
architect, Catholic. It will not easily be superseded.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 BIOGRAPHY

A NDRO L INKLATER and an idealist. In

this fascinating
HIS OWN GUINEA PIG biography, Martin
Goodman specu-
lates that listening
S UFFER AND S URVIVE : G AS ATTACKS, M INERS ’ to the laboured
CANARIES, S PACESUITS AND THE B ENDS – breathing of an
T HE E XTREME L IFE OF D R J S H ALDANE adored elder
★ brother as he died
By Martin Goodman of diphtheria led
(Simon & Schuster 422pp £14.99) Haldane to spe-
cialise in respira-
SCIENCE IS AN accumulative body of knowledge, and tion, but it is also
what was once an astounding breakthrough quickly true that he found
becomes background information. Three pages in a himself attracted
standard A-level biology textbook can teach you about to studying the
the helical structure of DNA, whose discovery won a metaphysical point
Nobel Prize for Crick and Watson fifty years ago, while at which the
two paragraphs are enough for John Scott Haldane’s breath, the pneuma
century-old work in understanding how we breathe. or spirit, entered
Yet Haldane deserves to be celebrated not only for his the body. Too
discoveries, but for the manner in which he practised sceptical and con-
science. Nothing demonstrates his approach better than trary to accept the Haldane: a breath of fresh air
the way he made the miner’s canary a safety device. constraints of aca-
Any tiny creature would have served as well. demic life, Haldane found an alternative university in
Investigating mine explosions and sewer poisonings in the field of public health, and a laboratory in over-
the late nineteenth century, where carbon monoxide crowded slums, factor ies and mines. Among late
and other lethal gases lurked invisibly in the air, Haldane Victorians, not even Henry Mayhew had a more com-
himself usually carried a mouse. With a metabolic rate plete knowledge of the poor than Haldane, from the air
twenty times that of a human, it reacted within seconds they breathed to the faeces they excreted.
to gases that would take minutes to kill a person. Breathing is so fundamental to life that we rarely think
Miners kept canaries, however. To encourage them to about it. That may be just as well, given the complexity
use their pets as safety devices, Haldane devised a square of the process by which nitrogen and oxygen, in a ratio
cage that allowed the surrounding air to get in but, once of four to one, are transferred from the environment to
the bird collapsed telling the miner to race for safety, the blood, and in exchange nitrogen, oxygen and carbon
automatically became an enclosed box with its own dioxide are returned to the environment. The focus of
reviving oxygen supply. Thus he ensured that the canary Haldane’s research was the manner in which haemoglo-
would survive, as well as its owner. To determine exactly bin, the iron-red protein that gives blood its colour,
how much time men and birds had, Haldane experi- combines with such gases as oxygen, carbon dioxide
mented by sealing himself in a lead coffin and breathing and, most readily of all, carbon monoxide, and carries
in different quantities of carbon monoxide; he would them to different parts of the brain and body. The
test his blood and breath ‘Haldane effect’ describes
until he fell unconscious. the critically important see-
His personal example was as saw mechanism that allows
persuasive as his science. haemoglobin to take up
Bor n in 1860, and more carbon dioxide as it
brought up in a Perthshire loses oxygen, and to carry
family whose motto was the MA Degree in Biography more oxygen as it releases
Starting January 2007
terse instruction ‘Suffer’, the Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or carbon dioxide. His discov-
tweed-suited, walrus-mous- two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first eries not only made life safer
tached, and admirably idio- postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. for miners and slum-
syncratic Haldane learned Course director: Jane Ridley dwellers, but enable today’s
medicine in Edinburgh and Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at divers, mountaineers and
The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
philosophy in Jena, becom- Tel: 01280 814080 astronauts to breathe artifi-
ing both an experimentalist cial gases at greater depths,

23
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
higher altitudes and in emptier space than should be
humanly possible.
Goodman writes enchantingly if waywardly of this
beguiling man. In a typically vivid sentence he describes
Haldane’s decision to use himself as his own guinea-pig:
‘Short of having a laboratory under his command, the
dark and sublime organism of his own insides offered a
fine alternative arena.’ And his accounts of how Haldane
unravelled the causes of death among miners killed in
underground explosions are as gripping as detective sto-
ries. But the chronology is exasperatingly obscure, and
the author’s shaky grasp of the science inspires little con-
fidence. Partly it’s a failure to understand fully scientific
details like the diffusion of oxygen from the lungs into
the blood. But more importantly he does not convey
the larger picture that shows one discovery, such as
Haldane’s about the role of haemoglobin as a transporter
of oxygen, fitting into another, such as that made by his
friend, Christian Bohr (father of the physicist, Niels),
about the mechanism that triggers the downloading of
oxygen to the tissues and muscles. Together they trans-
formed the existing knowledge of how respiration
worked. Most disappointingly, Goodman only refers to
but fails to explore the intimate connection between all
Haldane’s work and his deeply held spiritual faith.
Even in his own day, Haldane’s belief in vitalism, the
existence of an eternal life-force common to all organ-
isms, was controversial. Today, the scientific jihad
launched by Richard Dawkins against all forms of spiri-
tual belief would see him ostracised. Yet the importance
of these inner beliefs becomes obvious in one of
Goodman’s best chapters, concerning the use of poison
gas in the First World War. Here Haldane’s moral sense
that a connection must exist between scientific discovery
and individual well-being can be seen pitted against the
value-free belief of Fritz Haber, inventor of chlorine and
mustard gas, that science was equally good whether it
killed, tortured, or healed. Not the least of the reasons
for reading this biography is to be confronted by that
stark struggle between good and evil in science.
Haldane fathered two notable children, the novelist
Naomi Mitchison and the geneticist J B S Haldane,
whose work in the 1930s touched upon such modern
concerns as kinship selection and the neo-Darwinian
theories outlined in Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Both
had frequently observed their father’s experiments in
which he poisoned himself to the point of uncon-
sciousness with carbon monoxide, and in 1936 they
watched him die. ‘He had a look of intense interest on
his face,’ Naomi recalled, ‘as though he were taking
part in some crucial experiment in physiology which
had to be carefully monitored. I could only go on the
look. But it made me feel that here was an experience
deeply worth having.’
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 37
24
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
A NDREW LYCETT
HARD ON THEIR HEELS
S TANLEY: T HE I MPOSSIBLE L IFE OF A FRICA ’ S
G REATEST E XPLORER
★
By Tim Jeal
(Faber & Faber 570pp £25)
D R L IVINGSTONE , I P RESUME ? M ISSIONARIES,
J OURNALISTS, E XPLORERS & E MPIRE
★
By Clare Pettitt
(Profile 244pp £15.99)
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ is one of those well-known
phrases whose deeper significance is strangely elusive.
I first heard it as a child, while living in what was then
called Tanganyika in the 1950s. Somewhere not so far
away at Ujiji in that same country, one white man had
once greeted another thus. The man who spoke the
words was Henry Stanley, an American journalist with a
questionable reputation. The other was the famous mis-
sionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone, who seemed
to be one of the good guys.
But what were they doing there? Why the curiously
stilted greeting? And why all the fuss? I realised it referred
to an important moment in the exploration of Africa.
But, so far as I was concerned, this was a place I romped
through on a daily basis. It did not need discovering. And
anyway (though this thought was not fully articulated),
what about the native inhabitants? Did they not know
about the place? The answers to those questions were
hidden in a miasma of ‘symbolic complexity’ – to quote a
phrase used by Clare Pettitt.
Over the years the circumstances became clearer.
Livingstone led the way in opening up the African conti-
nent to Europeans. Having discovered the Zambezi and
various Central African lakes, he was trying to pinpoint
the source of the Nile on Lake Victoria when in the late
1860s he went awol and was presumed lost. Stanley, an
enterprising Welshman turned American, seized the
opportunity to find him and make his name.
But while Livingstone has been treated kindly by his-
tory, Stanley has come off badly, branded variously as an
opportunist, liar, racist and sadist. His nadir came in
1989, when Frank McLynn published the first part of
his two-volume biography which accused Stanley of
being motivated by a ‘volcanic rage against the world’ as
a result of his deprived background, as well as being
impotent and a repressed homosexual.
After writing his ground-breaking life of Livingstone
in 1973, Tim Jeal always wanted to turn his attention to
 BIOGRAPHY
Stanley. But he was put off, largely by indications that the
necessary source material was not all available. By one of
those coincidences beloved of biographers, he was giving
a lecture in 2002 when he met Maurits Wynants of
Belgium’s Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, who was
cataloguing Stanley’s entire personal archive (including
5,000 letters) and invited him to use it.
Five years on, Jeal has produced as comprehensive and
readable a life of Stanley as is likely to be written. He
covers the ground from his subject’s inauspicious birth in
1841 as John Rowlands, an illegitimate child abandoned
by his family to a workhouse in North Wales, to his
death, sixty-three years later in London, a knight of the
realm married to an ambitious artist who specialised in
sentimental portraits of street urchins.
In between, Rowlands had reinvented himself as the
American Henry Stanley, the name of a New Orleans
cotton broker who he claimed adopted him but whom he
never actually met. He enjoyed
a colourful Civil War. After
enlisting in the Confederate
army, he was captured at the
battle of Shiloh. Imprisoned
at Camp Douglas outside
Chicago, he decided that,
because he felt no particular
enthusiasm for the Southern
cause, he might do better to
change sides. However he then
deserted from the Unionist
army to return to Europe, later
rejoining the Unionist navy,
from which he absconded Stanley’s version
again. Ever resourceful, he
found a job reporting the frontier wars against the
American Indians, before gaining his first foreign assign-
ment covering a British campaign in Ethiopia. Eventually
in 1869 James Gordon Bennett Jr, proprietor of the brash
New York Herald, agreed to send him to find Livingstone.
Although Stanley’s subsequent discovery of the errant
Scotsman made headlines in both Britain and America,
he was granted only ten minutes of Gordon Bennett’s
time on his return to New York. He kicked his heels for
a couple of years before adopting the mantle of his new
(and now deceased) hero Livingstone and returning to
Africa on a gruelling 7,000-mile expedition which not
only explored the source of the Nile but pushed along
the Congo River to the Atlantic Ocean. After a period
as an administrator in the newly opened-up Congo on
behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium, he returned to
the region on one last expedition in 1887 to rescue
Emin Pasha, governor of the Anglo-Egyptian province
of Equatoria, who was threatened by Mahdist forces.
Jeal’s achievement is on several levels. As a historian, he
gives a fine sense of the interests jockeying in Africa in the
25
wake of Livingstone – from Arab slave-traders through
would-be German and Belgian empire-builders to the
British businessman Sir William MacKinnon, who hoped
that free trade would follow the Bible as a civilising influ-
ence. As a chronicler, he keeps up the excitement in
reporting the details of arduous, often repetitive treks over
difficult terrain. And as a biographer, his feel for his subject
allows him to interpret the more damning indictments in a
sympathetic manner. So he thinks the explorer exaggerat-
ed the violence on his trips (a cause of outrage at the time)
largely to win readers, and he finds no evidence that
Stanley was aware of King Leopold’s plans to enslave the
Congo. One of his most interesting observations is to
show how strongly Stanley was affected by his encounter
with the frail Livingstone, adopting him as a father figure
and genuinely seeking to carry on his work.
As for that meeting at Ujiji in November 1871, Jeal
thinks Stanley made up the strange wording of his
exchange with Livingstone
because of his lifelong insecu-
rities – adopting the clipped
tone and understatement of
the Br itish officers he had
accompanied in Ethiopia.
While acknowledging her
debt to Jeal for background,
Pettitt’s approach is to tease
out the meeting’s significance
by interpreting its cultural
representations. From the first
US newspaper reports to
Hollywood’s 1939 film Stanley
and Livingstone star r ing
Spencer Tracy, the Americans
tended to show themselves as bounding to the rescue of
the ineffectual British. But there was also a more subtle
message of the coming together of Anglo-American
interests after the tensions of the Civil War. (The transat-
lantic telegraph cables which allowed Stanley to transmit
his account of meeting Livingstone to New York were
an example of renewed Anglo-Saxon cooperation.)
Ironies abound in this story. The New York Herald which
inevitably played up its discovery of Livingstone was known
for its Confederate (and therefore pro-slavery) leanings. And
while Stanley hoped that his work in the Congo would
become like ‘a torch to those who sought to do good’, it
only attracted the exploitative attentions of King Leopold.
Niall Ferguson got it about right when, in his book
Empire, he referred to the Ujiji meeting as being ‘between
two generations’ – Livingstone’s, which believed in the
moral rebirth of Africa, and Stanley’s, committed to the
harsh realities of imperialism. Tim Jeal shows Stanley as
the crucial transitional figure, while Clare Pettitt takes a
useful step back to get the historical perspective.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
H UGH M ASSINGBERD
SWEET AND SOUR
P RINCESS M ARGARET: A L IFE U NRAVELLED
★ ture of solid
By Tim Heald
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 346pp £20)
I ONCE SPENT a Sunday with Princess Margaret. It was
not an unqualified success. I was supposed to be showing
her round some houses and gardens, in which she took a
lively interest, but because of my incompetent map-read-
ing we found ourselves in the hall of an unplanned pile.
The wretched chatelaine, roused from an afternoon nap
to discover that the Queen’s sister was on the premises,
dropped a very creditable curtsey in her nightdress on the
stairs, but the Princess was not amused.
Nonetheless, I was quite bowled over by Her Royal
Highness. Far from the grotesquely caricatured demon
drunken dwarf of popular mythology, the Princess was
fun to be with and, in the flesh, extraordinarily alluring,
with beautiful eyes and lovely skin. Even in her mid-
fifties she still had an overpowering sex appeal. She was
a witty, intelligent, stimulating companion with a gen-
uine enthusiasm for the arts, as well as evidently having
a religious, indeed spiritual, side to her personality.
What especially struck me was her loyalty. When we
eventually arrived at the right house, I confided in the
Princess that I was hoping to feature it in an article. At
just the right moment she tackled the initially reluctant
owner: ‘Now, you will let him write it up, won’t you?’
Happily Tim Heald captures all these qualities in his
admirably well-balanced biography. He also rightly stresses
her much-underrated sense of duty, throws light on the
largely unacknowledged hard work she undertook in the
service of the Crown, and makes the excellent point that
her children, ‘conspicuously not royal in the sense that
their mother felt herself to be, won wide approval for
their apparent normality and niceness’. He adds: ‘To
some they seemed her greatest credit.’
Yet this is certainly no hagiography. As Heald himself,
who knew and liked the Princess, says: ‘She could be
inconsiderate, rude, insensitive and spoiled.’ Even close
friends acknowledged she was contrary and contradictory.
The veteran courtier, Lt-Col Sir ‘Johnny’ Johnston, who
died last year, summed it up pretty well: ‘When she was
nice, she was very very nice. When she was awkward she
was very awkward.’
As he showed in his perceptive biography of Prince
Philip, the affable Heald hits it off well with courtiers,
understands what makes them tick and, as an experi-
enced reporter, takes the trouble to explain how the
‘royal roadshow’ really works. Behind the bright and
26
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
breezy façade
of his chatty,
re f re s h i n g l y
ir reverent
text, there is a
sound struc-
research trawl-
ing through
the Royal
Archives, files
of letters from Amusing, but not always amused
ladies-in-wait-
ing and exhaustively detailed records of long-forgotten
royal tours. His journalistic eye for amusing detail,
whether in Tuvalu or Swaziland (where the King,
whom she was investing with an Order, towered above
her), makes for an entertaining read. In Japan the
Princess asked an imperial prince whether he enjoyed
dancing. The Japanese prince, who had little English,
replied: ‘No, I prefer my balls on ice.’ I also particularly
enjoyed this extract from a letter to a circus from the
Princess’s office: ‘You ask about the bouquet. I think it
would be best if this were not to be presented by one of
the clowns, or indeed an animal.’
With his sensible understanding of the stuffiness of the
postwar Establishment, Heald finds the behaviour of
Group Captain Peter Townsend in embarking on a rela-
tionship with his boss’s daughter (‘above all, his capacity
for self-delusion’) ‘frankly bizarre’. But neither is he
convinced by the Earl of Snowdon’s semi-rhetorical
question, ‘I never really thought the Townsend business
was all it was cracked up to be, did you?’ Heald shrewd-
ly assesses their marriage ‘on the rebound’ and gives a
sympathetic account of Princess Margaret’s gradual dis-
appearance from centre stage, followed by a sad end.
When this most enjoyable book is reprinted, it would
be worth correcting a few slips. The nickname ‘Tugboat
Annie’ (because she moved from peer to peer) was not
bestowed upon Mrs Ian Fleming but the Countess of
Rosse (also unkindly dubbed ‘Lady Roscommon’), Lord
Snowdon’s mother. The Duke of Marlborough is not
called ‘Sonny’ but ‘Sunny’ – short for Sunderland, his
original courtesy title. John Wayne was hardly ‘diminu-
tive’ (perhaps Heald was thinking of Alan Ladd?). ‘Debo’
Devonshire was not Mistress of the Robes; that was her
mother-in-law, ‘Moucher’. The late Duke of Beaufort’s
nickname of ‘Master’ did not allude to his Mastership of
the Horse or of the Beaufort Hunt but – as he told me
when I went to interview him about his memoirs, a work
he had clearly not read, let alone written – went back to
his boyhood, when he was given his own pack of harriers
at the age of eight. And Billy Wallace was not an ‘Hon’.
Such things mattered to HRH The Princess Margaret.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 INTERVIEW

PHILIP PULLMAN has recently C LAUDIA F ITZ H ERBERT MEETS these forces will be the poorer
won the Car negie of for it?
Car negies for Northern This is something that’s
Lights, the first volume of his happened in the last forty
epic tr ilogy His Dark P P
HILIP ULLMAN years or so – since the
Materials, which celebrates New English Bible in the
the success of a latter-day early 1960s and the decline
child-Eve in defeating the in the use of the Book of
agents of an oppressive God, Common Prayer and the
first published twelve years loss of that tradition of
ago. This was the latest in a string of accolades which saying the same words Sunday after Sunday which the
have included the Whitbread – for The Amber Spyglass – English Church has had since 1662. I know those words
and a two-part stage production at the National Theatre. so well, I can do the whole of the General Confession
The film of His Dark Materials, renamed The Golden and Prayer for the Church Militant, and they were
Compass, is due to be released before Chr istmas. beautiful words. They might have been beautiful acci-
Pullman, meanwhile, is some way into The Book of Dust, dentally because they happen to have been written at a
which will pick up Lyra’s story two years on and answer time when English prose was peculiarly rich and pun-
some of the huge theological questions thrown up by his gent – I’m talking also about the Bible in the King
reworking of the story of the Fall (or not) of Man. I James version, and Hymns Ancient & Modern, but the
began by asking him whether he ever envied his key point is that that language has all gone. It suddenly
sources Milton and Blake for the artistic energy they went away as if it had never been and this is an extraor-
derived from the religious belief he cannot share. dinary act of neglect and vandalism on the part of the
PP: Blake was a visionary. That’s the important thing Church of England.
for me. Somebody said to him, ‘When the sun comes up I was brought up so deeply in that stuff that I can’t
do you not see a round thing rather like a guinea?’, and separate it from myself any more than I can separate my
he said, ‘No, I see a choir of angels singing.’ Blake was childish knowledge of the Latin I used to learn when I
able to see things that other people would have said was seven. I can’t abandon that now. So when I look at a
weren’t there. To my mind that’s not very different to per- word, I see at once whether it’s a Latin word or a Saxon
fect pitch. Some people hear a singer or a violinist and word or a French one and that forms part of the way I
don’t realise that they’re not in tune whereas others know use it. The history, the linguistic charge, almost the
at once because they can hear what the pitch should be. perfume, that word carries – I can’t separate out my
As for faith, Blake was a pretty heterodox believer, if knowledge of these things. Similarly I can’t separate my
Blake the believer is who you’re interested in. Do you early involvement with the language and music of the
remember his famous demonstration that Jesus broke all Church – it made me what I am. And certainly all the
the Ten Commandments? I’m more interested in Blake as people I know now who cherish as I do these things
an artist. I suppose I find it hard to separate – to say this is were themselves brought up in the tradition and brought
the part that’s due to belief and this is the part that’s due up to believe and presumably when they were young did
to his aesthetic power as an artist. The same goes for believe. I don’t know what age Richard Dawkins was
Milton, although Milton is a little easier because Blake has when he left his belief behind him but when he was five
explained Milton so well by saying he’s of the Devil’s or six I dare say he was as fervent a believer as you can
party without knowing it. It’s a wonderful, wonderful be at five or six.
way of explaining Milton and absolutely true. When he Of course I would be delighted if as a result of reading
writes about Satan in the first part of Paradise all his imag- Northern Lights some child were impelled to go and
inative empathy is engaged by this rebel God, and I think explore the Book of Common Prayer, but I don’t think
that is to do with his power as an artist rather than his it’s very likely. As for the loss to the imagination – well,
doubts – or faith – as a Christian. Of course Milton goes the imagination loses when it has never seen paintings
on to demonstrate that there is no perfection in large- by great masters or heard classical music – again I would
scale works of art by letting Satan down rather badly in say it is an aesthetic thing more than a belief thing.
the end, where he makes him into a figure of fun and OK, leaving aside the imaginative uses of belief, what about
turns him into hissing snakes. the consolatory aspects? The Authority in ‘His Dark
It may be that future generations of children will be led to Materials’ is a force for repression throughout. What do you
read ‘Paradise Lost’ by your retelling of the story in ‘His Dark say to critics who ask where is the good that is done by religion?
Materials’. But what about the language, history and teaching This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in
of the Church with which your work is imbued (for all that you order to deal precisely with that question; I don’t want
make an evil thing of it): do you think children not exposed to to anticipate it too much by switching a light on the

