I APRIL 2000 U 3.00 $7.

00

WOLLSTONECRAFT TAKES A DIVE

*
Sylvia Plath's Diaries Rebecca West's Letters
Herningway vs Fitzgerald
*
Lenin: A New Life Rasputin: The Last Word
Tolstoy: The Libel Laws
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto battles for God
Caroline Moorehead delivers us from Evil
John Simpson tackles the Taliban
Nigel West spies on Japan
Anthony Clare is consoled by de Botton
Shakespeare is gripped by Orchid Fever
Simon Heffer is passionate about Bach
SPRING FICTION: Saul Bellow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joyce Carol Oates
David Malouf, E L Doctorow, Peter Ho Davies, Victor Pelevin, Michael Arditti
 I

BARYE-DEGAS-FRINK

200 YEARS ~ a r y e - ~ u r k i sHorse

h c. 1830

OF THE HORSE
IN BRONZE
10th May - 23rd June 2000
Degas-Dr~nklng Horse c. 1870

This major exhibition will include over

twenty works o n a n e q u i n e t h e m e
c o m m e n c i n g w i t h Barye's famous
Turkish Horse through the impressionists
and modern masters t o t h e best of
the contemporary sculptors who continue
to break new ground with this ever
opular subject.

Haselt~ne-Suffolk Punch c.1930

Fully illustrated colour catalogue available upon request.

'HE SLADMORE GALLERY

Fine 19th & 20th Century Bronze Sculpture
32 BRUTON PLACE, OFF BERKELEY SQUARE,
LONDON W1X 7AA.
Telephone: 020 7499 0365 Facsimile: 020 7409 1381
Web: www.sladmore.com e.mai1: eh@sladmore.com 1
F ~ d d ~ aGreen-St~ll
n Water, c.1999
 F R O M THE P U L P I T
THE GROWING SUCCESS
Greenwich's infamous Dome - at
any rate among schoolchildren
of
An 0 the r Ap p r 0 a c h
at half-term - has led to calls for
those who criticised it in the first
place to eat their words. My friend
to Criticism
and colleague Richard Ingrams, has a
robust answer to this suggestion. Even if the project can
succeed in paying for itself, he wrote,
It doesn't follow that the Dome is any good. Though
I have not been myself, I have closely cross-
questioned those who have, and have read innumer-
able accounts by men and women whose judgement
I respect. And there can be no getting away from the
fact that the contents of the Dome are thoroughly
tacky and second-rate.
This would seem to open a debate on the vulgarity and
ghastliness of mass culture, but the most interesting
aspect of Ingrams's criticism is that he admits to not
having been there or seen any of these tacky and
second-rate things himself. He would seem to be basing - edge- has never stopped critics from drawing all the
his judgement on a mixture of intuition
and the reported opinions of other people,
of whom only a certain number may
themselves claim first-hand experience.
As for the Dome, others may eat their
words but I will not be numbered
among them. Great is the truth and it
will prevail.
In quoting all this, I am not questioning
Ingrams's conclusion about the Dome. I am
sure he is absolutely right. Without having
been there myself, I am convinced it is an
embarrassment and a national disgrace. My
purpose is to draw attention to a new
critical discipline - where the critic cheer-
fully admits he has not seen, heard or
smelled the object he is criticising. Having
had one's attention drawn to it. one realises
it is frequently used in literary conversation if less often
in written work. But it exists, and having identified it as
a school of criticism, we must surely give it a name.
To call it the Ingramsian school might be thought
insulting, although there is no suggestion that it is a less
valid form of criticism than any other. The idea no
longer holds that ignorance of a subject should prevent
anyone from having an opinion on it. Nowadays we
must accept that the opinion of those with no knowl-
edge is just as valid as that of an expert, or 'so-called
expert' as these people are more rightly dubbed.
Perhaps if we cannot call it the Ingramsian method we
might call it after the Greenwich structure that so few
people have actually visited - either 'Domestic', in
approval, or 'Domboid', in dsparagement. The essence of
the new school is that the critic should admit to not
having read the book he is dscussing or reviewing. One
does not need to have great experience of literary criti-
cism, let alone literary conversation or any other aspect of
the literary life, to reahse {hat people
inside it already spend an enormous
amount of time discussing books and
authors they have never read.
In many cases they do this very
well, and produce amusing, some-
times memorable criticism. They do
it, in part, out of politeness, for fear of casting a gloom if
they admit ignorance and withhold comment on that
score. But of course most of those present will guess
they are bluffing. It does not detract from our enjoy-
ment of the performance, but it adds an unnecessary
element of uncertainty if we have not been told. Some
may disagree with me, but I should judge it will add a
new dimension of enjoyment and insight if we know for
certain whether the critic has read the book or not.
A few people to whom I have put this idea have
grown quite angry, saying that of course criticism must
be properly informed to have any value. If they remain
unimpressed by my argument that this weight of knowl-
wrong c~nclusionsor writing gibberish, I
have to tell them that I think they are out
of date; times have moved on without their
noticing. I draw their attention to a book
produced in Berlin by five German writers
which has taken Germany by storm.
Tristesse Royale, as it is called, is the
account of five male German friends
staying the weekend in a luxury Berlin
hotel, tallung about the enjoyment of life.
Although the book has none of the
ingredients that sometimes cause offence
- pornography, violence, obscenity -
and does not even commit any of the new
crimes of racism, sexism or homophobia, it
has been bitterly attacked in every
respectable literary quarter.
This is because the five authors are
uninterested in history and guilt, unconcerned with
social reform, political purpose, literary and artistic
theory. They like drinking champagne and enjoy
unfashionable rock music. They despise the mass culture
of television and down-market films, disdaining it as
'proletarian'. Much of their conversation would be seen
& this country as unacceptably snobbish.
Yet Eistesse Royale, dismissed by the German presi-
dent's wife as 'dreadfid' and denounced at great length
in Der Spiegel, continues to sell in its hundreds of thou-
sands in Germany for the simple reason that it describes
a new generation of Germans who live for pleasure, and
who have never been allowed to read about themselves
before. Awareness of this new generation has been sup-
pressed - and not only in Germany. When news of
Tristesse Royale breaks through to the young people
of Britain, France and Italy, I suspect it will be seen as
the most important book of the new decade. They wdl
not need to have read it - any more than I have.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

MALCOLM BRADBURY'S new novel
To the Hemitage appears at the end
of May from Picador.
KATHRYNHUGHES'SGeorge Eliot:
The Last Victorian (Fourth Estate) has
just w o n the James Tait Black
Award. She is currently writing a
biography of Mrs Beeton and is
trying hard to learn how to cook.
ANTHONYCLARE'SMen: Crisis in
Masculinity will be published by
Chatto & Windus in August.
PAMELANORRIS, following her
acclaimed biography of the first
woman, The Story $Eve, is continuing
her exploration of human relationships
by writing a history of romantic love.
PETERJONEShas just published An
Intelligent Person's Guide to Classics
(Duckworth), and, when he is not
composing encomia of David
Blunkett for offering government
money to make Latin available on
the Intemet, is revising E V Rieu's
translation of Homer's Iliad.
R I C H A R DOVERYis Professor of
Modern History at King's College,
London. His latest book, The Battle,
will be published by Penguin in June.
EAMONDUFFY is Reader in Church
History at Cambridge University.
RICHARD GOTT is writing a biogra-
phy of Hugo Chivez, President of
Venezuela and Fidel Castro's friend.
It will be published by Verso in the
summer.
ANNAREID'SThe Shaman's Cloak,
o n the indigenous peoples of
Siberia, will be published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson next year.
FRANKMCLYNNwill be bringing
out his long-awaited study of the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920
in June. The first significant book
on the subject in English for thirty
years, it will be published by Cape
under the title Villa and Zapata.
1
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
CONTENTS
FROM THE PULPIT 1 AUBERON
WAUGH
LITERARY LIVES 4 K A T H R Y N H U G H E SM a r y Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary
Life J a n e t T o d d
5 M A L C O L M BRADBURY H e m i n g w a y v s Fitzgerald: T h e
R i s e and Fall of a Literary Friendship S c o t t D o n a l d s o n
7 P A M E L A N O R R I S T h e Journals o f S y l v i a Plath,
1950- 1962 (Ed) Karen V Kukil
8 J E S S I C AM A N N Selected Letters of Rebecca W e s t
(Ed) Bonnie K i m e Scott
10 T H O M AHS O D G K I N S O NT h e Broken Tower: T h e Life o f
H a r t C r a n e Paul M a r i a n i
FOREIGN PARTS 11 J O H N S I M P S O N Taliban: Islam, O i l and the N e w G r e a t
G a m e i n Central A s i a A h m e d R a s h i d
12 GERALD B U T T Righteous Victims: A History of the
Z i o n i s t - A r a b Conflict 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 9 9 B e n n y M o r r i s , T h e
Iron W a l l : Israel and the A r a b W o r l d Avi S h l a i m , M u r d e r
i n the N a m e of G o d : T h e Plot to K i l l Y i t z h a k R a b i n
M i c h a e l K a r p i n and Ina Friedman
14 R I C H A R GDO T T Lost W h i t e Tribes: Journeys A m o n g s t the
Forgotten R i c c a r d o O r i z i o
MUSIC 15 S I M O N HEFFERJohann Sebastian Bach: T h e Learned
Musician C h r i s t o p h W o l f f
16 F R A N K M C L Y N N A a r o n C o p l a n d : T h e Life and W o r k of
an Uncommon M a n H o w a r d Pollack
OPPRESSION 18 F E L I P EF E R N A N D E Z - A R M E S T O T h e Battle for G o d
Karen Armstrong
19 C A R O L I NMEO O R E H E A D Deliver U s From E v i l : Warlords
G Peacekeepers i n a W o r l d of Endless Conflict
W i l l i a m Shawcross
22 N I K O L A I TOLSTOYR e p u t a t i o n s U n d e r Fire: W i n n e r s and
Losers i n the Libel Business D a v i d H o o p e r
AMERICAN FICTION 23 J O H N D U G D A L E Ravelstein S a u l B e l l o w
24 E L A I N E S H O W A L T E R Blonde J o y c e C a r o l O a t e s
25 J U S T I N CARTWRIGHT C i t y of G o d E L D o c t o r o w
26 R H O DKAO E N I G G a i n R i c h a r d P o w e r s
27 PAUL S A Y E R T h e Verificationist D o n a l d A n t r i m
RUSSIA 28 R I C H A ROVERYD L e n i n : A Biography R o b e r t S e r v i c e
29 S I M O N D I X O N R a s p u t i n : T h e Last W o r d
Edvard Radzinsky
30 B E N Y A R D E - B U L L E R Bread o f E x i l e D i m i t r i O b o l e n s k y
If
Editor-in-Chie :AUBERON
Editor: ANCY SLADEK
WAUGH
Assistant Editor: LlsA ALLARDICE
General Assistant: THOMASHODGKUVSON
Business Manager: ISABELBOOTHBY
Advertising Mana er LOUISEHARRISON
Classijed Sales: & X M A S HODGKINSON
Subscriptions: B E N HOUSE
Publisher: N A I M ATTALLAH
Foundin Editor: DR ANNES M I T H
Cover filustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 262
 APRIL 2000

WILDLIFE 32 SEBA ST IAN SHAKESPEARE Orchid F we r: A Horticultural J OHN SIMP SON is W o rld Affairs
Editor of the BBC.
Tal e of Lo11e , Lust and Luna cy Eri c Hans e n
33 TAHIR SHAH To th e Elephant Gra ve y a rd Tarquin Hall , J USTIN CAR.TWR.IGHT, w ho won last
T1gers in th e Snow Peter Matthi esseh yea r's Whitbread Prize for Leading
34 EMMA TENNANT Th e Garden Plants of China Peter V alder the Cheers, about Am eri ca n cheer-
leaders, and was nominated for th e
Booker Prize two yea rs ago with In
HISTORY 36 DJ TAYL O R Th e Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s E11ery Face I Meet, has just fini shed a
Piers Brendon new novel, Half i11 Lave, to appear
37 NI GEL W ES T Int ellige nce and th e War against ]apa11. from Hodd e r H ea dlin e 111
Ri c hard L A ldrich September/ October.
38 D AN IEL j OHNSON Einstein 's German World Fritz Stern ELAINE SH OWALTER is Professo r of
40 CLAUS VON BuL OW Th e Priri.ce ly Co1uts of Europ e English at Prin ceton University. Her
1500-17 50 (Ed) John Adamson most recent book is H ystories.

N IGEL WEST, who has written exten-

SHORT STORIES 41 ANN CH ISHO LM Dream Stu_ffDavid Malouf sively on eve1y aspect of secret intelli-
42 CRESSIDA C ONNO LLY Equal Lo ve P e ter Ho Davi es gence - his books include th e only
43 SARAH A SMITH Days Like Today R ac h e l In galls, My Dat e reliable histories of MI5 and M I6 - has
with Satan Sta cey Ri c ht e r , l ee Cream H e len Dunmore a new volume coming out in October
about the Pope, under the bewitching
LIFE&DEATH title The Pope: C IA, Solidarity and the
44 ANTHONY CLARE Th e Con solations of Philo sophy
KCB's Plot to Kill Him.
Alain de Botton
45 MI CHAE L WAT ER.HOUSE Death in Eng land: An Illu s trat ed C RESS IDA CONNOLLY, in be tween
Hi story (Ed) Pet e r C Jupp a nd C l are Gittings looking afte r he r three c hildren , is
starting a new boo k of sho rt stori es .
H er last , The Happies/ Days, n.ow
GENERAL 47 EAMO N DUFFY A History of th e Et'tg lish Parish: Th e Culture
availabl e in paperback from Fourth
of Relig ion from Augustin e to Victoria N J G Pounds Es(ate, is ho tl y tipp ed for a major
48 J OHN M c EWEN Th e Oxford Hi s tory of W es tern Art (Ed) Literary prize.
M art in Kemp
NIK OLAI T OLSTOY, w ho is working
50 PETER ] ONES Literature in th e Creek and Roman World s:
hard on th e bi ography of his step-
A New Surv ey (Ed) Oliver Taplin father, the late Patrick O'Brian , had
reco rd dama ges in lib el awa rd ed
FICTION 51 ROB ER T WI ND ER Whm We W ere Orphans Kazuo Ishi guro agai nst him w he n he was sued b y
52 DAMIAN THOMP SON Ea ster Michael Arditti Lord Aldin g ton - th e forme r
52 AN NA R EID Baby/on Victor Pelevin conserva ti ve po li tician T o b y Lo w
- over remarks all egedl y made by
53 CHRISTOPHER HART My Once Upo n a Tim e Diran Adeba yo
T o lsto y abo ut Low ' s h a ndlin g of
54 MI C HAEL ARDITT I The Abotnination Pau l Golding
Yu gos la v and Cossac k e migres in
55 LESLEY GLAI STER Laura Blundy juli e M yerson Austria at the end of the war.
56 J OHN MuRRAY Birds of Pa ss ag e Rob e rt Sole
EMMA T ENNANT is chairman of the
56 LESLEY M c D OWE LL ON FIRST NOVELS BY WOMEN
N ational Ttust Gardens Advis01y Panel.
CRIME 58 PHILIP 0AK ES
SILENCED VOICES 59 SIOBHAN D ow o SIMO DIXON is Professor of Modem
LETTERS 60 History, University of Leeds.
AUDIOBOOK 61 SUSAN CR OS LAND THOMAS H ODGKINSON is translating
POETRY COMPETITION 62 from the Latin a sixtee nth -century
SUBSCRIPTION FORM 64 History of the Tartars, by Minu ccio
LRBOOKSHOP 39 Minucci, Archbishop of Zadar.

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LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD
MARYWOLLSTONECRAFT:
A REVOLUTIONARY
LIFE
*
By Janet Todd
(Weidenfeld G. Nicolson 474pp L20)
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT TURNS out to have been the
kind of person that gives women a bad name. A moaner,
manipulative, and bossy as hell, she managed to annoy
pretty much everyone with whom she came into contact.
The evidence has always been there, but it is only now,
after twenty-five years of 'Girls' Own' history writing,
that Janet Todd feels able to tell the inconvenient truth.
Wollstonecraft's chief disqualification as a feminist
heroine lies in her relationshim with men. Far from
being their autonomous equal, she was needy, nagging
and, to cap it all, badly dressed. In letters to her lover,
Gilbert Imlay, she begs for a corner of his heart and
then, sensing rejection, spits out a string of complaints.
So ghastly is the thought of the author of A Vindication
ofthe Rights of Woman wheedling affection out of a bluff,
philandering opportunist that earlier biographers like
Claire Tomalin have played the whole thing down. In
fact, Wollstonecraft's letters to Imlay are no more
excruciating than Charlotte Bronte's to Constantin
Heger, or George Eliot's to Herbert Spencer. The sad
fact is that clever women have always made fools of
themselves with wretched men. It is onlv now that it has
become acceptable to say so.
Mary Wollstonecraft grew up miserable. She was born
in 1759, into a family where the eldest boy got
everything, fiom his mother's breast milk to a sizeable
inheritance. Her father was a weak man who should
have stuck to silk merchanting but fancied himself as a
gentleman instead. H e took the family away from
Spitalfields and dragged them fiom one unlucky farm to
the next. With all the money gone, Wollstonecraft was
left with the option of becoming either a companion or
a governess. In the event, she proved equally hopeless at
both. She was exactly the sort of girl you wouldn't want
living in your house: prissy, picky and always on the
point of tears. In Bath, where she worked as a compan-
ion, she made a point of looking as dowdy as possible.
In Ireland, where she was governess to Lady
Kinsborough's family, she sat in a corner and imagined
herself insulted. Unsurprisingly, she lasted only a year.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, like everything
Wollstonecraft wrote, is hasty, passionate and utterly
concerned with herself. Put together in three months in
1792, it actually has little to do with political rights; it is
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
Wollstonecraft:Mary, Mary quite contrary
Wollstonecraft's attempt to work out why her own life,
and that of her two younger sisters, was quite so ghastly.
All three girls seem to have been permanently depressed
and, perhaps for that very reason, attracted dreadful
men. Mostly they wanted to be somewhere else, but
could never muster the energy to get there. Too
exhausted to take the initiative. thev svent most of their
, , L
time boring other people with their unhappiness.
In A Vindication Wollstonecraft argues that it is living
with men that has made women sillv. The sexes are born
psychologically identical, but custom and culture have
crippled women's capacity to act autonomously. Instead
of using their talents and energies to forge a productive
life. middle-class women spend far too much time
.L
indulging their emotions and worrying about whether
they're sufficiently pretty. Wollstonecraft's antidote to
this doll-like atrophy is a 'rational' education which will
give girls the chance to grow up as frank and sensible as
their brothers. 'I do not wish [women] to have power
over men. but themselves'. she assured her nervous
readers. T h s was no consolation to one poor lady, who
wrote to a magazine declaring that A Vindication had
ruined her daughters: one had started betting on horses,
a second had taken uv Latin and Greek. a third was
a
scientifically dissectikg her pets, and fourth was
challenging men to duels.
Wollstonecraft herself never managed " that kind of
transformation. She was thirty-four when Irnlay came
on the scene, but still managed to act like a particularly
damaged teenager. She tried to boss him into loving her
and when that didn't work, took an overdose of lau-
danum. Her histrionics repelled him, and if she thought
 1 LITERARY L I V E S I

having a baby would keep him close, she was sorely
disappointed. Afier the initial honeymoon, Irnlay started
a slow and cruel retreat which wound Wollstonecrafi up
even more. It was only when she discovered he had set
up home with another woman that she accepted that
the thing was finally over and jumped off Putney Bridge.
Luckily, Wollstonecrafi was fished out in time to be
able to start a relationship with the philosopher William
Godwin. Having a rationalist for a partner was not
necessarily a formula for fun: Godwin didn't believe in
love, marriage or, given that he was a virgin at forty,
even much sex. He once said that, faced with the choice
of saving the life of a close fi-iend or that of an important
philosopher, he would take the latter course. Still, he
unbent sufficiently to arrange some romantic weekends
in Ilford and then, misunderstanding the female cycle,
managed to get Wollstonecraft pregnant. Nine months
later, she died giving birth to Mary Shelley.
The great strength of Janet Todd's biography lies in
her vvlllingness to unpick the feminist fi-ame on which
earli'er lives of Wollstonecrafi were stretched to fit. She is
not afraid to tell us that the Vindication is a contradictory,
careless piece of writing, or that Wollstonecraft was a
selfish, indifferent mother. Indeed, Todd argues that it is
by exploring rather than denying these difficulties that
we get a sense of where WollstonecraftS proper impor-
tance to women's history lies. For in her endless
headaches, her longing to -be literary, her coldness to
Fanny (her daughter by Imlay), and her grievance
against her father, Mary Wollstonecrafi embodied every
tension of a very modern kind of female experience.
And it is here, rather than in any falsifying story of
triumphant achievement, that her significance lies.
To order 'Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life' at the
special price of L18 with free UK p+ call Literary Review
Bookshop on 0181 324 5510 or use ourform on page 39.

peace had come with the American-brokered Versailles

settlement and, as Fitzgerald said, something subtle

What This Odd Couple passed to America, 'the American stylis~icleadership'.