27
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 INTERVIEW
answer now. The interesting – the curious – question is,
if people can be helped by something that is palpably
not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not
true and not being helped? When I say palpably not true
I am speaking from my perspective as an atheist. This
perspective thing is important: if I compare the tiny
amount of things that I know to all the things I don’t
know, then of course out there in the darkness there
may be God. So from that perspective I’m an agnostic.
But then, if we imagine being inside a camera coming
closer and closer to this tiny pinprick of light – to the
things that we do know – then as we come closer the
pinprick gets bigger, as things do, until finally it reaches
from horizon to horizon and we are standing inside the
light. From this perspective – which is all the things I
know – we can see quite clearly there is no God, so in
that respect I’m an atheist. That’s the
way I look at it. Of course, as they used
to say in the First World War, there are
no atheists in foxholes. But if you’re in
the habit of thinking honestly about
what you do, can you leave that honesty
behind when you’re in a foxhole? It’s
very difficult – much more difficult to
contain that state of mind than to be a
simple believer.
Have you read William James’s The
Varieties of Religious Experience? It’s a
great book. He talks about once-born
and twice-born – nothing to do with
born-again. This is another phenome-
non altogether, one which occurs when
doubt has entered. He writes about
people who have seen the emptiness
and horror and futility of everything.
They might come back to belief but
something’s been broken. In effect this is what happens
to Lyra when she has to re-learn to use the alethiometer
– she loses her instinctive way at puberty. Re-learning
will be a long, painful process but in the end she will
do it better. This is an image of education for me. I
pinched this from Heinr ich von Kleist’s On the
Marionette Theatre. Everything that I managed to say in
1,300 pages is in that essay. Kleist says we exist on a
spectrum that goes from the unconscious to the fully
conscious, and once we’ve left unconscious grace
behind we can’t go back, we can only go on – through
life, through education, through suffering, through
experience to the thing we come to call wisdom, which
is right at the other end of the spectrum.
You used to work as a teacher and you write and speak a lot
about education, reminding us of the cardinal values of creativi-
ty in learning which are so often honoured in the breach these
days. But your vision of education is expensive – classes of
never more than twenty taught by the best, brightest graduates.
28
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
What would you give up to make your vision happen?
Easy. Trident. Iraq. Easy. Of course we should spend
more on education. Much, much more. This recent
hoo-ha about grammar schools intrigued me. When we
spend five minutes talking about grammar schools, why
don’t we spend twenty talking about secondary mod-
erns? I spent some of my teaching practice in a sec-
ondary modern. It was a dreadful place. Nobody felt
good about being there.
There’s one other thing I’d like to say about educa-
tion. Everything we ask a child to do in school should
intrinsically be something that’s worth doing. Are SATs
worth doing? Of course not!
Would you say that your version of Victorian England as
depicted in the Sally Lockhart quartet owes something to a
strain of Fabianism?
I find it difficult to write about the
modern world – and you’re right, it is a
version of Victorian England on offer
in those books. They actually take place
between 1872 and 1882, so just before
Fabianism got going, but it was a time
when the best response of the best peo-
ple to what they saw around them was a
form of socialism. People like Shaw. I
find it a fascinating time – it had just
become possible for women to train as
doctors, there was universal literacy
thanks to the 1872 Education Act,
which meant that ever y child left
school able to read. Telephones were
coming in. I love the Sally characters.
I want to go back to them. If there’s
time.
Were you consciously constrained by the
historical and chronological framework of that
quartet? How much were you itching to invent alternative
worlds before embarking on ‘Northern Lights’?
I wasn’t itching at all. It took me entirely by surprise. I
always took a dim view of fantasy – still do in fact. Most
of it is trash, but then most of everything is trash. It
seemed to me writers of fantasy in the Tolkien tradition
had this wonderful tool that could do anything and they
did very little with it. They were rather like the inven-
tors of the subtle knife who used it to steal candy when
they could have done much more.
The first book I think really did what fantasy can do,
besides Paradise Lost, was a book published in 1920 called
The Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. It’s a very poorly
written, clumsily constructed book which nevertheless
has the force, the power, the intensity of genius. He uses
fantasy to say something profound about morality – none
of Tolkien’s imitators do this.
Another thing about fantasy – I’m sure that far more
adults have read His Dark Materials because they were
 INTERVIEW
published as children’s books than would have done if
they had been published as fantasy. Nor was I itching to
write about religion. I originally wanted to write a story
about a girl who goes into a room where she shouldn’t
be and has to hide when someone comes in and by
chance overhears something she’s not supposed to hear.
A little later I discovered she had a daemon, that was the
point at which I realised I’d got hold of a story some-
how that I could use – no, you don’t use a story – that I
could explore, and say something about Kleist’s essay
which I had come across fifteen years before. The reli-
gious theme evolved as part of what Lyra has to struggle
against and give up.
What do you say to Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing
happen?
Poetry by itself is just a stringed instrument making no
sound. It needs air around it and a human mind to resonate
it. Then it makes a difference but not in a simple instru-
mental ‘x therefore y’ way. It’s more complicated; it takes
longer to resonate and to set up neural patterns. It does
things, but it doesn’t do what the poet thinks it’ll do. You
can’t predict how people will read your work. You might
think you’ve written a searing indictment of the slave trade
and people read your novel for the love story – that’s part
of the democracy of reading that I’m very keen on.
While not being afraid to play God as a writer?
This business about the omniscient narrator also has a
bearing on Lyra and the alethiometer and the loss of grace
and innocence and confidence and so on. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, with the modernists, we
lost confidence in storytelling – think of Joyce, and Woolf
to some extent, and E M Forster with his ‘oh dear – yes,
the novel tells a story’ as if it were a shameful thing to do.
Suddenly the novel became self-conscious about itself and
about the process of storytelling, and a huge awkwardness
set in that resulted in a split between the people who tell
stories – the middlebrow – and the others who would do
anything rather than tell a story who were the other thing
– the highbrow. Hugh Walpole on one side, James Joyce
on the other, and never the twain shall meet. Whereas in
Victorian times everyone read Dickens. The gulf is lessen-
ing now because people are becoming less self-conscious,
or rather learning to deal with their self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness is like shyness – charming in a child of
twelve but not so charming in someone of 32 or 42 or
52, so to deal with it you have to pretend you’re not shy.
The way to deal with self-consciousness in storytelling is
to pretend that you’re not self-conscious. Writing for
children is liberating because it forces you to pretend
you’re not self-conscious.
There is a lovely passage in an essay by Umberto Eco
about the difficulty the post-modern chap has in telling
his girlfriend that he loves her. He doesn’t want to say ‘I
love you’ because those words have been used without
irony by Barbara Cartland. Finally he finds a solution.
29
He says to her, ‘As Barbara Cartland would say, I love
you.’ Ha! The tongs of irony you need to hand the sugar
of affection.
Have you seen the film of ‘Northern Lights’ (to be released
as ‘The Golden Compass’ this Christmas) and do you feel at
all sorry to think of children coming across the story for the first
time as a film?
I’ve seen bits of it. Teams of slaves are still putting the
thing together, assiduously. The look is wonderful,
immensely rich and intriguing and attractive. Lyra is
played by a girl called Dakota Blue Richards who has
never acted before and holds the whole thing together.
She was one of ten thousand seen for the part.
No, I’m not sorry. I think the story will survive. I
would be sorry if there was a law which said every time
a film comes out the book or books on which it was
based had to be withdrawn. As James M Cain replied
when asked if he minded what had been done to one of
his books: ‘They’ve done nothing to my book, it’s there
on the shelf.’
A number of those who see the film will have read the
book already. Non-readers probably wouldn’t have come
across the book anyway.
How much trouble did the project encounter in America as a
result of your book’s perceived anti-Christian bias?
The problem for those who think there’s an anti-
religious anti-moral bias in the books comes when they
haven’t actually read the books: of course there’s a
criticism of organised theocratic tyrannical religion but
who can disagree with that?
A review in the Church Times said, ‘When the morality
is secure the metaphysics don’t matter.’ The qualities
which my books criticise are intolerance, fanaticism, cru-
elty, and the qualities they celebrate are love, kindness,
openness, curiosity. I think the moral majority in
America is not a majority at all and that the power of the
organised Christian Right is a phantom.
Theocracies don’t have to be religious. Soviet Russia
was a theocracy. They had a holy book, which was
Marx; they had prophets and doctors of the church
(Lenin, Engels, Stalin, and so on); they had a priesthood
that had privileges and powers above the ordinary,
which was the Communist Party. There was also a tele-
ological view of history and you could either be on the
side of history or against history. There was a state appa-
ratus of denunciation, betrayal, punishment, the idea of
heresy, even the cult of holy relics – so many parallels.
In the new edition of ‘His Dark Materials’ you have added a
series of what you call Lantern Slides at the end of each volume,
glimpses of the characters in different but possible situations.
Aren’t these an invitation to others to write stories about your
created worlds?
It already happens on the Internet. It’s called fan fiction:
there are six hundred or so already doing it, maybe more
now. Bloody nerve, isn’t it?
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 MEMOIRS
C AROLE A NGIER
The Pounding
Of Silence
P EELING THE O NION
★ ing elegy for his friend: ‘My silence pounds in my ears.’
By Günter Grass
(Translated by Michael Henry Heim)
(Harvill Secker 425pp £18.99)
WHEN THIS BOOK was published in Germany last year it
unleashed a furore. The great castigator of the German
people for their secrets and lies had kept his own secret for
sixty years: he had ended the war in an SS unit. The press
rounded on him. Grass was so shaken he couldn’t sleep.
In fact it wasn’t the book itself that caused the storm,
but an interview Grass gave for its publication.
Newspapers have less space and time than books, and not
for the first time the truth was distorted. The SS scandal
was absurd. Grass was only seventeen at the time; he was
drafted during the chaos at the end of the war; he never
fired a shot; and he didn’t know that his destination was
the SS until he arrived. It is almost as though the press had
picked a paper tiger: an accusation so unfair that Germans
reading it could feel, once more, unjustly reviled.
In Peeling the Onion Grass does the opposite. He
doesn’t let himself off lightly by admitting something
everyone will forgive. The SS story is only one shameful
episode among many, and far from the worst. Peeling the
Onion is not a paper tiger, but a painful and courageous
book. Forget the fake controversy and read it.
Grass’s real accusation against himself is the other point
the press made: not the service, but the silence. Not so
much the silence afterwards, for sixty years, though that
is disturbing, in a man who attacked it in others. But an
even worse silence: the one before, during and immedi-
ately after the war. That is the one that Germans, and all
of us, need to reflect on; and Peeling the Onion does.
Grass was an ordinary Nazi boy from an ordinary Nazi
family. He was a dreamer and a romantic, so a particu-
larly easy pushover (his own word) for patriotism and
heroics. He thrilled to the Olympics and adored Hitler.
At eleven he watched a synagogue burn, feeling only
curiosity and surprise. At fifteen he volunteered early, at
sixteen he joined in the bullying of a boy who refused
to bear arms. At seventeen he believed in Germany’s
final victory to the bitter end; afterwards he refused to
believe the pictures of Belsen until his own one-time
leader, the ex-head of the Hitler Youth, admitted they
were real. And all along, those awful silences: when his
own partisan uncle was executed; when first a friend,
30
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
and then a teacher, disappeared from his school to
Stutthof, a concentration camp nearby, about which he
never asked either. The teacher, who survived, forgave
him. But Grass does not forgive himself. He was only a
boy, and betrayed no one, but he rejects all such excuses.
He allowed himself to be seduced, he writes, while mil-
lions of people were killed in his name; if he had been
born two years earlier, he might well have partaken. He
could have known, but he kept silent. He ends his mov-
After the events last year, Grass said he was glad that he
could no longer be the conscience of his nation. But he
still is – more than ever; and ours as well. He and his fel-
low Germans could not believe that their leaders would
lie, that a German war could be a crime, that Germans
could ever do wrong. We are all the same. Criticising
your country is harder than criticising yourself, since the
latter will make you friends, while the former will make
you enemies. But Peeling the Onion shows that if you
don’t do it, as an individual and a nation you may lose
your soul.
It shows much else as well, being the memoir of a man
and a writer as well as a German: Grass’s Lawrentian
family, for instance (poor working class, with a philistine
father, overshadowed sister, and adoring, aspiring moth-
er); the three terrible months of his war, and his wander-
ings after; his numerous loves, and numerous jobs (as
painter, poet, stonemason, sculptor) on the way to his
real one as a writer; and thrilling glimpses into a writer’s
mind, as it stores up characters and images – including
the tin drum itself, seen with splendid improbability in a
comfortable house in Switzerland. It is all vividly con-
veyed, in Grass’s characteristically pungent, if sometimes
clotted prose (which the translator doesn’t do enough to
smooth out for us, incidentally, even leaving Germanisms
like ‘the by then Polish city of Gdansk’ untouched.
Why? Grass deserves better).
But even the writer is a German in the end. British
critics have admired Grass’s interrogation of memory, his
careful distinction between the eighty-year-old mem-
oirist and his young self – hardly ever called ‘I’, but
rather ‘he’, ‘whoever I was at the time’, or at best
‘someone who was definitely me’. This may well be a
writer’s subtlety; but Grass tells us himself (on page
twenty-eight) that it is German guilt as well.
It is only to the last accusation against him – why he
didn’t break his silence before – that he returns a purely
writerly answer. He couldn’t write about the Wilhelm
Gustloff, the ship that went down in 1945 with 9,400
German lives, or about his mother’s rape during the war,
until sixty years later. And he couldn’t write his own story
until sixty years later either. That’s just how he writes; and
it’s the writing that matters. If he has to wait sixty years to
write something properly, he will, whatever the cost.
Grass doesn’t say all this in so many words in Peeling
 MEMOIRS

the Onion, but it’s plain. His life has been driven by three
hungers, he tells us: for food, for sex, and for art, and
the greatest of these was for art. From his childhood and
youth spent obsessively drawing, to his maturity as a
writer, his insatiable desire has been ‘to conquer all with
images’. His books are more real to him than his life; he
has used up every bit of his life for them, and it is as
though there is nothing left. At the end of this book,
when he has peeled back all the layers of his memory,
he remarks that the onion of his life ‘proved devoid of
any meaningful core’. That is an extraordinary thing
to say of such a rich and profound journey, and I can
only think that this is what it means: the meaning is in
the books, not the life; not in Günter Grass, but in
Oskar Matzerath.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 37

J ONATHAN M IRSKY Now it is true that Herz-Sommer, who was 103 when
this eloquent and painful book was being written, had a

Betrayed from privileged time in Theresienstadt. She was a pianist

famous throughout Europe. The Germans wanted the
inmates of Theresienstadt to remain placid. The Germans
Within and Without also intended – successfully – to gull foreign inspectors,
notably the Red Cross, into thinking Theresienstadt was
no more sinister than an agreeable ghetto. So Herz-
A G ARDEN OF E DEN IN H ELL : T HE L IFE OF Sommer was directed to practise almost every day and to
A LICE H ERZ -S OMMER give dozens of concerts, at which she played Bach,
★ Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin to raptur-
By Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki ous audiences – most of whom, unknown to them, were
(Macmillan 341pp £18.99) doomed to be gassed and burned.
Herz-Sommer’s mother died at Treblinka and her hus-
T HE D IARY OF P ETR G INZ : 1941–1942 band at Dachau. Her young son Stephan, later renamed
★ Raphael, was saved because their captors valued Alice
Edited by Chava Pressburger and wished to encourage her to play for the camp. In his
(Translated by Elena Lappin) remarkable preface, Raphael, who died in 2001, writes
(Atlantic Books 161pp £16.99)
MENTORING : FICTION : NON-FICTION : POETRY

:
:

A FRIEND WHO was a child in Israel in the early Fifties

CHILDREN’S
MEMOIR

told me that in his school the students were taught to

honour Jewish heroes. Theirs was a long history, the The Literary Consultancy
teachers said, from Old Testament times to the present, The UK’s leading manuscript assessment and editorial advice service
including those who had died in the Warsaw ghetto
:

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survived four camps, described how when the SS razed
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was futile. They were mowed down.’ He concluded Truthful, critical feedback on all genres of work
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bleakly: ‘Acquiescence, surrender, assimilation, conver-

sion – nothing would ever satisfy our executioners. Helping writers since 1996
Simply and indiscriminately, we had to be expunged –
our blood was tainted.’ www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk
Alice Herz-Sommer, one of the 3,500 who survived
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which 89,000 inmates were transported to ‘the east’ to

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be exterminated), made her way to Israel in 1949. She

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and there [in the camps] were the “lambs who allowed
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POETRY : NON-FICTION : FICTION : MENTORING

themselves to be led to the slaughter”’.

31
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 MEMOIRS
that he slept in his mother’s arms almost every night in
their cramped cellblock.
I lived under the protecting veil of my mother and so
cannot describe the darker side of our lives in the
concentration camp. Not once did she allow me to
see the humiliations and insults she had to suffer …
she [created] a joyful and ‘normal’ environment
around me that had little to do with the reality in
which we lived … my early childhood seemed to me
happy and utterly normal.
So did the Jews around Herz-Sommer, many of them
from Prague, walk to their deaths like lambs? I think
not. There are plenty of books, such as Samuel Pisar’s,
on how the Germans terrified and paralysed their Jewish
subjects with an accelerating series of laws and depriva-
tions buttressed by severe and prompt punishments,
notably shooting, for those who wavered even slightly
from total obedience.
Auschwitz itself was literally a deadly secret. A half-
Jewish engineer had been transported there from
Theresienstadt; because of his skills he was then trans-
ferred on to a slave labour camp. But he had seen what
was happening at Auschwitz. Escaping from the labour
camp, this hero bribed a Czech guard to let him back
into Theresienstadt and told what he knew to Leo
Baeck, a much respected German rabbi and one of the
leaders of the Council of Elders, whose responsibilities
included choosing inmates for transport to Auschwitz
where, unknown to the Elders, they would be gassed.
Baeck, ‘the spiritual leader of the German Jews during
the Nazi period’, made an extraordinary decision: ‘In
the end,’ he wrote later, ‘I decided that no one should
know. If I told the Council of Elders, within minutes
the story would be around the entire camp. To live in
the expectation of death by gas would make life only
more difficult; and there was no certainty of this death.’
Some might say that Baeck deprived the Jews of a
chance to rise up and perhaps die fighting. After the
war, Herz-Sommer travelled the two hours back to
Theresienstadt to ask Baeck, who was still there, for
help. What was on her mind was the anti-Semitism of
the Czechs in Prague. Baeck’s murmured response was,
‘Maybe there are too many Jews in the world.’ That
response ‘pierced Alice like an arrow’ and she fled the
room. Not long thereafter she was informed that her
husband had died of typhus at Dachau.
On 1 February 2003 one of the crew on the Space
Shuttle Columbia was the Israeli Ilan Ramon. He was
carrying a mysterious drawing, ‘Moon Landscape’,
which he had obtained from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Museum in Jerusalem. The shuttle exploded re-entering
the Earth’s atmosphere. Everybody and everything was
destroyed. The drawing was by Petr Ginz.
Petr Ginz was certainly no meek lamb. Aged fourteen,
he began a slim but poignant diary of his daily life
32
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
in Prague under the
German occupation and
then in Theresienstadt,
and kept it until just
before he was sent to
Auschwitz, where he was
murdered. The diar y
is especially touching
because it records a spe-
cial teenager having fun,
teasing his friends, read-
ing Thomas Mann,
Dickens, Jules Verne and
Oscar Wilde, writing five
novels, and creating the
evocative drawings and
paintings reproduced in Alice: played for survival
the diar y. But he also
recorded, sometimes in a special cipher, his observations
of the Nazis and the anti-Semitic Czechs. For example,
20 April 1942: ‘Hitler is fifty-three years old … Every
building has to hang out a swastika flag, except for Jews,
of course, who are not allowed this pleasure.’
As Petr’s sister, Chava Pressburger (who was reunited
with her brother at Theresienstadt – which she survived
– and found the diary after her brother was taken to
Auschwitz), says in her edited version, ‘Petr presents all
the facts in a dry manner, without expressing emotions,
without demonstrating worry, fear, or hate.’ Pressburger
notes what is also plain in the Herz-Sommer diary: the
Nazi method of very gradually restricting freedom,
adding laws and regulations, and listing things to give
up. In Petr’s diary people disappear, help each other
pack, suddenly are not in school – which functions nor-
mally, with teachers handing out normal penalties (Petr
notes when he receives them). Even as changes become
apparent, normal life seems to continue: after writing
that he has been thrown off a tram because he is a Jew,
Petr records the same day that he received very high
marks in school.
Pressburger recounts a Red Cross visit to
Theresienstadt. ‘They happily allowed themselves to be
cheated by the Nazis and made no independent effort
to find out about the real life of Theresienstadt
inmates.’ The Red Cross team was led by a Dr Rossel,
vice-president of the Red Cross in Berlin. He
described a place where ‘people live happily’ and pre-
sented his photographs to the Germans for propaganda
purposes. All the time, Pressburger states, the Red
Cross had ‘authentic testimony’ from two men who
had managed to escape Auschwitz and make their way
to Geneva, where they described the exterminations.
Britain and America, too, knew of these reports, but
turned Jews away.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 INDIA

D AVID G ILMOUR into the sea after Edwina’s coffin.

The audience will appreciate the author’s classification

DIVIDED IT STANDS of her characters into good guys, Nehru and Edwina
(not only romantic but also brave, philanthropic and
politically commendable), bad guys, Churchill (for
I NDIAN S UMMER : T HE S ECRET H ISTORY OF encouraging Jinnah and Pakistan) and Jinnah (for creat-
THE E ND OF AN E MPIRE ing Pakistan), and some figures who manage to be often
★ silly and sometimes astute (Gandhi and Mountbatten).
By Alex von Tunzelmann Viewers will find the Gandhi of this film very different
(Simon & Schuster 464pp £20) from the Mahatma of Richard Attenborough; they will
also enjoy a more accurate representation of the period.
T HE G REAT PARTITION : T HE M AKING OF Although she has been unable to see the Edwina–
I NDIA AND PAKISTAN Nehru correspondence, Alex von Tunzelmann has been
★ resourceful in research and tells her story with verve and
By Yasmin Khan fine judgement in a colourful, virtuoso style. Yet occa-
(Yale University Press 251pp £19.99) sionally she is flippant and unfair to certain characters,
concentrating their defects and inconsistencies into a
I NDIAN S UMMER is surely destined for Hollywood. short passage and thereby giving the impression that
Equipped with a handsome and flamboyant cast, Alex they were ridiculous people. Apart from relishing
von Tunzelmann has already more or less arranged the Gandhi’s political blunders, she picks out the silliest of
settings, designed the costumes and produced a script Mahatman views on non-violence (eg that the British
which flits from place to place and from character to should not resist Hitler and that women should not resist
character, deftly interweaving private lives with political rapists), the most heartless of his decisions (eg refusing to
events in a racy, dramatic and often humorous narrative. let his dying wife have penicillin) and the crankiest of
It’s easy to envisage some colourful scenes: ‘Dickie’ his activities (eg testing his vow of celibacy by sharing a
Mountbatten and ‘David’ Prince of Wales larking about bed with naked girls). Yet she allows him to redeem
in a pool and pig-sticking in Jodhpur (frivolous upper- himself at the end when his heroic fast in Calcutta saves
class background); Mountbatten as viceroy and his wife the city from further communal carnage.
Edwina having nightly rows in midsummer Delhi (marital Mountbatten is also a target for jibes and mockery
stress and pathos); Gandhi on his day of silence visiting before he too comes up trumps in an emergency. The
Mountbatten and answering the viceregal conversation author loves to dissect his absurdities, especially his vani-
on paper (amusing interlude); ty, his love of flags and uni-
Edwina and Nehru (the Great forms, and his obsession with
Loves of each other’s lives) rush- genealogy, a passion which
ing off to stop a riot during parti- becomes a triumph when his
tion (heroism), walking in the nephew Philip marries Princess
hills around Simla (romance) and Elizabeth and becomes Duke of
being discovered some years later Edinburgh. She is ruthless about
embracing in the lovely hill-sta- his military shortcomings, his
tion of Naini Tal (sex). weakness as a strateg ist, his
The finale is difficult to decide bungling over the Dieppe raid.
upon. The Mountbattens being The account of his naval career,
cheered by emotional Indian which relies largely on Philip
crowds at Independence? The Ziegler’s masterly biography, is
former viceroy whispering into hilarious, a catalogue of acci-
his Queen’s ear that the invasion dents that blighted the ships
of Suez is ‘lunatic’? Mountbatten under his command. These
and members of his family being would hit a Br itish mine or
blown up by the IRA? All these crash into British ships or attract
would be strong, but stronger and German torpedo fire because
more sentimental still would be their captain was speeding ‘too
the sight of the Indian frigate sent noisily’ or making ‘overzealous
by Nehru all the way to the use of his signalling lights’. On
English Channel so that a wreath one occasion Mountbatten
of marigolds could be thrown Mountbatten: averting his gaze changed direction when he was

33
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 INDIA
going too fast with the result that his ship rolled so vio-
lently that its lifeboats flew off the side into the sea. No
wonder he was known at the Admiralty as ‘the Master
of Disaster’.
Yet there was more to Mountbatten than this, and as
viceroy he displayed unusual skills in his dealings with
Indian leaders, princes as well as politicians. Much
assisted by Edwina, who could empathise with Indians
of all classes, he obtained agreement to both partition
and the accession of nearly all the princely states to
India or Pakistan. Indeed Alex von Tunzelmann recog-
nises some of his achievements when she defends him
against accusations that he ignored the problem of the
Sikhs, failed to use British troops to stop the communal
killing in the Punjab and, by bringing forward the date
of independence, prevented adequate preparations from
being made to deal with the consequences of partition.
Indian Summer does not ignore the atrocities that sur-
round its exotic characters: it has a horrifying description
of the tactics used by Sikh gangs when they set out to
erase a Muslim village and exterminate its inhabitants.
But otherwise it has little in common with The Great
Partition, Yasmin Khan’s intelligent and empathic work
on the same period. It is unlikely that the second book
will have scriptwriters salivating.
Most historians of partition like to apportion blame
among the leading players, British and Indian, for the
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 September 2007
For full details write with SAE to:
Awards Secretary,The Society of Authors,
84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SB.
or
email: info@societyofauthors.org
website: www.societyofauthors.org
34
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
disaster that occurred. Yasmin Khan is not interested in
doing so. Nor does she give time to the simplistic and
oft-repeated theory that partition was the result of
Britain’s alleged policy of ‘divide and rule’.
The author’s main interest is in the experience of parti-
tion, how people thought of it and how it affected them.
Nobody could have predicted that it would lead to a
million murders and twelve million refugees. But then
nobody thought it through very carefully in the first
place. Partition ‘meant myriad things to different people’
even within the same community, even sometimes with-
in the same head. Jinnah himself made ambiguous noises
about federalism. So did his supporters. To some of them
Pakistan was ‘an imaginary nationalistic dream’ while to
others it was contiguous Muslim territory stretching all
the way from East Bengal to Kashmir and the North-
West Frontier. Educated Muslims from Delhi and Aligarh
clamoured for partition without apparently realising that,
for demographic reasons, their homes could not possibly
be included in a Muslim state. Sikh leaders made a simi-
lar miscalculation, demanding the partition of the Punjab
without understanding that as a result their holiest
shrines and a good number of their followers would end
up in Pakistan.
Instead of examining partition with a contemporary
lens, when we know what happened and assume it was
inevitable, Yasmin Khan tries to look at it from the
standpoint of its participants, for whom nothing was
inevitable. She understands the fear of small communi-
ties as they hear rumours of approaching violence and
suddenly abandon everything to seek safety on the other
side of the new and often bewildering frontier. She
writes of the fear of women who, even if they were not
murdered, faced rape, abduction and – for those who
managed to stay put after their ordeal – repudiation by
their families for having ‘dishonoured’ them. Later in
the book she writes with similar sympathy of the mil-
lions of penniless refugees who arrive in ‘Mother India’
or ‘the Land of the Pure’ (Pakistan) to find not much
purity and precious little motherliness. As the author
relates, many of them never overcame the traumas of
massacre, uprooting and divided families.
South Asian violence is often considered in the West to
be spontaneous and hysterical, a moment of aberration
that suddenly takes possession of a normally docile people
(as Hindus at any rate are often imagined to be). As
Yasmin Khan demonstrates, however, much of the parti-
tion violence was planned by nationalist politicians,
inspired by political rhetoric and orchestrated by political
organisations. Alas, such events set a precedent for modern
India. Recent pogroms of minorities, such as the massacres
of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, contained a similar mix of
ingredients, a similar collusion of the police and a similar
immunity for those who carried out the atrocities.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 INDIA
C HARLES A LLEN
A GREAT SOUL
GANDHI: THE MAN, HIS PEOPLE AND THE EMPIRE
★ the most engaging part
By Rajmohan Gandhi
(Haus Books 738pp £25)
I REMEMBER QUITE clearly the moment when I heard
that Bapu had been shot, and I remember being com-
forted by one of my parents’ servants, who assured me
that he was now seated beside Vishnu on a lotus in
heaven. Nothing better illustrates M K Gandhi’s unique
hold over the popular imagination in India in January
1948 than the fact that even a little white boy not yet in
school should have been so distressed.
Biographies of saints should always be approached
with caution – and when a saint’s biography is written
by his grandson, who in his earlier days was a politi-
cian, the reader has every right to be doubly, if not tre-
bly, suspicious. But then ‘saint’ might not quite be the
right word to describe Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Very early in his political career his admirers took to
calling him a mahatma or ‘great soul’, and that seems as
fair a summation as we are ever likely to get of a man
who came far closer than most mortals do to practising
what he preached. Rajmohan Gandhi clearly has no
doubts that his grandfather was a mahatma, but it is a
measure of his soundness as a biographer that he does
not shy away from enumerating his subject’s flaws,
ranging from shortcomings as husband and father to a
headstrong conviction – one he shared with Joan of
Arc – that the voices in his head were always right and
all others wrong.
But the flaws are almost beside the point. The fact is
that M K Gandhi did something quite extraordinary: he
recognised British colonial rule in South Africa and
India for what it was – a moral wrong – and then set
about constructing a political mechanism for putting
that wrong to rights, not by the conventional means of
physical opposition but by the application of moral
superiority, pure and simple. This was not a reworking
of ancient Vedic philosophies drawn from such texts as
the Bhagavad Gita (as many Gandhians have convinced
themselves it was), nor the ‘civil disobedience’ envisaged
by Thoreau, but a genuinely novel political philosophy
arrived at by trial and error – by what Gandhi himself
called his ‘experiments with truth’. Beginning with his
discovery, as a 21-year-old law student in ‘dear London’,
of Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism, he developed over
the course of two decades spent mostly in South Africa
a form of political protest which the American philoso-
pher William James termed ‘the moral equivalent of
35
war’. Gandhi called it
satyagraha, meaning
‘firmness for the truth’
but which he redefined
as ‘soul force’ or ‘truth
force’. Far and away
of Rajmohan Gandhi’s
exhaustive biography
concerns itself with the
evolution of this politi-
cal philosophy. The
process spanned some
twenty-five years, from
1888, when the ‘now-
timid-now-audacious’
Hindu boy from the
mercantile banya caste
defied family, custom
and orthodoxy in his Gandhi: hear no evil
deter mination to be
educated in England, to December 1915, when the 45-
year-old veteran of numerous political confrontations
with the British authorities in South Africa landed in
Bombay to apply his political philosophy to the libera-
tion of India: Swaraj or ‘self rule’.
The ‘freedom struggle’ that followed was an immense-
ly chaotic process, complicated by the war years, fac-
tionalism within the Congress Party, Muslim fears of
Hindu domination, and the determination of Jinnah to
break away and form the new nation of Pakistan. The
tendency is to reduce the period to absolutes of black
and white, best exemplified by Richard Attenborough’s
brave but simplistic biopic Gandhi (1982), which is how
most people outside India perceive M K Gandhi and his
role in the division of British India into independent
India and Pakistan. For historians and biographers, too,
the temptation to cut a clear path through the jungle by
oversimplification is enormous, just as it is for historians
with ties to the Indian subcontinent to respond to the
siren call of cultural loyalties. It is enormously to
Rajmohan Gandhi’s credit that he resists both tempta-
tions as he leads us painstakingly through the welter of
secondary growth that surrounds every issue at every
stage, drawing extensively on documents and letters.
For older Br itish readers the real test has to be
Rajmohan Gandhi’s explanation of his grandfather’s
actions in 1942, when Japanese bombs began to fall on
Indian cities. Earlier, M K Gandhi had announced that
on moral grounds it was ‘wrong to help the British war
effort with men or money’ and had initiated a campaign
of civil disobedience, even while acknowledging that
Britain’s ‘very existence hung in the balance’. Then in
April 1942 – believing that Britain now had no option
but to pull out immediately, leaving India ‘in God’s
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 INDIA
hands’ – he rejected Sir Stafford Cripps’s offer of a
national representative government with independence
to follow and initiated the infamous (in British eyes)
‘Quit India!’ campaign with the declaration that an
inner voice was telling him that ‘even if the whole of
India tries to persuade me that I am wrong, even then I
will go ahead ... I cannot wait any longer for Indian
freedom.’ In his handling of the episode Rajmohan
omits this and other published statements that show his
grandfather in a less than favourable light and seemingly
at odds with his principles. Fortunately for India, the
Quit India movement failed, the Indian Army stood
firm, and the Japanese were repulsed.
Indians can rightly point with pride to the Gandhian
S ANKARSHAN T HAKUR
A FUNCTIONING ANARCHY
I NDIA A FTER G ANDHI
★ assassination and the consequent street mayhem. India
By Ramachandra Guha
(Macmillan 900pp £25)
H OLY WARRIORS : A J OURNEY INTO THE
H EART OF I NDIAN F UNDAMENTALISM
★ liberal attitude of its author: this is not a hectoring history,
By Edna Fernandes
(Portobello 334pp £15.99)
INDIA CONFOUNDS MOST Indians. None, for instance,
can even hope to read the banknotes they use daily;
there are eighteen scripts embossed on each one and
more linguistic constituencies are agitating to be repre-
sented. Differences of caste, creed and class mean that
most Indians are unfamiliar with the lives of most other
Indians. Imperial eminences – John Strachey, Winston
Churchill, et al – weren’t the last ones to flag the impos-
sibility of India or to predict the collapse of the entity
that emerged from colonial rule in 1947, sundered and
bloodied: as recently as the 1980s, Indira Gandhi was
trotting out the threat of ‘Balkanisation’ to rally support.
Ramachandra Guha is, wisely, wary of reaching conclu-
sions about India, but he is probably right when, towards
the end of his elaborate exploration of her coming of age,
he says:
Secessionist movements are active here and there, but
there is no longer any fear that India will follow the
former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal
parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly
abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will
emulate neighbouring Pakistan.
However, India’s journey has been neither facile nor
ordinary. Until recently, V S Naipaul wrote only darkly
36
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
legacy, not least as applied by the civil rights movements
in the United States and – initially, at least – in
Northern Ireland; but the central question that every
history involving M K Gandhi, and certainly every
biography, must answer is this: what did satyagraha as
applied by M K Gandhi in India actually achieve?
Rajmohan Gandhi makes a brave stab at an answer, con-
cluding that M K Gandhi simply could not square the
circle: ‘There was an incurable contradiction in Gandhi’s
great goals. As long as Indians harboured rage at the
British, Swaraj and non-violence were bound to clash.
As long as Hindus and Muslims distrusted one another,
Swaraj and Indian unity would clash.’
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37
about India, and most of what he had to say was pre-
scient. M J Akbar’s India: The Siege Within was written
in a volatile phase that seemed, two decades ago when it
was published, about to crack – Sikh separatism in
Punjab, the renewed clamour for self-determination in
Kashmir, the spew of religious fundamentalism, Indira’s
would earn just concessions in Naipaul’s later work,
though. And Akbar might want to update his pulsating
report of alarm from the trenches with calmer analysis.
India After Gandhi is a work of immense sweep and
scholarship, but its real merit lies in its lucidity, and in the
this is a charming invitation to understand the making of
a complex nation. To Ramachandra Guha, and to mil-
lions of other Indians, at the heart of the country’s
endurance against odds lies the liberal–democratic ethic
wrought deep into the nation’s political consciousness
during the Nehru era – so deep that his daughter Indira
was shamed into calling elections within two years of
declaring the Emergency, during which all rights and
freedoms were suspended. She was cast out in the 1977
elections, then she rode back to power on a huge man-
date in 1980. Indians felt, justifiably, that their mammoth,
often unwieldy country was fairly a creature of their will.
Indians are wont to dispose of emergencies, big ‘E’ or
small. Neither the demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque
by Hindu zealots in 1992, nor the state-sponsored slaugh-
ter of Muslims in Gujarat a decade later, has driven the
country’s most populous minority east or west into
Bangladesh or Pakistan. Balasaheb Thackeray is a virulent,
Hitler-loving bigot but his appeal remains contained
within a precinct of Mumbai. Secession remains a live cry
in India’s North East and in Kashmir, but both sets of sep-
aratists are negotiating with the government, even if they
have not forsaken arms and terror.
Edna Fernandes’s Holy Warriors is a journey of discovery
into some of the tensions that regularly stretch India.
Religious fundamentalism is as much a part of India today
as it is of the rest of the world, but India is troubled by
 INDIA
Literary Review Bookshop
more than this and the image it is trying to paint of itself
as a modern, advanced democracy powering into the big
league is defiled by episodes that show how far it still has
to go: an urban water riot; dreary death on remote and
famished farmlands; medieval clashes between caste
groups vying for jobs.
India’s problems are manifold. Primary education and
healthcare are still widely unavailable. Large swathes of
this nuclear-power nation still have no access to water or
electricity. Caste-based discrimination remains rampant
enough for leaders to create militant political con-
stituencies out of those that consider themselves vic-
timised. One such party that champions the cause of
Dalits (a catch-all term for communities considered to
be untouchable) rode uproariously to power in Uttar
Pradesh, politically India’s most important state, in May.
To ignore any of India’s many new mutinies would be
to court ugly surprises. The slow burn of Naxalism, or
armed ultra-leftwing rebellion, along the country’s
impoverished eastern flank, from Bihar to Andhra
Pradesh, probably holds in store many more terrible
lessons about the pitfalls of iniquitous growth. Inequality
is the key problem. People are trying to discover ways of
securing their rightful share in what they are being told is
20% discount on all
a prosperous place; they are impatient and their frustration
will increasingly lead them to extra-democratic resorts.
There has never been any dearth of bad news from India;
titles under review
of late, there has been an awful lot of good news too. The
truth probably is that neither describes India well enough.
India is what quietly happens in between – a country living Call our Order Hotline
and prospering in its few unbroken, and largely unnoticed,
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 INDIA
D AVID S MITH
729, BY THE WAY
T HE B OOK OF L OVE : I N S EARCH OF
THE K AMASUTRA
★ masterpiece on the mythology of Shiva in the Puranas,
By James McConnachie
(Atlantic Books 272pp £17.99)
SURELY IT IS self-evident that woodworking’s primary
appeal for the man about town, that is to say, for the
Kamasutra’s man about town, would be the fashioning of
wooden dildoes? Yet James McConnachie, in his study
of the history of Vatsyayana’s book on the art of love,
finds this bizarre!
Last year the University of Cambridge decided to
stop the teaching of the Sanskrit
tripos, begun in 1831. It is to a
travel writer that we are indebted
for this lively account of the most
famous Sanskrit book in the mod-
ern world, indeed the only Sanskrit
book known to the world at large
– the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, writ-
ten probably around AD 300. This
Rough Guide to an item of intel-
lectual history is not without faults,
but the idea in itself, to trace the
life of the Kamasutra from ‘palm-leaf
manuscript to coffee-table book’, is
fine. McConnachie makes the
important point that the Kamasutra
is a book whose title alone can
stand for the very thing it repre-
sents, putting it in a highly select
group, joined by little more than
the Bible and the Odyssey; and
perhaps the Arabian Nights.
He shows chutzpah in attempting
to sum up the Sanskrit erotic tradi-
tion without knowing any Sanskrit. Straight from the Kamasutra: post-Mughal lovemaking Along with not knowing Sanskrit,
Inevitably the nineteenth-century
translator, the notorious Sir Richard Burton, steals the
show. It was Burton who thought up the Kama Shastra
(Ars Amoris) Society, and recast the translation in lithe
attractive prose.
A cursory treatment of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex
features in the last part, which quickly brings the cover-
age up to date. But although the author pays tribute to
modern scholars Lee Siegel and Wendy Doniger, these
two, along with the psychologist–novelist Sudhir Kakar,
deserved a whole chapter to themselves. Siegel, with his
witty work on street magicians and snake-charmers in
38
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
India, his studies of erotic poetry, and his novel about a
translator of the Kamasutra, is no less than a Californian
latter-day Burton. Wendy Doniger has inspired two or
three generations of graduate students (‘Wendy’s chil-
dren’, as Hindu fundamentalists who oppose her call
them) with her joyous acclamation of erotic myth – a
lifetime’s work that began over thirty years ago with her
and continues as richly as ever, making her a major
contributor to modernity’s understanding of India.
Both she and Siegel are brilliant translators of Sanskrit
poetry for the new ‘Loeb’, the Clay Sanskrit Library.
McConnachie is accomplished, but his publisher has
done him harm by denying him the framework and
discipline of annotation. Books about books, about bib-
liography, need scholarly apparatus. Without references
it is usually impossible to check McConnachie’s state-
ments. Doniger and Kakar’s annotated translation
of the Kamasutra (Oxford
University Press, 2002) is a major
source, and easy to check. As noted
above, McConnachie cr iticises
Yashodhara, the thirteenth-century
commentator, for his explanation of
Vatsyayana’s mention of woodwork-
ing; but when he rebukes him for
‘staggering pedantry’ in working
out the maximum possible number
of sexual conjunctions (729) – after
all, a sum of more than geekish
interest – he is merely rehashing
Doniger’s remark that the commen-
tator was in this arithmetic ‘being
somewhat flatfooted’. Moreover, if
McConnachie calls Yashodhara’s
level of pedantry ‘staggering’ he
plainly hasn’t seen much pedantry.
McConnachie’s eager style,
pulling you along by the ar m,
stumbles more than once. ‘Sexing
up’ belongs to Alistair Campbell,
not to Bur ton’s editor ial role.
McConnachie has another fault –
he is too young! Burton and Doniger were in their six-
ties when they published their translations of the
Kamasutra, Alain Daniélou in his seventies. In the 1984
film Utsav, a recreation of the famous Sanskrit play The
Little Clay Cart, we are shown the author of the
Kamasutra as a heavily bearded figure in late middle age
who peeps into brothel chambers to note down vari-
eties of posture. Nevertheless, the zest and enthusiasm
of James McConnachie’s study will lead many to look
further at the riches of South Asian civilisation.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 MOP & PAIL
L UCY L ETHBRIDGE
UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
M RS WOOLF AND THE S ERVANTS : T HE
H IDDEN H EART OF D OMESTIC S ERVICE
★ raised in an institute for foundlings, with her crimson
By Alison Light
(Fig Tree 376pp £20)
FOR THE CHILDREN of Leslie Stephen, growing up in
the late nineteenth century in their large house in Hyde
Park Gate, servants were inevitable cogs in the complex
social and practical machinery of the upper-middle-class
home. Lighting fires, producing meals, cleaning and pol-
ishing, their work was for the most part as intensive and
back-breaking as it had been for their predecessors.
Leslie Stephen considered installing new-fangled run-
ning hot water – but decided that having servants heat it
and then laboriously carry it upstairs
was the cheaper course. Yet by the
standards of their age, the Stephens
were enlightened employers. Julia
Stephen was one of the ‘slummers’,
that band of women who devoted
much time to visiting and helping
fallen women or the poor and other
philanthropic projects. They were
fond enough of their servants to
take photog raphs of them. But
while her aunt Julia Margaret
Cameron photographed the young
Mrs Stephen in the pose of a heavy-
lidded Madonna, the model of the
Victorian ideal of ethereal woman-
hood, a photograph of their cook
Sophie Far rell, with her stout,
aproned frame and thick labourer’s
forearms, portrayed her as the ideal
cook (if there were such a thing),
her destiny to be nothing else. Sophie Farrell
When the elder Stephens died,
Sophie came with Virginia and her siblings as they made
their first foray into Bloomsbury. They found a house in
Gordon Square. ‘Sophie approves of it in every particular’,
wrote Virginia. There, they resolved that all would be dif-
ferent, that fresh air would blow through the stuffed and
buttoned Victorian drawing rooms of the previous genera-
tion. Conversation and creative study would form the
timetable, there would be jazzily printed curtains, and they
would have whisky at teatime. But down in the basement,
to facilitate this Utopia, Sophie still toiled, with just one
housemaid to help her. Fires had to be lit; meals, however
casual and erratic, had to be produced; and there was still
39
no running hot water.
On the whole, the servants of the Woolfs and Bells
stayed, and in fact often moved between households
within the Bloomsbury set. They even, imitating the
exclusive world of their employers, referred to themselves
as the ‘click’. After Sophie, there was Nellie Boxall, the
Woolfs’ recalcitrant cook; the housemaid Lottie Hope,
lipstick and her black bobbed head ‘like a disarranged
dahlia’; the five Selwood sisters; Grace Higgens; and
Louie Everest, who stayed loyal until Leonard Woolf ’s
death in 1969. Alison Light has done an extraordinarily
impressive job in unearthing the individual histories of
those who left few letters and no diaries, and whose
births and childhoods were barely recorded. At the heart
of her book, however, is the vexed relationship between
Virginia Woolf herself and the women who made possi-
ble a domestic life that she found both alluring and
abhorrent, and through this Light examines the great
domestic changes of twentieth-century Britain.
Virginia Woolf was fascinated and
repelled by her servants. She felt
guilty about them and yet she
despised them for in many cases
embodying characteristics that she
found repellent: respectability, gen-
tility, conservatism, garrulity and
fleshliness. She was curious about
them – her diaries and letters are
full of observations of Lottie and
Nellie – and yet she couldn’t bring
herself to see them fully as individu-
als, preferring instead to rail against
what she called ‘the servant mind’.
With Nellie Boxall in particular, she
had a relationship that at times
reduced both of them to tears. They
rowed like lovers, Nellie wielding a
metaphorical rolling pin and threat-
ening regularly to hand in her
notice, Virginia wilting at the hor-
ror and complicatedness of it all.
There was simultaneously an inti-
macy and distance in the relationship between servant
and employer that was profoundly disquieting to Woolf
and to many others of her generation. Woolf tried to
untie the knots: ‘Why is there always this relationship
between master and servant. Always deceit and disgust.
Our transition age perhaps.’ She was right about the
changes of a new century; like many of her class and
age, despite the efforts she had made to unfetter herself
from convention, she was caught between two genera-
tions. She wanted light and air and cordiality between
Nellie and herself, but she also wanted obedience and
deference. Even the spare and unencumbered delights of
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 MOP & PAIL
a room of one’s own had to be kept clean – by someone.
Vanessa Bell at Charleston found the servant problem
less agonising than her sister (being an employer in a
more traditional, distant mould) – though as a bohemian
it behoved her to try and break down some of the barri-
ers. She tried to be kind, but Angelica Garnett recalled
her mother talking to her servants ‘As though she were
waving from a train at women working in the fields’.
In the end, Nellie Boxall was eased out of the Woolfs’
life by modern conveniences. Monks’ House was
equipped, by the money earned by Virginia’s novels,
with electricity and a fridge. Nellie was no longer neces-
sary. There need be no more the guilt-inducing sound of
her lugging coal scuttles and boiling coppers. In 1934,
she gave notice for the last time. Virginia wrote: ‘After
eighteen years, I have at last got rid of an affectionate
domestic tyrant.’ She never made another reference in
writing to Nellie.
With Nellie gone the Woolfs tried their hand, with
some expectation of enjoyment, at housework. It was an
eye-opener. ‘I’ve been washing up lunch – how servants
preserve either sanity or propriety if that is nine-tenths
of their lives – greasy ham – god knows!’ Virginia
V IRGINIA I RONSIDE
A GRUBBY LOT
C LEAN : A H ISTORY OF P ERSONAL H YGIENE
AND P URITY
★ bodily waste is seen as rather repulsive, and jobs like
By Virginia Smith
(Oxford University Press 457pp £16.99)
WHEN I WAS young we only had a bath once a week –
the day, Friday, was known as ‘bath night’. In my great-
aunt’s house a line was drawn in the bath to show where
the hot water had to stop – it was about four inches
from the bottom. Everyone in England smelt – of sweat
and of unwashed hair.
But there are fashions in
cleanliness and personal
hygiene, as Virginia Smith
points out in her immacu-
lately researched book,
Clean. No doubt in genera-
tions to come we will be
just as amused by our obses-
sive attitudes to cleanliness
in the twenty-first century
as we are by those rules
imposed by past generations.
Nature has made us a
pretty grubby lot. We shed
40
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
wrote. Not, as Light points out, that she had to do
everything: there were still people to come in and ‘do
the rough’ – the scrubbing, scouring and heaving that
made housework labour.
What makes this book subtle is Light’s refusal to over-
simplify the bond between servants and their employers.
She is alert to the complexities in the relationship – how
dependency was often mutual and affectionate and how,
despite the ambivalence and high-handedness of their
attitudes towards class, the Bloomsbury set upheld their
convictions against the dreaded nar rowness of
‘respectability’. When one of the Selwood sisters, for
example, had an illegitimate child, the baby was taken in
by Vanessa Bell’s friend Faith Henderson and raised as
one of her own children.
Mrs Woolf and her Servants is a fascinating, beautifully
written and meticulously researched book. Inevitably,
it is Virginia Woolf ’s voice that we hear most clearly,
but the varied and individual characters of Nellie,
Lottie, Sophie, Grace and all the other servants of
Bloomsbury are for the first time given definition, and
their stories told.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37
skin, hair and toenail clippings at the rate of between
three to six ounces a day – that’s four tons in a lifetime.
Around 80 per cent of the contents of a vacuum cleaner
consists of human skin cells. And that’s not counting our
obvious waste – excreta, sweat, various gases and chemi-
cals, not to mention tears and bogeys. We don’t like it.
Which is why close physical contact with other people’s
laundering, rubbish clearance and lavatory cleaning are
given to the lowest human ranks.
The book is filled with fascinating pieces of informa-
tion. The Egyptians used hair oil, depilatories, hair dis-
entangling cream, and had recipes for the treatment of
grey hair, dandruff, lice and nits. There were salves of
face paint for the lips and other unguents to cover up
moles, blemishes, pimples and peeling. Teeth cleaners
were used, and mouth, armpit and nose deodorants.
In Homer’s world, to wash
or bathe someone was a par-
ticular sign of respect; in the
Odyssey, male guests were
always washed on ar r ival
(sometimes the whole body,
eight times), while the young
always washed the hands of
their elders before eating.
In England in 1693, John
Locke recommended cold
baths for decayed and weak
constitutions, which resulted
in misery for schoolboys for
 MOP & PAIL