Both began to write as the Twenties, the most American
of decades, dawned. Both ended up in Paris; they met,
and their lives became a ioust.
Loved About Each Other T h e story has bee; told very often, and Scott
Donaldson, who has written biographies of both men,
HEMINGWAYVERSUS FITZGERALD:THERISE
AND FALLOF A LITERARYFRIENDSHIP
*
By Scott Donaldson
(John Muway 384pp A25)

F SCOTTFITZGERALD and Ernest Hemingway are two of

the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
Among the remarkable things about them are the peculiar
similarities and parallels of their backgrounds and the
kind of literary friendship - which was also a literary
enmity - that they forged. Both were born to reasonably
affluent professional families in the American Midwest;
the families lived 150 miles apart in Minnesota and
Illinois respectively. Both households were troubled, not
least by domestic gender wars between the parents. Both
writers were born on the cusp of what was to become
known as the American century (Fitzgerald in 1896,
Hemingway in 1899), and both felt a large responsibility
for pursuing its mythologies and establishing its styles.
Both, as Scott Donaldson notes in this book of engaging
comparisons, were jilted by their first loves in dramatic
and unlovely circumstances which became central to
their fictions. Both responded to the crisis of the century,
the Great War, in which the Americans became
implicated in 1917. Hemingway went to Europe and
was wounded, Fitzgerald applied for service but got his
emotional wounds at home. Both were ready, once

I A I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 I LITERARY LIVES
does not have a great
deal of new material
to report. After all,
postwar Twenties
Paris was crowded
from the start with
writers who were all
assiduously reporting
on themselves and
each other. What he
does have is a vivid
sense of narrative and
a delight in interpreta-
tion; the jousting of
the men has a kind
of mythic quality,
which has to do with
the often odd nature
of literary friendships. Beautv and Beast
Again and again h e is
struck by the parallelisms of the two men, and the way
the life of each is central to the life of the other. As for
heroes and vdlains, the matter isn't easy. Some would say
Fitzgerald was the better man and the worse writer,
others would claim Hemingway was the true inventor,
since he created, like Picasso, a modern discourse for the
age of which Fitzgerald was no more than the brilliant
fictional reporter.
In the matter of achievement, both reputations have
risen and fallen. It was a rhythm which Fitzgerald had to
adapt to early; by the Thirties he had, as he so strangely
expected, cracked up; his decade was over, and by the
time of his death, as the decade ended, his name had
gone and his books were out of print. Hemingway rode
triumphant, the military hero fresh from his triumphs in
Spain and ready to go to war again. Ten years later,
Fitzgerald was rising, Hemingway falling. Now, in most
sensible judgements, both writers can be associated with
works both good and bad, and their own moments of
greatness: Fitzgerald's in 1925 with The Great Gatsby;
Hemingway's with his early stories of similar date and
with A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
The one who lives longer tells most of the story; and
so Hemingway did. His version is in what became; with
his suicide, a posthumous memoir: A Moveable Feast
(1964). Yet Fitzgerald was the kinder soul and the better
friend, and dld the greater favours. When the two men
met, he was by far the more successful author. He
secured Hemingway's American publication with his
own firm, Scribner's, publishers of Henry James and by
this time the home of the finest of all the editors,
Maxwell Perkins. Thanks to Fitzgerald, Hemingway
moved from poverty to riches, obscurity to fame. Such
favours cannot be accepted easily, and there is generally a
price to pay. Hemingway, the younger and more arrogant
of the two, was a
bruiser, a figure of total
confidence in his own
powers; he expected
nothing less. He had
already adopted a note
of amused condescen-
sion toward Fitzgerald,
looking down on
hls drinlung, his disor-
derly marriage, his
public escapades, his
general performance as
Twenties public icon
and popular-market
prophet of the jazz age.
He was serious, and he
took Fitzgerald's admi-
ration and respect as
his due. He was no
socialite but the pure artistic expatriate, the man who
worked hard, knew the territory, fought over the terrain,
learned what to do and how to live with it. Paris was his
creative-writing class; he was there to study, not to drink
and enjoy himself. And he was a naked literary strategist,
always ready to play writer off against writer, opportunity
against opportunity, and to get into the ring.
It is, in a sense, a ritual story: about society, fame,
rivalry, jealousy, and the war to win in art. Donaldson
tells it vividly, as a battle of the giants, and an example of
how failure destroys, and success does too. In every way,
each man was in the books of the other. Their worlds
are eternally intertwined, with all that went into them:
jealousy, hardness, moral contrast, a brute competitiveness
and a pathos that in the end afflicts and surrounds the
careers of both men. As Donaldson says, Hemingway
treated Fitzgerald with extraordinary cruelty, and even
after his death conducted a campaign against his
reputation. He concludes:
What Scott loved about Ernest was the idealised
version of the sort of man - courageous, stoic,
masterful - he could never be. What Ernest loved
about Scott was the vulnerability and charm that his
invented persona required him to despise. It made
for a poignant story, really; one great writer
humiliating himself in pursuit of a companionship
that another's adamantine hardness of heart would
not permit.
Yet as a pair, an odd couple, a Gog and Magog, these
two writers are still at the heart of twentieth-century
American fiction. The Great American Novel of the
first half of the century always was a game for the boys.
To order 'Hemingway vs Fitzgerald' at the special price $ L 2 2
with fvee UK p@ call Literary Review Bookshop on 0 1 8 1
324 5 5 1 0 or use ourform on page 39.
 I LITERARY
I WHO IS SYLVIA?
THEJOURNALS OF SYLVIAPLATH,
1950-1962
* took on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy, in which
Edited by Karen V Kukil
(Faber G Faber 752pp A30)
SYLVIA PLATHBEGAN keeping a journal when she was
eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty.
This new edition publishes the journals that survive
from the last twelve years of her life. Two notebooks are
missing, from late 1959 to three days before Plath's
suicide in February 1963. According to Ted .Hughes,
Plath's husband and literary executor, the first of these
'disappeared'; the second, containing entries for the final
few months of Plath's life, was destroyed by Hughes in
order to protect her children.
The loss of these notebooks is
regrettable, but there is still plenty to
delight the Plath enthusiast. Her
journals have never previously been
published in the United Kingdom,
and her publishers promise 'an exact
and complete transcription'. The
source manuscripts cover her student
years at Smith College and then at
Newnham in Cambridge, her mar-
riage to Ted Hughes, and their two
years teaching and writing in New
England. Previously sealed journals,
including notes on her private therapy
with Ruth Beuscher, are published
for the first time in their entirety.
T h e editor, Karen V Kukil, an
assistant curator at Smith College,
where the Plath archive is held, has Plath: daddy's girl
also drawn together a mass of related
material. Kukil's notes are clear and urhssy, and an exten-
sive index (which I haven't seen) promises further back-
ground information. Most importantly, this edition of
the journals permits uncensored access to Plath's personal
notebooks. Unlike almost any other editor of Plath's
work, Kukil does not tell the reader what to thnk.
When Plath died in 1963, she was virtually unknown
as a writer. It wasn't until the publication of Ariel, in
1965, that her work began to receive serious critical
attention. These poems, many written during dawn
'
vigils after the collapse of her marriage, contirmed Plath's
originality and power. Their revelatory subject matter,
combined with the manner of her death, secured her cult
status as a wronged woman. Over the years, her family
A
LIVES I
responded to the growing interest in Plath by cautiouslv
releasing her surviving writings, often with an explanatory
foreword. Whlle Plath's mother, Aurelia, sought comfort
in the idea that her daughter had a svlit ~ersonalitv.or
L L
'double', Hughes wrote gf Plath's poetry as a struggik to
come to grips with a 'deep and inclusive inner crisis',
dating back to the death of her father. His life with Plath
both had played preordained roles. At the same time,
negative views about Plath began to circulate. Bitter
Fame, a biography of Plath written in close collaboration
with Hughes's sister, Olwyn, depicted Plath as greedy,
selfish and manipulative. When Plath's journals were
published in the USA in 1982, the editor, Frances
McCullough, sought to protect Plath's survivors by openly
deleting 'nasty bits' - Plath's exercise of 'a very sharp
tongue' - and making further cuts to diminish Plath's
'eroticism', which she described as 'quite strong'.
Kukil's edition allows the reader an unexpurgated view
of Plath's eroticism, sharp tongue, and many other aspects
of her protean nature. There is little
evidence that Plath wrote the note-
books with a view to publication;
they are a ragbag of styles and
content, an outlet for violent emo-
tions and mood swings, and for
detailed commentary on people and
events that caught her attention. Like
the poetic spirit Ariel, Plath seems to
have been a shape-shifter, trying on
and discarding various identities.
Before her marriage to Hughes, she
was preoccupied with relationships
and her emotions, and with the
conflict between her planned future
as wife and mother and her desire to
become a writer. The need to be
'perfect' seems to have been a
bugbear, her vivacity and enthusiasm
enervated by the inner voice of
failure and self-doubt. Even minor
setbacks lefl her crushed and vituperative, and were the
source of the hostility and sulks which 'friends' such as
Dido Merwin have recalled with d c i o u s relish. When
love affiirs failed, Plath was particularly vulnerable, and it
was perhaps her misfortune (or fate) to marry a man who
was extremely attractive to women: in a passage omitted
from the American edition of the journals, Hughes is
described by a fellow-student as 'the biggest seducer in
Cambridge'. Plath's sexual jealousy and insecurity inform
such incidents as her 'catching' Ted walking with an
admiring student. Her reaction was extreme and pitiable:
'I won't jump out of a window or drive [her brother]
Warren's car into a tree, or fill the garage at home with
carbon monoxide...I am disabused of all faith, and see too
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
lc LITERARY LIVES
clearly.' Years later, when Hughes embarked on the affair
that split their marriage, Plath did drive her car off the
road, and finally filled her kitchen with poisonous gas.
Through therapy, Plath came to see that her teenage
breakdown (in which she narrowly escaped killing
herself) and psychological struggles were closely connected
with her relationship with her parents. Some of the
most interesting passages in the journals deal with her fan-
tasies of her dead father, Otto Plath, as 'the buried male
muse & god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted', and of
Aurelia as a 'murderess', who 'lulled the only man who'd
love me steady through life'. Aurelia was a 'smarmy nice'
hypocrite, who had sacrificed herself for her children,
'and now by God they can give themselves back to her:
why should they make her worry worry worry?'
Plath's rage and resentment, charted with savagery and
anguish, metamorphosed into some of her finest poems,
but not without effort. From her early teens, she chivvied
herself to practise writing, setting herself exercises to
improve her knowledge and ability. Many of the more
dramatic entries - concerning the turbulent relation-
ship with her lover Richard Sassoon, battles with her
colleagues at Smith, or her murderous feelings towards
girls stealing rhododendron blossoms - may be read as
set pieces in which Plath the writer vents emotion with
a canny eye to literary effect. When, however, she relin-
quished teaching in order to write full-time, she experi-
enced an almost overwhelming panic. Only after months
of paralysis was she finally able to confide to her journal, 'I
have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my
fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledgng
myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.'
Ted Hughes is reported to have said to one of Plath's
friends, he time to tell the truth about Sylvia is when
you are dying.' Hughes offered his own version of Plath's
story in Birthday Letters, published shortly before his
death. These heartfelt poems provide a persuasive anti-
dote to views of Plath as monster or martyr. Hughes's
delighted response to Plath - 'Beautiful, beautiful
America!' - is a reminder of youth, passion, and the
excitement of cultural difference. In her useful com-
mentary on the poems, Ariel's G$: Ted Hughes, Sylvia
Plath and the Story o f 'Birthday Letters' (Faber & Faber
192pp E14.99), Erica Wagner closely follows Hughes's
doomed reading of events and, although she draws on
biographical detail and Plath's writing for endorsement
and illumination, Plath's voice is often difticult to hear.
It is strong and eloquent in the journals, and their publi-
cation is a valuable contribution to understanding and
appreciating this important poet. Is it too much to hope
that Plath's missing journal still lurks in some dusty attic,
waiting for hrther chapters of her story to be revealed?
To order 'The]ournals of Sylvia Plath' at the special price of
L 2 6 with free UK p Q call Literary Review Bookshop on
0 1 8 1 324 5 5 1 0 or use ourform on page 39.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
She is Said to Have
Written 10,000
LETTERSOF REBECCA
SELECTED WEST
*
Edited by Bonnie Kime Scott
(Yale University Press 544pp A22.50)
'THEINFANT PRODIGY of the day' at twenty-one,
Rebecca West was rich and famous by the time she was
middle-aged and in old age became the undisputed
grande Dame (literally) of English letters. During an
extraordinary career, which continued almost until her
death in 1983, she participated in and described many of
the important events of the twentieth century. Her out-
put was prodigious. She produced reams of journalism,
always informative and well informed. Among her many
books, at least two are modern classics: a novel called The
Fountain Ovevflows, and a vast history-cum-travel tome
about Yugoslavia called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She
was passionately concerned with history, politics, art and
moralitv. She read voraciouslv. for her tastes were catholic
and he; reactions uninhibited. She travelled widely and
observantly, and had countless notable friends. In fact,
she was quite right to claim that her life was much more
interesting than that of any of her Bloomsbury contem-
poraries, with their 'limited experience'.
Her real name was Cicily Fairfield. Born in 1892, the
rebellious youngest daughter of an unhappy marriage,
she marched with the suffragettes in her teens, and at
twenty-one, having adopted a pseudonym, became a
provocative journalist and a radical socialist, embarlung
on a love affair with the much older, married and
world-famous H G Wells. An unintended pregnancy
resulted in an illegitimate child, Anthony West, and the
long, lonely struggle to bring him up. The consequent
scandals and embarrassments lasted as long as mother
and son both lived.
Rebecca West's vrofessional career was brilliantlv
successful. Her journalism appeared on both sides of the
Atlantic, and some of her non-fiction books, such as the
one about Yugoslavia and The Meaning of Treason, seem
just as relevant today as they did half a century ago. In
later years she became an outspoken opponent of
Communism, rightly recognising the horrors to which
manv of her liberal-minded but less clear-sighted
contemporaries were blind.
Rebecca's personal life was perpetually contentious.
Contact with Wells deteriorated into endless disaaree-
U
ments about Anthony. Energetic sibling rivalry lasted
until her sister Letty's death at those who already know
the age of ninety-one.
' something about ~ e b e c c a
Rebecca's long marriage to a West and her times will find
banker and all her numerous that too much is left unex-
love affairs apparently caused plained here. For example, it
more grief and grievance than is not enough to note that
joy. The relationship with Anthony never joined the
Anthony became hostile and armed forces during the war.
competitive, and she was as Why was he not called up?
offended by his portrayal of her O r why include a reference
in his venomous novel Heritage to gossip about a Cabinet
as Letty was by an equally minister (Philip Snowden)
unflattering description of without explaining what the
herselfin Rebecca's fiction. gossip was about?
Having been in great awe of Fortunatelv. ,, the wisdom
Rebecca West myself, and and unique wit of this
having greatly admired her, I twentieth-century titan shine
was sorrv to discover how few through. As she remarked, 'I
of those4who saw me reading: m have written a great many
this volume of her letters kne; letters in my life ...and
who she was; and the more obviously they contain a
sorry
.- .
to realise that this great deal of material which
collection may not restore or West:.,fluent oen
A
wdl be and alreadv is of some
enhance her reputation. Of interest to literary historians.'
course, it is full of the grandeur, wit, fireworks and And to general readers, too. Encore, encore.
perceptiveness that made West such an admired prose To order 'Selected Letters 4Rebecca West' at the special price
writer; of the acuteness that made her political of A 2 0 . 5 0 with j e e UK p+ call Literary Review Bookshop
commentary so remarkable; of the breadth of angry, on 0 1 8 1 3 2 4 5 5 1 0 or use ourform on page 3 9 .
sympathetic or imaginative interest that made her as
trenchant about the great events of her time as about a
single crime novel. But the book also reveals an I THE
unexpectedly petty side of a great woman. Dame
Rebecca often turned her fluent pen to rants or
whmges, and her letters are fdl of self-pity, self-justification
and regular complaints (complete with forensic details
and cherished memories of ancient insults) about her
relatives and friends. She does not forgive and forget; Grants for Authors
she does apologise and explain, repeatedly and in
exhaustive detail. She also seems to have been sickly The Society is offering grants to published
(every other letter excuses its lateness on account of authors who need funding to assist in the
some new ailment), which makes her redoubtable writing of their next book.
energy and productivity all the more remarkable.
Writers of fiction, non-fiction and
But of course these impressions may be the result of
Bonnie Kime Scott's selection. About two hundred poetry may apply.
letters are published here, all long (one runs to eight

II II
closely printed pages), but Rebecca West is said to have The grants are provided by The Authors'
written 10,000. Many disappeared - naturally enough, Foundation and the K. Blundell Trust.
anyone else would suppose; but not Rebecca. She
detected a 'curious will to annihilate me and every trace Closing date 31 May 2000.
of me which I don't understand' and took terrible
offence on discovering that her fiiend G B Stern had not Full details from:
attached enough value to her letters to keep them all. Awards Secretary, The Society of Authors,
This selection of West's correspondence whetted my 84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SB.
appetite for more to fill in the gaps, and the incomplete
editing failed to satis@ the curiosity it aroused. Even

I I

LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 1- LITERARY LIVES
His Great Masterpiece was
Impossible to Finish
THEBROKEN TOWER:
THELIFE OF HARTCRANE
* half-finished o n his desk. And as he became more
By Paul Mariani
(W W Norton 512pp A24.50hbk ,El2.95pbk)
W H O 1s HART C R A N E ?Paul Mariani's inspired
biography goes a long way towards answering that ques-
tion. The short answer is that Crane (1899-1932) was an
American visionary poet and drunk, 'who killed himself
at the age of thirty-two by leaping off a ferry into the
sea. Harold Bloom, in his introduction to The Complete
Poems of Hart Crane (published this month, also by
Norton, at R19.95), pegs him as one of the seven or
eight 'major American poets', along with Whitman
and Eliot.
This would have delighted Crane, not least because he
hero-worshipped Whitman, and conceived his
weightiest work, The Bridge, as a kind of answer to Eliot.
Crane felt that the pessimism of The Waste Land was its
flaw, and he set about constructing a rival myth, held
together by the overarching image of the bridge as an
emblem of man's creative achievement. H e spent seven
years (1923-30) writing this poem, and even then found
it impossible to finish. I've spent as long trying to read it,
with the same result.
That said, Crane always was a prophet-poet, in the
tradition of Dante and Blake, so perhaps we should not
complain too much if a good deal of what he wrote is
incomprehensible. 'Syntactically violent', we shall call it,
or 'possessed of high ellipticality', and instead give
thanks for those lines of his which rise to the surface
with a streamlined beauty. 'To Brooklyn Bridge', the
prelude to The Bridge and probably his best-known
single poem, is full of them.
The subject of another Mariani biography, William
Carlos Williams, resented the notoriety that went with
Crane's drinking and brawling - before he was canon-
ised bv his suicide (which Williams resented even more).
The homosexual and handsome Crane used to go o*
solo missions to the docks in search of friendly sailors.
At one point he subscribed to a Navy bulletin which
detailed the comings and goings of the fleets. At a party
in the chateau of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld at
Ermenonville, outside Paris, he tattooed his face with
India ink and danced the gotzotzsky. H e used to get
plastered in cafks without any means of paying the bill.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
H e was effectively deported from France and later
Mexico on account of his behaviour.
There is a lund of awe one feels at the spectacle of this
life lived on the edge, but it is tempered by the thought
that Crane was probably not capable of doing anything
else. Despite his father's unimaginative and well-
intentioned efforts to slot him into the family business
(making chocolates), he remained temperamentally
unsuited to a conventional career. Even writing. " did not
come easily t o him. Journalistic commissions lay
dependent on alcohol, and more convinced that The
Bridge was a failure and that his poetic talent had dried
up, he became increasingly impossible to live with. A
friend in Mexico recalled: '[he] would weep and shout,
shaking his fist. "I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am
Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ." But never once &d
I hear him say he was Hart Crane.'
Harold Bloom says that Mariani's is the best biography
of Hart Crane available; I am sure this is not influenced
by the fact they share the same publisher. Actually, The
Broken Tower is superior both to Philip Horton's 1937
study and to John Unterecker's hefty 1969 paperweight.
Mariani's approach is to write as if he were Hart Crane,
adopting the poet's ecstatic lyricism and his occasionally
fruity use of the vernacular, and, while retaining the
third person, presenting each episode from Crane's point
of view. This is the biography's strength and also its
weakness. Mariani gets into character as Crane to write
U
Crane's life, but forgets to come out of character when
explaining Crane's poetry. The result is that the long
exegeses of the poems, which take up about a third of
the-book. are-as lvrical and vatic as t h e voems
themselves. This is fine for a poem you understand
already. For a poem you do not, it is no help.
Harold Bloom provides a cleaner dissection of the
poetry in The Collected Poems. Nevertheless, The Broken
Tower is the most masterful guide to Crane's life. Its final
pages, filled with suicide attempts, make anxious rea&ng.
By April 1932, all the highballs, the clashes with the
authorities in Mexico and the news of complications
over his father's will had driven Crane to despair and
the decision that he must return to cleveland. H e
wrote to his stepmother: 'It certainly has about made a
nervous wreck of me. But I'll rest up on the boat.' O n
the Orizabana, sailing from. Havana to N e w York,
Crane got drunk again and made a nuisance of himself
with some of the crew. The purser had him bundled
into his cabin and the door nailed shut. This could not
keep Crane in. The next morning, on 27 April, clad
only in his pyjamas and a light topcoat, he said goodbye
to his companion, Peggy Cowley, with the words 'I'm
utterly disgraced', walked to the railing at the edge of
the deck, took off his coat, folded it over the rail, and
vaulted the parapet.
 FOREIGN PARTS
l
l
l

local commanders, who seemed to thrive most in the

chaos of post-Najibullah, mujaheddin-ruled Afghanistan,

A Bit Strict in fact preferred a climate of control and proper a h n -

istration. When the Taliban proved, after capturing
Kandahar, that they could deliver this, they won most of

on Women the rest of the country. They did it not by military

TALIBAN:
ISLAM,OILAND THE NEWGREAT
GAMEI N CENTRALASIA
* beautiful, infuriating country speaks to everyone else
By Ahmed Rashid
(IB Tauris 274pp A12.95)
IT I S PERHAPS the most extraordinary political
movement in the modern world: dedicated in all
seriousness to a literal return to the req~ire~ments of the
Koran. 'Taliban' means 'dlsciples', or 'religious students',
and in the early 1990s I would visit the madrasahs along
Palustan's border with Afghanistan and see some of these
unworldly, exiled students preparing for the day when
they would return to the country of their parents and
return it to full Islam. It never occurred to me then -
conquest but by persuading the local commanders to
come over to their side.
Ahmed Rashid has watched and visited Afghanistan
since before the Soviet invasion, and his love for this
who knows and loves it. In this exceedingly well-
informed, highly intelligent and compelling book,
Rashid proceeds (as anyone who wants to explain
Afghanistan must) by anecdote as much as by observation.
His explanation of the Taliban's success in Kandahar is
only one of a number of versions, but it is the most
convincing: in 1994 Mullah Omar heard that a local
commander had abducted and raped two young girls.
Omar attacked the base with thirty Talibs and only
sixteen rifles, released the girls, and hanged the commander
from the barrel of his own tank. 'How could we remain
quiet when we could see crimes being committed against
U

nor, I think, did it occur to any women and the poor?' he asked.
other Westerners who knew This is not the way the outside
Afghanistan - that the polite world regards the Taliban, of
young acolytes, with their uncut course. 'It is disgusting', com-
beards and their white robes, plained an angry female viewer
might, within a few years, take over when I visited Afghanistan to
the country. make an end-of-the-year report
I was last in Afghanistan in on the war, 'that you should have
December. The road to Jalalabad ignored the persecution of women
and Kabul from the Pakistani there. It's like going to Auschwitz
border-crossing at the Khyber Pass and ignoring the Holocaust.'
is worse than ever; yet the journey Well, of course, everything gets
can be made in only six hours, and compared to the Holocaust
the traveller's sole anxiety is for the nowa-days, but mere repetition does
tyres of his vehicle. The old check- not make the analogy any more
points, where uncontrolled local helpful. There are many aspects of
mujahedclin commanders (that is to Taliban rule whlch Western o~inion
say, bandits) could rob or kill you, finds unacceptable: the widespread
have been swept away. I saw only closure of girls' schools, the restric-
one: it consisted of three or foul- tions on the movements and dress
Taliban supporters sitting on of women, the systematic reintro-
hillock beside the road, brewi duction of sharia punishments, the
tea, chatting, and waving thc persecution of anti-fundamentalist
passing vehicles on without even intellectuals. and so on.
looking at them. This countr).. As a regime, it can indeed seem
where up until a few years ago no brutal and obscurantist. I once
man went out without his gun, I \ interviewed the Taliban Minister
now largely peaceful; and it ha\ of Health, Mullah Balouch (later
become rare even to see a weapon. killed fighting against the
The Taliban, under their extraor- Northern Alliance), who personal-
dinary, charismatic leader Mullah lv cut off the hands of thieves and
Omar, succeeded because even could not understand why the