years to come, and in to wash, kind of thing.

seventeenth-centur y The only area in
France not only was which this book falls
the bidet invented but down slightly is in cov-
research into the care of ering the late twentieth
teeth became the rage and early twenty-first
and dentistry became centur ies, the most
far more sophisticated. cleanliness-obsessed era
And so it needed to, of all. We’re constantly
since many people being encouraged to
cleaned their teeth so detox: we shower
thoroughly with sticks, ever y day, have our
badly-ground powders own bathrooms, slather
and whiteners that they ourselves in deodor-
damaged their teeth ants, moistur ise our
irreparably. bodies – so much so
Clean becomes par- You can never be too clean that some doctors fear
ticularly interesting as it that our obsession with
nears our present day. While we all know that Florence cleanliness is actually making us ill, encouraging auto-
Nightingale transformed medicine by insisting her nurses immune diseases, asthma, and allergies. But could the
use scrubbing brushes and concentrate on cleanliness to tide be about to turn? The fad for not washing your hair
reduce the death rate at Scutari Hospital in the Crimean and the ‘grunge’ look may be examples of a rebellion
War, what I didn’t know was that as a result, in Victorian against over-cleanliness. Despite this gap in the book,
times, there came a pathological fear of ‘germs’. Clean is an interesting read which should perhaps be
Constipation became a preoccupation and laxatives bought to live in the loo – it is a natural ‘bathroom
were used extensively to avoid the build-up of disgusting, book’, as the Americans coyly call it.
germ-ridden poo in the body. Germs were the great To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 37
enemy, and that’s why everything had to be boiled until it
screamed – resulting in our reputation for overcooking
vegetables till they were virtually inedible. Every kitchen
saucepan had to be sterilised and work surfaces had to be
cleared of ornate fittings. Long skirts were discouraged (at
least ones that touched the germ-ridden ground), gloves
encouraged, and a clean handkerchief was a must for
every day. Contact with anyone else even among family
members posed a risk – which might be why for a long
time children were rarely hugged or kissed.
Smith writes interestingly, too, on the different emo-
tional and spiritual attitudes to cleanliness. ‘Cleanliness is
next to godliness,’ goes one saying, and we are always
being encouraged to ‘wash away our sins’. In Vedic the- )RUPRUHLQIRUPDWLRQSOHDVHFRQWDFW3DXO0DUXV
ology, sweat, saliva, hair and nail clippings, vomit, urine, RU&KULV+RZOHV7HO)D[
blood, sperm, faeces and afterbirth were closely moni- (PDLOSDXOPDUXV#FRUEDUFRXN
tored, while Egyptian priests were urged to shave their
bodies every day to guard against the presence of lice.
On the other hand, Saddhus are not known for their
bathing habits, except of course in the filthiest river in
the world, the Ganges, and Judaeo-Christian asceticism
meant that the cleansing of the inner soul was absolutely
imperative, whereas the cleaning of the outer body was a
worldly distraction.
Artists also have often eschewed cleanliness in an effort
to convince everyone that they are too busy with their art
to bother about bourgeois matters like cleanliness, and
very posh aristocrats can have a similar attitude. Too posh

41
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 GENERAL
J ANE R IDLEY
DAY OF THE SPINSTER
S INGLED O UT: H OW T WO M ILLION WOMEN
S URVIVED W ITHOUT M EN A FTER THE F IRST
WORLD WAR
★ control of their lives. Nicholson quotes women confessing
By Virginia Nicholson
(Viking 336pp £20)
IN 1917 THE Headmistress of Bournemouth High School
for Girls made a chilling announcement to her sixth
form: ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one
out of ten of you girls can ever marry … Nearly all the
men who might have married you have been killed. You
will have to make your way in the world as best you can.’
She was right: 700,000 British soldiers died in the First
World War, and over a million and a
half were wounded. Ghastly and
unthinkable though their fate was, it
has been endlessly commemorated
with Remembrance days, with war
memorials and a literature which still
continues to grow. The women who
were left behind are forgotten. The
Census of 1921 revealed a surplus of
one and three-quarter million women
over men. These Surplus Women
for m the subject of Virginia
Nicholson’s book. She succeeds tri-
umphantly in telling the human story
behind the demographic statistic.
Being condemned to a lifetime of
spinsterhood was especially hard for
women who had been programmed
by their Victorian mothers to seek
fulfilment through men, love, mar-
riage and children. Society had never
been kind to spinsters. Victor ian
maiden aunts with wispy buns and District maternity nurse, 1931
ruined hopes were caricatured and
despised as frumps who had failed to attract a man. The
Surplus Women in the wake of WWI could hardly be
blamed for their spinster state, but nonetheless, as
Nicholson shows, they were punished for it. The male
minority, many of them damaged or mutilated by war,
felt threatened by the surplus of healthy women, and
sneered at bossy, warped, cat-loving virgins with thick
legs. Misogynists waxed hysterical about man-hating,
sexually abnormal viragos with ‘busy little brains’.
Some women were defiant. ‘I was born to be a spinster,
and by God, I’m going to spin,’ declared Winifred Holtby,
who is one of the heroes of Nicholson’s book. Addressing
42
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
the issue head on, she wrote an essay, ‘Are Spinsters
Frustrated?’, and pronounced that sex wasn’t the only
thing that women wanted. In The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, Muriel Spark created an interwar spinster teacher
who is the antithesis of the maiden aunt – glamorous, cul-
tured and subversive, she enlivens Eng Lit classes with
reminiscences of her dead lover, killed in action.
The reality was often grim, as women failed to take
to a terrible sense of time passing, of the clock ticking, of
regret for chances missed and fears of dying an unhappy,
shrivelled virgin. There was something desperate about
the postwar women who put on their war paint and went
out dancing, often making do with female partners
because there were not enough men to go round.
Women had worked hard during the war to keep the
economy going, but when the ‘khaki boys’ came home,
they found themselves on the scrap heap. Surplus
Women were forced onto the labour market to survive,
but they were expected to do jobs
that didn’t compete with men. The
‘business girl’ or shorthand typist,
demure and neat, posed no threat to
patr iarchy, tinkling away on her
Remington and taking dictation from
the boss; but, as Nicholson shows,
business girls lived grey half-lives,
shivering in mean lodging houses and
saving up for sardines on toast in
dingy tearooms. Many Sur plus
Women became school mistresses,
locked into spinsterhood by their
profession, as they lost their jobs if
they married – which in any case was
unlikely, as schoolmar ms were
famously unattractive, and (in defi-
ance surely of Darwinian theory)
men are put off by clever women:
even today, women’s mar r iage
prospects apparently drop 40 per cent
for every 16-point increase of IQ.
The realities of living without sex
in the early twentieth century, says
Nicholson, are impossible to disinter – DON’T ASK.
Nonetheless, she has a damn good go at it, quoting
anguished letters written to sex counsellor Marie Stopes
by single women riddled with guilt about masturbation.
The story is not all gloom and doom though. If the war
destroyed the certainty of mar r iage, it destroyed
Victorian morality too. Newly liberated women had
affairs, used contraception, enjoyed sex without mar-
riage. ‘To be white as the driven snow at thirty is just
damn silly,’ declared Angela du Maurier. Women came
out as lesbians too; championed by Radclyffe Hall, they
cropped their hair and smoked jewelled pipes.
 GENERAL

If the golden generation of boys killed in the Great
War had survived, Nicholson suggests, the odds are that
their women would have gone on much as before,
becoming wives and mothers. The classically educated
empire-builders who were slaughtered in the trenches
showed little sign of sponsoring women’s liberation.
Demographic disaster forced social change. The Surplus
Women included spectacular success stories, such as the
colonial historian Marjory Perham or the archaeologist
Gertrude Caton-Thompson, both of whom found free-
dom in travel. Gertrude Maclean, spinster aunt, ‘a rock
and a sport’, founded Universal Aunts, the agency
which became the lifestyle consultants of the 1920s. My
favourite is Caroline Haslett, spinster engineer, who lib-
erated women from household drudgery by pioneering
the application of electricity to washing and dusting and
cleaning. Nicholson’s conclusion is upbeat. In spite of
the loneliness and the heartache, the Surplus Women
were the first generation to prove that women can sur-
vive without men.
Virginia Nicholson has found a wonderful subject. The
virtue of her book is that she doesn’t attempt to generalise
or theorise or preach, but allows the women to speak for
themselves. Taking the life stories of a sample of women,
she skilfully weaves them into her narrative, and the result
is not an arid social history but a book packed with human
interest, elegant and funny and a compelling read. Today,
more women are choosing to remain single than ever
before. The difference is that they are in control of their
lives, in a way that their great-grandmothers of ninety
years ago most certainly were not.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

D AVID C ESARANI exclusion of the other. Rather, he sees the potential for
good and evil within everyone. He also rejects the

ROTTEN APPLES
T HE L UCIFER E FFECT: H OW G OOD P EOPLE
T URN E VIL
★ ‘the Situation’ in which good people do terrible things.
By Philip Zimbardo
(Rider 551pp £18.99)
BY NOW WE are all too familiar with the ghastly images
that came out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. But
no one was more appalled than Philip Zimbardo, emeri-
tus professor of psychology at Stanford University. They
brought back to him chilling memories of the experi-
ment he had conducted at Stanford thirty-three years
earlier. To his horror, the behaviour of the guards
seemed exactly to replicate what occurred in a basement
of the university when he simulated conditions in a
prison. Before long he was approached to act as an
expert witness on behalf of one of the military police-
men accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners. In The Lucifer
Effect Zimbardo recounts the Stanford Pr ison
Experiment and goes on to
notion that people are predisposed towards one or the
other by virtue of genes, character, or pathology. Instead
of explaining deviance by looking for the ‘bad apples’ in
a neutral barrel, he maintains that a bad barrel makes the
apples go rotten. The barrel is ‘the System’ that creates
And it is the ‘power elite’ that creates ‘the System’.
This theory was based on his observations during the
infamous 1971 prison experiment. Over six days, a
group of student volunteers from Stanford role-played
prisoners and guards in a basement converted into a jail.
Within twenty-four hours some of the ‘prisoners’ were
rebelling against the ‘rules’ and the ‘guards’ were already
acting abusively towards them. By day five the experi-
ment was getting out of control. The guards were
humiliating the ‘inmates’ who were themselves begin-
ning to exhibit pathologically craven behaviour. On the
eighth day Zimbardo aborted the experiment. He was
finally unnerved by an assistant who protested that he
was becoming an accomplice to degradation and sadism.
What had happened? The recruits were young
men with no prehistory of psychotic or cr iminal
behaviour, but when they

NEW AUTHORS
record his investigation of were assigned their respec-
the real abuses that hap- tive roles they were given
pened in Abu Ghraib. It is PUBLISH YOUR BOOK – ALL SUBJECTS INVITED unifor ms that confer red
an absorbing work, packed Have you written a book, and are you looking for a publisher? Athena anonymity. Stripped of their
with insight into human Press is a publisher dedicated to the publishing of books mainly by first
time authors. While we have our criteria for accepting manuscripts, we are
identities they were freed
behaviour and streetwise less demanding than the major blockbuster and celebrity driven publishing from prior inhibitions and
observations that go back to houses, and we will accept a book if we feel it can reach a readership. cut from the moorings of
his childhood in the South We welcome submissions in all genres of fiction and non-fiction; literary normality. Destructive emo-
and other novels, biography and autobiography, children’s, academic,
Bronx. spiritual and religious writing, poetry, and many others.
tional and cognitive changes
Zimbardo rejects the rapidly followed. The guards
Write or send your manuscript to: ATHENA PRESS
polarity of good versus evil were empowered to deni-
and the common tendency QUEEN’S HOUSE, 2 HOLLY ROAD, TWICKENHAM TW1 4EG, UK.
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g rate the pr isoners who,
to essentialise each to the rendered powerless, began

43
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 GENERAL
to internalise what was said about them. The deterio-
ration of sanitary conditions created an ‘ecology of
dehumanisation’ as the guards perceived the sweaty,
dirty, smelly inmates as ever more contemptible.
Zimbardo observed that as long as the guards believed
themselves to be essentially decent they could go on
harming the inmates indefinitely. They simply went to
greater lengths to rationalise their behaviour. This
paradox was one of his most striking insights. It caused
him to view the essentialisation of goodness and evil as
potentially one of the most destructive human traits.
The Stanford prison experiment was hugely influential.
Social psychologists and historians subsequently used it to
explain the origins of mass atrocity in various contexts.
Most notably, Christopher Browning found situational
pressures the best explanation for the behaviour of the
Germans in Reserve Police Battalion 101, who shot to
death thousands of Jews in Poland in 1941–42. However,
Browning’s analysis has been questioned, not least
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Indeed, cases of Nazi atroci-
ties, which Zimbardo constantly invokes as both proof
and evidence of his thesis, expose the weakness of the
entire project.
P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D
1 2 3 4
7 8
9 10
11
12
13
14 15
19
21 22
23 24
Oxford University Press has generously decided to sponsor the prizes
for this month’s crossword. Five winners will be selected from the correct
puzzles received by noon on 16 August 2007. Each will receive a copy of
the magnificent Oxford Dictionary of English.
The winners of our July competition are.Mr R Snailham of Windsor, Rodney Dingle of Devon, Clive Murphy
of Brick Lane, Sandra Moore of Suffolk, and Anais Gutowska of London. Each will receive a copy of The
Proms, published by Thames & Hudson.
Answers to the July competition:
ACROSS: 4 Palace, 7 Passim, 8 Opinions, 9 Wide, 10 Strum, 12 Eden, 18 Rheumy, 19 Upkeep, 20
Bale, 23 Spine, 27 Lion, 28 Allegory, 29 League, 30 Tsetse.
DOWN: 1 Satin, 2 Ashes, 3 Amour, 4 Priam, 5 Loire, 6 Canoe, 11 Tome, 13 Diet, 14 Nips, 15 Crab, 16
Deal, 17 Spin, 21 Atlas, 22 Event, 23 Stowe, 24 Idyll, 25 Elgar, 26 Vogue.
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
The Nazi killing fields were not a tabula rasa and the
perpetrators were not innocents. The Germans saw their
victims through lenses tinted by ethnology, geography,
religion, nationalism, and racism. Yet Zimbardo’s
explanatory framework relegates ideology to insignifi-
cance. To him, ‘Ideology is a system or proposition that
usually legitimises whatever means are necessary to attain
an ultimate goal’. It is precisely because his volunteers
were ‘ordinary’, with no ideological baggage, that their
conduct tells us so little.
Ideology sets the goals. The American military police
did not arrive in Abu Ghraib as a bunch of innocents.
They were Christians transported on a ‘crusade’ to a
region that had been stigmatised in US popular culture
for decades, and thrust into a Muslim country full of
‘towel heads’. While Zimbardo is undoubtedly correct
that the abuses arose from poor training, lack of
resources, appalling leadership and malign instructions
from on high, he cannot simply blame ‘the System’.
Ultimately he reduces the perpetrators to puppets of
anonymous forces, part of a vast conspiracy in which
they are almost as helpless as their victims.
To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 37
ACROSS
1 Aluminium, Cobalt and Tritium used twice by author (6)
5 6 4 Second fruit with asparagus shoot (5)
9 Biscuit taken with drink? (7)
10 Useful quality a Hardy heroine rejected (5)
11 A hospital intern moved English poet (1.1.7)
12 Born to meet daughter’s requirement (4)
13 Novelist’s depressions (5)
16 Missing introduction to Callas operatic solo (4)
19 Cover for book? (9)
21 Small hole not completed by pack animal (5)
22 One tightly packed into function crossing a road (7)
16 17 18
23 One might wager this is deadly to Stoker’s subject? (5)
20
24 Piece heard in darkness (6)
DOWN
1 Reddish-brown and golden glow (6)
2 Duo overthrow the French (6)
3 Excellent piece turned up with bone (5)
5 Paltry amount paid for Schulz cartoon (7)
6 Suppose fool and yours truly have you, say, taken in (6)
7 Compiler sets record, one gathered by army
following soldier (11)
8 Weight of tablet (5)
13 Sorcerer making conflict over stretch of canal (7)
14 Breathing apparatus for young creature in South
Africa (5)
15 Rain lightly covering state in hard stuff (6)
17 Travelling on horseback to part of Yorkshire (6)
18 Appearance in period leading up to party season (6)
20 One taking spin around Italian city (5)
 GENERAL
J W M T HOMPSON
A RESTORATION ROGUE
T HE P LOT AGAINST P EPYS
★ Richard Ollard summed him up with some restraint as
By James Long and Ben Long
(Faber & Faber 322pp £17.99)
THE CENTRAL CHARACTER in this story is not, in fact, the
eminent public servant Samuel Pepys, but one ‘Colonel’
John Scott (as he styled himself), surely one of the most
comprehensive and unregenerate of villains from any
period of English history. This Scott’s well-attested record
included murder, theft, swindling, confidence tricks,
bigamy, forgery, and other such matters. His significance
here arises from the disreputable part he played in the pol-
itics of the Restoration years. He was a prize specimen of
the chancers and rogues who flourished in those unstable
times when England was repeatedly gripped by anti-
Catholic hysteria.
In 1679, with fear of the ‘Popish Plot’ at its most
extreme, Scott was happy to supply forged evidence (for
money, of course) that implicated Pepys in the supposed
conspiracy. His special function was to establish treasonable
links between Pepys and the French by providing manu-
factured records of clandestine meetings and fake corre-
spondence. To this was added the damaging allegation that
Pepys was a secret Catholic. Of course, Pepys was not the
real target – that was the Duke of York, Charles II’s broth-
er, who, awkwardly, was a Roman Catholic and also the
heir to the throne. Pepys, in his career as Secretary to the
Admiralty and a principal creator of the Navy, had worked
closely with the Duke. To destroy Pepys would thus grave-
ly weaken the Duke’s already insecure situation, and Scott
offered himself as a willing tool to such lordly anti-Stuart
plotters as the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duke of
Buckingham. Had the attack upon Pepys succeeded, he
would have been executed for treason. As it was, he was
imprisoned in the Tower of London and had a desperate
struggle to clear his name.
The story has been told before, from several different
angles, but it is not what most people think of first in
connection with Pepys. The great Diary has familiarised
us to a unique degree with the details of his early life,
but after that (the diary ceased when he was thirty-six) a
certain vagueness blurs our picture of Pepys as he rose to
wealth and power. The authors of this lively, if at times
uneven, account have set out to tell the story of Pepys’s
dangerous later years with something of that rich detail
which we find in the diary. They have researched dili-
gently in the great mass of papers that Pepys left behind
(which are now in the Pepys Library at Cambridge, the
Bodleian and elsewhere). They have discovered much
45
there about both the plots: the suppositious ‘Popish
Plot’; and the other plot, to strike at Pepys and through
him at his royal patron. They have also unearthed much
about Pepys’s chief accuser, John Scott, a fascinating if
unsavoury character. Other historians have found that
describing Scott adequately presents quite a challenge.
‘a figure whose universal shadiness beggars description’.
James and Ben Long do nothing to soften that picture.
Scott’s usual pose was as the son of a landowner in
Kent. In fact his father was a poor miller in that county,
who probably went bankrupt and soon afterwards died,
whereupon his widow emigrated to New England with
her child. It seems that from an early age the boy
showed a natural talent for dishonest transactions, help-
ing himself to other people’s possessions (including, by
trickery, an estate on Long Island). When things became
too hot for him on that side of the Atlantic he decided
to try his luck in London and, as the authors of this
book indicate, the turbulent, lawless London of the day
was a place where a swaggering scoundrel like Scott
found plenty of opportunities.
The Longs are father and son, not a collaboration often
encountered. Their delving in the records has been tire-
less and fruitful, although the result occasionally gives the
reader a sense of research overload, as the carefully accu-
mulated details crowd the text. It is a complicated story,
blending the iniquities of the unspeakable Scott and the
other plotters with the increasingly desperate efforts of
Pepys to defend himself. This defence required all the
great administrator’s skills. He had to gather evidence
from several parts of Europe, working through various
agents, to prove his innocence. It seems to have been
touch and go.
The first accusation of treason had come to him as an
‘immense surprise’, it is said. What also emerges clearly
from this narrative is the terrifying arbitrariness of the
judicial processes in which he then found himself
entangled, with the shadow of the scaffold drawing ever
closer. There were no fastidious concerns about ‘human
rights’ to rely upon. Even the recently passed Habeas
Corpus law did not apply to prisoners in the Tower.
When Pepys was temporarily freed from prison his bail
was set at a huge sum, the equivalent in today’s values
of many millions.
One wonders what would have become of his diary
had Pepys fallen victim to the plotters. Instead he lived
out his last years tranquilly, cataloguing his fine library
(which contained the diary as well as the papers which
James and Ben Long have studied). As for Scott, when
London eventually became unsafe for him, he sought
new opportunities in the Caribbean. Evidently he had
retained some of his confidence trickster’s skill to the last.
He ended up as Speaker of the Montserrat Assembly.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 GENERAL

THOMAS PAKENHAM’s fine J AMES F LEMING woodpecker; the hours of

new book, In Search of
Remarkable Trees: On
Safari in Southern Africa
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Tall, Dark and Handsome:
192pp £25), is, like his
others, essentially a Book of
Marvels. He’s chosen some
Four Books about Trees
100 of South Africa’s (and Madagascar’s) most spectacular
trees – baobab, kokerboom, sausage tree, pod mahogany,
fever tree, and so on – and illustrated each with pho-
tographs, sundry arboreal information and safari anec-
dotes. It’s a beguiling mixture. He’s especially good at
wood uses. In a previous book we learned that the outer
shell of the baobab is used for castanets. Now we find
that it was up a sycamore fig that Zaccheus the publican
climbed to see Jesus pass through Jericho; that the same
wood was used for mummy cases; that lucky charms are
made from the shiny red seeds of the coral tree.
He has a good eye and ear. I enjoyed his description of
a lion considering him for a meal as having a face ‘like a
cross between that of Paul Kruger … and the famous oval
radiator of a Bugatti’. Did that
come to him in the presence of
the lion, I wonder?
The book seems to have
been compiled at speed, how-
ever. Fewer species of tree and
a more reflective text might
have been better.
Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A
Journey through Trees (Hamish
Hamilton 391pp £20) suffers in
the opposite direction. The text
is as thick as nectar but begs for
something more substantial
than a few line drawings.
However, it is a wonderful
book and stands proudly despite The tree that Zaccheus climbed
the publisher’s stinginess.
Because of our soft climate, English culture, whether in
prose, verse or art, has long existed in complete intimacy
with Nature. Topsell, Evelyn, Gilbert White – well, at least
that gets us to the eighteenth century. Let the late Roger
Deakin take a place among that famous throng. I have read
none of his previous books but on the evidence here he was
incapable of being boring or commonplace, no matter
whether he was describing the natural history of England or
Australia or Poland or the vast walnut forests in the
Ferghana Valley. (In respect of the last I was reminded of the
work of another East Anglian naturalist, Douglas
Carruthers.) In fact my notes are so extensive that I’m
spoiled for examples of his breadth of learning. However, all
readers will be grateful for knowing about: the etymology
of our bizarre names for moths; the toes and tongue of the
work that went into Silbury
Hill (18 million); horse-mad
Lesbos; the cyanide in apple
pips – and the bat Don
Bradman used for his record
score of 334 against England
in the third Test at Leeds in
1930. A good young bat should have no more than four
grains in its face. His had ten. It was ancient. It could have
splintered from the impact of any one of his shots and
offered a catch. So wasn’t England unlucky!
If the Pakenham is a Book of Marvels, this is a Book
of Wonderment. Wildwood sparkles in all directions and
is none the worse for being worldly, tolerant and old-
fashioned. It gave me real pleasure.
Would that I could say the same for Richard Preston’s
The Wild Trees: What If the Last Wilderness Is Above
Our Heads? (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 291pp
£20). ‘Wild’ in this context means unclimbed and ‘tree’
means the Californian redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. The
author would have us believe that he’s passionately inter-
ested in trees. But the tone is
cold. It is as if he was casting
round for a subject to follow
up his previous book, The Hot
Zone, and looking up saw the
vague substance of a tree
between him and the sun. For
the record his book concerns
the discovery, measurement
and climbing of a succession of
giant redwoods in California
plus a snooty excursion to the
Scots pines of Glen Affric. The
only subject on which he
threatens to become interesting
is that of lichen and its various
species. But there is neither
force nor cogency in his
remarks, which is a pity. To the birds with whom he per-
force shares the canopy, I could find only one reference.
The truth of the matter is that Zaccheus knew more
about the value of tree-climbing than Preston.
Finally, is the tree of Zaccheus a sycamore fig or a
sycomore fig? Only in D J Mabberley’s The Plant-Book:
A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants can the
correct answer to this and a million other botanical ques-
tions be found. (His answer, supported by the 1993
SOED but not by Pakenham, is that the word ‘sycomore’
has one application and one only: to Ficus sycomorus.)
No brief mention can do justice to this book, first pub-
lished in 1987. An updated edition was published last year.
The pith of the book was compiled on the dense-thicket
lines of Clapham, Tutin and Warburg – ‘Bletia: Ruiz &