I
1
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 c l FOREIGN PARTS
International Red Cross refused to join him in doing
the job. Those relatively few educated, Westernised
Afghan women who remain in Kabul find life almost
intolerable, though some believe they can see signs that
the fill ferocity of the law on hejab (set out by Ahmed
Rashid in a useful appendix) is starting to fade.
But knee-jerk reactions, whether from Western
feminists or the United States, rarely make an advisable
basis for action. The decision of the Clinton administra-
tion to impose sanctions on the Taliban because they
would not hand over the ludicrously inflated and
demonised Osarna bin Laden hurts no one except the
ordinary Afghan, and puts no serious pressure on the
TaLban themselves. 'Picking up single issues and creating
entire policies around them' is how Rashid rightly
describes this f d a r American instinct. In this case, it
results from the perception that Afghanistan is a political
black hole, affecting nothing and nowhere outside itself.
Ahmed Rashid demonstrates how foolish that is. Two
of the world's most simificant commodities - oil and
V
heroin - either can or do pass this wav. There is,
4
indeed, as the title of his booc proclaims, new Great
Game going on in Central Asia over these and other
issues, involving all the major powers in the area, fi-om
Russia to Turkey and Israel. Afghanistan lies, derelict
and ignored, in the middle, the waste ground on which
all the gangs of the region stage their rumbles by proxy.
There have been few greater betrayals in the past decade
than the decision of the Western powers, and America
most of all, to turn their backs on a country they only
cared about when they thought it made for good
anti-soviet propaganda.
Rashid's account of these things is, quite simply,
excellent; and you don't have to agree with his interpre-
tation of every single incident to see that he has got the
broad picture absolutely right. His publishers, I B Tauris,
deserve a word of praise as well. Like the quiet, unob-
trusive management of some highly successful football
team, they continue to spot winning titles and winning
authors in their articular field: Ahmed Rashid's is
merely the latest in a series of books which deserve to
become the definitive accounts of their subjects.
I
notPiochnW people who wantto make the most of the lnd
www.molemag.net
Visit our web site, telephone us or write
We look forward to hearing from
I I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
No Hope of Peace
In the Middle East
RIGHTEOUSVICTIMS:A HISTORYO F THE
ZIONIST-ARABCONFLICT1881-1999
*
By Benny Morris
Dohn Munay 752pp A25)
THE IRONWALL:ISRAEL
AND THE ARABWORLD
*
By Avi Shlaim
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 688pp A25)
MURDERIN THE NAMEOF GOD:
RABIN
THE PLOT TO KILLYITZHAK
*
By Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman
(Granta Books 292pp A13.99)
THE STATE OF Israel, now in its fifties, is more divided
than at any time in its history, but in many ways the
divisions reflect the Jewish state's growing maturity: it is
regarded less and less by the world as something special,
a plucky David facing the Arab Goliath. Israel has
become to a large extent just another state, with divi-
sions and difficulties of the kind experienced elsewhere.
Another symptom of Israel's maturity is its ability to
conduct honest and critical self-analysis. Just as school
textbooks are being revised to depict Arabs and Muslims
as people with a proud history, so revisionist historians
are sweeping away the layer of nationalist rhetoric
covering the popular version of many events in the
period leading up to the creation of Israel and the
half-century of its statehood.
Benny Morris's Ri,ghteous Victims is a tour de force, a
meticulbusly sourced-and balanced history of ~ionist-
Arab conflict &m 1881 until the present day. Although
the book covers such a long period, the author does not
skate over incidents that discredt the founders of Israel. In
language which is calm and dispassionate Morris describes
the actions of the Jewish underground against the British
mandate authorities and agrunst the Arabs in the kind of
detail that will make uncomfortable reading for many
Israelis. In particular, he devotes three pages to the mas-
sacre of Palestinian civilians in the vlllage of Deir Yassin in
1948 - an event which, more than any other, terrified
Palestinians elsewhere and was 'a major factor in their
massive fight during the followidg weeks and months'.
 At the same time, Professor Morris explains clearly the
abject failure of the Arabs to stand up to the Zionist
Movement or to the state of Israel itself. Time and
again, potential Arab action was paralysed by disunity,
with political leaders in disagreement and divisions
surfacing between rural and urban areas, and between
Muslims and Christians.
The author's views on the prospects for peace between
Israel and the Arabs are less than optimistic. 'No doubt'.
he says, 'most Arabs in some corner of their mind hope
for Israel's disappearance or destruction.' (He could
safelv have left out the element of doubt.) And while
Israel, winning all the wars with its neighbours, has
attracted some Arab leaders to the negotiating table,
these developments alone are not enough. 'Like most
nationalist movements. Zionism. once ascendant. was
unmarked by feelings of generosity toward its enemies
(even though it is clear that a durable peace, and hence
real security for Israel, could only be achieved on the
basis of genkrous concessions).'
A similar theme emerges from Avi Shlaim's The Iron
Wall. T h e title is taken from the writings of Ze'ev
Jabotinsky, the founder in the 1920s of the hardline
right-wing faction of the Zionist Movement and the
inspiration for Israelis on the far Right today, including
the former Likud Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Jabotinsky believed that there was no point in negotiating
with the Palestinians because their demand to remain
I Selected Letters
dominant in their land was not something that Zionism
could accept. Therefore, the Zionists should use force
against the Palestinians and build an iron wall against the
Arabs. And when the latter had bashed their heads on it
I of Rebecca West
in vain for long enough, they would negotiate - from
an inferior position.
This is largely the way it has turned o u t . T h e
Egyptians, the Palestinians and the Jordanians 'have
recognised Israel's invincibility and been compelled to
negotiate with Israel from a position of palpable weak-
ness'. Hardly the recipe for durable peace.
I Edited by Bonnie Kime Scott
Professor Shlaim's view is that the iron-wall mentality
has vervaded the Zionist Movement - before and after
the creation of Israel - ever since. In the most absorbing
chapter of all (making uncomfortable reading, this time,
for the Arabs), the author describes how a number of
Arab leaders secretlv sent veace overtures to Israel in the
years after its creation. But the then Prime Minister,
David Ben-Gurion, rejected them all. Alone among the
earlv Israeli leaders. Moshe Sharett believed in the ~ r i n -
ciplk of seelung peace with the Arabs, even conduchng a
dialogue, through third parties, with President Nasser of
Egypt. But in a milieu dominated by military leaders,
.,
I
there was no room for someone seeking to reach out
over the iron wall. Sharett was dismissed, prompting the
comment fiom Ben-Gurion: 'He is raising a generation
of cowards. I will not let him. I will not let him. This
r
will be a fighting generation.'
Curiously enough, it was one of the senior figures of
the fighting generation, Yitzhak Rabin, who finally
tried to bring down the wall. But before he could finish
his task h e was assassinated by an Israeli Jewish
fundamentalist, Yigal Amir. Murder in the N a m e of God, a
collaborative work by two Israeli journalists, describes
how Jewish fundamentalism grew, almost unnoticed.
They tell an interesting story, not just of how extremism
blossomed among Jewish settlers in the West Bank, but
also of the extent to which the fanatics were being
encouraged and funded by Jewish groups i n t h e
United States.
But the amazing aspect of Rabin's murder, which is
treated in detail in this book, is the way in which the
internal security services in Israel failed either to take
action against the fundamentalist groups or to act on
what they already knew about Yigal Amir. The security
services kept a file on him, but dismissed him as a
mentally disturbed loner. They failed to realise that, on
the contrary, he was the leader of an active group of
extremists. They also failed to grasp how vehemently
the move towards peace with the Palestinians instigated
by Rabin was viewed by Jewish fundamentalists as the
ultimate betrayal. These failures, and the subsequent
assassination of the first prime minister dedicated to
making peace, have contributed as much as anything else
to the current di\ i\ion\ \ \ l l i i l l , ~ f l l i c rIlrael.
"A unique, exhilarating and disturbing
torrent of letters by a unique,
exhilarating and disturbing woman
whose life and literary work spanned
almost a century...Forthright and
controversial, her letters range over
politics, literature, gossip, sex, friendship,
and her own extraordinary experience of
life."-Victoria Glendinning
Yale University Press
23 Pond Street London NW3 2PN
Tel: 020 7431 4422 E-mail: sales@yaleup.co.uk
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 I FOREIGN PARTS
P r o u d to be White, Even
If They Are Lost
LOST WHITETRIBES:
JOURNEYS AMONGST
THE FORGOTTEN
*
B y Riccardo Orizio
(Translated b y Avril Bardoni)
(Secker G. Warburg 271pp A15.99)
AT THE END of the long history of European imperialism
a strange flotsam of white survivors remains in small
forgotten communities throughout the globe. Some, like
the Baasters of Namibia and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,
are descendants of the first conquerors; others, like the
Poles of Haiti or the Germans of Jamaica, are relics of
the imperial armies. Stdl others, like the Confederados
of southern Brazil, are descended from a refugee influx
from distant wars. They are of little intrinsic interest
except to themselves, and they have few common
denominators. Their principal characteristics are poverty
and pride -pride in being white.
Few people brought up in the Anglo-Saxon historical
tradition would have had much interest in resurrecting
their stories, so it has been left to an Italian journalist to
put some life into these footnotes to history. In a world
where lives lived at the margin have moved to the fore-
ground, these strange tales may well find some readers.
Riccardo Orizio is clearly regarded as a 'fine writer' by
his publisher, and his acknowledgements give an enthu-
siastic nod in the direction of a clutch of foreign travel
writers, including Bruce Chatwin, Ryszard Kapuscinki
and Claudio Magris, as though the mere mention of
their names might cast reflected lustre on his own work.
Yet, for those who like stories about oddities who
escape the general pattern, there is much here for both
entertainment and reflection. Three of the six cases on
which Orizio has chosen to focus are to be found in the
Caribbeari: the Germans in Jamaica, the Poles in Haiti,
and the Blancs Matignons in Guadeloupe. Orizio went
in search of them, but none of them were easy to find or
to get to know. The Jamaican Germans arrived in the
1830s, when slavery was about to be abolished and
white landlords were worried about the future supply of
labour. Typically miserable poor whites, they ended up
being recruited to appear in the film Papillon. The Poles
of Haiti had comparably obscure origins, arriving with a
Polish legion sent by Napoleon to crush Haitian
independence in 1803. When Pope John Paul I1 arrived
in Haiti in 1983, the Poles in the hllls believed that he
I
had come to rescue them.
The inbred Blancs Matignons of Guadeloupe have an
even stranger story. They appear to be the descendants
of aristocratic French settlers who fled inland during.
" the
Revolution to escape the wrath of the French
Commissioner sent out from Paris. Some of them
believe that they are related to the Grimaldi family
of Monaco.
Orizio has rather more fun with the descendants of
the old Dutch empire in Sri Lanka and Namibia. The
Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka spoke Portuguese, the
language of an even older empire, and they survived the
arrival of the British at the end of the eighteenth century,
becoming an indispensable part of the-~ritishadminis-
trative machine. As such, they became an early target for
the first generation of Sri Lankan nationalists, and those
that have not emigrated now survive as a protected
species, laclung their earlier power and influence.
The Baasters of Namibia - the result of unions
between Dutch settlers and Khoi-Khoi. or Hottentots
- were among " the trekkers who moved north from the
Cape colony in the nineteenth century to escape from
the predatory British. Tolerated by the German empire,
they survive to this day in the Free Republic of
Rehoboth, sixty miles south of Windhoek.
Although Orizio has found some interesting and
original material, his treatment of these forgotten tribes
appears to lack any clear intellectual purpose. The reader
is left wondering why anyone's attention should be
drawn to these perhaps deservedly hsregarded peoples.
Orizio makes no comvarisons and draws no conclusions.
though he does sugg;st that 'all of us ...belong to a lost
tribe'. He also argues that 'the whites living among
Jamaican banana plantations are not basically different
from the Jamaican immigrants living on the outskirts of
Western cities'. That seems to me not to be so.
 I MUSIC
Everything you Need
to Know about Him
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH:
THELEARNED MUSICIAN
* of the valets de chambre - as well as a musician. Soon,
B y Christoph W O @
I (Oxford University Press 608pp L.25)
ON 28 JULYit will be the 250th anniversary of the death
of Johann Sebastian Bach. Produced to commemorate
the event, this book will, accorhng to its publishers, set a
new standard for Bach biography: and for once such
a claim is not far from the truth. Its author is Professor of
Music at Harvard, and dean of the Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences. In this work he displays, as one might
expect with those credentials, phenomenal erudition, not
just about his subject but about the inextricable consider-
ations of musical and court life in early eighteenth-
century Germany: there is not much one would ever want
to know about Bach that is not contained in these pages.
It is not, perhaps, a book for a
beginner. Those who are familiar
with Bach's music and wish to know
about the social, theological and
political contexts in which it was
written are clearly the target
audience. The technical descriptions
of music, always so intimidating to
the untrained, are couched in happily
familiar and comprehensible terms.
Those embarking on a journey
through Bach's work will find this
I
book a useful companion, and one
that becomes more relevant and
illuminating the further they travel. It
will also open the eyes of many readers
to the vital role that patronage from
the various small German courts of
L
the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies played in giving the German
states such an immense and enduring
musical culture: and, by extension, to Bach: prolij?c
why the uneducated, philistine
aristocracy of our own country saw to it that we had
almost none at all in Great ~ritain.
From amid the wealth of detail about almost every-
thing in Bach's life, ranging from the programming of
his concerts to the itineraries of his professional journeys,
much about the man himself shines through. He was
I
born in 1685, into the family of the town piper of
Eisenach in Thuringia. His family was packed with
musicians, and he quite naturally went into the trade
himself: as his obituary said, 'the love of our little Johann
Sebastian for music was uncommonly great'. After a
thorough classical and musical education, during which
he demonstrated a fine soprano voice and began to
compose, he started at the bottom: the job description
of his first post at the court in Weimar included the
direction that he was to be a 'lackey' - effectively one
though, he began to climb up the ladder.
Bach was a gified organist from his earliest years; but
he was also, as Christoph Wolff points out, a brilliant
organ mechanic. He helped his family make running
repairs on the organ in Eisenach as a child, and by the
age of eighteen knew as much about the construction
and engineering of organs as anyone. He earned a
decent living travelling around Germany from one
princeling to the next, inspecting organs and advising on
their repair and maintenance. In the course of doing so,
he advanced his reputation and made the contacts that
would be crucial to him in his career.
Until he settled at Leipzig as Capellmeister in 1723 -
a post he held until his death in 1750 - Bach gained
promotion by the late-twentieth-century practice of
moving jobs with- surprising
frecluencv. Wolff also shows what a
genius Bach was at screwing.money
out of his various princely and ducal
employers, not just for himself but
for lns second wife, the singer Anna
Magdalena Bach, as well. Despite
these efforts. he left his widow
dependent on charity after his death.
When one recalls, however, that he
fathered a total of twenty children
(nine of whom survived him) by
two wives, it becomes easier to see
where the money went.
Bach's habit of clearing off when-
ever he had a better offer occasionally
put him in some difficulty. His
attempt, eventually successful, to
leave Weimar for Anhalt-Cothen in
1717 led to lns spenhng a month in
prison for trying to 'force his
hsmissal'. He lefi h s post in 1723 on
better terms, so much so that he
retained the honorary title of Princely Capellmeister at
Cothen after he went-to Leipzig.. and returned for various
2 U.
guest appearances there. At Leipzig he was able to devote
himself to composing and performing what are massive
and probably s d his most celebrated works, the Passions.
German court life, like any other, harboured its share
LITERARY REVIEW April 20(
 MUSIC
of backstabbing and petty jealousies. Bach was a serious
music scholar, and a man of all-round learning: Wolff
details his library, which as well as containing learned
works on music also branched out into the classics and
theology. Bach was well equipped for his additional
teaching duties at St Thomas's School at Leipzig, even if
his radlcal conduct brought him into conflict with the
hidebound headmaster, Rector Ernesti. That local
difficulty aside, Bach was able to work in a way which
ensured that he and Leipzig were put on the musical
map for ever.
His death, after a life in which no ill-health had been
discernible, was gruesome: he died tkom the after-effects
of a botched eye-operation carried out by a visiting
English oculist, Sir John Taylor, the details of which
ALL THREE COPLANDS
AARONCOPLAND:THELIFE AND WORKOF
A N UNCOMMONMAN
* song cycle based on
By Howard Pollack
(Faber G Faber 687pp A30)
AARON COPLAND, WHO was as quintessentially American
as Elgar or Vaughan Williams were British, is often
considered the musical voice of the United States. In a
long life he wrote sixty works, and his oeuvre extend to
variations on previously composed works and orchestral
I
I
suites drawn from ballets, operas and film music. He was
versatile and experimented with jazz, the twelve-tone
method and musical abstractionism as well as orthodox
tonality. The usual judgement is that there are two
distinct Coplands: the accessible, tonal, lyrical composer
of Appalachian Spring, The Tender Land, Billy the Kid,
Rodeo and the Third Symphony on the one hand, and
the esoteric creator of the Piano Variations, Symphonic
O d e , Connotations and Inscape on the other. As with
Prokofiev and Stravinsky, who also each composed in
two very different styles, the two strands of composing
rarely met; of twentieth-century composers only Bartok
successfully integrated the romantic tradition of the
nineteenth century with the. dissonance of the twentieth.
Actually, as Howard Pollack shows, there are really
three Coplands, for the distinguished movie scores he
composed put another wheel on the wagon. One of the
most commendable things about Pollack's excellent
biography is that he takes film music seriously, and does
not evince the de haut en bas attitude of most music
critics. Not only does Pollack understand the world of
Hollywood very well - the distinguished director
William Wyler was always trying to get Copland to
I LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
Wolff gives with his usual meticulousness and scholarship
(but they are probably best read on an empty stomach).
The book is rounded off with a thoughtful essay on
Bach and perfection in music, which is a springboard for
hrther listening, and not just to Bach.
Although at times a little earnest, and rather swamped
with detail, Wolfi book is a Rolls-Royce of a biography.
It is hard to imagine anyone finding anything new to say
about the great composer after this author's thorough
and painstaking job. Above all, however, Wolff's
achievement is to make the reader want to go off and
listen to the music in a different, more enlightened way.
To order 'Johann Sebastian Bach' at the special price of L 2 3
with free UK pGp call Literary Review Bookshop on 0181
324 551 0 or use ourform on page 39.
score his films - but
his thorough" knowl-
edge generates unex-
pected insights. He
points out that it was
no accident that
Copland wrote his
poems by Emily
Dickinson immedi-
ately after his score
for the Wyler movie
T h e Heiress - a
version of Henry
James's Washington
Square. Pollack argues
persuasively
Sloper could have
been contemporaries
and that they faced
that
Diclunson and James's
heroine Catherine
1 Copland: edgy
similar problems:
overweening respect for a distant father, followed by
withdrawal fi-om the world.
O n Copland the composer, Pollack is invariably lucid,
judicious and insightful. His portrait of Copland the
man is also fascinating. Three facts are salient: Copland
was Jewish, leftist and homosexual. The Jewishness does
not seem to have struck deep roots in his music and
there is no evidence of Zionism; indeed, both musically
and as a 'promised land' Copland preferred Mexico to
Israel. However, Copland's role as a man of pronounced
leftist sympathies takes Pollack into interesting areas. In
the 1930s Copland regarded Communism as the true
spirit of Americanism, the logical conclusion of the
ideas of Jefferson, Lincoln and Walt Whitman. But in
the very different climate of the post-1945 Cold War
Copland had to do some nifty verbal juggling to avoid
 -
I l here is one writer on whose work
all other writers focus
"I consider Sebald to be one of the most original new
proscription by the anti-Communist zealots. When \.oices to have come from Eiu-ope in recent years."
summoned before Senator McCarthy's notorious
PAULAUSTEK
inquisitorial committee, Copland played a cool hand,
appearing to co-operate but luring the committee onto "One emerges from it shaken, seduced and deeply
ground where it got bogged down in a morass of detail
and obfuscation. Had McCarthy and his acolytes not irnpressed." ANITA BROOK'VER
been so stupid, they would have realised that Copland I "Sebald infi~seshis prose with tlie tension oSa stylish
was making monkeys of them.
Pollack devotes a lot of attention to Copland's homo- thriller and this atmosphere of paranoia keeps us turning
sexuahty, without really offering any explanation for his the pages." ALAIN DE BOTTON
'deviant' socialisation. His significant partners included . v.
1. ,..-h~.,bl*l

Leonard Bernstein and Victor Krafi, but he was promis- "It ~sn'toften that I am siae'l$
cuous and had numerous lovers among the young men
he picked up in gay bars. He refused to 'come out' and curiousl> ewtlltg and ~nv~gorating
"
deplored the overt campness of his friend Bernstein,
who, together with Koussevitzky, was his principal
champion among the world's leading conductors. Pollack
flirts with the curious yet intriguing argument that the
tonal and melodic composers of the twentieth century
were gay ('feminine') while the atonalists and serialists
were macho, but admits that no convincing correlation
can be made between Copland's music and his sexuality.
Copland made a bad mistake when he propositioned

' $
Roy Harris, the good-looking heterosexual composer.
Not onlv did Harris rebuff him. but he took the view
that coiland had stolen his musical thunder and that he
(Harris) was the authentic musical voice of America, the
Walt Whitman of the concert halls. One of the surprises
of Pollack's fine biography is to discover the edginess of
Copland's relations with his fellow American composers.
I1 6

While he maintained cordial relations with Benjamin

Britten in England and Carlos Chivez in Mexico, jeal- 1'4%
ousy and recrimination impeded any real entente at
k 4
home. He dld not get on with Gershwin and resented his
rival's greater musical popularity. His relations with the
other first-division American comDosers were similarlv

3
frosty. Virgil Thomson, who regarded Copland's secre-
tiveness and reticence as a machiavellian career ploy and "l-or all the POW er of'\\ hat is \\ ritten by Scbald, nhat is
hinted that his success was due to the 'Jewish Mafia', par-
ticularlv dlsliked him. but then Thomson detested evew- tiot stated lno~nsthe largest." JEYYVDISKI

I(
one and everything, so that is perhaps no great matter.
I
Pollack's life of Copland is a major achievement. For
once, the decision to eschew a straight linear narrative in
favour of thematic treatment works, as it seldom does in
Vertigo
biography, mainly because Copland's external life was
uneventful and thus, as a conventional stow. rather dull. the new masterpiece by I
But it is difficult to 'think of any sipifican; 'aspect of his

WGSEBALD
I
life that is lefi untreated, whether Copland's austerity of
lifestvle. meanness with monev. , taste for belles-lettres.
,

espeiially Santayana, or musical likes and dislikes (he

loved Bach, Beethoven, Palestrina, Mussorgsky, Verdi
and Mahler; he dlsliked Wagner, Bruckner and Sibelius).