46
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 GENERAL
Pavon. Orchidaceae (V 11). 30 trop. Am. Terr. Cult. orn.’
(The index of abbreviations takes up fifty-nine pages.) But
this is only a fraction of the story. Taken as a whole, it
must be the wittiest and most cosmopolitan, informative
and gorgeous dictionary ever compiled. It will live for
ever. Whether Mabberley is a man or a woman, I do not
know. But if he isn’t a committee, he must have a brain
the size of Andorra. No detail is too small for him (except,
L EO M C K INSTRY
PIONEERS AT WORK
T HE I NDUSTRIAL R EVOLUTIONARIES : T HE
C REATION OF THE M ODERN WORLD
1776–1914
★ of interest in his moving steam engine and moved to Peru
By Gavin Weightman
(Atlantic Books 400pp £20)
IN MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY it has become common to
see the process of industrialisation as a vast, all-powerful
economic force, transforming the Western world with a
ruthless inevitability. In this analysis, which owes much to
Marxist determinism, the role of the individual is contin-
ually downplayed. But the historian and broadcaster
Gavin Weightman has adopted a far less sweeping and
impersonal approach to the Industrial Revolution. His
latest book is refreshingly old-fashioned, focusing on the
lives of some of the men whose work led to such dramat-
ic changes in our society. In this lively study, there is little
room for the dry academic prose that so often makes eco-
nomic histories a painful reading experience. Instead, we
have a wealth of vivid portraits of figures from the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, featuring such characters
as the pioneer of the electric telegraph Samuel Morse,
whose eagerness for publicity was matched by his gift for
engaging in feuds with rival inventors, and Hiram
Maxim, developer of the machine gun and, according to
the author, a bigamist with a penchant for young girls.
In his concentration on the personal, Weightman not
only looks at the renowned names of the Industrial
Revolution (like James Watt, the cool, cautious Scot
who helped to make steam power a practical reality) but
also rescues some of the now-forgotten heroes of the
past. One of the most striking of this neglected group is
Joseph Perkins, an American born in Massachusetts in
1766 whom Weightman describes as ‘surely the most
brilliantly creative inventor of his generation’. Among
Perkins’s many designs were a machine for automatically
cutting and heading nails, a device for stamping patterns
on metal, a system for engraving banknotes, and a steam
cannon. Having crossed the Atlantic after the end of the
Napoleonic Wars, this mechanical genius set up business
47
curiously, the interesting origin of larix, the larch tree). It is
an unparalleled achievement of learning – and humour.
Under the entry for Ficus is this: ‘… epiphytes & stranglers
(with coalescing roots, some “individuals” comprising
more than one genome!)’. Is that not the most refined
exclamation mark ever? Can there be more than one hun-
dred and fifty people in the entire world who get the joke?
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
in England, where he built the printing presses that
turned out the world’s first postage stamps.
Another pioneer too often ignored was the Cornish
engineer Richard Trevithick, who exploited develop-
ments in steam technology to build one of the first loco-
motives at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Described by Weightman as ‘a giant of a man with
immense energy’, Trevithick was disillusioned by the lack
to try to make his fortune in silver mining, leaving his
wife behind in Cornwall. This enterprise, for which he
had a number of Cornish pumping engines and boilers
transported across the Atlantic, turned out to be a failure.
In a subsequent series of adventures, he fought with
Simón Bolívar’s army, did some pearl fishing, and was
almost killed by an alligator in Colombia, before he
returned to his family in 1827 after an absence of three
years. At home he continued to develop the steam engine
and lose money until his death in 1833.
Trevithick’s was typical of the buccaneering, indepen-
dent spir it shared by many of the Industr ial
Revolutionaries. What is particularly remarkable is how
few of them had much formal education. For instance,
Thomas Alva Edison, who rightly has a prominent place
in the book, was from a poor family, had to leave school
at twelve, and was hopeless at mathematics. Similarly,
George Stephenson, the founding father of the railways,
was largely self-taught. Indeed, it was the inventors’
willingness to challenge conventional wisdom which
often inspired the originality of their ideas.
In contrast to the orthodox Marxist emphasis on eco-
nomic inevitability, Weightman also shows that some
technical breakthroughs were the results of chance. So the
pneumatic rubber tyre owed its inspiration to a child’s toy.
The young son of John Boyd Dunlop, a Scotsman who
had a large veterinary practice in Ulster, loved to race his
tricycle against other boys in a public park in Belfast, but
complained to his father that the rough surface of the
ground slowed him down. So, in 1888, Dunlop decided
to attach to the wheels a set of crude tyres made of rub-
ber and linen cloth, blown up with a football pump. The
primitive inflatable tyres were such an instant success that
Dunlop had them fitted to ordinary bicycles and soon his
invention had transformed road transport, though Dunlop
himself made little money from it.
Weightman is excellent at demolishing some of the myths
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 GENERAL
of the Industrial Revolution. I was intrigued to read, for
example, that the first public lighting system using electric
bulbs was installed not by Edison in the USA, as is often
claimed, but in the more prosaic setting of Godalming in
Surrey, using bulbs invented by Joseph Swan, a chemist from
Northumberland. The book abounds in telling details. It
was also interesting to learn that parts of the boots used by
British soldiers during the Peninsular War were actually
made of clay to give them a more solid appearance, but they
turned to liquid mud during the rainy campaigns.
For all its depth, there are some odd omissions. I was sur-
prised that there was almost nothing about the discovery of
manned flight, certainly the most far-reaching of all inven-
tions in the Edwardian age. Nor is there much about radio,
the subject of one of Weightman’s previous books. And at
M ICHAEL C OREN
THE BIG SMOKE
C HURCHILL’ S C IGAR
★ and certainly exploited to show the difference between free
By Stephen McGinty
(Macmillan 213pp £12.99)
AS FREUD THE fraud famously said, a cigar is sometimes
just a cigar. He was right. And a thin monograph about
Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke
is sometimes, well, just a thin monograph about
Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke.
The problem is that there just isn’t enough to say
about the great man’s Cuban habit. Mind you, the
author certainly tries. The most tenuous connections are
explored, from the chronological chain of ownership of
the various shops where Winston bought his cigars to
the bureaucratic correspondence concerning wartime
cigar gifts and whether they were politically acceptable
or even physically dangerous.
These attempts during the war years to protect the
Prime Minister from poisoning make up the most enjoy-
able part of the book – a delightful
combination of the comical and the
grotesque, as quintessentially British
security agents argue whether they
should simply dump all of the cigar
gifts or have them tested for toxins.
They invariably decided on the latter,
but scientists in laboratories could
only learn so much and it was left to
loyal guards to smoke a random
selection from each box. What’s the
worst job you’ve ever had?
It’s disarming to remember how
many people were willing to risk their Customer service
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
times I felt that the author could have provided more direct
quotations from contemporary diaries or records to
illuminate his characters and give more variety to the text.
The book inspires a feeling of nostalgia for the industrial
culture that Britain has lost in recent decades. Again and
again, Weightman stresses that our nation was at the fore-
front of the revolution, almost a century ahead of France in
terms of technological development. The Great Exhibition
of 1851 was a symbol of that enormous self-confidence,
when British engineering dominated the world. Yet today,
unlike almost every other major developed economy, we
have hardly any home-grown manufacturing capacity left.
The 1851 Exhibition displayed our industrial greatness,
the 2000 Millennium Dome our national hollowness.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37
life for someone they genuinely saw as the leader of the
free world. And Stephen McGinty makes this point partic-
ularly well. Churchill was the magician of hope, his cigar
the wand. So he waved it around for effect, chewing on it
and sometimes not even smoking the thing at all. It was a
limb of defiance, used to make points in Cabinet meetings
democracy and non-smoking, non-drinking Hitlerism.
The book is also rather good on Churchill followers
who went to bizarre lengths to collect even the butts of
his cigars. Not as dumb an idea as it seemed, with even
the most flimsy memorabilia selling for vast amounts of
money. The author also celebrates the sheer magnitude
of his subject, the lust for life and all of its grand possi-
bilities. The cigar was part of that cacophony of relish.
Big, bombastic, smelly, and damn the consequences.
McGinty is delightful in his conclusion, where he
tours Chartwell and describes the myriad cigars and
cigar boxes that are on display. The house, he explains, is
now a National Trust building and thus aggressively
smoke-free. The author retreats to the garden. ‘After the
third attempt the match flared,’ he writes, ‘my cigar
caught and smoke once more began to perfume the air.’
Try as it does, however, the book still gives us little that
is not found in the admittedly enormous biographical
work that already exists, and
Churchill’s Cigar never manages to
escape the feeling that it is just anoth-
er chronicle, this time with an
emphasis on nicotine. Seldom more
than a pleasing distraction and some-
times straining to justify its theme, it
is far more likely to satisfy the cigar
monomaniac than the Churchill
enthusiast. To borrow and twist old
Freud again, sometimes a nice idea
ought to remain just a nice idea.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR
Bookshop on page 37
48
 FICTION
S AM L EITH
THE ANGRY BRIGADE
M Y R EVOLUTIONS
★ Chris’s induction into revo-
By Hari Kunzru
(Hamish Hamilton 288pp £16.99)
THE DEDICATION TO Hari Kunzru’s third novel is cryp-
tic. It says: ‘To all at 34.’ Is Kunzru (who I guess is that
age or thereabouts) offering fraternal solidarity to his
contemporaries? Is he alluding to a smart bar with a
numerical name? To the inhabitants of a shared house in
which he once lived? Or, perhaps, to the code number
for a cell of revolutionary terrorists? My Revolutions is
just the sort of book to make you wonder.
Michael Frame, whom we meet as preparations are
underway for his 50th birthday party, is living a life of
bourgeois ease. His partner Miranda is a successful
entrepreneur with a range of hippyish Body Shop-type
potions called, with horrible plausibility, ‘Bountessence’.
He marinates in candid affection for his grown-up step-
daughter. Everything in the garden seems to be rosy;
except that Mike Frame is an assumed identity, and he is
– with no explanation to his unsuspecting partner and
stepdaughter – about to go on the run.
In the 1970s, Chris Carver was a member of a radical
group (modelled, as an afterword suggests, on the Angry
Brigade) that went beyond bedsit theorising into terror-
ism. Chris, living out his middle age as Michael Frame,
thought he had escaped his past. But then, while holi-
daying in a little village in the Languedoc, he catches
sight of Anna Addison, his sometime lover and comrade
in the struggle – a woman he believed had been killed in
1975. Meanwhile, another friend from the old days
turns up as if at random, wanting to talk.
The structure of the novel effectively embeds past in
present, Chris in Mike. As the story’s present tense fol-
lows Mike in flight – orbiting the Paris périphérique in
a hire car; heading back to the Languedoc – his mind
flashes back by turns to the 1970s, and to the more
recent encounters with his past that have precipitated
disappearance. This triple thread of narrative lines, each
seeming to move towards some sort of revelation or cri-
sis, gives Kunzru’s novel the torque of a good thriller.
My Revolutions is also, pleasingly, funny. Kunzru is
interested in the darker absurdities of Chris/Mike’s revo-
lutionary transformation of identity – in the ways it tri-
angulates with the disciplines of the junkie and of the
Buddhist monk (both are also features of his past). But
he isn’t so high-minded as to deny himself the fun of
vamping about in period colour – afghan coats; men in
frocks; speed ‘n’ acid; horrible furnishings in orange,
49
brown and purple; hippies and
happenings, and so forth. He
has a lovely ear, above all, for
the earnest absurdities of 1970s
post-Marxist and trad-Marxist
theoretical bullshit.
lutionary nihilism begins in a
strong comic set piece: a
rooftop talking-shop in which
a collection of self-righteous
and increasingly stoned Kunzru: light of touch
strangers compete to be more
right-on than the previous speaker. What’s clever is the
way Kunzru charts Chris’s move both socially and
rhetorically into much, much deeper waters.
The book isn’t without faults. If Kunzru has a weak-
ness, it is occasional heavy-handedness, particularly in
the contemptuous sending-up of Mike and Miranda’s
dinner-party world of ‘cheek-kissing and coat-finding
and insincere expressions of concern about driving over
the limit’. Likewise, a late-1960s liberal home with ‘a jar
of spaghetti on the counter and poster of a Picasso dove
pinned above the hob’, a mental hospital smelling of
‘urine and boiled cabbage’, a prison smelling of, again,
‘boiled cabbage’, are more received than properly imag-
ined. And at times dialogue clunks:
Everyone in the cell was listening to me now. I felt I
had the upper hand. ‘No one else is going to do it, if
we don’t. No one else is going to build the revolu-
tion. I think we owe it to the future.’
‘But what kind of future will it be?’ he asked, lean-
ing across again and gripping my arm. ‘What exactly?
That’s the question.’
But My Revolutions picks up pace exceptionally well, and
there are passages of bravura writing – not least the most
evocative and exact description of an acid trip I have
ever read. The way unacknowledged sexual competi-
tion, the thrill of transgression, and the very adolescent
desire to find a theory for everything sends its characters
out of their depth is thoroughly understood, and care-
fully described. And in Anna Addison – Chris’s nutty,
sexy, ruthless Rosa Luxemburg – Kunzru creates a
memorable and persuasive fanatic.
Most importantly, Kunzru is light of touch where
heavy-handedness would be fatal not just to the odd
paragraph, but to the whole project. This is, joy to
report, a novel about terrorism that doesn’t insist on, or
even suggest, its relevance to the events of today. In fact,
reading about murderous Maoist wackoes in loon pants
is, if anything, a delightful holiday from the fear of being
set on fire by Scottish junior doctors.
So, to all at 34, whoever or whenever you are: thank
you.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 37
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
GO WEST
AWAY
★ to Seattle by railroad, and then to
By Amy Bloom
(Granta Books 224pp £10.99)
AMY BLOOM’S SECOND novel begins with promising
brilliance. Around 150 young women are queuing out-
side the Goldfadn Theatre in New York in 1924, hoping
for jobs sewing costumes. The party atmosphere of this
‘all-girl Ellis Island’ reminds Lillian Leyb, who arrived in
America thirty-five days ago, of market day in Turov, the
nearest town to her village in Russia. She thrusts her
way to the front to speak to the theatre’s owner, Reuben
Burstein, and his matinee idol son, Meyer, in Yiddish;
her rivals are scornful (it’s ‘as if she just hoisted her skirt
to the waist … that vulgar, that embarrassing, that effec-
tive’), but her potential employers are impressed (‘Bold is
good,’ says Reuben).
She smiles at them and their scowling assistant, Miss
Morris:
Lillian has endured the murder of her family, the loss of
her daughter, Sophie, an ocean crossing like a death
march, intimate life with strangers in her cousin
Frieda’s two rooms, smelling of men and urine and
fried food and uncertainty and need. Just so, she
thinks, and smiles at the new king and queen and
prince of her life, as if she has now risen from a soft,
high feather bed to enjoy an especially pretty morning.
This bravura conclusion to the opening set piece is
Bloom’s own equivalent of her heroine’s outrageous
gambit, subtler and more graceful but possessing a simi-
lar chutzpah. She smiles at the reader, just as Lillian
smiles at the Bursteins. I could have begun with a grim
chapter telling the Russian back story, runs the subtext,
but instead I’ve condensed it into a single lovely sen-
tence. And aren’t you happy I did?
More about the dreadful events that caused Lillian to
flee is gradually revealed piecemeal as she gets the job
and starts dating Meyer, who sets her up in a love nest.
His sexual needs, though, are unconventional, and she
becomes his father’s mistress too. Thus far a scarily self-
ish figure prepared to do whatever’s required in order to
survive, Lillian is transformed when a new arrival from
Turov reports that her daughter – who she thought had
drowned after escaping when the rest of her family were
killed – is still alive. Desperate to be reunited with
Sophie, she destroys her arrangement with the Bursteins
by asking for money to return to Russia.
So begins an odyssey in which her ultimate goal is to
continue her westward passage all the way around the
50
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
world: crossing the USA to the
West Coast, heading north to
Alaska, sailing to Russia via the
Bering Strait, then crossing it too
(Turov, aka Turaw, is in the south
of present-day Belarus). She gets
northern Alaska by sea and mule
train. But along the way she’s
required again to provide sexual Bloom: bravura
favours, is beaten up and left for
dead, gets involved in killing the pimp of a hooker who
rescues her, and does time in a women’s prison.
Picaresque novels are notoriously prone to lose energy
once they pass the halfway point, and Away is no excep-
tion: although many later episodes are strong, nothing
that follows equals the early chapters in New York. The
ending is affecting and accomplished, however, and the
falling-off is by no means as marked as in Defoe’s Moll
Flanders (which it frequently recalls).
Lillian never ceases to be a beguilingly contradictory
figure: flexible and protean yet as fixed of purpose as a
migrating bird; mythical (with typical deftness, Bloom
implies a parallel with Ceres descending into the under-
world in search of her daughter Proserpina) yet as messily
real as the grubby, stinking, cacophonous country she
travels through.
And while the narrative momentum is reduced in
the novel’s later chapters, they importantly fill out its
depiction of her adopted country, which eventually
encompasses transport, prisons, the police, prostitution,
communications, fashion, entertainment, several ethnic
groups and a plurality of landscapes and cityscapes.
Although Away is set in the Jazz Age, such clichés as
speakeasies, Broadway showgirls or indeed jazz are com-
pletely absent. Instead it delineates 1920s America’s
underbelly, as Dreiser and others did at the time – but
from a woman’s perspective, and with no restrictions on
sex scenes and a stylistic verve that is in sharp contrast to
the plodding prose of Dreiserian naturalism.
Bloom can be seen, alongside Michael Chabon,
Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart, as evincing a
resurgent willingness among Jewish-American writers to
put Jewish themes at the centre of their novels: an atti-
tude which sets them apart both from the late-period
output (with obvious exceptions) of Bellow and Roth,
and the fiction of an intervening generation also intent
on universality. Like Safran Foer and Shteyngart, she is
drawn to exploring American Jews’ roots in Russia and
Eastern Europe, but she differs from them in what she
takes from the old maestros.
All three male novelists follow Bellow and Roth in
making one man’s extraordinary voice what you remem-
ber most about their novels – Chabon’s The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union, Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated,
 FICTION
Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. In Away, you remember an
extraordinary woman and her successes and mishaps: it
reproduces the picaresque for m of Bellow’s The
Adventures of Augie March but not its monological moxie,
J OHN D E FALBE
HARSH TERRAIN
T HE K INGDOM OF A SHES
★ who they are? Does anybody care? It is presumed that
By Robert Edric
(Doubleday 400pp £16.99)
ROBERT EDRIC IS one of our most prolific contempo-
rary novelists. Besides his recent trilogy of crime novels
set in Hull, this is his fourteenth novel; the last two have
been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work is
serious but highly readable. Moral confusions animate it,
often in the context of a collapsed society or one on the
brink of collapse. His historical backgrounds range
widely: the Arctic of the 1845 Franklin Expedition
(Broken Lands, 1992); Conrad’s Congo (The Book of the
Heathen, 2000); Tasmania in 1864 (Elysium, 1995); the
First World War (In Desolate Heaven, 1997). They are
vividly portrayed, with a lightness of touch that makes
one hesitate to call them historical novels. No detail is
there just for period flavour.
The Kingdom of Ashes is a complementary work to
Peacetime (2002), which focused on the decommission-
ing of an airfield in East Anglia just after the Second
World War. Now Edric has turned his attention to a
provincial town in Germany where a British officer,
Alex Foster, is employed interrogating German prisoners
at an ‘Assessment and Evaluation’ centre. The
Nuremberg Trials are underway and everyone is aware
that this is a sideshow: much of the work may be futile
and unrecognised, crimes may go unpunished, yet it is
clear that vast and horrific crimes have been committed.
It is worth considering the entire first paragraph:
Alex Foster leaned forward and looked down at the
corpses. The slab of fractured concrete on which he
was standing rocked slightly, and the man beside him
held Alex’s arm as the ground beneath them settled.
Alex thanked the man and then turned back to the
bodies. Rods of rusted and twisted metal protruded
from the edge of the concrete; elsewhere, this rein-
forcing mesh had already been cut away and discarded.
The prose is precise and rhythmic, soberly descriptive.
Death is introduced immediately, examined with a care-
ful, appraising eye, but from a position that is ‘fractured’
and ‘rocky’. Technical details are noted, for life and
death in Edric’s worlds are often subjects for technicians.
Preconceptions will not be ‘reinforced’ but forced apart
51
and gives it a female twist. Asking to be measured against
such a masterpiece involves Lillian-like audacity, but Amy
Bloom’s splendid novel can stand the comparison.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 37
by extreme circumstances; ‘mesh’ will be discarded;
people and their values will be exposed as little more
than ‘rods of rusted and twisting metal’.
It emerges very soon that near the civilian bodies
uncovered in the cellar is another group, evidently pris-
oners from a concentration camp. Does anybody know
the locals know, but it isn’t in their interests to go into
the matter – the venal new Mayor is much more interest-
ed in constructing a War Memorial and moving on. Nor
does Colonel Dyer, the senior British officer, want to be
distracted with inconvenient bygones: he likes to feel his
own power, and requires his underlings to restrict them-
selves to their explicit instructions. Among these are
interviews that Alex is obliged to conduct with two pris-
oners on behalf of the Americans. One of them may
have been involved in a confused massacre of prisoners
but it is impossible to establish independently whether he
was there. But the Americans want scalps – and does it
really matter if he was definitely there or not, because it’s
certain that if he had been there then he would have
been involved? The other, despite his crimes, is useful to
them in an exchange with the Russians for a scientist.
Woven into this story is a local one. Alex starts up a
relationship with Eva, one of the translators at the
Institute. Nina, a friend of hers, has a half-starved
teenage sister who is heavily pregnant by a passing
American soldier. Alex’s colleague Doctor Whittaker
goes to visit her in a ramshackle camp and wishes to
transfer her to the town hospital. But he doesn’t have
the authority to do this, and the German authorities
don’t want anything to do with her because she repre-
sents aspects of their recent history that they would
rather ignore. It becomes increasingly unclear whether
Whittaker’s laudable behaviour actually helps her, or
anyone else, in the long run. Indeed by getting drugs
from Jesus Hernandez, the American officer’s driver
who operates a thriving black market, he buys into just
the corruption he detests. The only character who
might be called pure is Eva’s deluded younger brother
Kurt, a relic of the Hitler Youth who understandably
and bitterly resents the high-handed actions of the
British and American authorities concerning the huts
where he lives in the woods with his friends.
Edric handles the many characters and threads of this
complex novel with skill. It is remarkable that anyone
should attempt to write so many novels with such varied
settings, but that he should manage to do so with such
consistent brilliance is astounding.
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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 FICTION
F RANCIS K ING
IN TASMANIA
S ECRETS OF THE S EA
★ relationship is jeopardised by their inability to have
By Nicholas Shakespeare
(Harvill Secker 402pp £12.99)
AFTER HE HAD written an acclaimed biography of his
friend Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare took him-
self off to Tasmania in an effort, he declared, to escape
from the gravitational pull of a subject that had for a
time totally dominated his life. But the effort was only
in part successful. Chatwin’s best book was his first, In
Patagonia. The title Shakespeare chose for the book he
wrote during this period, In Tasmania, clearly referred
back to that work, and Shakespeare’s book is also a fas-
cinating mixture of history, travelogue, autobiography
and, one strongly suspects, fiction. Now he has pro-
duced a novel that has the same setting, and might have
been given the same subtitle, as the earlier book:
‘Adventures at the End of the World’.
Constantly buffeted by these adventures, as the former
penal colony is constantly buffeted by storms and high
winds, the two central characters have suffered childhood
bereavements so traumatic that their eventual marriage
and attempts to be happy together in a farm on the edge
of a ‘one-horse town where even the horse is on its last
legs’ all too often seem to be doomed.
When Alex was seven, his immigrant English parents,
two ineffectual misfits in the country of their adoption,
were killed by a log truck that barrelled into their car on
a country road. The orphaned Alex is despatched to
school in England, and then, having reached adulthood
and decided to be a teacher, he returns to Tasmania –
temporarily as he mistakenly thinks – to deal with an
inheritance that now consists of a dilapidated farmhouse
and land shamefully neglected for years by the agent
paid to look after it. As Shakespeare corrosively depicts
them, the people of his small town on the edge of
nowhere long to escape from a place that is at once a
scenic paradise and a social hell; but at the same time
their attitude to any would-be settler – English,
Japanese, or even mainland Australian – ranges from
courteously chilly to derisively hostile.
Merridy, when she first meets Alex, is a sexually and
intellectually restless young woman, tied to a father
reduced to a wheelchair-bound existence by a high-
voltage shock received while at work and to a domi-
neering mother whose twin addictions are religion and
the bottle. When she was a child, her adored younger
brother suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace other
than a single discarded shoe. Murdered, kidnapped, lost
52
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
while explor ing the dense and often dangerous
Tasmanian countryside? She is obsessed with a mystery
to which there is no answer until the last pages.
After the couple have settled down together, it is clear
that Merridy is incapable of feeling for Alex the all-
consuming love that he feels for her. In addition, their
children. (If this otherwise absorbing novel has a fault, it
is in the way the couple’s attempts to overcome this
problem become increasingly wearisome in an accumu-
lation of trivial detail about IVF and the other desperate
expedients to which they resort.) Having at last given up
any hope of parenthood, Alex works harder than ever to
make a success of his farm, while Merridy embarks on
an oyster business. Shakespeare deals with both these
activities so knowledgeably that it is clear that he must
have spent a lot of time on research.
Drama verging on melodrama is provided by a teenage
delinquent, suspected of murder, whom the couple
heroically rescue from a ship wrecked in a storm off the
coast near the farm and then in effect adopt. Kish, by
turns sulky, threatening and demanding, all but destroys
an already fragile marriage.
One of Shakespeare’s acknowledgements is to a friend
who ‘guided’ him to the works of Patrick White.
Throughout one is aware of White’s towering shade at
Shakespeare’s side. Reminiscent of White’s is a style
staccato in its short paragraphs and sentences and idio-
syncratic in a syntax that often makes one wonder
whether words may not have been swallowed by the
author’s computer. ‘“You’ve chosen the hottest day of
the year”, pouring out five plastic cups’ is one typical
whole sentence. As with White, there are also a lot of
bizarre images like ‘his moustache so close to his
mouth, like a mutton-bird flying over water’, and some
hectic overwriting, chiefly about sex or the sea.
For all its occasional oddities and intermittent slacken-
ing of tension, this is a remarkable novel. It is brilliantly
successful in portraying the forlorn, claustrophobic, gos-
sipy, defiant little society in which it is set, most
piquantly when it quotes items from the Newsletter
compiled by the owner of the town’s only department
store. The first of these wryly sets the tone: ‘At the next
meeting of the Wellington Point reading group, Mavis
Pidd will speak about her recently released autobiogra-
phy A Self-published Life.’ Later, a favourite of mine runs:
‘MENOPAUSE INFORMATION SESSIONS. You are
not alone. If you are interested, please drop by and
browse.’
When I read Shakespeare’s earlier novel The Dancer
Upstairs (later made into a mediocre film, in which John
Malkovich gave a surprisingly inert performance), I
realised how fine a novelist he was. This latest work
shows him to be one of our dozen or so best.
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 FICTION
F RANCES W ILSON
A BUMPY NIGHT
T HE B IRTHDAY PARTY
★ and leaving behind him the flotsam and jetsam of chaos.
By Panos Karnezis
(Jonathan Cape 264pp £12.99)
MARCO TIMOLEON, AS he is called in full throughout the
novel, is The Richest Man in the World, and it is the
occasion of his daughter Sofia’s twenty-fifth birthday. To
celebrate, he organises a party on his private island and
secretly includes amongst the invitees a doctor, a nurse
and an anaesthetist, whom he has asked to perform an
abortion in one of the guest bedrooms. Sofia, Marco
Timoleon has discovered through his private investigator,
is pregnant and while she is delighted by the news, he
does not approve of the father-to-be. The tycoon, who
does not have long to live, wants to ensure that his empire
will be inherited by the heir of his choice. Also at the
party is Ian Forster, Marco Timoleon’s official biographer,
who happens to be Sofia’s lover. It is at this point that The
Birthday Party begins; to quote Bette Davis from All About
Eve, ‘fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’
Not even after take-off can our seatbelts be loosened,
despite the fact that the party does not get going until
the end of the book. We are indeed heading into a
bumpy night, but there are enough twists and turns
along the way to make us wonder how and if we will
ever get there. As we wait for the guests to arrive, Panos
Karnezis, who is a wonderfully gifted story-teller, steers
us back through the tycoon’s strange and lonely child-
hood in Izmir, Asia Minor, where his father disappeared
when he was a boy; taking us then to Buenos Aires,
where he reinvented himself as rich and impervious to
pain, to New York, where his success as a dodgy busi-
nessman began, through his two unsuccessful marriages,
the mysterious death of his first wife, the accident which
killed their son, and finally describing the growth of his
international fame and notoriety. The story spans from
the 1920s to 1975, and Kar nezis unfolds Marco
Timoleon’s life in seductive detail, tripping up only
once, but badly, when he describes Colonel Stanley
Nicholls, the man who saved Timoleon from starvation
in Buenos Aires, as ‘a compassionate Quaker who had
spent several years in the Middle East as a young army
officer’. Committed pacifists, no Quaker has ever joined
the army; it is as if Karnezis had described a Rabbi
working in a pork processing unit.
Any resemblance between Marco Timoleon and
Aristotle Onassis is surely deliberate: both are shipping
magnates of Mediterranean origin who marry a jet-
setting American princess; both have unhappy daughters
53
who battle endlessly against fat, addiction and depres-
sion. Both inhabit the homeless half-world of the mega-
rich, and sack and promote their friends and family as
though they were employees. A monarch without a
throne, Marco Timoleon rules the seas over which he
wanders like the ancient mariner, burdened by the past
In Marco Timoleon, Kanezis has created an entirely
believable character which is why the improbable plot
works so well; this, one feels, must be what it is like to
have all the money in the world and no sense of who you
are. The story of how Marco Timoleon became a monster
is complicated by the ubiquitous Ian Forster, who will do
anything to uncover the true nature of his biographical
subject and whose presence adds both veracity (we begin
to suspect Forster is the book’s narrator) and menace to
the plot. The complex relation between biographer and
biographee recalls the one brilliantly described in The
Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, also out this summer and
equally gripping in its exploration of biographical morality.
The birthday party itself, by the time we return there
in the final pages, is a cocktail of Pinter’s play of the
same name, the party thrown by Mrs Dalloway and one
of those surreal affairs laid on by Jay Gatsby to which he
doesn’t bother turning up. To say what happens will
ruin the night; just make sure you refasten the seatbelt.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37
The Yale Drama Series 2008 Competition
Yale University Press and Yale Repertory Theatre are seeking submissions
for a major new playwriting competition, the Yale Drama Series.
The winner of this annual competition will be awarded the
David C. Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of his/her manuscript by
Yale University Press, and a staged reading at Yale Rep. The winning play
will be selected by series judge Edward Albee.
Submissions for the 2008 competition must be postmarked no earlier
than July 15, 2007, and no later than August 15, 2007. There is no
application form. Please note that the rules governing this year’s
competition have changed from those governing last year’s competition.
• Playwrights must be citizens of the United States, Canada,
the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.
• Submissions must be original, unpublished, full-length plays
written in English—translations, musicals and children’s plays are
not accepted. The Yale Drama Series is intended to support
emerging playwrights. Playwrights may win the competition only once.
• Plays that have had professional productions are not eligible.
• Playwrights may submit only one manuscript per year.
Send your manuscript to: Yale Drama Series, P.O. Box 209040,
New Haven, CT 06520-9040, U.S.A.
Include a cheque for $25.00, made out to Yale University Press.
Do not send cash.
For complete rules governing the competition consult:
www.yalebooks.com/drama
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 FICTION
C HRISTOPHER H ART
BENEATH THE SURFACE
T HE D IG
★ very English meditation on time, mortality and love.
By John Preston
(Viking 230pp £16.99)
JOHN PRESTON’S GREAT idea has been to tell the story
of one of the most dramatic discoveries in British
archaeology – that of the Sutton Hoo burial ship and
associated treasures in Suffolk, on the eve of the Second
World War – and yet tell it as a quiet, contained and
dryly funny chamber piece, with a small cast of eccen-
tric and appealing characters. There’s Edith Pretty, the
landowner of the site, whose desperate visits to a medi-
um in London to contact her dead husband neatly echo
the whole business of archaeology, as well perhaps as the
belief systems of the pagan-Christian Angles buried
beneath the sandy Suffolk soil. There’s Peggy Piggott –
in reality she was John Preston’s aunt – whose marriage,
and growing realisation of its barrenness, is beautifully
drawn. And there’s the chief digger himself, Basil
Brown, who rarely changes his clothes and smells like a
silage heap on fire, or something like it.
It’s a charmingly modest and limpid novel, its style and
54
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
technique the very opposite of flashy and overbearing:
perfectly suited to a more self-effacing age, when parents
really did admonish their children: ‘Don’t draw attention
to yourself ’, rather than take pride in them appearing on
Big Brother and fornicating with strangers on camera. The
characters are entirely believable, and the whole thing a
Preston is also good on the way in which archaeology
straddles both art and science. It’s partly about accurate
measurements and painstaking digs with tiny little trowels,
or even, as Basil Brown demonstrates at one point, a pas-
try brush. But it is also an art, an act of imagination and
empathy, re-member ing dismembered forebears.
Reminders of human mortality stalk every minute in the
muddy archaeologist’s trench. Towards the end, Robert
Pretty, Edith’s son, examines a body found in the earth –
except that it isn’t a body, it is simply the outline of a
body. There is really nothing there. ‘Nothing except a
thin crust of sand. Inside the crust, there was no sign of a
skeleton; there was just more sand.’ Yet he finds this
strange, fragile fossil a kind of consolation, for all that.
This long-buried imprint of one long dead is still a little
way of cheating death, for a while.
Preston’s evocations of the Suffolk landscape are precise
and unobtrusive, suited to that county of slow streams and
meadows and big skies. At least there were plenty of
meadows back in 1939. He uses the word ‘prairie’ at one
point, which sounds slightly anachronistic, though is, alas,
all too accurate now. Many of the descriptions are lovely,
of a ‘landscape … drained of colour’‚ a waterland, ‘hard
and shiny’‚ and ‘between the rows of barley and rye, the
soil was the colour of canvas’. There are more mysterious
and ancient aspects to this landscape. The area around
Sutton Hoo has always been known as Little Egypt. ‘No
doubt on account of the mounds’‚ explains Edith. ‘People
claim to have seen mysterious figures dancing in the
moonlight. Even a white horse.’ But as you would expect
from such a writer, the magic and faery are not overdone.
You’re in safe hands here.
I did wonder whether silage was really much in evi-
dence back in those days. A quick consultation of Mary
Kay Siefers’s authoritative study of the subject, A Brief
History of Silage, put me right. (No, I’m not making it
up.) I’m still brooding about whether you can have pur-
ple sprouting broccoli at the same time of year as
mature cow parsley. But this is a rather footling little
botanical-leguminous pedantry, especially when set
beside such memorable descriptions as an unearthed
‘cluster of rabbit skeletons, with the bones all entwined
together like a giant bird’s nest’. Edith Pretty observes at
one point, ‘As in life, it was the ones who were keenest
to make themselves heard who invariably had the least
to say.’ And vice versa – as this understated, pensive,
humorous little novel so deftly demonstrates.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 FICTION

M ATT T HORNE is in Shteynfarb’s creative writing class but has misunder-

stood the old cliché ‘show, don’t tell’, believing that it
SNACK DADDY means ‘instead of expositing about something, you just
gotta come out and say it’, which seems like Shteyngart’s
ironic comment on his own narrative technique, as the
A BSURDISTAN novel is driven mainly by his narrator’s humorous
★ diatribes, lurching between static meditations and
By Gary Shteyngart sections where he is buffeted into action by a succession
(Granta Books 333pp £10.99) of conmen.
Stuck in Russia after returning in 1999, Vainburg
L ENINGRAD - BORN G ARY S HTEYNGART came to spends the early part of the novel on his daybed, despair-
America aged seven and now lives in New York. The ing about when he will be allowed to return to New
cultural differences between Russia and America are the York. But as much as Shteyngart seems to want to write
main source of humour in Absurdistan, Shteyngart’s sec- a ‘twenty-first-century Oblomov’ (he mentions this book
ond novel. For Misha Vainburg, New York represents all so often it’s as if it’s a deliberate prompt to prospective
that is great in the world, a heaven to which he cannot critics), he’s too antic a writer to truly capture the wi-fi
retur n because his gangster father has killed an induced ennui of the current age. It may also be that he
Oklahoma businessman named Roger Daltrey (no rela- fears this ter r itory has already been exhaustively
tion to the frontman of The Who, although the name is explored by other young American authors, such as J
used as a source of humour). Robert Lennon, who got five hundred pages out of an
Misha Vainburg is a fat man nicknamed ‘Snack onanistic postman in his novel Mailman. Vainburg has
Daddy’. His penis has become a mutilated mess after his the capacity to idle away hours in front of the computer
father arranged for him to be circumcised at eighteen exciting himself with images of sexual depravity, but to
upon first arriving in America to study at ‘Accidental keep the comedy going Shteyngart has him jump up
College, USA’. He considers himself a typical protago- and head off to ‘Absurdistan’, a fictional former Soviet
nist of Russian literature, suggesting that although the republic, in search of a Belgian passport. Caught in the
reader might think he’s most like Oblomov, the epony- middle of a civil war between the ‘Sevo’ and ‘Svani’, he
mous hero of Goncharov’s great novel and a noble man seeks to escape the conflict by becoming the Sevo
incapable of making a decision (or getting out of bed), Minister of Multicultural Affairs, a position that enables
he believes he’s more like Prince Myshkin, the kind, him to indulge his love of rap music.
humble protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Although this is an excellent novel, spending over three
Lest the reader believe that the rebarbative Vainburg is hundred pages in the company of Snack Daddy becomes
Shteyngart’s alter ego, he introduces another figure with rather exhausting. Shteyngart seems to have set himself
a similar background into the early part of the novel. an impossible challenge, and as his metafictional alter ego
Professor Jerry Shteynfarb is an Americanised Russian outwits his protagonist (and steals and impregnates his
émigré who, like Shteyngart, came to America aged girlfriend) his rich loser begins to seem so much an
seven. Shteynfarb has used his unpleasant sap that it’s hard not to
‘dubious Russian credentials’ to “This is a book to
sympathise with the characters
r ise through the ranks of the who line up to insult him. It seems
animate both our
Accidental College creative writ- a deliberate part of the novel’s con-
ing department while sleeping reading and our struction that Snack Daddy’s jokes
with half the campus, before pro- theater-going.” become progressively less funny as
ducing a novel whose title, ‘The the book continues and the reader
Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job’, Kenneth Gross, discovers that in spite of all his
sounds suspiciously similar to author of Shylock delusions, he’s a fat, tedious fool;
Shteyngart’s first book (The Is Shakespeare but this makes the final third
Russian Debutante’s Handbook). hard to read. Nevertheless, Gary
Although this sort of metafictional Shteyngart’s position as one of the
humour is wearyingly familiar and Granta Best of Young American
its inclusion reveals a weakness of Novelists seems well deserved, and
the novel (Shteyngart’s inability to This Wide and Universal Theater Absurdistan is undoubtedly one of
Shakespeare in Perfor mance, Then and Now
resist an obvious joke), for the David Bevington
this year’s most interesting
most part Shteyngart’s humour is American novels.
of a much higher standard. The University of Chicago Press 256 pp. £15.00 To order this book at £8.79, see LR
ISBN: 978-0-226-04478-1
Vainburg’s girlfriend, Rouenna, Bookshop on page 37

55
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 FICTION
L INDY B URLEIGH
BIRTH OF A TERRORIST
T HE S IRENS OF B AGHDAD
★ are apparently justification for suicide bombers, who are
By Yasmina Khadra
(William Heinemann 307pp £12.99)
The Sirens of Baghdad is a novel about a suicide bomber
in Iraq and promises an insider’s view. Mohammed
Moulessehoul, who writes under his wife’s name of
Yasmina Khadra, seems ideally placed to imaginatively
inhabit and demystify the terrorist mind. He is a former
Algerian army officer and the author of two previous
novels exploring Middle Eastern terrorism. This novel
completes the trilogy, but readers expecting penetrating
insights into the Jihadi mindset will be disappointed.
Like his last novel, The Attack, it’s written in lurid,
clichéd prose, and fails to illuminate the connection
between radical Islam and suicide bombers. This more
predictable narrative, however, lacks The Attack’s cumu-
lative tension and menacing, nightmarish atmosphere.
The narrator, an unnamed Bedouin Iraqi, is in Beirut,
preparing for a deadly mission on enemy territory which
will be ‘a thousand times more awesome than the attacks of
September 11’. Contemplating his own end as well as the
annihilation of the entire population of the West, he looks
back over the journey which has brought him from Kafr
Karam, a remote village in the Iraqi desert, to this juncture
in his life. He is an introverted, thoughtful student at
Baghdad University, looking forward to a none-too-rosy
future under Saddam, when the Americans invade and he
is forced to return home. His village, ‘sprawled beside the
road like roadkill’, has been overlooked for centuries, until
the war encroaches. Kafr Karam, steeped in inertia, has
nothing to offer its men, who are unemployed, purposeless
and kept by their wives and sisters. Stripped of their dignity,
they pass the time playing cards. All are agreed that while
Saddam was a monster, he was ‘our monster’. They feel
keenly the humiliation of being pushed around by crass,
loud-mouthed ‘American boys’.
The Bedouins are depicted as honest, proud people,
unfortunate casualties of progress and modernity. There
is much to be said for Kadem the lute player’s plea for the
West to understand Arab love songs and ‘hear our soul in
the voices’, but then again it’s asking a bit much for it to
‘renounce all its cutting-edge technologies’. The arro-
gance and cultural insensitivity displayed by the callow
GIs (their profanities and shouting are grossly insulting to
Arab sensibilities) results in the death of a simple, vulner-
able boy from the village and culminates in the ultimate
sacrilege when the narrator’s father is left exposed and
half-naked in front of his family during a terrifying night
56
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
raid on their home. The offence to his family’s honour is
too much to bear and he hastens to Baghdad intent on
avenging his father. He stays with his easy-going, hedo-
nistic cousin, Omar, but amid the chaos and carnage he
falls in with a group of fanatical Jihadis.
Thus a suicide bomber is born. Western abuses of Arabs
portrayed as principled but wrongheaded. Even so the
conversion of the Bedouin from ‘docile, courteous boy’ to
righteous scourge of the Western world is hard to fathom
without reference to the allure of fundamentalist Islam.
Once he’s volunteered for a suicide attack, he comes
under the tutelage of Dr Jalaal, an embittered, alcoholic
academic who turns away from the West when his genius
goes unrecognised because of racism. Contrived, lengthy
debates on the morality of suicide bombing and mass mur-
der ensue, and a writer, representing humane Islam, sagely
counsels that for ‘the sake of humanity’s future’ Arab cul-
ture must assert its moral superiority over the godless,
materialistic West by non-violent means. The many Iraqis
who don’t view the West as their enemy and who came
out to vote in their millions in the country’s first ever
democratic elections are presumably ‘Arab Uncle Toms’.
When a last-minute crisis of conscience on the part of
the Bedouin jeopardises the mission, the other members
of the cell are surprisingly tolerant of the blow to their
dastardly plot. The ending is a further illustration of
Khadra’s conviction that Arab suicide bombers at least
are honourable men and not murderous ideologues, and
the blame for terrorist violence is laid squarely and dis-
honestly at the feet of the West.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37
D AN G WYNNE J ONES
D-DAY AND DERRING-DO
C OWARD ON THE B EACH
★
By James Delingpole
(Bloomsbury 336pp £12.99)
T HE BLOOD - SPATTERED, OILY beaches of the D-Day
landings of June 1944, and the ensuing slaughter at the
Battle of Normandy, are still a bit too close for comfort.
It is therefore a brave place for James Delingpole to
begin a series of light-hearted historical romps. But he
has made a pretty decent fist of it.
Dick Coward is billed as a twentieth-century Flashman:
charismatic roister-doyster with permanent semi-erection
and a knack for getting out of the most devilish scrapes. His
memoirs, we are told, have been transcribed and edited by
his grandson from a set of old cassette tapes. This first
volume sees Coward dodging Nazi bullets and largely
 FICTION
undeserved opprobrium from his fellow commandos as they
take part in the early stages of Operation Overlord and strive
to capture the strategically useful town of Port-en-Bessin.
It starts with a faintly implausible chain of events tak-
ing Coward from a pleasant seaside hospital, where he’s
recovering from some earlier adventure in Burma, to a
spot of genteel lollygagging at his cantankerous father’s
country pile, and thence to France. There, despite his
service history and social standing, he finds himself an
ordinary soldier under the command of Sergeant Price,
formerly his trusty servant back on the estate.
Coward and Price’s aims are to stick one over on Jerry,
help bag Port-en-Bessin, and try not to get blown up.
But Coward also has a couple of private missions, much
derided by Price: to cover himself in enough glory to
outshine his ne’er-do-well brother, and to keep the flaky
officer Captain Dangerfield from winding up as dogmeat.
All the comic devices you’d expect are present and
correct – an ill-timed calvados binge with a smelly old
Frenchman, a madcap ride on a runaway horse, fellatio inter-
LETTERS
D ROPPED IN THE G UMBO
Sir,
Why decry genius? I challenge Charles Elliott to name a
more consequential book publisher of the last century than
James Laughlin, who founded New Directions in 1935 and
remained its fiercely independent owner until his death in
1997 (LR, July). The fairies must have filled his slippers
with thorns the night before he wrote his review of The
Way it Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin (‘mysterious’,
‘banal’, ‘would have done better to stay in the files’).
Laughlin was six-five, a manic depressive, a poet and
lady’s man – not a wheeler-dealer publisher and certainly
not a salesman. His first strength, which this book illustrates
brilliantly, was that he loved people. His other was his
judgement. He had only two misses: Beckett and Nabokov
(Lolita and the later novels). There is no sign that he regret-
ted pushing Nabokov and his manuscript towards Girodias.
In 1955 Lolita was a dirty book, no question about it (‘I
wrote saying: “Volya, you are so sophisticated, you may not
realise the effect this book is going to have on the college
community … Your wife will be ostracised, stones will be
thrown at your child.”’) Otherwise he took on all the great
ones when no one else would. He kept their books in
print and stuck by them through thick and thin, often the
latter. The year George Oppen won the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry the sales of his winning book were negative. A good
project would be to print an annotated edition of
Laughlin’s trade catalogues.
One reason he could afford New Directions was that
from time to time he had a hit. At one point Siddhartha
was selling a quarter of a million copies a year. The
57
rupta from a dead Nazi’s mistress, and so on. But there’s
more to the novel than that. The terror of the Normandy
landings is precisely portrayed, and at times humour plays
wingman to the carnage on the beach. Delingpole’s expe-
rience in interviewing veterans of the Second World War
has obviously influenced the narrative, and there’s a
constant play between Coward’s amusing episodes of der-
ring-do and the tragic waste of life on both sides.
Flashman was a self-confessed cad, happy to admit that
his primary career motivations were whoring, mischief-
making and personal profit, cheeking off Johnny
Foreigner for the sake of it and coming home with a
good yarn. Coward is more of a decent chap, angling to
do his duty and marry the chick, but also to pass down
to his inquisitive grandson something of the last war that
truly touched everyone. Whatever the marketing blurb,
at this early stage it seems there’s a deeper layer to
Coward than mere cheek, spunk and bluster – as further
volumes will no doubt reveal.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37
other reason was that he inherited a steel fortune. This
enables Elliott to nail him as a ‘spoiled rich kid’. I do
not think he meant it jestingly. His few favourable
remarks about the book fail to ring true.
He is also exercised by the production. However, no
one has worried about ‘gulfs of white space’ since paper
rationing ceased fifty years ago. The ‘disorienting’ type-
faces are necessary to distinguish between the different
voices. When called for, the type is large. And the thick-
coated paper stock enables the photographs to shine.
I pray daily, God give the book trade another Laughlin.
It baffles me why Elliott should talk this book down so. A
philanthropist-genius should be stuck up there on a
plinth, not dropped in the gumbo. Every reader of this
journal should buy The Way it Wasn’t for total unadulter-
ated pleasure and as a protest against ordinaryism.
James Fleming
Wick, Caithness
B LACK M ASS
Sir,
Alan Ryan, in his review of John Gray’s Black Mass:
Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (LR, July),
quotes the author as saying that ‘…Hitler was the prod-
uct of the Enlightenment’ and comments that ‘One
might think that whatever else Hitler stood for, it was
not the values of the Enlightenment’. But in his History
of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell states quite cate-
gorically that ‘…Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau’.
Can all this be true? I think we should be told.
Peter Tallon
Geneva. Switzerland
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
 FICTION
A LICE , THE HEROINE of Julie S IMON B AKER ON
Maxwell’s darkly comic debut, You
Can Live Forever (Jonathan Cape F OUR F IRST N OVELS
288pp £15.99), is a member of the
Worldwide Saints of God, a Christian sect which promises
immortality to its followers. Their leader, William P Pope,
is the author of such books as Christian Life on Other
Planets, and of a monthly bulletin, ‘The Plain Truth’,
which contains all the latest prohibitions (mostly onanism-
related). Alice’s horrid mother and dull brother are dedi-
cated ‘Worldwiders’, but her father, who married Alice’s
mother before she converted, is not. He is a cheerfully
amoral Irishman, devoted to Alice but willing to cremate
murder victims in his incinerator for the right fee.
Recently, Alice has begun questioning the truthfulness
of The Plain Truth. She is a bright Oxford student who
struggles with a religion which does its members’ think-
ing for them. However, she fears that apostasy might be
met with damnation, and so tries (without much success,
naturally) to reconcile her religion with her wider views.
This is a very promising first novel, in which Maxwell
demonstrates wit, elegance and great insight. On several
occasions she takes a familiar phrase or notion and
observes it anew, sometimes to hilarious effect. There
are some unsubtle touches – the religion is so insane that
Alice’s adherence to it seems improbable; also the lan-
guage of a character who is Spanish is of 1970s-sitcom
standard – but overall this is an excellent debut work.
Another youngster tr ies to grow up in Zoology
(HarperPress 291pp £12.99), by Ben Dolnick. Henry
Elinsky, a teenager living in a comfortable East Coast sub-
urb, drops out of college for a year and, rather than live
with his parents, moves to his brother’s New York apart-
ment, to develop his saxophone playing into a profession –
something his sax-playing father never did. Unfortunately,
things don’t work out smoothly. Henry takes a mundane
job in the children’s zoo in Central Park, and later discov-
ers that he doesn’t have the talent to make it as a musician.
His brother’s girlfriend resents his being in the apartment,
and his parents’ marriage becomes shaky. All this could be
rescued by Margaret, a girl living in the same block,
whom Henry falls for. However, Margaret has a boyfriend,
and while she encourages Henry’s affection to a point, she
never allows it to progress.
Henry’s problems may mount up, but each alone – job-
hatred, unrequited love, downsizing of dreams, dissolution
of family – is the kind of knock experienced by many peo-
ple, and Dolnick sensibly acknowledges this in the tone of
the novel. For the most part, Henry remains balanced and
good-humoured in the face of his trials, and the novel’s
tenor is conversational and wry rather than despairing. Near
the end the author briefly moves the beleaguered Henry
into slightly darker territory, but with less success. However,
while Dolnick may write deeper, more textured work in
future, this is a controlled, well-paced, enjoyable start.
58
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
Gifted (Viking 272pp £16.99),
by Nikita Lalwani, is a novel
about the awfulness of being a
child prodigy. Rumi, who was
born in Cardiff to Indian parents, was five when her talent
for mathematics was discovered. Since then Mahesh, her
father, a mathematics lecturer, has regimented her life
around study. The results are, first, that she takes A-level
maths at fourteen and enrols at Oxford the following year
and, secondly, that she is utterly depressed at having her
childhood and her natural exuberance crushed: at one
stage, while sitting a mock exam set by her father, she
walks out and dials 999 simply to hear a human voice.
What makes this novel successful is the author’s ability
to sympathise broadly. Mahesh is not a monster; he is a
solicitous father who believes that for Indian people in
1980s Britain, success comes only to those with preter-
natural talent. Unfortunately, in trying to do his best, he
alienates his daughter and creates a life far worse than the
one of mediocrity from which he tries to liberate her.
Rumi herself is superbly drawn, far more interesting than
the standard idiot savant of fiction. She is genuinely fond
of maths, but in other respects is unspectacularly childlike:
addicted to sweets, longing for friends, therefore destined
never to be fulfilled by sitting in front of a mountain of
past papers. Her gift is a curse, because it keeps her in iso-
lation but is not enough on its own to sustain her. Rumi’s
plight is touchingly drawn in this likeable novel.
Goodbye Lucille (Jonathan Cape 320pp £11.99), by
Segun Afolabi, is narrated by Vincent, a Nigerian pho-
tographer working freelance in licentious mid-1980s
Berlin. Vincent longs to be a famous photographer, but
is far too lazy to be anything other than average; he
therefore drifts from nightclub to nightclub, living a life
of empty hedonism among friends including Tunde, a
Nigerian playboy, and Clariss, a gigantic transsexual.
Home is a shoebox apartment with an empty fridge.
Early on Afolabi captures the ennui of a directionless life
very well. The sweaty clubs, throbbing to Michael Jackson
and Shalamar, are effective examples of noise without
emotion – all disco but no soul – and you can sense the
crisis bubbling under in Vincent. However, the author does
not move on from this, and the novel becomes repetitive.
There are ways in which it might have gained greater pur-
pose. Vincent has hang-ups relating to his childhood, and
his relationship with Lucille, his London-based girlfriend, is
decaying; meanwhile, a politician whom he photographs is
murdered. None of this, however, is brought in with con-
viction. Lucille remains in the background, and the lack of
chemistry between her and Vincent makes the plausibility
of their relationship questionable. At the same time the
darker aspects concerning the murder are likewise kept on
the margins of the action, so the narrative soon simply
meanders from club to club, much like Vincent himself.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37
 SILENCED VOICES
THERE IS GROWING alarm at L UCY P OPESCU
the prosecutions and violent
harassment of members of
the media in Azerbaijan. E YNULLA FATULLAYEV
According to PEN, there are
now five journalists serving
prison terms on charges of
defamation, terrorism and
‘inciting religious enmity’. Although violations of free-
dom of expression are nothing new in the South
Caucasus state, attacks and imprisonment of journalists
have risen sharply in the last year.
Even the Br itish gover nment is concer ned by
Azerbaijan’s stringent media controls and the deterio-
rating environment for independent journalists. The
Foreign and Commonwealth Office reported the mur-
der of Elmar Huseynov, a prominent journalist, who
was shot dead outside his apartment in March 2005,
observing that the Azerbaijan government declared the
killing a ‘terrorist act’ but, despite international con-
demnation, have made little progress in bringing the
perpetrators to justice. Huseynov, founder and editor
of the independent weekly news magazine Monitor,
had been under constant pressure from the authorities
for the critical nature of some of its articles, and had
experienced difficulties with printing and distribution
as well as facing several defamation lawsuits.
A more recent case of concern is that of a former col-
league of Huseynov, Eynulla Fatullayev, who in April
this year was sentenced under Article 147.2 of the
Criminal Code to two and a half years in prison on
charges of libel. The outspoken editor-in-chief of the
independent Realni Azerbaijan and Gundelik Azerbaijan
newspapers was convicted for a statement attributed to
him that was published on the website AzeriTriColor.
The Internet posting accuses the Azeri army of culpabil-
ity in the deaths of Azeri citizens during an Armenian
army siege of a city in Nagorno Karabakh in 1992.
Fatullayev says he did not post the article and maintains
that it was a set-up aimed at landing him in prison. He
has been targeted before for his writing. Fatullayev was
reportedly a close friend of Huseynov, and Realni
Azerbaijan newspaper is the successor to Monitor, which
closed after Huseynov’s death. After publishing an article
accusing the Azeri authorities of obstructing the investi-
gation into the murder of the editor, Fatullayev reported
death threats against him and his family. The Azeri
authorities refused to investigate these claims or to offer President Ilham Aliyev
protection to Fatullayev.
On 20 April 2007 Yasamal District Court in Baku
convicted Fatullayev of ‘criminal libel’ and ‘insult’,
sentencing him to thirty months in prison. The same
day, unknown assailants attacked one of Fatullayev’s
colleagues at Realni Azerbaijan, who sustained serious
injuries. Uzeyir Jafarov told Human Rights Watch
59
(HRW) that as he left the
office, around 11.45pm,
two people attacked him
from behind and hit him
several times on the head.
The assailants fled only after
Jafarov’s colleagues respond-
ed to his calls for help.
Jafarov was later hospitalised for head trauma. He
claimed to have seen one of the assailants in the court-
room at Fatullayev’s hearing earlier in the day.
On 22 May 2007 Fatullayev was served with addition-
al charges of ‘terrorism’ under Article 214 of the
Criminal Code, for which he faces a further twelve
years in prison. He is accused by the Ministry for
National Security of aiding the Armenian Special
Forces, although no specific details were given. On 20
May, his newspaper’s offices had been searched by
National Security agents and computers and documents
were seized.
According to HRW, Fatullayev is known for his
frequent criticism of Azeri officials and for exposing
instances of government corruption. For over a year
he has been under increasing pressure to stop practis-
ing his profession. High-ranking state officials have
initiated cr iminal def amation charges against
Fatullayev. In September 2006 Fatullayev was handed a
two-year suspended sentence and forced to pay dam-
ages in a cr iminal libel case brought by Inter ior
Minister Ramil Usubov. (Usubov has apparently
brought similar charges against numerous other inde-
pendent journalists and newspapers.) On 1 October
2006 Fatullayev’s father was kidnapped. The kidnap-
pers threatened to kill both Fatullayev and his father,
and he was forced to suspend the publication of his
newspapers in exchange for his f ather’s release.
Fatullayev resumed publishing only two months later,
but at r isk to his own life, since the kidnappers
remained at large.
The latest reports suggest that the journalist is being
held in inhumane conditions and that he has received
multiple death threats whilst in prison. Readers may like
to send appeals calling for the release of Eynulla
Fatullayev and protesting against the additional sentence
levied against him which is considered to be in violation
of international standards guaranteeing the right to free-
dom of expression:
Office of the President of the Azerbaijan
Republic
19 Istiqlaliyyat Street
Baku AZ1066
Azerbaijan
Fax: 00 994 12 492 0625
Email: president@gov.az
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