I
This is a superb book about the composer who best available from all good bookshops in hardback at
expresses the ideal of America as the 'city on a hdl', if 16.99 and trade paperback at f 12.00.
not the gruesome reality.
I I h c Han 111 Pmra. I AILCC Ron. BFIIIUI\ Rd.
 OPPRESSION
HATEFUL CERTAINTIES
THEBATTLEFOR GOD
* bleakness of modernity, the other great begetter of
By Karen Amstrong
(HarperCollins 442pp A1 9.99)
KARENARMSTRONG HAS a tough mind and a tender
heart. She can tell a menace when she sees one, analyse
it thoroughly and summarise it fairly. She belongs to the
sympathetic school of scholarship, and tries to share her
subjects' points of view rather than affecting dispassion.
Her new book is an attempt to understand one of the
most bafiling and revolting movements of our times: the
rise of religious fundamentalism. Even Karen Armstrong
is hard-pressed to find something generous to say
about it.
She starts by bucking the need to define fundamental-
ism, on the grounds that the term is imperfect and
misleadmg, though ineluctable and 'here to stay'. All the
movements we call fundamentalist are different but can
be identified by the excesses they share: militancy,
hostility to pluralism and a determination 'to sacralise
politics and national struggle'. Fundamentalists are self-
cast as warriors against secularism in 'a cosmic war
between the forces of good and evil'. Their dogmas and
scriptures are not their defining characteristics but rather
strategies to 'fortify their beleaguered identity'. After
these preliminary declarations, Armstrong takes an
avowedly selective path through the material, telling the
stories of what seem to her to be representative or
interesting hndamentalist movements in Protestantism,
Judaism and Sunni and Shiite Islam. She reaches back to
the late fifteenth century to sketch their backgrounds.
The conclusions, as always in Armstrong's work, are
well documented, soundly reasoned and calculatedly
provocative - indeed, cleverly counter-intuitive.
Fundamentalism is an aspect of what she calls 'modernity':
it is never quite clear what she means by this term but its
most important ingredient, for her argument, is a scale
of values which puts science and practical utility at or
near the top. Fundamentalism is scientific or, at least,
pseudo-scientific. It treats religion as reducible to
matters of incontrovertible fact. It is hateful not just
because it is bloodstained and barbarous but also because
it is charmless and humdrum - a Gradgrind-religion
with all the enchantment filleted out. Fundamentalists
are victims of the transformation of the modern world,
trapped in the 'God-shaped hole' which godlessness has
left in the fabric of life. The real disaster has been the
forfeiture of archaic, inclusive, compassionate, mystical
spirituality: Karen Armstrong associates this with what
XTERARY REVIEW April 2000
she calls 'pre-modern' religion. Fundamentalists may
have primitive mindsets, antiquated ideas and
su~erannuateddoctrines. but make no mistake about it:
according to Karen Armstrong's history, they are 'ardent
modernisers', who have 'absorbed the Godless and
genocidal tendencies of modernity'. Apart from the
fundamentalism is fear: fear of millennia, of Great
Satans, of chaos and, above all, fear of the unfamiliar. To
fundamentalists, all dfference is subversive.
O n the way to this impressive thesis, Armstrong
displays all her usual talents: she has an eye for colourfill
evidence, a wonderful gift for clarity of exposition and
an unerring sense of pace and voice in narrative. The
least successfbl part of the book is the attempt to provide
a long-term perspective in the first four chapters. For
the first eighty pages the reader is bemused by the need
to explore so far back in the past and the explanation,
when offered, is unconvincing. For nothing recognisable
as 'modernity' really began at the start of the sixteenth
century: this way of periodising the past is a relic of
exploded historiographies. And no one called himself a
'fundamentalist', as far as I know, until the early
twentieth century.
The scholarship in these early chapters is flawed by
hurry: she relies on Paul Johnson's History of the Jews,
which is in many ways a great book, but it is not a
reliable or up-to-date source on fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Spain. The Wahhabites of eighteenth-
century Arabia, who are often plausibly said to have
established a tradition to which today's Islamic funda-
mentalists are heirs, get only a brief paragraph. Some of
the movements of 'reform' and 'renewal' which might
be said to have exhibited fundamentalism avant la lettre
are given short shrift. Armstrong gives us an engaging
rogues' gallery of fanaticism but it is not clear how much
it has to do with the subject of the rest of the book.
In her account of the-late nineteenth centurv and the
twentieth, however, every line counts and every story
grips. Armstrong is particularly convincing on the
vicissitudes of Protestant hndarnentalism. She takes us to
Princeton in the early 1900s, to see intelligent minds
corrupted by a literal-minded dogmatism in
reaction against critical Bible-readings. We penetrate
backwoods America for a sense of the crises that have
scotched fundamentalism but have not killed it. She
brilliantly evokes the confrontation of Darwinism and
Creationism in Tennessee in 1925 (unfortunatelv. , ,
Armstrong finished her book before the recent recrudes-
cence of this conflict in Kansas). She deftly relates the
sex and cash scandals that beslimed televangelism in the
Eighties. Armstrong's picture of current Jewish funda-
mentalism, with practitioners who license genocide and
sanctif;j revenge, is particularly chilling. And she gives
clear and sensitive accounts of revolutionary Islam in
 OPPRESSION
present-day Egypt and Iraq. She is properly cautious
about the abiding threat: fundamentalism seems to be
experiencing a check but remains menacing.
Missing from her analysis is any specific explanation of
the extraordinary appeal of fundamentalism in today's
world - its enormous constituency, the confidence of
its challenge. The 'modernity' Armstrong sees as its
breedng-ground has been around for a long time. Why
is fundamentalism so rampant now? T h e huge
allegiances it commands are proof of the strength of a
folkish reaction against relativism, pluralism, multicultur-
alism and scepticism; its power to reassure is irresistible
to the rootless and the baffled. Modernity may have
been its nursery but in post-modernity fundamentalism
incubates even more intensively. It ought to repel
anyone endowed with a normal dose of decency or
intelligence and appeal only to the desperate and &m: its
rise is evidence of how many desperate, dim people
there are out there. A comprehensive study would
embrace the psychology of fundamentalism: the comfort
effect of cocksure assertions and unthinking certainties.
Fundamentalism demands a closed mind and the
suspension of critical faculties. It is the very negation of
real religion, for doubt is a component of faith and reason
is a divine gift. Protestant fundamentalists embrace an
obvious lie: that the Bible is unmediated by human
hands and weaknesses. In justifjing violence, terrorising
dissenters and bloodily enforcing moral conformity,
Islamic fundamentalists wantonly misconstrue their own
sacred texts. In recent years, 'Christian fundamentalism'
has become almost as much a political term as 'Muslim
fundamentalism'. This is profoundly disturbing, because
when fundamentalists get power, they usually start per-
secuting the rest of us. Some fundamentalist sects, with
their crushing effects on individual identity, their ethic
of obedience, their paranoid habits and their campaigns
against the rest of the world, behave in frightening ways
like the early fascist cells. Meanwhile, their witch-hunts
and book-burnings continue. They have given us a lot
t o worry about. Thanks to Karen Armstrong, our
anxieties are much better informed, if unallayed.
New Authors
Publish Your Work
ALL S U B J E C T S C O N S I D E R E D
Fiction, Non-fiction, Biography,
Religious, Poetry, Children's
wrlte, or send your manuscript to:
M I N E R V A P R E S S
31 5-31 7 REGENT STREET. LONDON W1 R N B , ENGLAND
www.minerva-press.co.uk
I
Faith and Hope in the
United Nations
DELIVERUS FROMEVIL:
WARLORDS& PEACEKEEPERS
I N A WORLD
OF ENDLESS
CONFLICT
*
By William Shawcross
(Bloomsbury 404pp k20)
SHORTLYBEFORE CHRISTMAS 1996, six people working
for the International Committee of the Red Cross were
shot dead in their beds in Chechnya. The turnout at
their funeral in Geneva's St-Pierre Cathedral was vast;
and so was the sense of shock. For almost the first time
in the history of the Red Cross its delegates, in their
distinctive red armbands, had been made targets for
attack. The increasingly perilous nature of humanitarian
work is one of the themes of William Shawcross's ambi-
tious and fascinating Deliver Us From Evil. Another is
how the international humanitarian community, while
claiming not to be able to deal with the disorder to
which the world has been reduced, has in fact dealt with
it over the past decade.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall there was talk of a
new order, based on peace and security. Within weeks
the optimism was replaced by the uneasy realisation that
peace was not, after all, about to descend on the thirty
or so countries currently at war, and the uneasiness grew
more marked as it became clear that the world was in
fact embarking on a new phase of barbarity and anarchy.
All established patterhs of warfare seemed to vanish as
one civil war after another broke out, in which recog-
nisable armies no longer faced each other across defined
battlefields under the command of identifiable officers,
but where warlords fought skirmishes of extreme brutality
with no reference to, or even knowledge of, the Geneva
Conventions. Often their ranks were swelled by child
soldiers, as Kalashnikovs became light and easy to carry.
Atrocities - rape, mutilation, mass killings - became
common. By the middle of the decade, there were 56
wars, 17 mlllion refugees and 26 million people forced
to leave their homes because of fighting. Part reporter,
part analyst, Shawcross investigates each of the larger
conflicts that marked the 1990s: Somalia, Rwanda,
Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor and others.
Humanitarian debates started, of course, long before
the Berlin Wall came down. Biafra in 1966, when war
broke out between the entrepreneurial Ibos of eastern
Nigeria and the dominant Hausas of the northern
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I OPPRESSION
provinces, is generally accepted as the defining moment
in humanitarianism: the public, alerted to the conflict by
television, for the first time took stock of the famine
caused by war and called for intervention. Many of the
debates today about the role and nature of intervention
stem from that moment: there is the fact that the
problem is often not the amount of food supplied, but
how to make it available; the question of how to ensure
that you feed the victims and not those responsible for
the conflict; and the fear that by taking in aid you may
actually be prolonging the war.
Biafia was but a shadow of what was to come. Somaha,
in 1991, was not just the place where peacekeepers and
refugees became pawns in games played by warlords, but
also the first conflict in which the humanitarians were
forced to carry arms to protect themselves. There is a
sense in which warlords dominated the 1990s, and the
history of that decade may be defined by the ways in
which the international community confronted them.
Shawcross's account of the UN's attempts to capture the
Somali warlord Aideed would be comic were it not so
tragic. Jonathan Howe, a retired US admiral and special
U N representative in Somalia, put up notices around
Mogadishu offering a $25,000 reward for his capture.
Aideed responded by putting up posters of Howe.
Aideed was, not surprisingly, rather better informed
about Somalia and its clans than Howe. In the end, after
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
1 1
a number of peacekeepers &ed, the US launched an air-
borne assault. Some thousand Somalis were lulled, along
with eighteen U N soldiers; but Aideed was not caught.
Within days, Clinton pulled out d remaining troops.
How much is humanitarian intervention - the
ICRC has a mandate to intervene where it perceives a
need - led by a public ever keener to respond to the
disasters it sees on the news, yet ever more determined
to keep its own casualties to a minimum? Nowhere was
this paradox clearer or more dreadful than in Rwanda,
where the few U N forces present were pulled out when
the massacres began, or in Srebrenica, which fell to the
besieging Serb forces in July 1995 while U N forces
stood by and did nothing. In the words of the judge at
the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
there were 'scenes of unimaginable savagery: thousands
of men executed and buried in mass graves ...children
lulled before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to
eat the liver of his own grandson. These are truly scenes
from hell, written on the darkest page of human history'.
Few catastrophes have exposed more graphically the
inconsistencies of our approach to ethnic conflict.
Shawcross's real interest, however, is in the role of the
UN, and particularly that of its new Secretary-General,
Kofi Annan, who took over from the unpopular Boutros
Boutros-Ghali in 1997. Over the last three years,
Shawcross has followed in Annan's footsteps, often
 OPPRESSION I
LIFE FOR RUSSIAN CHILDREN
"P
N
SIDE
travelling with him, and some of the best passages in
Deliver Us From Evil are his descriptions of an obviously
exceptional man battling with a totally impossible job.
The U N Charter has practically nothing to say on the
Secretary-General's job. Annan took up his post promis-
ing to create a more open UN, closer to people and to
non-governmental organisations. His manner, writes
Shawcross, is persuasive but he never loses his dignity or Nikolai is lucky.
his authority, and he has a presence that stems from
He lives with his
innate calm and politeness. In a world of shifting views,
Annan possesses the skd to make people change their family.
minds without feeling " threatened.
Yet Annan is in the terrible position of living in an age He is not in an
when people, fired by images on television, demand
instant action for which there is neither the will. nor the institution.
volunteers, nor the money. President Sommaruga of the
Red Cross has repeatedly said that the human costs of
the never-ending violence are overwhelming the world's
ability to respond.
Deliver Us From Evil is a meticulously researched book,
with new insights into the wars of the 1990s and the
world's complex reaction to them. It is about politics In Russia 94% of children born with Down Syndrome
and commitment, and the lengths to which
prepared to go to save the lives of others. More than any
are
...
are institutionalised only half survive to see their
writer before him, Shawcross has attempted to analyse first birthday.
the conseauences. failures and achievements of the U N
peacekeeping mission. Not surprisingly, so much detail Those who do survive are condemned to a life of
is hard to digest. Where Shawcross excels is in his ability institutional deprivation and neglect. They are
to paint the larger picture as well. It is not as depressing officially classified as "idiots".
as it might be.
One of the main questions at the heart of the book is
Downside Up is devoted to improving the quality
whether or not the U N Charter can and does provide
adequate defence against evil. Shawcross concludes that of life for children with Down Syndrome and their
it can, and that occ~sionallyit does. Even if warlords like families.
Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are still free,
the two International War Crimes Tribunals have begun 'Downside Up does offer them u choice, a chance to
their work and in the summer of 1998, in Rome, 120 keep their child in the family and curefor it in the best
countries agreed to set up an International Criminal way at the same time'.
Court to try cases of mass murder and genocide wherever Ralph Fiennes, IlSU Patron.
they have been committed. (The US, in the company of
Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, Israel and China, refused to
sign; it also refuses to pay its huge debt to the UN.)
The 1990s saw humanitarian aid turn not simply into For as little as 50 pence per day you can help children
a political enterprise but into a military one. ~ h e alsoi like Nikolai who benefit from Downside Up's Early
saw, Shawcross argues, a real willingness to embrace the Intervention Centre and family support programmes.
'new diplomacy', in which the Red Cross, non-govern-
mental organisations and ordinary citizens could and did To find out inore about Downside Up or to sponsor a child
put pressure on their governments not just for action but please contact: Debbie Watson, Downside Up
for accountability. The word 'impunity' entered the lan- 9 Warwick Street, London W I R 5RA
guage of human rights, with a determination that killers Tel: 020-7292 2570 or Fax: 020-7434 3366
must be brought to trial. All these, concludes Shawcross,
are promising signs. One can only hope that he is right. E-mail: debbie@downsideupI .freeserve.co.uk
To order 'Deliver Us From Evil' at the special price of L18
I >v\\nsidc t Jp IS the opr;tting narnc of I k)wnsidc l Jp I .imitcd, a rcgistcrcd IJK
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 I OPPRESSION
PROFITABLE FOR SOME
REPUTATIONS
UNDERFIRE: WINNERS AND
LOSERSIN THE LIBELBUSINESS
* defendant are correspondingly suppressed. The plaintiff
By David Hooper
(Little, Brown 552pp A25)
ENGLISH LIBEL LAW is one of the wonders of the world
that deserve commemoration in the great Dome itself.
Although some means of legally protecting unjustly
defamed reputations is a requisite of any properly
ordered state, under the English system this aspect is
largely incidental. The origins of English libel law lie in
the first Statute of Westminster of 1275, which ruled
that 'from henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish
any False News of Tales, whereby discord...may grow
between the King and his People, or the Great Men of
the Realm'. Such disturbing reports were categorised as
'false, horrible, malicious, vile, unseemly, heynous,
phantasticall, lies, sehtious and slanderous'.
Much has changed since 1275 (not all for the better),
but the fundamental purpose of the libel laws remains
unaltered. While the present monarch may personally
choose not to make such use of them as her predecessors
were accustomed to do, the protection of 'the Great
Men of the Realm' remains as much a priority in the
twenty-first century as it was in the thirteenth.
Doubtless the de Clares, Mortimers and FitzAlans would
have regarded today's ennobled entrepreneurs and media
macmates with dis-dain. but it is undeniable that Bob
~ o i t h b ~'~stablishment'
's has succeeded to the position
enjoyed by the great magnates of Edward 1's reign.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Whig
oligarchs extracted much of the weaponry of seditious
libel law from the hands of the Crown, shifting it into
the field of civil law. However, its prime purpose, that of
protecting 'the Great Men of the Realm' from being
criticised by their inferiors, was if anything entrenched
yet more securely within the legal system. This was
ensured as much as anything by the lack of real
distinction between the executive and judiciary branches
of government in this country.
Libel lawyers are generally chary of discussing the his-
tory or objectives of the laws from which their huge
incomes derive. However, the facts speak for themselves.
Consider the following. Unique to English libel actions
is the concept that the defendant is guilty until proved
innocent. Unique again to libel actions is the prohibition
of legal aid to defendants, on grounds so patently disin-
genuous as scarcelv ever to be aired. The motivation and
Lharacter of the defendant are essentially discounted by
lTERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
the court, whereas the virtues of an influential plaintiff
are likely to be extolled by judges, in terms which make
the panegyrists of the later Roman emperors appear
petulant detractors. The supposed suffering undergone
by the (usually wealthy and secure) plaintiff is dwelt
upon at length by sympathetic judges, while the danger
and fear that an unsought action visits upon the unwary
is rigorously protected from any disclosure of
hscreditable behaviour not considered directly relevant
to the action, while the reputation of the defendant is as
often as not subjected to harsher excoriation by the
Judge than by the plaintim counsel.
More - much more - could be cited to make it
manifest that our libel laws have been carefully crafted
for the prime purpose of protecting wealthy, influential
and determined members of the ruling elite. David
Hooper, a solicitor specialising in libel, has written an
entertaining survey of some of the more notorious
cases of recent times. Although nothing suggests that
many libel lawyers wish to see so lucrative a source of
income drastically reformed, Hooper notes some of the
more extravagant inequities of the system. He dwells
(as no one writing on the topic can avoid doing) on
the extent to which the late Robert Maxwell was
enabled to perpetrate his massive swindles under the
protective mantle of the law of libel. He points out the
lengths to which foreign litigants go in seeking to have
actions heard in English courts, other countries' legal
systems not being quite so attentive to the protection
of plaintiffs.
Hooper is amusing and instructive on many of the
scandala magnatum of recent times: Robert Maxwell,
Jonathan Aitken, Mohammed 'Al' Fayed, the farcical
McDonald's case, Virgin Airways v British Airways, et al.
My tussle with Lord Aldington (in the eyes of the judge
certainly a 'Great Man of the Realm', though his title
may not ascend to the Plantagenets) is accorded a
chapter. Regrettably, it does not inspire much
confidence in the author's accuracy or the profundity of
his research. Almost everything Hooper writes about the
hearing, regardless of which side he seems to favour,
gives the impression that he has done little more than
browse hurriedly through a file of newspaper cuttings.
He certainly never spoke to the principals involved, nor
does he appear to have consulted the trial transcript.
My assumption is that where he was acting for one of
the parties, as in the case of Fayed, Hooper's account
of events is likely to be reasonably accurate, but the
remainder ranges from superficial to downright wrong.
This is a pity, since a properly researched history of
English libel law would be instructive as well as enter-
taining, and might even lead to some reform of a system
as ludicrous as it is unjust. However, I doubt whether
those who profit from it have much cause to worry.
 1 - AMERICAN FICTION
UNRAVEL A MEMOIR
* interest us in Chick in his own right should surely have
By Saul Bellow
(Viking 254pp A1 6.99)
SAULBELLOW'SFIRST work as a twenty-first-century
novelist is an account of the death of a modern Socrates.
Gay, charismatic and provocative, Abe Ravelstein is a
professor of philosophy at a Midwestern university
(almost certainly Chicago) who teaches a course on
great thinkers from the Greeks to Nietzsche. Once a cult
figure Gted only by his past and present students, he has
recently been made famous by a bestselling book
attacking relativism, the education system and the
dumbing-down of America.
Like Socrates, Ravelstein is an inspirational teacher, at
once affectionately teasing and almost cruelly
demanding. According to the novel's narrator, an older
writer identified only as 'Chick', his 'serious preoccupa-
tions coexist with his buffoonery', so that he is earnest
about 'real issues - say, the correct ordering of the
human soul' but always ready to 'cut a caper'. He likes
Me1 Brooks movies as well as baroque music, is excited
to discover that Michael Jackson is staying at the same
hotel, invites students over for televised basketball games
as well as philosophical discussions. He is bewitching in
his contradictions - severe and frivolous, cerebral and
sensual, a pursuer of eternal values addicted to gossip
and luxury goods, a neo-conservative who lives with
an oriental toyboy.
Far less emerges about Chick, whose suggestion of a
book for a general audience led to Ravelstein's bestseller,
enabling the previously cash-strapped scholar - by now
a guest of and guru to Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher - to buy his ties in London and his Lanvin
suits and Lalique glassware in Paris. Knowing death from
Aids is imminent, Ravelstein makes a suggestion of his
own - Chick should become his biographer, taking
Boswell's L$e ofjohnson and Keynes's epistolary profles
of the statesmen at the Versailles Peace Conference as
his models.
Although billed as its author's thirteenth novel, this
book lacks many of the conventional features of fiction.
Remarkably static even by Bellow's standards, it has no
moral crisis and no narrative development other than
the hero's movement towards death. Conversation
replaces plot; Ravelstein and Chick talk, in Chicago and
Paris, and their exchanges prompt the latter to musings
about his friend, memories of past incidents and sketches
of figures in their circle.
I
Equally lacking is novelistic shape. Chick tends to be
rambling and repetitive, and the final section describes a
Caribbean holiday he takes with his wife Rosamund
after Ravelstein's death, when he is nearly lulled by the
toxin in an undercooked fish. Read as fiction, this
ending seems crudely bolted on; a novelist intending to
made him more than a cipher in the previous 200 pages
and given the book a different title.
But to take it purely as fiction would be naive;
Bellow's coda describes his own poisoning in 1995, after
which he spent a month in intensive care. Rosamund,
his saviour, is his fifth wife Janis, and Ravelstein is based
on the late M a n Bloom, author of The Closing of the
American Mind. Cast in an uneasy hybrid form, the book
becomes accordingly difficult to assimilate and assess,
leaving one uncertain whether to read it as a novel or as
a biographical essay. D o the secondary figures, for
example, contribute to an overall coherence of meaning,
o r are they n o more than real, lightly disguised
campus characters?
The puzzle Ravelstein presents is why Bellow chose
fiction at all, rather than writing a non-fiction memoir.
And the answer must be that it allows him to write an
elegy for a vanishing style of mind, not just an individual
academic. Dying 'as this stupefying century ends',
Ravelstein relishes the chance encounters and sybaritic
opportunities of the city as much as the dialectic of the
seminar room, and is as familiar with the feats o f
Michael Jordan as with the works of Rousseau. The last
of Bellow's line of Jewish intellectuals, he epitomises a
certain combination of moral gravitas and voracious
hunger for experience - a combination that will die
with him, thanks to the process of cretinisation his
bestseller described.
Much of the above also applies to Bellow himself, it is
'hard not to notice, and the otherwise inexplicable
juxtaposition of Chick/Bellow's near-death with his
friend's death invites that connection. Unravelled,
Ravelstein adumbrates how its author yearns to be
commemorated, tensely aware that a conventional biog-
raphy (by James Atlas) is imminent. Despite Chick's
apparent artlessness, his friend is evoked in all his tangled
contradictoriness with a masterly vividness which is
possible only to a Boswellian biographer, on relaxed,
even intimate, terms with his subject.
Beginning with Ravelstein spilling coffee on a new
$4,500 suit, and ending with him listening to Rossini
while dressing to go out, Bellow concentrates o n
moments seemingly too trivial to find a place in a
standard linear chronicle. But only by thus re-creating
someone's living presence does one defy death, he
suggests and demonstrates, implicitly anticipating that
his own memorial - Atlas's book - will be far
more marmoreal.
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 [ AMERICAN FICTION
Epic Fairy Tale Told as
a Shakespearian Tragedy
BLONDE
* Shakespearian tragedy, being dlvided into five parts, or
By Joyce Carol Oates
(Fourth Estate 738pp A1 6.99)
A FEW YEARS ago, I was talking to Joyce Carol Oates,
who teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University,
about a poem she had written describing a deer in her
garden. 'Actuall$ she told me, 'there were five deer; but
art must simpli@.' I recalled this wry remark when readlng
Blonde, her twenty-fourth novel, which is based on the
life of Marilyn Monroe. At 738 pages, it is a lavish,
overatic narrative. which sees ~ o n i o &storv as both an
k e r i c a n and a female tragedy. From ~ o r h a nMailer
to Elton John, most of the writers and biographers who
have mythologised Marilyn Monroe as 'goddess' or 'leg-
end' have been men. Oates's version is noteworthy first
of all because she has tackled the subject of Monroe's life
I and legend from a feminist perspectiA.
But even more significantly, in an era
when much women's fiction tends to be
domestic, psychological, and personal,
the epic scope and ambition of this
novel demands attention. Oates has been
fearless in taking on a subject that
criss-crossed almost every important
strand of mid-twentieth-century
American culture - sports, religion, lit-
erature, theatre, politics, and, of course,
the Hollywood dream machine. Apart
from her, only Don DeLillo, among
today's American novelists, and no one
at all among today's American women
novelists, would be able to handle such a
huge cast of imagined and real characters,
among them Darryl Zanuck, Van
Johnson, Richard Widmark, Marlon
Brando, John Huston, Joe DiMaggio,
Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Arthur
Miller, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift,
and JFK; or weave in such a complex
background of political and historical
events. This is truly the Balzacian novel
towards which Oates has been striving
throughout her career.
Yet, despite the book's length and dar-
ing, the work of condensation, stylisation Monroe: Blonde Ambition
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
and, to use her word, 'dlstillation' has clearly been needed
in setting this vast, messy story in an aesthetic context. In
an author's note, Oates explains that 'in place of numerous
foster homes in which the child Norma Jean lived,
Blonde explores only one and that fictitious; in place of
numerous lovers, medical crises, abortions and suicide
attempts and screen performances, Blonde explores only a
select, symbolic few.'
Structurally, the novel is designed to mirror
acts, dedicated to the Shakespearian critic Michael
Goldman (and to his wife Eleanor Bergstein, a
Hollywood film-writer and producer), and framed
throughout by epigraphs on acting from Stanislavsky and
others. Oates asks what it means to be an actress in the
contexts of Hollvwood and The Studio. For Norma
Jean Baker, she suggests, Stardom, the construction of
the platinum blonde Marilyn, was a form of 'animal
manufacture, like breeding'. At the same time, Monroe's
private mythology, the fa&ly romance of an abused and
abandoned child, took on the falsity of film. Oates's
Norma Jean imagines herself as the foundling whose
great-grandmother might have been Mary Baker Eddy,
whose godmother was Norma Shearer, whose father
might bg Valentino.
Oates also frames her narrative as an epic fairy tale, the
story of the Fair princess and the Dark
Prince. 'In every decade,' she writes,
'there must be a Fair Princess exalted
above the rest and the role demanded not
just extraordinary physical gifts but an
accompanying genius.' In a recent essay
on the fairy tale, Oates has pointed out
that even the Princess pays a heavy price
for her celebrity: 'to be a heroine in even
a limited sense requires extreme youth
and extreme physical beauty; it would
not be sufficient to be merely beautifkl,
one must be "the greatest beauty in the
kingdom", and thus vulnerable to "the
homicidal envy of older women", and
the rivalry of younger ones.'
Thus the Princess is also the Doomed
Maiden, and, like DeLillo in Underworld
or Libra, Oates sees Monroe as the
victim of a massive, murderous conspiracy,
but here a male conspiracy to exploit
and destroy female innocence. So the
Blonde's lush sexuality carries within it
elements of decay, and provokes an
allegedly male disgust with what is
soiled, sour, rancid, bloody, or scarred.
At the same time, Oates's intellectual
seriousness and tragic sensibility are
combined with a strong sensuality, and
 cl A M E R I C A N FICTION
with a lyric sense of the beauty of male as well as female
bodies lifted to iconic significance by the screen. 'B', the
young Brando, for example, has 'a beautifully sculpted
male body with distinct chest muscles, perfectly shaped
male breasts and nipples like miniature grapes'. As the
Dark Prince of legend, he too pays for fame.
In the Melvillian American tradition she admires,
Oates believes that a mighty book requires a mighty
theme. Here she has found that theme, and, despite the
radical simplification of art, has produced a mighty -
and a mesmerising - book.
Importance of Belief
In the Big Apple
CITYOF GOD
* is suffering a crisis of faith, is drawn to the simple and
By E L Doctorow
(Little,Brown 288pp k15.99)
THE CITY IN question is New York, and this is a novel
about belief. Novels of ideas are welcome; the prerequisite,
however, is that the ideas do not swamp the characters.
City of God has characters - sometimes mere voices -,
galore. Wittgenstein, Einstein, an omniscient narrator, a
writer known only as Everett, an Episcopalian priest and
two Reform rabbis appear, to mention a few. Passages of
f?ee verse, the account of ajlm noir which takes a surreal
turn, and much, much more pop up without explanation.
A kind of unity of purpose does emerge out of this,
however. We come to see this is a midrash.
Doctorow has attempted a postmodern but, at times,
earnest examination of faith in our day, set in New York
in 1999. St Augustine's City of God provides a good title,
as one of the characters remarks, but little else.
St Augustine was concerned with doctrinal difficulties;
Doctorow's book is entirely about the meaning of faith in
the modern world. What is the point of belief in the light
of the new physics? Why should the world's monotheistic
religions, which developed in desert countries thousands
of years ago, still be the basis of contemporary faith in
Manhattan? Why did God permit the Holocaust? And,
somewhat bathetically, why do we see everything as a
movie? The book seems to suggest that what happens
within its narrative is also the script of a movie. I think
the point that Doctorow is making here is that film and
television have produced a form of reality which is
stronger in our minds than the reality we find around us;
a new h n d of credulity. But I am not sure. A lot of the
book is unnecessarily obscurantist in its construction.
I
The plot, in contrast
to the largeness of the
themes, is relatively
simple, and contains a
little Highsmith-type
mystery. A priest, Tom
Pemberton, in charge of
the derelict St Timothy's
in lower Manhattan, dis-
covers one day that the
giant cross which hung
above his altar has been
stolen. H e receives
much crank mail when
the loss makes the
papers, but eventually it
is found on the roof of a Doctorow: gives his all
very liberal synagogue
run by two married and incredibly saintly rabbis, Joshua
Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal. Why the cross was placed
there, and by whom, is never resolved. Pemberton, who
rational approach of the rabbis, and also by the attractiveness
of Sarah Blumenthal. We have to take the attractiveness
on trust; none of Doctorow's characters have physical
substance. There is much speculation about who could
have taken the cross and what the message of placing it
on the synagogue roof is; this provides the opportunity
for plenty of ontological dsquiet.
As a priest, Pemberton is somewhat derelict himself.
He is called to task by his superiors, and defends his kind
of faith. Nobody comes to h s church and he is becoming
less and less interested in the rituals of Episcopalianism.
He isn't the first person to wonder how it was that the
Church piled its inventions of ritual and liturgy on the
foundation left by the first Christians, after all a Jewish
sect, but nonetheless he wonders at length.
Meanwhile, one of the narrators introduces the story
of a small boy who was a runner of messages in the
ghetto in Vilnius. This is quite moving, but then all
Holocaust horror stories are. There is a tricky problem
about using invented Holocaust material in novels. A
little research showed that this was based on an actual
diary, written in Kovno, but still it seems to me
questionable, in a literary sense, to drop it into this nar-
rative. Its purpose, however, is to suggest the importance
of examining faith in the light not just of physical facts,
like Big Bang, but also of the fact of the Holocaust.
Joshua Gruen goes to Lithuania on a quest to retrieve
the diary, which, it turns out, concerns Sarah's grandfa-
ther; he is killed, probably by anti-Semites. Like much
else, this information comes in an ofthand fashion, but it
clears the way for Pemberton's romance with the widow.
The characters may be somewhat casually realised but
they all talk. A midrash, it is worth noting, is a commentary
n
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 on the scriptures. As a little conceit, Doctorow offers the
Midrash Jazz Quartet, who play the standards, mostly
Gershwin, and then deconstruct them. This is painfully
unfunny. The midrash is an essential element in Judaism,
and one which Doctorow seems to regard as the only
basis for religious belief. The continual testing and
questioning of the law wdl tease out its true meaning and
relevance. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jews are
constantly interpreting the Scriptures. In fact, Doctorow's
thesis seems to be that this is in itself a spiritual exercise of
greater value than beliee it is perhaps the act of creation
itself: Je pense, donc je suis. As Pem says to the Lord, after
he has converted to Judaism and married the fragrant
Sarah Blumenthal, 'I think we must remake You. If we
are to remake ourselves, we must remake you, Lord.' This
SOFT SOAP
GAIN
* the company's process of incorporation, deals with
By Richard Powers
(William Heinemann 355pp 915.99)
COMBINING TWO FASHIONABLE topics, one popular, one
semi-intellectual, seems a good way to improve one's
chances, and, judging by the comments on his book
jacket, Richard Powers has succeeded. The three serious
American newspapers have all applauded Gain, and even
wily old John Updike says it is 'intricately, intelligently
and accurately constructed ...formidable'. Yet, once past
the jacket, that compliment appears rather self-serving.
Gain resembles an Updike novel all right, but not one of
the sparky ones, with language and characters busy
worlung, rutting, noticing. It calls to mind Updike's more
recent, flabbily synoptic works, in which individuals, too
wan to put up much resistance, are flattened by the
tide of history.
The two genres joined in Gain are the romance-of-
trade saga and the incurable-dsease dary (the latter, of
course, a non-fiction as well as a fiction stalwart). We are
taken through the history of the Clare Soap and
Chemical Company, from its beginnings in a chandler's
back yard in 1830 to its present-day implication in the
high cancer rate of a Midwestern town. The other story
is also a sudser - Laura Bodey, a nice divorced mother
of two teenage children, learns that she has cancer, suffers
a great deal, and des. No, I'm not leaving anything out.
Powers uses a different style for each section - the
soap history is detached and portentous, the. cancer-
patient story down-to-earth - but both have a rather
hygienic distaste for personality, plot, and even the
political indignation one would expect, given Powers's
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
final speech is so mind-numbingly sentimental that it casts
a retrospective gloom on what has gone before.
T h e ambitions of this book are huge. Doctorow
suggests that N e w York is a phenomenon of the
unnatural world; what he is attempting is to find a
relevance for faith in this unnatural world. It's a doomed
task, but Doctorow gives it all he's got. Very occasionally,
as when he describes the Big Bang and in some of his
depictions of Manhattan, he comes close to the sublimity
of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate. At other times the whole
enterprise is banal, nothing more than a sort of Atlantic
Monthly quasi-seriousness. Doctorow approves of
Wittgenstein, but apparently has forgotten
Wittgenstein's main contribution to philosophy, namely
the establishment of the boundaries of sense.
topics, a title that recalls the classic Greed, and his jacket
photo (stark background, open-necked shirt, accusatory
glare). While a few of the early Clares are individuated,
none is particularly interesting (or, indeed, has any life
outside the company), and their chronicle soon becomes
even drabber. Powers, who spends five pages describing
human matters in aloof and ornate prose, telling us, for
instance. when two babies die. 'Semis harvested two
infant sbns', and producing this iescription of the
depression of 1871: 'Overnight, the glory train derailed
into material reality's steepest defile .... Businesses
defaulted, pulling apart t h e shoddy blanket o f
interloclung debt .... Shift foremen reported hearing the
workers' stomachs conversing above the ravenous
factory steam.' The Clare Company, however, is no
monster out of a Sinclair Lewis expos&, ballyhooing
health and selling filth. It sells good products at full
weight, and treats its workers well. Its decline, suggests
Powers, like that of so many American companies (and
people), owes less to corruption than to ignorance and
confusion - an honest enough assessment but one that
is completely undramatised.
Over in the present, Laura's life is consumed, in both
meanings, by her disease: we get no sense of her apart
from it. Her son plays computer games and dslikes his
homework, her daughter never opens her mouth except
to denounce modern chemistry. The little exchanges
between mom and kids or ex-wife and ex-husband are
often bright and appealing, and a few sharp points are
made (Laura's insurance pays only for 'usual and custom-
ary treatment', which, she soon discovers, is not the
kind that works). But here, too, the reader is swamped
with dismal fact, with talk of 'intraperitoneal radation
therapy' and 'granulite-colony-stimulating factors', and
portentousness seeps in. 'First you lose five sons in a
war,' Powers intones in a comment on Laura's television-
watching, 'then someone goes and makes a feature film
about it. Then they rerun the monster at midnight,
 I AMERICAN F I C T I O N

forever. Until every child of every mother falls.' Does
this mean anything? And, if so, what?
-What seems most pointless and puzzling of all is that
Powers's two narratives can never meet, much less
entwine. Nearly all of the soap stuff takes place many
decades before Laura is born, and so shifting from one
focus to the other does nothing to create suspense, fore-
boding, unease. After reading Gain, Updike's praise
looks even more suspicious. This is not a novel whose
structure is tricky, or even particularly complex. How
much of a joiner do you need to be to make a hinge?
wants to eat her pussy.' There's more of this welcome
satire throughout.
There's fin, too, in Tom's takes on his private life, on
the labyrinthine workings of the mind, and on love,
which is the cue for the girl, a pretty waitress called
Rebecca, to grasp his hand and rise up with him in an
unquestioning defiance of gravity. At this point, Tom's
romantic longings take centre stage, and in a near-
hallucinatory sequence they rise out of the pancake
house and alight on an ancient burial mound. There he
declares his love to Rebecca while at the same time con-
fessing a brilliantly funny incident from his past when he
accidentally stabbed her father during a battle re-enactment.
But then, in keeping with the acid-trip nature of this

GOOD LONG LEAP NEEDED story, they are not really on the burial mound, but are
still suspended above Tom's philandering, pancake-
munching workmates, and it is here that the 'action'
THEVERIFICATIONATIST resumes as two more of them rise up to join in the aerial
* dance, this time with coital intent. Unbelievable? Well,
B y Donald Antrim you have to stick with it.
(Bloomsbury 1 79pp A9.99) Eventually, with Bernhardt's penis jammed into his back,
Tom draws together the threads of his life, sometimes mun-
ONEAPRILNIGHT in Middle America, twenty psychoan- danely, often touchingly, though never without a hugely
alysts meet for dinner in a pancake house to discuss 'the redeeming dollop of black humour. But be warned: that
seemingly everlasting task of reconciling classical off-the-wall, indeed off-the-floor, narrative device takes
metapsychology t o o u r particular branch of a good long leap of the imagination to accommodate.
Self/Other/Friction Theory7. O f course, like all works
outings, the party soon descends into factionalism,
professional jealousies, and sexual tension. But when the
narrator, Tom, wants to start a food fight, he is picked up
h-om behind in a bear hug by a fellow analyst. And he
remains in this ungainly position for the rest of the book.
Much hangs on this weird mechanical construct,
particularly its use as a viewpoint from which Tom makes
observations about life, the semantics of psychology, and
the symbolic importance of Bernhardt, the panarna-hatted
man who is squeezing him in 'a form of metaphorical
patriarchal rape'. Sometimes you can buy into the
Beckettian surreality of all this, but occasionally it is hard
not to feel there's enough good material here for a more
conventional novel. Yet Antrim has chosen to give us his
story in this way, and it is nothing if not original.
So, floating above the crowd in this 'playroom', we are
offered the two apparent aims of the book: Tom's
musings about his own life, and the debunking of his
profession in all its pomp and incongruity. The latter is
achieved with a wonderful store of one-liners and
rejoinders, such as the moment when, after Tom has
been joined in the air by a young girl, one of the
analysts below asks a trainee for his assessment of the
situation: 'Psychotic break,' replies the boy, 'with sudden
onset of schizophrenic episodes, uh, possibly hostile
behaviour leading to a gradual dissolution of coherent
identity, necessitating antipsychotic medicalisation...'.
No, says the once sexually spurned Maria, 'He only

LITERARY REVIEW April 20(

 RUSSIA

was Lenin who steered his confused 'party through the

civil war; it was Lenin who insisted on the New
~ c o n o m i cPolicy as the only way to save the regime
He had a Slightly from probable historical eclipse. He emerges here as
perhaps the key influence on the outcome of the

Darker Side, Too Revolution. This is a bold conclusion, and Service can
make it only because he is acutely aware of just how
accidental that triumph was. Lenin might so easily have
LENIN:A BIOGRAPHY played little part in 1917, stuck as he was in Switzerland
* with almost no inkling of the impending crisis. Even
By Robert Service after he managed to return to Russia across Germany, he
(Macmillan 527pp A25) had to navigate a great many dangers; from July he was a
wanted man, living in hiding, crudely disguised. O n the
WHENLENINSEIZED power in Russia one of his first historic night of 24 October, when Lenin persuaded his
acts was to requisition the Tsar's Rolls-Royces for Bolshevik comrades that revolution was now possible
government use. He justified the move on the grounds and necessary, he arrived at the Smolny Institute not as
that even a sociahst government needed to establish its the acknowledged leader, but with a false entry ticket, a
dignity in the eyes of the people. So Lenin, the violent wig, and bandages covering his face. He finally tore off
revolutionist and scourge of the old order, cruised the the mask and delivered his historic address, but by that
streets of Moscow in the style of the Tsars. time the revolution outside had already begun.
This is one of the many paradoxes of Lenin's extraordi- Who was Lenin? Most Russians in 1917 had not heard
nary life: the son of minor nobility, he developed a of him; even members of his own party had
visceral loathing for the ruling classes; a Marxist revolu- difficulty recognising him, so long had he been absent
tionarv, ,. he turned his back on socialist traditions of fiom Russia in political exile. He was almost fifiy by the
emancipation in favour of time of the ~ e v d l u i i o n .
dictatorship; a man obsessively Though his life was devoted
tidy and fastidious, he created t o socialist agitation and
chaos in Russia, from which polemics - much of it spent
his revolution almost failed to away from the centre of
recover. Robert Service does affairs, all of it spent away
wonderful justice to all this in from the working classes he
Lenin's richest biography by hoped to liberate - Lenin
far. It is not simply that Service was not a natural revolutionary
has had access at last to the vast leader. O n the very eve of the
archive which lay hidden away collapse of the Tsarist order,
in the USSR, important Lenin wrote that 'we the old
though that is. T h e great people' would not live to see
strength of this remarkable the socialist promised land.
book is the author's ability to His personality might also
blend the personal history with have kept him from power.
a convincing analysis of the Service gently exposes a man
Lenin oeuvre and a confident who throughout his life was
reconstruction of the wider difficult to live and work with.
political and social milieu of His terrible temper and
Russia in the age of revolution. explosive intellect were
Service has a grudging masked by anally retentive
respect for Lenin both as man behaviour: he kept his desk
and revolutionary. He recog- meticulously tidy, pencils
nises that whatever view is always sharpened; he hated
taken of Lenin's politics, he waste, so cut the unmarked
was, at decisive moments, a paper from letters to be
man who could turn history. recycled later; when impris-
It was Lenin who pushed his oned for the first time in
more timid colleagues t o 1895, he polished his own cell
launch the October coup; it And so farewell floor. Service relates an

I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 RUSSIA
I extraordinary, but entirely credible, story in which
Lenin, sealed up in the famous train across Germanv
with less fastidious socialists who smoked, took com-
mand of the toilet paper as the only way to prevent the
long queues to puff away in the lavatory. The surprising
thing is not Lenin's behaviour, but the fact that the 0th-
ers let h ~ mdo it. Lenin, for all his grouchiness and intol-
erance, could move others when he wanted.
Service's account is full ofverv human touches. Lenin's
affair with Inessa Armand durikg his sojourn in Paris is
sensitively treated; his terrible grief at her death in 1918,
years after the affair had ended, suddenly shows another
side of him. His efforts to keep up hls disguise when on
the run in July 1917 border on sheer farce: at one point,
the glue on the mask began to melt in the heat; at another,
his wig blew off in the wind and had to be rescued and
washed; the decision to shave off his beard and
moustache to complete the disguise, innocuous enough
on its own, assumes a more menacing aspect when it is
revealed that he asked Stalin to wield the razor.
There is another, harsher side to Lenin. Service does
not pretend that Lenin could not display inhuman
touches too. Throughout his revolutionary career he
used exceptionally violent, even exterminatory,
language. This might be forgiven as mere metaphor, but
The Authentic Voice of
the Russian People
THELAST WORD
RASPUTIN:
* tsar, were published bv the Bolsheviks in the 1920s.
By Edvard Radzinsky
(Translated by Judson Rosengrant)
(Weidenfeld G Nicolson 524pp L20)
WHILSTMOST BRITISHpoliticians are unknown to the
electorate, Rasputin's public profile remains as high as
ever. He is a household name in the tabloid press and
also in popular music. Indeed, he can be used as
ammunition in current political debate. Musing whether
Londoners might be more inclined to trust a shaven
Frank Dobson than the current bearded model, the Sun
had only to conjure up a trinity of the untrimmed:
Rasputin, Satan and Jeremy Beadle.
A potent combination of sexual athleticism, a deviant
churchman and the downfall of a dynasty has generated
a stream of bestselling biographies in recent years. But
none of these satisfies Edvard Radzinsky. Previous
authors may have sought to strip away the legend in
search of historical explanation, but all they have done,
there is evidence that Lenin not only absorbed the
traditions of terrorist violence in his native Russia. but
was quite capable, when the need arose, of constructing
a regime of terror in order to preserve the Revolution.
The mindset revealed here is much closer to that of
Stalin than might be expected, given Lenin's growing
antipathy to the man who became his successor. In one
angry exchange late in 1917, after the founding of the
Cheka securitv, Dolice. Lenin was told that his
I
Commissariat of Justice might as well be called the
'Commissariat of Social Annihilation'. His reply was
chillingly apt: 'Well said!' He had no truck with Western
notions of liberty and participation. The Revolution was
all. It had first to be made, then protected, and woe
betide those mischievous enough to obstruct it.
Lenin displayed a remarkable arrogance in his
revolutionary politics. In his final years, plagued by illness,
he became almost paranoid about the inadequacies of his
colleagues, and remained convinced that he alone could
guide the revolutionary ship to its destination. He &ed
in.January 1924. After years of hagiography, he would, I
think, be pleased with this new life.
To order 'Lenin' at the special price of L 2 3 withfree UK p&
call Literary Review Bookshop on 0 1 8 1 324 5 5 1 0 or use our
form on page 39.
Radzinsky complains, is confirm the image of 'a crude
bearded Deasant rushing" about Petrograd " like some
Henry Miller character with his phallus steaming'.
Rasputin has been deprived of his mystery.
&dzinsky thinks -the problem lies ih the sources.
Until now, Rasputin's biographers have been obliged to
rely on his critics. Parts of their testimonies to the
Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, set up by
the Provisional Government in 1917 after the fall of the
Supplemented by voluminous memoirs, these
testimonies have formed the case for the prosecution
ever since. As a corrective, Radzinsky supplies some
important new evidence, purchased by his friend Slava
Rostropovich at Sotheby's. (It is symptomatic of the
book's casual approach to chronology that we are not
told when.) This large bound volume - '426 numbered
folios of double-sided interrogation records', reverentially
described throughout as 'The File' - contains the miss-
ing testimonies of more than forty of Rasputin's closest
contacts. 'Would my portrait be a new one?' Radzinsky
wondered as he sat down to write. 'I did not know. But
I knew it would be fair. And the warranty of that would
be the participation of those who cared about him.'
'The File' fills some crucial gaps. We 'discover from
Bishop Feofan (Bystrov) that when Rasputin first
penetrated Russia's ecclesiastical elite in 1903 it was not,
as he himself later claimed, on account of his personal
charisma, but because he bore a letter of introduction
m I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 RUSSIA

fiom an archimandrite in Kazan. The extensive testimony

of Anna Vyrubova, a notorious h e r at court, dovetails
neatly with some of Empress Alexandra's letters. Now
we can put flesh on the bones of some of the more
colourful characters in St Petersburg, not least that
'cunning Chinaman', the Tibetan Dr Badrnaev. And, at
the denouement of the book, we have a new account of
Rasputin's assassination.
The difficulty for Radzinsky is that, like so many
historians before him, he finds that his evidence serves
not so much to explain Rasputin as to explain him away.
He is honest enough to admit it. 'The most plausible
version' of the assassination is 'boring': 'Most likely it all
took place very quickly.' Poisoned pastries
notwithstanding, Prince Felix Yusupov simply shot the
man whose drunken antics had done so much to
discredit the monarchy. In truth, there is not much that
is mysterious about Rasputin. For some naive clerics, he
promised contact with souls that remained stubbornly Rasputin: 'our fiend'
immune to more orthodox approaches. For aristocratic
admirers, bored rigid by stultifjring court routine, he pious monk', but his sometime ecclesiastical ally
offered the tempting prospect of redemption through Hermogen, Bishop of Saratov. The error is all the more
expiated sin. Social climbers grasped at the chance of curious since the photograph of both men with
influence and reflected glory (though gossips always Rasputin is autographed by all three in the published
exaggerated Rasputin's political influence). For the volume of Iliodor's memoirs, used by Radzinsky as a
imperial couple themselves, mistrustful of their reliable source.
Westernised ministers and advisers, 'our friend' was a Scholars may think that Radzinsky exaggerates the
one-man peasant parliament. Why consult the claque of novelty of some of his findings and wish that he had
Duma politicians when the authentic voice of the published 'The File' itself, rather than a book which
Russian people could growl gently into their ears? Even might have been more convincing had it been half as
the police surveillance teams set to monitor his nocturnal long. But readers with no academic axe to grind will
visits to the bathhouse in the company of prostitutes enjoy this atmospheric re-creation of Imperial Russia's
code-named Rasputin 'the Russian'. twilight years. It is a racy story, well told and peppered
Radzinsky might have tried comparing and contrasting with genuine historical insight. Even those who doubt
Rasputin with other charismatic peasants who, like him, that Radzinsky has written 'the last word' will rank his
enjoyed a degree of imperial protection and, like him, new biography among the best of its lund in English.
attracted both a large female following and the less flat-
tering attentions of the Orthodox authorities, who were
anxious to stamp out heresy. One such peasant, whose
influence was greater among workers than among aristo-
crats, was Ivan Churikov ('brother Ivanushka'), who had
been rescued from imprisonment in a Suzdal monastery
NOT LIKE THE OTHERS
by the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, and whose BREAD
OF EXILE:A RUSSIAN
FAMILY
archival file contains not only locks of hair, but also some *
red ribbons of the type distributed, as Radzinsky says, at By Dimitri Obolensky
meetings of the flagellant sect of Khlysts with whom (The Hawill Press 352pp L18)
Rasputin has convincingly been associated.
But Radzinsky is not at his strongest on the ecclesiastical Bread of Exile is a compilation of the memoirs and
context. For all his archival forays, he seems to have left diaries of Dimitri Obolensky's family, members of the
the voluminous Synodal files untouched. It is especially Russian high aristocracy since Rurik the Viking founded
unnerving that he has built up a misleading psychological the kingdom of Rus in the ninth century. Obolensky
portrait of the anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, Iliodor himself is directly descended fiom Rurik. The writers of
(Trufanov), on the basis of a misattributed photograph. these pieces all lived through the final stages of the
It was not the highly-strung Iliodor whose 'large, fleshy Romanov dynasty, and were intimately acquainted with
face' made him look 'more like a Volga brigand than a the Imperial family. When it became clear that the tide