TOKYO Y EAR Z ERO
★ ulated by archaic superstition and tra-
By David Peace
(Faber & Faber 368pp £16.99)
IN Tokyo in 1946, ‘this city is no city,
this country, no country’. And this
police department is one in which
everybody has good reasons to be
afraid, and most have even better rea-
sons to disguise their true identity.
Little wars are fought beneath the
attention of the American occupiers,
as different ethnic groups compete to
control the sale and supply of black-
market food. This counts as crime
fiction because its plot is a murder
investigation – apparently based on a
real-life case from 1946 when two
young women were found murdered
in Shiba Park. Detective Minami of
the Tokyo Metropolitan Police
Department is assigned to the case
and it is fascinating to follow his
investigation as he gradually realises
that he has a personal involvement in
the secret past of the victims and their
killer. But what makes the book
remarkable is the brilliantly evocative
portrait of the devastated city and its
defeated inhabitants: ‘We have seen
hell, we have known heaven, we have
heard the last judgement, and we
have witnessed the fall of the gods.’
K ILLER T UNE
★ logical study of a good man in a
By Dreda Say Mitchell
(Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £11.99)
THE rap artist and mega-star Jeremiah
Skantleberry, aka Lord Tribulation, is
suspected of being involved in
crimes: his father’s death to the sound
of reggae and the firebombing of a
house by a teenage Vivaldi fan. Lord
Tribulation’s own investigation takes
him back to the drought summer of
1976, when Notting Hill’s million-
pound flats were still North
Kensington’s derelict bedsits and
young people tried to change the
world with rhythm, reggae and riots.
An interesting, original novel, worth
reading even if you don’t get half the
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
references and in real life would block
your ears to the noise.
N ATURAL H ISTORY
★ mythology; but it is absorbing, beauti-
By Neil Cross
(Simon & Schuster 279pp £11.99)
I read this book on the day the West
Country’s local daily ran a story about
a family who bought and moved into
a derelict Devon zoo. The real-life
parallels made an even more unsettling
read of a story that seems to lack the
usual signifiers of mystery fiction, as it
follows the unusual lives of an appar-
ently perfect nuclear family. A woman
zoologist and TV Don takes on a
monkey sanctuary in North Devon
and goes off to work in Africa while
her ex-journalist husband and their
two children turn the unsuccessful
tour ist attraction into a thr iving
wildlife park. A series of peculiar inci-
dents add to an uneasy atmosphere,
but it is not until the very end that the
first overt cr ime is committed.
Suddenly it becomes clear that the
whole book has been a study of crimi-
nal behaviour by a psychopath and
only on a second reading does every
seemingly innocent incident shout its
awful warning. Highly recommended.
T HE M ESSENGER OF ATHENS
★
By Anne Zouroudi
(Bloomsbury 288pp £10.99)
THE god – a fat man in formal clothes
– steps from the machine, in this case
the ferry that is the only link between
the outside world and the Greek
island of Thiminos. This strange man,
as inscrutable and mysterious at the
end of the book as at the beginning,
has come to secure justice for the
shade of a woman whose battered
body was found at the bottom of a
cliff. In such a remote place modern
forensic methods seem as irrelevant
as the usual rituals of a twenty-first
60
century legal system; the island is reg-
ditional codes of honour, which mean
justice can only be achieved by an
unorthodox investigation. In fact this
whole novel is unorthodox and could
equally well be categorised as updated
fully written and reveals the savage,
superstitious reality behind the pretty
façade that is all that most of us know
of any Greek island.
ROUNDING THE M ARK
★
By Andrea Camilleri
(Picador 288pp £12.99)
INSPECTOR Montalbano is a Sicilian
policeman, who with each successive
novel becomes more pessimistic and
cynical. This is the universal fate of
European police detectives in fiction,
if not in real life, and Montalbano,
who began as a cheerful character,
will probably soon be as morose and
depressed as any Swede. Admittedly
there is very little to smile about in a
plot based on human trafficking,
child abuse and slavery, but Camilleri
has created such a realistic and like-
able hero that his books are both
instructive and enjoyable; and the
Sicilian setting is fascinating.
Technically this is a police procedur-
al; actually, it is an insightful psycho-
deviant world.
S ECOND V IOLIN
★
By John Lawton
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 432pp £17.99)
SECOND VIOLIN is the sixth book in
the Frederick Troy series about a posh
policeman before, during and after
the Second World War. In chronolog-
ical terms it is the first, and casts a fas-
cinating new light on the background
of characters and events referred to in
previous volumes. Various historical
episodes are shown with unusually
vivid and sensitive insight: Austria on
the day of the Nazi takeover, or

Britain in 1940 when the government
embarked on the panicky internment
of enemy aliens in the Isle of Man,
described as though from the author’s
personal experience. I have read and
recommended all Lawton’s novels but
this is not the one for a newcomer to
the series to begin with, since the plot
is not easy even for an enthusiast to
follow. Never mind: the journey was
enjoyable, even if I got lost on the
way to its final destination.
J ACQUOT AND THE F IFTEEN
★ By Karin Slaughter
By Martin O’Brien
(Headline 416pp £11.99)
THE number refers to members of a
French rugby team that beat England
at Twickenham twenty years before
the story opens. The captain, now a
captain of industry, organises a
reunion in his palatial villa on the
Côte d’Azur. One team member
commits suicide there, and in the next
few weeks, another half-dozen die.
Each death looks natural and only
Detective Inspector Jacquot (who
scored the winning try) realises that
CRIME
his former teammates are being killed
off. If you can swallow the unlikely
idea that these relatively young men,
all formerly famous and some still
well-known, could die in so short a
time without the authorities smelling
a rat, and – even odder – without
swarms of reporters buzzing around,
and if you can also credit Jacquot’s
indestructibility, then this is an enjoy-
able tale set in mouthwatering places.
S KIN P RIVILEGE
★ Fr iend of the Devil by Peter
(Century 416pp £17.99)
DR Sara Linton is in trouble. She is
being sued for millions in a malprac-
tice suit and she has to help her police
chief husband get one of his detectives
out of jail in a small town in deepest
Georgia. Soon both are caught up in
a chaos of methamphetamine making,
taking and trafficking, muddled up
with white supremacy groups and
long-buried family secrets. Slaughter
specialises in forensics, terror, claustro-
phobic communities and the more
uncivilised aspects of the Deep South.
On the strength of books that are
relentlessly frightening, melodramatic
and disgusting she has become a
mega-seller. But to me, following this
story’s sadism felt like masochism.
AND don’t miss the next instalments
in the adventures of some favourite
investigators:
The Last Breath by Denise Mina
(Bantam 352pp £12.99) Another in
this outstanding ser ies about the
Glasgow journalist Paddy Meehan.
Robinson (Hodder & Stoughton 416pp
£14.99) Featuring the always interest-
ing DCI Banks and DI Annie Cabot.
Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell
(Hutchinson 272pp £17.99) The age-
less Wexford and Burden investigate
old crimes with modern methodology.
The Skeleton Man by Jim Kelly
(Michael Joseph 352pp £16.99) An
intensely atmospheric Philip Dryden
mystery set in the fens.
Death’s Door by Quintin Jardine
(Headline 416pp £11.99) More from
Edinburgh police HQ and its popu-
lar team of clever, spouse-swapping
detectives.
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
THERE’S something Larkin-esque R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
about D A Prince’s excellent
winning poem this month (on
the subject of ‘choice’), with its canny self-deprecation and Anyone who had a few books to donate could do worse
slick enjambements. She wins £300 for the first prize;
Colin Wood gets £150 for second, and all others printed
receive £10.
Ted Giles, a regular name on these pages, wrote to me
recently about his local council library, which is being
FIRST PRIZE
CHOICE by D A Prince
The whole world takes the road less travelled by,
or so it seems. Loud choruses of My Way
drown out all other songs - just watch the crowds
turning Frost’s track into a busy highway.
So, paradoxically, the road reviled
is empty of the herd, and left to those
who never think to flaunt their choice, but go
in peace, not full of angst for how they chose.
Coffee is simply coffee; clothes the ones
that happened to be clean; and home a mix
of varied unassuming comforts - not
a showcase for interior fashion’s tricks;
and saving all the lifetimes that are spent
on the modern cult for being different.
SECOND PRIZE
PASCAL by Colin Wood
He worried about God. Could there be ever
A way of solving the Divine Equation?
Could any formula, however clever,
Give absolute assurance of salvation?
No mathematics could provide a basis
To choose between belief and unbelief,
So, Janus-like, with contradictory faces,
He wavered weakly like an aspen leaf.
He could not choose. Instead, he gave his conscience
A crafty way of choosing not to choose –
He gambled on the chance of God’s existence:
That way, he might not win, but could not lose.
Did he, when dying, hear God’s thunderous voice:
I wanted, not your Wager, but your Choice?
INDECISION by Alanna Blake
Alternatives all come in twos
Which means I cannot help but choose.
At least, whichever choice I make
Can only lead to one mistake,
Whereas if options multiply
A different outcome will apply:
There’s room for errors, few or many,
62
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007
partially closed ‘as a money-
saving necessity, so it is said’.
One wonders what money is for.
than give them to the Chalfont St Giles library, now
being run by volunteers. The next subject is ‘False
Economy’, then; entries should be in by Wednesday 29
August: poems should be no more than 24 lines, and
should rhyme, scan and make sense.
That sometimes cost a pretty penny,
Those misplaced votes, misguided bets
That leave me haunted by regrets.
And quite the hardest task I find
Is having to make up my mind;
It drives me almost to distraction
To try to pick a course of action:
Select from menus, buy a dress,
Decide on presents – and the mess
That follows leaves me stirred and shaken,
With life grown full of roads not taken.
I wonder, though, would I rejoice
If no one gave me any choice?
THE CHOICE by Maureen A Jeffs
Read this, I am telling it with a sigh
and also – I will whisper this – regret;
not that I chose to be another’s bride
but that I had to choose. I can’t forget
your parting words, the sorrow in your eyes
the day I left without a backward glance
fearing I, like Boscawen’s Merry Maids,
might turn to stone. The moment passed, the chance –
and there was one – was past recapturing,
except in dreams where frequently we tread;
generous with loving, lying face to face,
I say to you those words that went unsaid.
And yet I know if I could rewind time,
I’d take again the course I took that day;
I opted for the safe and sane and sure
and, though I love you, chose to walk away.
TALKING CURE by Noel Petty
To be or not to be: is that your question?
I’m sorry things are looking quite that bad.
Perhaps it’s toothache, or a poor night’s sleep,
Or maybe just a trick of the digestion.
I know you think somebody topped your dad
And then your mother shacked up with the creep,
But here’s the thing:
Right now life may seem difficult
But if you bide your time you’ll still be king.
That’s not a bad result.
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE

To be or not to be? To be, of course. (what did she see in him?)

That not to be just closes off all choice. then Harry might have dated Pam
No chance for second thoughts, no turning back. so Richard would be free
And if it’s meant to prick your mum’s remorse, to dally where his fancy leads
You won’t be here. Ignore that ghostly voice, and take the plunge with me.
Be rational and take the cautious tack.
Defer, delay, As things turned out, our stars were crossed
Keep all your options free. That’s how and fate had other plans
You live to fight (or not) another day. I sense it when our glances meet
Feel better now? and each time we brush hands –
wishing we could pick again
PRESIDENTIAL (BEG)PARDON by Peter Butler undo the choices made –
It’s clear to me now (said the President), but rules are broken easier
The signs have become all too evident. the more the game is played.
We screwed the attack in Iraq
And it’s me who’s been getting the flak. So Richard flirts behind Pam’s back
There’s a murmur in Burma of chaos in Laos, and Josephine’s turned gay
Hail in Sahara, snow in Barbados. since Harry had a fling with Sue
The change in the climate, they say, is my fault, who’s set to move away
Emissions I did too little to halt. now she’s divorcing Cederic
Now Putin is rooting to cut off my gas, while – typical of him –
While someone has stolen the chair from my ass. Tom’s come up with one last bid
Regime change, I reckon, is now overdue. but I’ve said yes to Jim.
Gentlemen, I quit – it’s over to you.

PRIX FIXE by Iain Colley AUDIOBOOK

At midday when, as is my wont
(I live my life by rote),
I settle in a restaurant T HE C ASEBOOK OF S HERLOCK H OLMES,
I choose the table d’hôte VOLUME I
★
If feeling spruce and debonair, By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Or even cock- a- hoop, (Read by David Timson)
I’ll start with huitres fines et claires, (Naxos Audiobooks 4 CDs Unabridged £16.99)
Which means I miss the soup.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’s commitment to spiritualism
And if I then proceed to eat led him to abandon fiction. Yet in the 1920s he published
Cassoulet (what a dish!) twelve final Sherlock Holmes adventures. These are the
I must forgo the bisteck frites, first six. In Thor Bridge, Maria is the past-her-prime wife of
And equally the fish. the Gold King, whom she adores. Wildly jealous of their
delightful English governess, she is prepared to kill herself
The same dilemma haunts dessert: in order to incriminate the innocent girl. Lloyd George’s
To opt for crème brûlée favourite story was The Mazarin Stone, in which a page
Entails that I can only flirt called Billy is in attendance. ‘How far am I justified in
With dreams of a sorbet. putting that boy in danger of sudden death?’ Holmes asks
himself, closing the curtain across the bow window in
I know that I could scoff the lot. which resides a facsimile of himself. He awaits the villain-
Sometimes I get the blues. ous Count Negretto Sylvius, who has stolen the great
But Sartre says that we have not Mazarin stone, a Crown diamond worth £100,000.
The freedom not to choose. Holmes is at his most manic and impish. Even leaner and
paler, he directs the cook to serve dinner ‘the day after
THE PICK OF THE BUNCH by J M Harvey tomorrow’. ‘The faculties become refined when you starve
If Tom had married Josephine them,’ he explains. ‘I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me a
and Sue had gone with Jim mere appendage.’ David Timson is a flawless reader.
instead of choosing Cederic Susan Crosland

63
LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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