I
LITElURY REVIEW April 2000
 1 RUSSIA

of the civil war had turned permanently in favour of the
Bolsheviks, they were forced to flee Russia (Dimitri at
the age of one and a half) and live out the remainder
of their lives in exile.
The title, however, is slightly misleading. The great
majority of the events related in the book take place in
Russia. between 1869 - when Dimitri's maternal
grandmother Sandra was born - and the Revolution in
1917. These were, of course, years of ever-quickening
revolutionary ferment, when those in high political
office were under constant threat of assassination by the
numerous terrorist organisations at large. Sandra's
husband, Paul Shuvalov, newly appointed Moscow City
Governor, was shot dead in 1905. Although the political
scene rumbles ominously in the background, Sandra's
and her sister Sofka's narratives are more concerned to
evoke a sense of life at court. and of its more
vrominent individuals.
These two sisters' accounts combine to produce a
vivid impression of a child's existence at court, and
abound in entertaining and revealing anecdotes.
Inevitably, one is struck by the opulence of the lifestyle:
both Sandra and Sofka relate how membership of 'The
Potato Club' (a sort of Bash Street Kids gang
- - for the
Tsar's children plus chums) was
denoted by a golden potato,
specially commissioned from I 1-
equal vigour and clarity: 'If God had granted the
Emperor longer life, he would never have given way to
Bolshevism.' Intriguingly, she goes on to say that
Alexander often told her father of his intention to intro-
duce more liberal policies, once order had been restored.
Perhaps more interesting than stories of Imperial high
jinks are the insights into the social and moral perspectives
of a family at the heart of Imperial government.
Obolensky's father writes with moving sympathy of the
lives of the peasants on his estate, and describes his
endeavours to use his privileged position responsibly.
Children were not only taught the superficialities of
court etiquette, but were also imbued with a deeper
sense of what might be called 'good manners'. Any
rudeness to servants, however insignificant it appeared,
was considered a serious breach, and both men and
women were expected to make strenuous efforts on
behalf of the poor. Although there is a strain of
self-justification here (never strident or intrusive), it is
difficult to resist the impression that Dimitri Obolensky's
family, on both sides, embodied a genuine ideal of
nobility, and strove to live in accordance with the principle
of noblesse oblige. Unfortunately, they were not typical; in
the words of a left-wing newspaper published after the
- ~ e v o l u t i o k :'If Nicholas I1
had had a few more collabora-
1 tors as enlightened as Count

II
&bergt: There is much vicari- ~orontsov-~ashk [Obolensky's
ous pleasure t o be had in great-grandfather], there
reading this lund of recollection, would have been no revolution
enriched by a nostalgia in Russia.'
communicated in the lingering T h e final chavter of the
affection for each detail book is taken up with
remembered. Obolensky's own memoirs: his
Of the two, Sofka provides earliest vears in Nice. his
more gossip. Sandra is more education in England, then in
reserved, possibly as a result of a French lycte, then at
her touching loyalty to the Cambridge, and his subse-
blighted Romanov family. quent life as an academic in
Sofka, too, is faithful to the Oxford. These pages are a
memory of her old friends, but rather sad appendix to the

is more willing to express,
sometimes quite bluntly,
personal opinions concerning,
for example, the character of
Nicholas. soon to be Tsar:
'Nikolai ' Alexandrovich I
undoubtedly possessed what is
called "charm". He inherited it
from his mother - but also
inherited her weak and vacil
lacing character.' Her view c-
Alexander 111, whom historians
conventionally regard as a para-
noid tyrant, is expressed with
I
book. They summarise the
author's attempt to recapture
and explore his lost heritage,
primarily via the avenues of
academic history. In some
ways he seems to have been
I successful: he discovers a love
of Russian poetry, and a pas-
I sionate interest in Byzantine
history. And yet the memoirs
I that precede- his own, alive
with the physical details of life
in Russia, hauntingly evoke all
Sofka ana aanara :KUSSlan aolls that has been irrecoverably lost.

LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 WILDLIFE l

testicle for nothing (the word orkhis in Greek means

testicle). It looks obscene, and has aphrodisiac qualities.

THEY DRIVE MEN MAD Hence its potent appeal. The Japanese bottle the orchid's
scent for perfume; the Turks turn it into ice cream.
Even more passionate than the orchid growers, or
ORCHID FEVER:A HORTICULTURAL TALE 'hobbyists', are the hybridisers who create new species
OF LOVE, LUST AND LUNACY to secure untold riches and fame. They harbour fantasies
* of breeding a black orchid and cloning it around the
By Eric Hansen world. Hansen tracks down the celebrated orchid
(Methuen 272pp 14.99) smuggler Henry Azadehdel in cyberspace and they
correspond by e-mail. Azadehdel, who was briefly
IN 1993, THE American explorer Eric Hansen led an imprisoned for his crimes against flora, is too paranoid
expedtion through the Borneo jungle to find the world's to meet up in person. The minor characters may not be
rarest orchid. It was the start of an obsession. He spent on line but they're equally off the wall. There's a
the next five years roaming what he calls 'the lunatic Christian who lies naked while meditating in his green-
fiinge of the orchid world'. His book is not so much house; 'a geriatric who has toothpick sex with his
about the plant itself as about the people who share his orchid'; a grower called Randy who French-kisses his
fixation. There are at least 25,000 species of orchid and English bulldog to test the reaction of his clients; and a
100,000 man-made hybrids but their diversity is as Chinese family who have handed orchids down from
nothing compared to the oddballs who collect them. one generation to the next for five hundred years. It
In the Victorian era takes from six to eiah-
they called it 'orchidelir- W teen years for the orcvhid
ium'. It was comparable t o flower, so you can
to the tulip fever of the understand why they are
seventeenth century and in it for the long term.
intoxicated a generation. And then there are the
T h e orchid still turns 'orchid police'. Rare
heads to this day - and species can fetch $3,500
how. 'You can get off each and Hansen enter-
alcohol, women, food tains us with endless tales
and cars but once you're of harassment, fines and
hooked on orchids, confiscation of orchids,
you're finished,' says a orchestrated by botanical
New York grower whose institutions which fear
words serve as the they are losing their
epigraph to this book. control of the market.
'You never get off This is a world of Alice in
orchids.. .never.' Wonderland paradoxes,
The publishing industry where convicted smug-
certainly seems t o be glers are 'conservation-
hooked. Last year we ists' and conservationists
were treated to T h e are 'smugglers'. Hansen's
Orchid Thi$ A True Story Varies in size journey ends up at Kew
of Beauty and Obsession by Gardens and he discovers,
Susan Orlean. Now, like the proverbial bus, along comes with a sense of piquant irony, that the Royal Botanic
another title devoted to the.same subject. Hansen's book Gardens boast a collection of flowers which have been
may not be as well written and skimps on the history, ransacked h m all over the world - 'the largest collection
but it reads like a comic thriller. of horticultural loot on earth'.
Our narrator travels across America and Europe as a The bogeyman of the book is CITES (the Convention
horticultural sleuth, attending orchid guild meetings and on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild
competitions. His entry to this green-fingered society is Fauna and Flora). T h s is a restrictive piece of legislation
engineered by eighty-four-year-old Eleanor, who which forbids the transport of orchids across international
enlightens him about breeding techniques and shows borders. Far from preventing widespread pillaging the
him a 'bodice-ripper' orchid, so called on account of its law serves only to increase the price on the black market.
blatant carnality. The orchid is not named after the Hansen veers off into the occasional rant but this is

I a
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 redeemed by a comic showdown with Kew Gardens
officials over their dubious links with Henry Azadehdel.
The author's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious,
and you begin to understand the roots of his mania. The
orchid, dubbed 'the king of fragrant plants' by
Confucius, varies in size from the microscopic to the
gargantuan. The largest species weighs half a ton and
measures forty feet in circumference. Its admrers are not
confined to mankind. The plants cheat insects into hav-
ing sex with them by mimiclung wasps, bees and other
creatures. Each species attracts its own insect. In
Madagascar, the Star of Bethlehem orchid can only be
pollinated by one type of night-flying moth which has
a twelve-inch tongue.
'We all speak the same language,' one grower tells the
author. 'We speak orchid.' Hansen not only speaks
orchid, he writes orchid as well and his text is peppered
with Latin binomials. But don't be deterred. You don't
have to be a classicist or a horticulturist to enjoy this
book. Plant politics are more gripping than
the American primaries.
To order 'Orchid Fever' at the special price of A 1 2 . 9 9 with
free UK pGp call Literary Review Bookshop on 0 1 8 1 3 2 4
5510 or use ourform on page 3 9 .

and cigarettes (as

elephants can

ELEPHANTS AND TIGERS smell them), the

hunter agrees.
Choudhury's
TO THE ELEPHANTGRAVEYARD team, known
* locally as 'the
By Tarquin Hall Elephant Squad',
Uohn Munay 256pp AI 6.99) set off on kunkis,
domesticated I
TIGERS
IN
*
THE SNOW
By Peter Matthiessen
elephants. They
include various
odd characters I
I
F e Hawill Press 160pp A22.50) like 'Badger',
the pensioned-
WHENWE THINK of elephants, certain words shoot to off Gurkha
mind: majesty, sagacity, compassion. But To the Elephant with a Cockney
Graveyard, by Tarquin Hall, shatters the old image, accent. As they
introducing us to the darker side of the Asian elephant. progress along
It is more of a thriller than a straightforward travel book, the rogue's path
and the writing is insightfiul and sensitive. of destruction,
In Assam, 0% 1ndi2s north-eastern frontier, a killer Hall wonders L
rogue is on the rampage. He's already destroyed crops, why a passionate
levelled houses, and killed thirty-eight villagers, elephant-lover
trampling their bodies into the ground. Locals say he's would want to
an incarnation of the Devil, as big as a temple, with slay the creature
red-glowing eyes, and a trunk raging with flames. They he so loves.
say he's afier their blood. But, as it turns out, the tusker's Choudhury
weakness is far more human afier all. He's in search of defends himself.
liquor. Every year, herds of alcoholic elephants swoop explaining that
down on villages throughout Assam, smashing illegal another hunter would be likely to botch the job.
stills, and guzzling vat-loads of drink. The creatures, As they track across the wastelands of Assam,
who have an insatiable thirst, can smell booze from Choudhury gives the tusker one chance afier another to
mdes away. Anyone in their path gets trampled to death. redeem himself and mend his ways. Unfortunately, his
Working as a hack in Delhi, Hall hears that the State dislike for Man and his Section for,booze are too strong.
of Assam has put up a 50,000-rupee g 7 0 0 ) fee to kill The rogue, who turns out to be an escaped domesticated
the rogue. The hunter chosen for the assignment is elephant, is dispatched by a Rernington bullet. As for the
Dinesh Choudhury, a mild-mannered, elephant-loving graveyard of the title, it turns out to be an analogy for the
loner, armed with a Magnum 458. Without wasting a region: it is an elephant burial ground, over whose future
minute, Hall flies up to Guwahati, the capital of Assam, hangs the spectre of extinction.
and begs the hunter to take him along. After Hall has Their natural habitats destroyed, and at war with the
promised to give up those old journalistic staples, drink local people, Assam's elephants face an uncertain future.

I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 WILDLIFE
But they are not alone. Peter Matthiessen tells of a
unique Russian-American tiger project to save the
Siberian tiger, which, thanks to the value of its bones
and body parts on the Asian aphrodsiac market, is on
the brink of extinction. The project, which began
almost a decade ago, is centred in the massive Siberian
reserve of Sikhote-Alin, the last great hunting ground of
Panthera tigris altaica. With the fall of Communism, the
international aphrodisiac business has gone from strength
to strength, and without the Iron Curtain to protect
them, Siberian tigers are no longer safe. Matthiessen
describes the Russo-American scheme to stabilise tiger
numbers, using electronic collars, radio-telemetry and
other methods - a collaboration that would have been
impossible a few years ago.
As well as portraying a frantic cause, strugghng against
bureaucracy and poachers, Matthiessen's book details the
tiger situation throughout Asia: India, Thailand,
Indonesia, Vietnam and China all have small tiger
populations. Matthiessen also delves into the rich folklore
which surrounds the great cats wherever they are. In Java,
IN LOVE WITH FLOWERS
THE GARDEN
PLANTS
OF CHINA
* an unwanted Buddleia seedling from your garden path or
By Peter Valder
(Carsell 400pp A30)
IF YOU GROW a plant with the specific epithet 'sinensis',
vou can be sure that it originated
" in China. If it is called
'wilsonii' or 'sino-wilsonii', it was introduced to the
West by the great plant-hunter 'Chinese' Wilson (1876-
1930). He was one of the indomitable band of emlorers
who iisked danger and death in the mountains of Gestern
China in order first to discover, then to introduce, the
plants that grew wdd there. Acers, camellias, rhododen-
drons, magnolias, viburnums - literally thousands of
Chinese species now enrich the gardens of the world.
Two of Wilson's best-known introductions are Lilium
regale, the most popular of all garden lilies, and Davidia
involucrata, the extraordinary Handkerchief Tree. The
name Davidia is another clue to this chapter of gardening
historv. When. after the Second O ~ i u mWar ended in
1860, the Chinese government was obliged to open up
most of the country to Westerners, French Jesuit
.
missionaries were quick off the mark. Fathers Armand
.,
David (best known for saving Ptre David's Deer from
extinction), Delavay, Farges and SouliC worked in the
most remote and inaccessible corners of the country.
Manv of the discoveries of these extraordinarv men are
named after them, and can be recognised by their specific
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
he tells us, hunters traditionally keep their nose hairs
trimmed 'lest the tiger hears their breath whistle through
their nostrils'; and in Hinduism, Man and tigers have the
same birth mother, and there are many shrines honouring
the tiger-god Vaghadeva, 'the guardian of the forest'.
There are grave statistics, too. Between 1975 and
1992, 8,200 pounds of Sumatran tiger-bone were
imported by South Korea alone. The estimated number
of tigers remaining in the wild is now as low as 4,600 (in
1900, the figure stood nearer 100,000).
Matthiessen's book is a warning. The three female
tigers he got to know while researching his book were
all killed by poachers before the ink of his manuscript
was dry. But for all the woe and worry, there may be a
glimmer of hope. Environmentalists met Chinese
medicinal manufacturers at a conference in Hong Kong
in 1998. The tiger-bone salesmen agreed to try making
potions from mole-rats instead. And one Chinese tiger-
breeding centre, whose feline occupants traditionally
went to make tiger-bone wine, is encouraging tourists
to admire the creatures rather than consume them.
epithets - Armandii, Delavayii, Davidii, Fargesii and
Souliei. Father SouliC. a medcal missionarv. , introduced
,
the now ubiquitous Buddleja davidii, scourge of many a
London gutter and chimney pot. He worked on the
troubled Sino-Tibetan border. where he was eventuallv
tortured and murdered by terrorists. Next time you pull
wall, spare a thought for the good doctor-priest.
'Chinese' Wilson wrote a book - one of several -
about his adventures. He called it China, Mother of
Gardens, by which he meant 'China, Mother of English
Gardens'. For a l l his sympathy with the country and its
peoples, Wilson's point of view was what is now called
Eurocentric. And it is a strange fact that few of the
Chinese wild flowers that he discovered were grown in
Chinese gardens. Neither Lilium regale nor Davidia
involucrata nor SouliC's Buddleja featured there.
Yet the Chinese have been keen and expert gardeners
for over two thousand years. What do they gow? Peter
Valder, an Australian botanist who has travelled widely
in China, tells us in The Garden Plants $China. He also
vuts these vlants into their cultural and historic context.
The bodk is illustrated with photographs old and new,
and with reproductions of Chinese works of art. The
skill 'of Chinese artists in depicting their favourite plants
has never been surpassed, and rarely equalled. Take, for
example, Pear Blossoms by Qianxuan (c 1280). The
combination of botanical accuracy with a free line
is awesome.
Wood-block prints from the Jieziyuan Huazhuan, a
student's manual of 1701, illustrate such favourites as
flowering plum, bamboo and pine with equally
remarkable liveliness.
 WILDLIFE
1 1
1 I Nine Good Reasons to support I
The Brain Research Trust=
Valder explains the symbolism that was attached to (Charity Registration No. 263064)
these plants. Pine, plum and bamboo were known as
'Three Friends of the Cold Season', and, because they
flowered or remained green in winter, symbolised moral
Epilepsy
tenacity under adverse conditions. Seasonality was very
important to the Chinese. Everything had its place in the
Brain Tumours
natural order of things. Orchids symbolised spring, lotus
flowers summer, chrysanthemums stood for autumn, and
Down's Syndrome
.
Prunus mume, the Chinese vlum, for winter.
,
Senile Dementia
The Chlnese love of flowers goes back a long way. In
138 BC the Emperor Wu grew over 2,000 species in his
ark. Heated houses were built for tender varieties.
Multiple Sclerosis
Peaches, apricots, cherries, pears and citrus fruits had
long been domesticated by the time of Emperor Wu.
Huntington's Disease
During the Song dynasties (AD 960-1279) five books
appeared on chrysanthemums, four on tree peonies,
Muscular Dystrophy
three on herbaceous peonies, two on orchids and three
on a single species and its varieties - the ravishingly
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beautiful Pmnus mume.
Before the nineteenth-century Opium Wars,
Motor Neurone Disease
European travellers to China were restricted to the
Treaty Ports and their environs. Most early introductions Serious diseases of the brain and nervous
were therefore cultivated plants, found in the gardens of system affect a million people in Britain
mandarins, or bought from the sophisticated nurseries. today. The aim of the Brain Research
T h e famous Fa Tee Gardens at Canton (now Trust is to fund research at the Institute
Guangzhou), for instance, grew a huge range of varieties of Neurology to discover their causes,
of the Chinese favourites: azaleas. camellias. roses.
peonies, wisteria, chrysanthemums and many more.
devise treatments and ultimately to cure
Some Chinese garden plants have travelled fi-om West to these complex and debilitating conditions.

East. Narcissus tazetta, a native of the Medterranean, has
been grown in the Far East for hundreds of years and is
shown on some of the most beautiful early paintings.
Even more surprisingly, the Frangipani, an archetypal
Buddhist 'temple tree', is a native of South America and
was taken across the Pacific by the Spanish. AU this is
explained by Valder in wonderful detail.
The Fa Tee Gardens are still going strong afier several
hundred years. Their survival is extraordinary, afier the
tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, which was dedicated
to destroying the old culture.
In a fascinating chapter on Camellias, Valder describes
an ancient Camellia reticulata which grows in a lamasery
in Yunnan. It is called the Ten Thousand Flower
Camellia and is said to be five hundred vears old and to
bear 4,000 flowers every spring. This treasure was
looked after during the Revolution by a monk who
risked his life to k e e ~it alive.
.,
Although much has been lost. much remains. Flowers
in China, now as ever, symbolise endurance as well as
longevity, wealth and optimism. Peter Valder has written
an important and scholarly book which fills a gap on the
shelves of botanists, gardeners and historians.
To order 'The Garden Plants 4 China' at the special price of
A 2 7 with free UK p Q call Literary Review Bookshop on
0 1 8 1 3 2 4 5 5 1 0 or use ourform on page 3 9 .
I
The Trust funds a number of projects at
the world's premier neuroscience research
centre, the Institute of Neurolo y in
Queen Square. The strength of the Jarity
lies in its supporters. Their donations
and bequests have been directly responsible
for a series of outstanding achievements
over the last 26 years.
I You can support this important work with donations,
i G.A.Y.E, Gift Aid or Deeds of Covenant
1 Please send donations or requests for information
i To: The Secretary & Administrator,
i The Brain Research Trust, 1 Bloomsbury House
i 77-74 Great Russell Street, London WClB 3DA
i Name.....................................(Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms)
i Address.................................................................
I .............................................................................
LR APR 2000
...................................................................
 I HISTORY
NORA KNEW BEST
* gave a speech; a burglar telling the British Communist
By Piers Brendon
(Jonathan Cape 880pp A25)
MY GREAT-AUNT Nora, a tough-minded old lady with
a variety of tenaciously held opinions, died a year or so
ago at the age of ninety-two. The last occasion we met
was in a hospital in the Euston Road, where she had
been sent for treatment. Frail, surrounded by medical
paraphernalia, and by her own admission falling apart,
Great-Aunt Nora proved as tough-minded as ever, and
never more so than when discussing those areas of
bygone life among which her mind had started to rove.
'I liked the 1930s,' she briskly informed me at one
point. Oh yes, I ventured with wary respect, wondering
what was so admirable about the age of appeasement,
hunger marches and rickety children? 'Easy,' the figure
in the bed lobbed back. 'People knew their place.'
People knew their place. And where exactly was that,
then? In Guernica, perhaps, where the Luftwaffe blew
several thousand more or less unsuspecting Spaniards to
pieces with lumps of therrnite? On the Jarrow march? In
the dustbowl of Oklahoma, with the crops torn up and
anyone who could commandeer a car in flight to the
west? On the street in Weimar, where, at the height of
the inflation spiral, a woman left a basket of marks on
the pavement and returned a few moments later to find
the basket gone but the marks strewn across the
flagstones? One never wants books to be reduced to
the status of debating tools, but my first reaction to Piers
Brendon's endlessly fascinating survey of the 1930s was
to wish that Great-Aunt Nora was still alive so that I
could send her a copy, with a dozen or so of the most
incriminating passages marked in red ink.
Over 800 pages long, and countless years in the writing,
The Dark I/alley is one of those enormous, panoramic
undertalungs in narrative history that scarcely ever get
written these days. The specialists have colonised the
early twentieth century as busily as any other tract of
recent time and no Wehrmacht panzer division is without
its scholarly monograph; yet heroic attempts at chronology
on the grand scale are still capable of filling the non-
specialist reader with awe. Inevitably, the title is a bit too
narrow. History, as Brendon soon demonstrates, doesn't
emerge out of a vacuum: he starts the book at Verdun,
proceeding via the Versailles peace conference, the 1923
Japanese earthquake and the General Strike to the
Weimar Republic and the US Depression, not reaching
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
1930 until a good eighth of the way in.
Equally inevitably, what sticks in the mind, as the narrative
weaves back and forth between Berlin, Paris, Rome,
London, Washington and Tokyo, is queer fragments of
detail, individual lives suddenly snuffed out in the
lepidopterist's lulling jar and tacked to the display case of
history: Hitler losing five pounds in weight every time he
Party boss Harry Pollitt, on the occasion of his imprison-
ment for sedition, that as someone with no respect for
private property it served him right; President Coolidge,
unimpressed by top-level advice to control the runaway
US investment market, going away to spend a happy
afternoon in the White House basement counting the
apples in a barrel sent to him by a fiiend.
Brendon's theme, predictably, is the rise of propaganda:
the reduction of government reports, political journalism
and even works of history to a series of falsehoods. And
yet one is struck by the weird truth some of the
propaganda contained. Mussolini, for instance, once
declared that France had been rotted by 'alcohol, syphilis
and journalism'. Research reveals that the per capita
annual French consumption of wine at this period was a
colossal 200 litres, that 10 per cent of the population -
four d i o n people - were syphilitic and that, just as in
the days of Balzac, most newspaper editors regarded
bribery as a kind of displaced advertising revenue. In this
respect, if not in his plan to assert Roman superiority to
'all the decrepit civilisations of the old world', Mussolini
was bang right.
The symbolic crisis of Brendon's study is Spain.
Reading his account of Guernica one simply marvels at
the depths of fraudulence plumbed by democrat and
tyrant alike: for example, how the flattening of a town
by unopposed German bombers was passed off as
Republican scorched-earthing; the lies told by Eden in
the House of Commons and in conferences set up to
monitor Hitler's supposed 'non-intervention'; the
emollient line (to put it charitably) taken by the Times
editor Geoffrey Dawson, who famously remarked: 'I do
my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper
anything that might hurt [Germans'] susceptibilities.'
Naturally, the wrongs done in the name of Liberty turn
out to be some of the worst of all. I was particularly
taken by the Communist cornrnuniqu; on the Battle of
Jarama: 'the dead were recovered with their arms stiff in
the revolutionary salute.'
Light relief comes in the form of recipes from
Marinetti's Fascist cookbook. The veteran of Futurism
- his manifesto had appeared as long before as 1909 -
was bent on a mission to overthrow the 'absurdist Italian
gastronomic religion' of macaroni, tagliatelle and other
pasta dishes. When serving 'Aerofood' the waiters would
spray the diners' necks with scent while the sound of
aeroplane engines and Bach rose from the kitchen.
 Throughout, one finds oneself wondering - doubtless
in a spirit of mild chauvinism - why it was that as
Germany, Italy and Japan succumbed to varieties of
Fascism and the USA opted for a h n d of presidential
dictatorship, Britain emerged relatively unscathed, or at
least with its institutions intact and its streets unbloodied.
The answer, oddly enough, lies in deference. Brendon
quotes a wonderfully snooty comment from Beatrice
Webb's diary about 'the unutterable snobbishness of the
lower type of Labour representatives'. By this she meant
politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald and Jimmy
NIGELWEST
An Irredeemably
Sorry Picture
INTELLIGENCE
AND THE WARAGAINST JAPAN
* possessions, colluded with Vietnamese rebels to shoot
By Richard L Aldrich
(Cambridge University Press 483pp A22.95)
WHY DID THE British Government's team of official
historians, led by Sir Harry Hinsley, neglect to produce
a volume in the British Intelligence in the Second World War
series covering the conflict in the Far East? Surely the
intelligence background to the capture of Singapore, and
to the loss of HMS Revulse and HMS Prince o f Wales d
deserves to be explained? The usual excuse is the paucity
of material on which to work, but Richard Aldrich has
proved, by taking advantage of the releases under the
Waldegrave initiative, that there are plenty of data available
if you know where to look. His conclusion, having
researched the sad story of Britain's lack of an adequate
intelligence infrastructure to cope with the Japanese
threat, is that the tale is so embarrassing, and the lapses
so egregious, that a decision was taken long ago by the
Cabinet Office to omit this particular inglorious tale. In
consequence, virtually the only officially endorsed pub-
lication has been Charles Cruickshank's 1983 study S O E
in the Far East. a version of events that. to be charitable.
tended to dwell on that ormnisation's few successes.
The reahty, as Aldrich rehes, is a picture of overlapping
responsibilities, incompetence, improvisation, muddle in
Whitehall and reluctance to devote any significant
resources to a theatre of operations that bore witness to
the loss of Singapore, described by Churchill as 'the
worst defeat in Britain's history'. The Secret Intelligence
Service, dominated by personalities more interested in
opportunities for postwar trade than in thwarting the
Emperor, failed to build local networks; SOE was in the
Thomas, who loved putting on their evening suits and
hobbing with the nobs. One might say that the eternally
middle-class taint of British radicalism has been its
damnation. T h e Monarchy, the House of Lords,
Baldwin's National Government - all the purblind
instruments of inter-war inertia - survived because,
well, people knew their place. Perhaps, in the end,
Great-Aunt Nora was right.
To order 'The Dark Wlley' at the special price of A23 with
free UK p+ call Literary Review Bookshop on 0181 324
5510 or use ourform on page 39.
hands of businessmen and colonial policemen who
distrusted the natives and were reluctant to arm them;
GCHQ's code-breakers were handicapped by limited
facilities and probably jeopardized a vital source by
having crypto-data compromised during the capture of
the SS Nankin in May 1942; US pilots had an unfortunate
habit of shooting down SOE aircraft; OSS (Office of
Strategic Services), reluctant to risk American lives in
fighting to restore British, Dutch and French colonial
French personnel.
Aldrich records that the prevaihng, generally disparaging
European view of the Japanese - as soldiers with the
martial skills of the Italians, and pilots unable to shoot
straight because of their slit eyes - prevented any
serious assessment of their true power. A prewar US
naval attach6 who reported accurately on the new Zero
fighter's capabilities was disbelieved because its perfor-
mance was unmatched by any American aircraft; news
of the development of the oxygen-powered Type 93
torpedo was rejected on the grounds that the technology
was too sophisticated. In consequence, the Japanese
outflew and outfought the RAF, which was equipped
with obsolete planes, and the US Navy suffered hideous
losses in the Battle of the Java Sea, having been attacked
with the 'phenomenally fast' enemy torpedoes, which
left virtuallv no detectable wake.
Perhaps the official historians were embarrassed by the
disclosure that Bletchley Park's outpost in East Africa,
deployed to scan the enemy's ainvaves across the Pacific,
gave a clear four-hour warning of an imminent,
catastrophic Japanese air attack on the two British battle
cruisers, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales. The cata-
logue of incompetence, mismanagement and internal
strife is endless, and unaccompanied by the usual
impressive tales of improvisation and personal gallantry,
which so ofien restore the balance in clandestine opera-
tions. Indeed, the whole irredeemably sorry picture
gives little credit either to the professionals, who were
slow to anticipate and to react to the Japanese challenge,
or to the amateurs, who failed to rise to the occasion.
Aldrich's most useful contribution is to resurrect,
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 HISTORY

examine and then bury that most persistent of myths
that, motivated by a ruthless regard for political expedi-
ency, a duplicitous Churchill connived to conceal his
advance notice of an imminent surprise air raid on Pearl
Harbor and thus brought Roasevelt into the war. Much,
generally overlooked, research has been undertaken into
how American linguists misinterpreted Japanese
diplomatic intercepts and Aldrich combines an account
of this with a detailed analysis of the controversial asser-
tions made in recent publications by the late Eric Nave
and Jarnes Rusbridger in particular, to lay these conspiracy
ghosts once and for all. Churchill demonstrably was
never in a position to exercise complete control over the
growing exchange of Anglo-American signals
intelligence in December 1941, and the private daries of
all the key players expressed uniform dismay, including
that of Malcolm Kennedy, who headed GCHQ's
Japanese dplomatic section and noted that the attack had
come 'as a complete surprise'. Far fiom suggesting that a
machiavellian Churchdl deliberately plotted to suppress a
warning, the most recently released material suggests that
the Prime Minister expected a Japanese offensive before
1942 - against British forces, and probably in
South-East Asia. Certainly GCHQ was making good
progress on enemy naval ciphers, but the proposition that
a calculated betrayal took place is wholly unsupportable.

an American lecture tour. This was news, because as early

as 1922 he had been the object of death threats in the

EMINENT EMIGRES increasingly anti-Semitic Reich, and f b m the moment he

took up his post in Berlin in 1914 he kept his Swiss
passport ready As a German diplomat in London told his
masters: 'With such a man we can make real cultural
* propaganda, and we should not drive him out of Germany.'
By Fritz Stem He was worth an army to the Allies, who, ironically,
(Allen Lane The Penguin Press 352pp L20) considered this paciiist advocate of world government too
much of a security risk to work on the atom bomb.
ALBERTEINSTEIN R E M A I N S incomparable. In the Einstein's German-Jewish milieu, however, is receding
iconography of science, his are the archetypal features. rapidly into history, as the last survivors of exodus and
His stature seems to grow with time, dominating the extermination grow old and die. In five sketches,
twentieth-century scientific landscape no less than grouped together under the heading 'The Promise of
Darwin d d that of the nineteenth century. His prestige German Life', Stern brings that intellectual context back
is as much moral as intellectual. His uncompromising into focus. He helps to explain why, even among such
rejection of German aggression in distinguished c~ntem~oraries~as the
both world wars, his eagerness to father of quantum physics, Max
embrace banishment and Planck, or the founder of
expropriation (he was abroad chemotherapy, Paul Ehrlich,
when Hitler came to power, and Einstein was so extraordinary. The
never returned), caught the longest essay, which compares
world's imagination and won his Einstein with his fiiend, the chemist
enduring place as the beau ideal of Fritz Haber, is a fragment of an
the humane genius. His only rivals abandoned book, richly grounded
in celebrity had been forced into in new archival material. These por-
emigration: Freud, who left traits are not only biographical; they
Vienna under humiliating circum- are also variations on 'the political
stances only after the Anschluss consequences of the unpolitical
and arrived in London mortally ill, German', the theme of a justly
and Thomas Mann, whose celebrated essav which first defined
attitude to Germany was, as a Stern's approach as an intellectual
non:]ew, far more ambivalent. historian some forty years ago.
~ m o n the~ cases of many
1 I Stern has long been intrTgued by

I
eminent Cmigrb, Einstein's exile
v .
made the greatest impact, as the dust
jacket of the American historian
Fritz Stern's book indirectly
demonstrates: it shows Einstein on a
German liner, the Deutschland,
returning to Germany in 1931 h m
Einstein: Swiss passport at the ready
Haber, who was his godfather. An
assimilated, patriotic J&, he helped
the German chemical industry to its
dominant position in Europe by
dscovering the tixation of nitrogen,
which led to the transformation of
agriculture by fertilisers, and the

I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
2 HISTORY L

commercial production of ammonia. He was tireless and

selfless in his promotion of science, and it was he who
brought Einstein to Berlin. But there was a sinister side
to Haber's work: during the First World War, his institute
developed poison gas. After the war, he continued to
work for the Reichswehr, which was then secretly
collaborating with the Red Army. One of his projects, a
pesticide called Zyklon B, was later used by the Nazis in
their gas chambers. In 1933, Haber refused to work with
the Nazis; but it was too late. He died in exile, a broken
man, a year later.
Oddly, given Stern's lifelong fascination with intellectuals
in politics, the least persuasive of these chapters is that
devoted to Walther Rathenau, who was successively a About Literary Review Bookshop. m
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supremo, foreign minister, and victim of the Weimar
retail price stated in'the review. Books in stock are usually
Republic's most notorious assassination. Stern notes but
despatched the following day and most are delivered in the UK
scarcely explores the pathology of Rathenau's Jewish within 14 days. You are under no obligation to order again.
self-hatred, his attraction to 'Aryan' youths, hls 'egregious
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LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 HISTORY
The charge that Goldhagen 'tried to please his German
audiences' anyway applies no less to Stern himself.
Although always generous to the Germans, Stern is
dismayed that they botched their 'second chance' after
1989: 'Once again, Germany's history did not have to
be like this.' And he does not forget the German victims,
who were not all Jews like himself. Stern went to
America as a boy of twelve, leaving his home in Breslau,
Silesia. He describes returning to what is now Wroclaw
and meeting the present owner of his grandmother's
villa: a Polish cavalry officer and survivor of Auschwitz,
Birkenau and Buchenwald. Stern pays tribute to this
man who 'suffered the fate most of my family had
escaped'. There are, after all, worse fates than exile.
AT LEAST THEY HAD TASTE
* stages for absolutism.
Edited by John Adamson
(Weidenfeld G. Nicolson 351pp A30)
THISATTRACTIVELY PRODUCED book covers a dozen of
the princely courts of Europe over the period 1500-
1750. Historical events are touched upon in the text,
but only to the extent that they affected life at the courts
of Europe. Some readers might object that this is a little
like studying Napoleon's effect on the cuisine in army
catering services in the early nineteenth century.
However, the publishers have struck a good balance
between the text and the illustrations, producing a
volume quite suitable for a small coffee table, and with a
title likely to interest a hostess with social ambitions.
The excellent and learned introduction is written by
John Adamson, as is the chapter on the Tudor and
Stuart courts. He
has also edited the
other chapters,
which cover the
courts of the
S p a n i s h 2
Habsburas. the
U .
Valois and
Bourbons, the
House of Orange,
the Vatican, tvhe
A u s t r i a n
Habsburgs, the
Wittelsbachs, the
Hohenzollerns,
the Medicis, the
House of Savoy, Henry VIII's
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
the Vasas of Sweden, and finally Russia.
Adamson, who writes lucidly, is a Fellow of Jesus
College, Cambridge. His team of collaborators also
deserves acknowledgement and praise. They touch on
many subjects with which readers will be familiar. We
know, for instance, how peripatetic the courts used to
be. It was necessary for the sovereign to cement the links
with distant provinces, which were often only part of
the realm through astute dynastic marriages. Temporary
courts were set up while the ruler was on tour, and resi-
dences built to accommodate such courts. Rural retreats
were built in order to escape the summer heat. Other
separate minor courts were set up for members of the
family - the dowager, the heir, and younger princes.
Fashionable historiography has largely become, if no
longer Marxist, at least focused on economics and
sociology. The importance of dead white males (and, of
course, females, like Elizabeth I and Catherine the
Great) is derided. For a treatment of them we fall back
on historical biography. Since Norbert Elias we have
been told that the courts of the ancien rdgime were just
We are the fortunate heirs of the artistic heritage of royal
absolutism. Building palaces, and entertaining inside them,
was one way of giving employment. The rulers also set up
royal rnanufactories for tapestries, for instance at Brussels,
Mortlake and Beauvais. The King of Saxony discovered
the secret of porcelain manufacture and his enterprise at
Meissen was copied in every court in Europe. Augsburg
was famous for its silver and gold objects and every ruler
commissioned great hoards of plate in the certain
knowledge that it would constitute a reserve of bullion
when required. To alleviate the boredom of court
ceremony and a rigid hierarchy of courtiers, intelligent
rulers also commissioned performances in theatre, music
and ballet. We can forgive absolutism almost anything
when we reflect it has left us our entire heritage of classical
music and great dramatic works.
Readers who
enjoy sightseeing
will find this book
a useful guide. It is
a relief to escape
from the ma'ln
residential palaces
I
of, say, Versailles,
St Petersburg or
Munich and roam
around their park
follies, faux
dairies, bath hous-
es, pagodas, hunt-
ing lodges,
belvederes and
Nonsuch Palace pavillions d'amour.
I
 1- SHORT STORIES
The Darker Side
of Australia
* the
By David Malouf
(Chatto G Windus 224pp A1 4.99)
NOT LONG AGO, it was still commonplace, if a sign of
ignorance, to regard Australia as a cultural desert. The
country's ancient and powerful native culture was
disregarded as impenetrable and irrelevant; as for
European art and ideas, they were bound to be thinly
spread and a poor imitation of the real thing. This
impression was compounded by the exodus Gom their
native land of many talented Australians. If you were any
good, it appeared, you operated elsewhere. But for
David Malouf, like his fi-iend and fellow novelist of an
older generation, Patrick White, the role of the expatriate
had little appeal. He has lived in England and in Italy,
but ~ u s t r a l l aremains his home. Over the years, to
increasing acclaim, his writing has drawn upon two
parallel sources of inspiration: the classical tradition
derived from his education and his Middle Eastern
forebears, and the landscape and history of AustraLa. He
has always employed myths and images from the old
world to celebrate and understand the new.
This latest collection of nine stories is firmlv Australia-
based, and deals with classic themes that have 'a particular
power in the Australian context. Thus several of the
stories revolve around a boy making the painful transition
to manhood, like the opening story 'At Schindler's', in
which Jack comes to realise that his father, a prisoner of
war in Borneo, is not coming home and that his new
friend, an American Air Force navigator, is his mother's
lover. Another boy, trapped in the bush in a family of
religious fundamentalists, is powerfully drawn to the
renegade Uncle Charles, who 'lives in Sodom' and
arrives in a fast car and a golden glow of sinister beauty.
Malouf has always written brilliantly about boyhood,
especially the lush tropical Queensland setting of his
own youth. In the title story, a boy hiding underneath
his family house, raised on stilts as are many old
Queensland houses, grows up to be a famous writer
living in London. On a visit home he is caught up in a
mysteriously bloody incident in a Brisbane street. The
'dream stuff' appears to be the cannabis plantations said
to exist in secret locations outside the city, growing in a
tangle of green in the damp heat, fuelling fantasies and
random violence.
I
l
Malouf's stories art
richly imaginative
beautifully written anc
usually left open to mort
than one interpretation
which gives them ;
strange, dreamlike powei
of their own. He is no
one for the tight plot o:
neat ending
Without labouring thc
point, he makes tht
reader uneasily aware o
the darker asDect;
of Australia's past
especially the displace-
ment and destruction o
the aboriginal tribe"
who were there first. Malouf: dream-like
The aboriginal presence
is kept to the margins, except in one of the strongest
stories, reminiscent of Malouf's best novel so far,
Remembering Babylon. In 'Blacksoil Country' the narrator
is a ghost, a white boy murdered and hidden away by
Aborigines in revenge for his father's violence against
them. 'I can show you this country,' says the ghost. 'I
been in it long enough.' It is characteristic of Malouf's
humanity, which pervades all his writing, that the
Genzied father is drawn with sympathy and understanding.
Equally, the deranged killer who encounters a quiet
suburban couple on holiday in their tidy caravan is not
presented as a monster, but as a man possessed by the
savage spirit of the violence he inflicts.
Gradually, Malouf allows another theme to surface.
Old tribal rituals have been replaced by the patterns and
activities of the modern Australian tribe, whose lives are
more fragmented and scattered but still revolve around
the perennial human preoccupations of love and death.
He does not write with quite as much insight or
assurance about contemporary life as he does about the
recent past; he seems to need a gap in time to set his
sympathies and imagination free. Equally, his women
and girls are not always as fully realised or as authentic as
his male characters.
All these stories reveal his deep love of Australia, what
it is and what it could become. He knows, like the
narrator in the story 'Jacko's Reach', that the heart of a
nation, like the human heart, can never be entirely
sunny or open, and that the dark side of life can be the
most fruitful. Jacko's Reach is the last patch of scrub on
the edge of a Sydney suburb, and it is about to be
cleared away for a new development of shops, tennis
courts and a Heritage Walk. However, writes Malouf,
'its darkness will never quite be dispelled, however many
mushroom-lights they install-inthe parking lot.'
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 of compiling the year's
fictional highlights

AUTHOR AS VENTRILOQUIST need look no further:

here is a storv which
begs to be ahtholo-
EQUALLOVE gised. 'How To Be An
* Expatriate' typifies
By Peter Ho Davies H o Davies's gift for
(Granta Books 272pp A9.99) concealing emotion
among apparently
THE TITLE O F this new collection comes from banal detail. 'You are
E M Forster, who is regretting - in Where Angels Fear to an only child, and
Tread - that imbalance of section which characterises sometimes you think
the relationship between parents and children: 'Life your family takes this
would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor to mean you're only a
and we might be wonderfidy happy', Forster writes, if child', says the central
children loved their parents as much as their parents love character, moving
them. It is a theme which Peter Ho Davies addresses away from his Enghsh
with delicacy and humour. He is compassionate, but parents to America.
never mawlush; witty without being unkind. His first when he is homesick
collection, The Ugliest House in the World, won prizes, and he goes 'to McDonald's or Burger King or Kentucky
it's easy to see why: he picks his way through fragile Fried Chicken, just like at home'. On the telephone, he
familial ties with an almost feline agllity and grace. listens to his father telling him that his mother misses
The twelve stories may be thematically linked, but him and his mother telling him his father misses him.
that is not to say that they-arelimited in their range. The A lot of people miss each other in Equal Love.
jacket blurb says that Ho Davies holds writing posts at There are two or three weaker stories. Sometimes the
universities in England and America and alternates, in tales are impelled by a single, good idea which is
fiction as in life. between one countrv and the other. inadequate to sustain a whole story, making for desulto-
Anyone can set H story in Florida or the Midlands, but ry, fizzled-out endings. 'Sales', about a man who prefers
Ho Davies can really do the voices. He is just as much at his job as an encyclopaedia salesman to his wife and
home in the idiom of a young American mother trying child, is a case in point. 'Cakes of Baby', about a
to get off drugs as he is with an old Enghsh dad trying daughter's decision to help her bankrupt mother, is
not to give up smoking. T h e book is a feat of another. In these stories it's as if Ho Davies has been
ventriloauism: it would be im~ossibleto tell. fiom this thrown a ball but he doesn't know which way to run
writing, the nationality of the author. One of the good with it: there's a sense of floundering. The title story -
things about short stories is that they let a writer be about near-miss adultery on an American campus - is
camouflaged by the density of the form; something that excellent, but if you were sold it as an early John Updike
.
is not allowed bv the wide-o~enspaces of the novel. I
think the finest short-story writers aim to be pretty
tale you'd never know the difference. Peter Ho Davies
doesn't need to pay that kind of homage to anyone,
much invisible. The very best practitioners - because when he's good, he's very good. Like his first
V S Pritchett. sav. or Eudora Weltv - succeed. The fact collection, Equal Love deserves the laurels.
that it is hard'to'deduce anything ;bout Ho Davies from
these tales is an indication of how good he is.
His subjects vary from the quirky to the mundane. In
one story, a couple's marriage-comes under strain when Literary Review Bookshop
they each remember an encounter with aliens in a
slightly different way; another uses a hospital visit to an
To order any book reviewed
Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother to explore the bond call 0181 324 5 5 1 0
between a father and a son. The oddest - and best -is or post orders to
'The Next Life', about a traditional Chinese funeral. Literary Review Bookshop,
The dead man's son - who has been left well off - 250 Western Avenue,
manages to get the ceremony for free, by gambling with
the professional mourners: in doing so he is proving his London, W3 GEE.
inde~endencefrom his father. This is Ho Davies on tot,
form: funny, touching, off-beat. Anyone in the business See ora'erfom for more a'etaih

I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 I SHORT ST0,RIES
THE LITERARY PAGES of a SARAHA SMITHENJOYSTHREE
broadsheet recently opined
that 'no one' reads short COLLECTIONS
stories any more. If this is
the case, nobody seems to have told the publishers:
short-story collections are still produced in great
numbers and they are one of the best routes into print
for new writers. As these recent collections by Rachel
Ingalls, Stacey Richter and Helen Dunmore illustrate,
the genre is nothing if not varied.
American-born and British-based, Rachel Ingalls is
the best-established short-story writer of the three and
the most classical in approach. Days Like Today (Faber &
Faber 289pp E12.99), her seventh collection, is loosely
organised around the theme of war and its impact: on
the war correspondent's wife, the soldier's girlfriend, the
soldiers themselves and, finally, the displaced returning
to a ravaged land. Stirring and reflective, the book
engages with the modern world, exploring the media
approach to conflict ('a combination of police work,
priesthood and style management') as well as the
struggle in the Balkans to re-establish a community.
What is really impressive about Ingalls is her comrnit-
ment to narrative. Her voice is detached and measured,
giving her work the timeless feel of the folk tale. Each of
the five stories is substantial, and full of characters and
events. Thus the horrieing 'Veterans', which looks at
the lives of two American soldiers after the Korean War,
deals n o t just with what t h e men have made o f
themselves but spreads out into local jealousies and
domestic tensions, adding layers to the coming tragedy.
In all the stories, ironic detail clinches our enjoyment -
the wife for whom normality is having a dentist in the
next town and enough time and money for an appoint-
ment ('No Love Lost') and the elderly patriarch who
rages over the sudden death of his grandson: 'Now their
miserable island was going to be on the map, a genuine
tourist attraction with a legend to go with it' ('Icon').
In her first collection, My Date with Satan (Scribner
223pp E6.99), American Stacey Richter takes a very
different approach. A series o f monologues from
fast-tallung and even faster-living misfits, the book mixes
satire and sympathy in its depiction of a deranged
Midwest. It is exhilaratingly weird.
Some of the stories are painfully honest. The rich
teenager of 'The Beauty Treatment' has her looks
ruined by her best friend and reflects, 'if I really forgave
her, something vast and infinite would open up inside
me... . It would be like some kind of a health spa -
where you go in naked without any things. God, would
I ever be lost in a place like that.' Others are painfully
funny in their deflation of everything from anthropology
to conceptual art and black-metal rock bands. There
can't be a much better way of dispensing with the latter
than the absurd 'Goal 666', in which the Lords of
1 1
Sludge find their dedication
t o 'evil in t h e extreme'
OF SHORT STORIES crumbling during their first
concert, when joy overtakes
t h e m all and they break i n t o R o d g e r s and
Hammerstein's gloriously inappropriate 'Happy Talk'.
Part of the pleasure of these stories undoubtedly
comes fiom their shock value ('Rules for being Human'
is about ghostly body parts, 'My Date ...' features a
dominatrix called Pippi Longstocking), and Richter
occasionally slips into self-parody (for example, in the
drug-fuelled 'Prom Night' and the just too odd 'Rats
Eat Cats'). Yet her writing is so full of wit and energy,
her approach so inventive, she can perhaps be forgiven
for over-exuberance.
Comvared to these two collections. British novelist
Helen ~ u n m o r e ' ssecond collection of short stories, Ice
Cream (Viking 21 8pp E15.99), looks extremely pale.
Rehashing the usual ingredients of Dunmore's fiction
(the Scandinavian landscape; a longing for the sea;
trauma intruding on childhood; even Ulli, a colourless
Finnish girl w h o appears in Love o f Fat Men), it is
technicall; , imvressiv&but intelle~tuall~void.
L
Part of the reason for this is Dunmore's apparent lack
of interest in storytelling. For all the intricate plotting of
novels like A Spell of Winter and Talking to the Dead, too
- -
manv of the vieces here are not so much narratives as
sliveis of desc;iption. This is fine in those stories which
aim simply at catching a mood (adolescence in 'Lilac'
and in 'Salmon', reverie in 'The Fag'). All too often,
however, there is a feeling of incompleteness about
Dunmore's work. This is evident in 'You Stayed Awake
with Me', in which a woman suffering from crippling
arthritis returns to her mother's derelict cottage with her
U
best friend; she enjoys the weather and recalls the
summers they spent there together until her father
abused her friend. The reader is left wondering quite
what Dunmore's purpose is here.
If she spends too much of her time on surface and not
enough on content, there are nevertheless a couple of
Dunmore gems. The poignant 'The Lighthouse Keeper's
Wife' toys with the reader's expectations as we struggle
to guess just what the lighthouse keeper will find on his
return home. Meanwhile, the funny, quirky portraits of
modern women remind us that this is a writer who
knows how to grab our attention - whether it's with a
starving model-who gives in to her craving (the title
story), a talking parking meter ('Be Vigilant'), or a
housewife who learns to relax in the water ('Swimming
in the Millennium'). It's just a pity she doesn't try and
grab us a little more often.
Visit the Literary Review Website
http: www.litreview.com
m
LITERARY REVIEW April 20(

EARLY PSYCHOTHERAPISTS
By Alain de Botton
(Hamish Hamilton 249pp L14.99)
AT THE HEART of this witty, thoughtful, entertaining
book is the provocative belief that there is no point in
philosophy unless it helps dispel mental sufferings. In
support of such an arguable thesis and to help us over-
come such contemporary problems as unpopularity,
poverty and wealth, frustration, human weakness and
the f i c t i o n s of love, Alain de Botton summons a sextet
of philosophers. His title is a teasing piece of literary
larceny - the original De Consolatione Philosophiae
having been written around 500 BC by the Roman
statesman Boethius, during his imprisonment for treason
against the Gothic king, Theodoric. Boethius, whose
work was translated by ~haucer,discusses with the god-
dess Philosophy the transience and insecurity of every-
thing save virtue. De Botton's message is similar. Men
are seduced by the trappings of wealth, power, status and
possessions but the secret of a hlfilled and satisfjring life
is the wisdom to know what wdl truly make us happy.
De Botton reclaims for the philosopher what today's
society has transferred to the psychiatrist - the task of
providmg answers to how we are to live. But his selection
and analysis of the observations and reflections of
Socrates, -~eneca,Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Epicurus
and Nietzsche only serve to show how much modern
psychiatry, whether it knows it or not, is busy
imvlementing: " some of their most fundamental beliefs.
Consider Epicurus. Here was a man prepared to confront
the question, what does it take to make a man happy? -
and answer: friendship; freedom; a willingness to analyse
and hspel anxieties about such things as money; dlness;
death; the possession of a purpose in life; and wealth suf-
ficient to pmvide food, shelter and clothng. The capacity
of money to deliver happiness, he insisted, is present in
small salaries but wdl not rise with the largest. His claims,
some two millennia later, receive mbust confirmation. In
the recently published The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies (Yale University Press) by the eminent
sociologist Robert E Lane, a number of scrupulously
desimed stuhes are described whlch have indeed shown
I
'
2
that once a person's income is above the poverty level, a
larger and larger one contributes next to nothing to
happiness. Quite the reverse happens: as wealth increases,
family solidarity and community bonding disintegrate.
To Seneca we are referred for advice on coping with set-
backs, and indeed he has much to say of relevance to such
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
contemporary inanities as football
hooliganism and mad rage. Anger
he sees as a kind of madness, given
that what makes us angry tends to
be the frustration of dangerously
optimistic ideas about the world
and other people. In this modern
world of ;faience and plenty,
effective mehcine, and a political
system devoted to shepherding us
safely f b m the cradle to the grave,
we do not anticipate evds before 1 7n
they arrive. We are, like the
passengers on the Titanic, expecting that things will turn
out the way we believe they should. Yet since so many
funerals pass our door, should we not be better prepared
for our own? The wise man always considers what can
happen and because we are injured most by what we do
not expect we must expect everything to happen.
Shades here of the latest thinlung in post-traumatic stress
disorder theory, which suggests that the attitude of those
who cope best afier trauma is not infused with personal
resentment or frustration, but with acceptance and relief
that they have survived and even prospered.
There is much in Socratic philosophy to give contem-
porary cognitive therapists encouragement, not least the
advice that 'If you wish to put off all worry, assume that
what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.'
At times, he sounds like one of those bearded, rangy
self-actualising Californian psychotherapy gurus who
declare that the wise man can lose nothing if he has
invested everything in himself, and progress consists in,
among other things, making a friend of yourself.
With the commonest sicknesses of our time in mind,
there is, naturally, much space devoted to sexual prob-
lems and their therapy. This comes in the form of an
enormously entertaining discussion with Montaigne, a
philosopher intent on encouraging an acceptance of the
human body with all its unpredictable and sometimes
antisocial instincts. Not only was he prepared to give his
views on everything from psychogenic impotence to the
difference between learning and wisdom, he was willing
to discuss his own relationship with his body. So we
learn that he found sex messy and noisy, liked quiet
when sitting on the toilet, enjoyed regular bowel
movements, ate rapidly and practised advanced dental
hygiene. But most important, we are reminded of his
belief in the superiority of wisdom - knowing what
helps us live happily and morally - over mere learning.
Education that makes us learned but fails to make us
wise is, in Montaigne's scheme of life, quite simply
absurd. Would that he were living at this hour.
Schopenhauer is the somewhat unexpected therapist
summoned by de Bonon to help ease the pain of loss,
while Nietzsche's consolations are to enable us to cope
 1 - L I F E & DEATH I

with the most fundamental philosophical question of all:

the point, purpose and meaning of suffering. Here there
are echoes of the Stoics. with the Nietzschean emvhasis
on accepting what we cannot avoid and speculation that
joy and suffering may be tied together so closely that
one cannot be savoured d e e ~ l vwithout the other.
I I
It is interesting" to note that none of de Botton's
philosophers are from the twentieth century: no
Wittgenstein, Ayer or Russell, no Daniel Dennett or
Karl Popper. However rich the rninings of contemporary
vhilosovhers in relation to such matters as our under-
standing of intelligence or the nature of language, they
would appear to have little of a genuinely consoling
nature to say to common humanity concerning the
meaning of suffering or the attainment of happiness.
De Botton dustrates his rich piclungs fiom the sensible
six with some gritty little problems of living and some
reflections on his versonal life and circumstances. The
end result is a st4ish book, which manages to make
philosophy both enjoyable and relevant while at the
same time providing a very sensible digest of consola-
tions for many of our current psychological ills.
To order 'The Consolations of Philosophy' at the special price
of A 1 2 . 9 9 with free UK p+ call Literary Review Bookshop
on 0181 3 2 4 5510 or use ourform on page 3 9 .
LOST, NOT GONE BEFORE
DEATHI N ENGLAND:
AN ILLUSTRATEDHISTORY
*
Edited by Peter CJupp and Clare Gittings
(Manchester University Press 282pp A40 hbk L 1 9 . 9 9 p b k )
EARLIERTHIS YEAR the eminent disc jockey and
purveyor of home truths, John Peel, asserted, with some
warmth, that death was no longer a forbidden subject.
'If I see the words "death remains one of the last great
taboos" again,' he threatened, 'I might just, well, die.'
True, we are exposed to death, in documented or
dramatised forms, whenever we pick up a newspaper
or switch on a television, but the test is whether
thoughts and feelings customarily regarded as private can
be admitted into public discourse.
Peter Jupp and Clare Gittings believe the taboo was
already waning at the close of the twentieth century and
that we are now in the process of overcoming our
reluctance to speak. Although the burgeoning sociology

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 I LIFE & DEATH I

of death throughout of Arms, which laid

the 1990s must tes* down a strict protocol
to that formal change, for each, according to
the case for supposing rank. A baron would
a new and general require seven principal
openness at the private mourners, a duke
level is much less clear. eleven. The rebellion
Death in England against these heraldic
assembles many of the hnerals took the form
tirst &vision currently of night burials,
writing on death, and which avoided
together they provide a expense and formality
rich and fascinating and, more importantly,
storehouse of mforrna- afforded an intimacy
tion and analysis. The between mourners
book is also very well that was more appro-
illustrated, depicting priate to profound
the many faces of grief. James I gave
death Gom disinterred royal approval to the
Iron Age skeletons and Here we go again practice of night
~enaissancebereave- burials when he
ment portraiture to an extraordinary Victorian photograph reburied his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, at night in
of a dead baby who was mistakenly thought to be asleep. Westminster Abbey in 1612.
The editors' aim is to explore the preoccupations of Although we might recognise something of our own
today's thanatologists in the context of a linear history of mourning behaviour in this need to express personal
England. The scope is consequently huge, and stretches suffering, the comparison is misleading. Throughout this
from the first known death rituals (circa 4000 BC) to book. the authors remind us that the hand of Christian
the flowers left at Kensington Palace after Princess tradition was always raised h g h against too much grief
Diana's death in 1997. Although little is recoverable because it suggested a lack of faith in God's gift of the
fiom the early period, the chapters on the Neolithic and resurrection. In the twentieth century, England
Bronze Ages affirm the discontinuous nature of hnerary abandoned that belief, and in what is probably the most
practice. For several centuries afier 1000 BC there is no ambitious chapter, Peter Jupp and Tony Walter face up to
archaeological evidence of burial rites in this country at the implications of that loss. The modern understanding
all. Did they throw the corpses into rivers? Why did of death is shaped by diverse influences, from increased
they take up burial again later? We don't know. But life expectancy to Aids, genocide and even telecornmuni-
what is clear is that the hlstory of death is not a developing cations. Death is all too familiar, yet as Jupp and Walter
continuum of good sense and increasing liberalisation. point out, English culture continues to suppress grief in
Instead, it is Gaught with anxiety and difference. public. Bereaved people might expect to weep at home,
, The rise and fall of purgatory is interesting in this but woe betide those who cannot 'keep themselves
context. The doctrine, first promulgated in 1274, held together' at work or while shopping. In this key respect,
that prayers for the dead could shorten their stay in death remains one of the last great taboos. Sorry,John.
purgatory. The wealthy endowed chantries so that
monks and priests could sing rich souls to heaven. These
a
intercessorv-masses offered ~racticalintiniacv between Literary Review Bookshop
the living'and the dead, a n i served as a midium for
grief. The Reformation changed all that. Purgatory, To order any book reviewed
chantries and the idea of intercession were swept away in call 0181 324 5510
Edward VI's reign, and with them went the chance to or post orders to
do anything useful for the dead. The change in doctrine Litera y Review Bookshop,
' wrought a fundamental change in grief. No longer able
to influence the destinv of the soul, the bereaved began
250 Western Avenue,
to concentrate on their own suffering. London, W3 GEE.
The right of the mourner to display personal loss
gathered strength in the seventeenth century. Funerals of See orderform for more details
the high-born were at that time run by the College

L
LITERARY REVIEW April 2
 GENERAL
** Special Offer **
Exclusive to Literary Review

NOT QUITE CONTINUOUS A History of the English Parish

OF THE ENGLISH
A HISTORY PARISH: The Culture of Religion from Saint Augustine to Queen Victoria
THECULTURE OF RELIGIONFROM N. J. G. Pounds
AUGUSTINETO VICTORIA
*
By NJ G Pounds
(Cambridge University Press 619pp L60)

THEENGLISH PARISH system, dividing the country into

upwards of 9,000 uneven units centred on a parish
church, crystallised out in the thirteenth century. From
then until the age of Queen Victoria the parish was the
single most important unit of local administration, and
the focus of local identity. Round its central ecclesiastical
tasks of providing the people with the rites of passage,
regular access to Christian worship, and a location for
Christian burial, other functions gathered: poor-relief,
military service, census returns, tax assessment and
collection, and the enforcement and regulation of social,
religious and political policy. The parish church was
often the only stone-built structure in a community, and
the centre of community pride and display: in the later
Middle Ages a huge proportion of the gross national
product was ploughed into pious art and parish
church building.
Each of these activities generated a tidal wave of paper,
and no English institution is so well worth study.
Academic parish studies have blossomed, as the history This book looks at the church from its lowest stratum - the
of lungs, bishops and battles has given way to history of parish - in which the church building is seen as the parishioners'
gender, minorities, the locality and the grass roots. In handiwork, and as a reflection of popular culture. It discusses in
county record offices nowadays the rows of amateur turn the origin and development ofparishes, their function, and
genealogists and local historians, who once monopolised the church fabric which embodied parishioners' aspirations.
parish registers, tithe maps and churchwardens' A sweepingaccount of the culture ofthe English parish from
accounts, have to jostle elbows with highly trained PhD early medieval times to the early nineteenth century
and post-doctoral students. Distinguished work by John
Another title by the author of popular works such as The
Blair and others has given us a much clearer grasp of the
medieval evolution of the parish from the huge rninster Medieval Cactle in Englandand Wales
parochiae of the Anglo-Saxon period, and a spate of stud- Contains fascinating material on parish history and
ies of the Reformation have drawn heady on parochial organisation, and the contents and fabric of the English
records to try to chart the progress of religious change. church
A survey of the present state of research on the history 2000 247 X 174 mm 619pp 164figures
of the parish is therefore welcome, and Professor f60.00 HB 0 521 633486
Pounds, an historical geographer, brings to the task a Literary Review readers can order this title at 20% discount
lifetime of research in local archives, as well as a passionate
Only f48.00
engagement with every aspect of his subject, from the
economics of tithe to the carving of poppy-headed
bench ends. The book, though equipped with a full
academic apparatus of charts and graphs, is also illustrated
with a host of engaging line-drawings, which appear to
be Pounds's own. Since he is now eighty-eight, this is
presumably his last major work, the distillation of the CAMBRIDGE The Edinburgh Building
UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, c s z Z R U , U K
insight and learning of a long career. But the result, it
must be said, is a curate's egg of a book (given its scale,
perhaps an ostrich's egg).
Pounds is best on the early evolution of the parish, a
complex subject presented here with economy and clarity.
H e is good, too, on the deep or long-term structural
aspects of the parish; fascinating on the whole question
of tithe (as he points out, the single most sustained, effec-
tive and burdensome form of taxation in English history);
and in general strong on the economic and administrative
dimensions of parochial history. A great deal of arcane
material is here made plain, and the enquirer seeking the
dfference between a rector and a vicar, the meaning of
impropriations, the duties of a sidesman or an overseer
of the poor, or the legal and social significance of bound-
ary perambulation, need look no further.
But the sheer scale of the book means that long-term
continuities are emphasised at the cost of a sense of
change.or evolution, while many subjects are given a
skimpy, summary treatment. The visual art of late-
medieval churches is charmingly illustrated by Pounds's
drawings, but discussed in terms which hardly rise in
tone or professionalism above the nineteenth-century
antiquarian material on which Pounds often draws.
N o r does he convey what difference, if any, the
Reformation made to the parish. The mid-Tudor aboli-
tion of gilds and chantries deprived parishes of clerical
personnel and major sources of income, and altered the
pattern of lay office-holding in many communities: it
drastically reduced, for example, the opportunities for
women to hold office. In many towns the medieval
parish structure collapsed, leaving all but a handhl of city
churches without clergy for decades at a time. The role
of churchwardens changed. Before the Reformation they
were administrators of the community's corporate
finances; after the Reformation they were increasingly
agents of government policy. In many parishes communal
forms of decision-malung involving all householders gave
way to control by select vestries drawn f h m the wealthiest
inhabitants. The Reformation, moreover, invented regular
methods of policing church attendance (thereby enabling
the historian, at least in theory, to attempt to measure
parochial conformity for the first time). Yet none of
these developments are adequately discussed here, and
Pounds, who thinks that 'most people did not turn a
hair' over the Reformation, clearly considers that
administratively, too, it was a relatively minor blip. This
may of course be true, but the matter needs to be
properly addressed, not allowed to go by default.
Many subjects suffer from over-compression and the
privileging of structural over chronological treatment.
Sub-parochial institutions like local guilds, for example,
have been a major recent focus for historians, substantially
modfjring our perceptions of the structure of the late-
medieval example. The gilds get skimpy treatment here,
however, and an inadequate bibliography. The same
could be said of Pounds's discussion of the rites of
passage: no one would gather from his account of the
rite of Confirmation, for example, that in the Middle
Ages it was administered not by the laying on of hands
but by anointing with chrism, or that the approved age
of Confirmation was raised at the Reformation from
three years or less to the teens or upwards, with a conse-
quent transformation of the social as well as religious
meanings of the ritual.
All in all, this book provides a fine summary of the
present state of research on the evolution and adminis-
tration of most aspects of the medieval parish, and a
useful if selective overview of the rest. O n many points
of detail, however, it needs to be used with caution.
Looking Back From the
Dregs of a Tradition
*
Edited by Martin Kemp
(Oxford University Press 527pp A40)
THIS IS ESSENTIALLY a picture book, and, as deadlines
dictated the review of an uncorrected proof copy in
black and white, the following appraisal is unavoidably
based on a partial appreciation of its contents.
Martin Kemp is Professor of the History of Art in the
University of Oxford, and he makes no bones about the
importance of the visual nature of this book and its
deliberately woolly subject. He intends it to be different
from previous histories of the kind, in that the illustrative
aspect should, if I understand him rightly, be appreciable
independently of the text - 'and not only in ways
consciously planned by the editor and authors'. In other
words, Kemp is becomingly humble in his low estimation
of the art historian in relation to the artist.
In defining what he means by 'art' he stresses its elusive-
ness, acknowledging that 'what is regarded as good is a
matter of taste, that it is subject to shifts of fashion, increas-
ingly rapid and extreme in recent times, that it cannot be
explained in words, and that all we can do in the last resort
is to adopt the formula, "I know what I like."'
One only has to read a German catalogue to know
that the Germans continue to be the Big Berthas of art
criticism, and one shudders to think how the Teutonic
equivalent of Dr Strabismus of Utrecht (whom God
preserve) will greet thls abnegation of critical responsibdity
by none other than the occupant of the art-historical
 chair at what Evelyn Waugh always referred to as 'the' 52) (who lie?), Antony and Cleopatra by Sir Lawrence
university, acknowl-edgingno other. Alma-Tadema, and the Palazzo del Lavoro, one of the
As someone who perverts the course of art as a trade, now much admired neo-classical buildmgs commissioned
I must watch my step, but the truth will out and it must by Mussolini, appropriately compared with the
be said that Kemp's approach is as refreshing as a melancholy urban visions of de Chirico. T h s in a section
window opened on a hggy, fuggy den. What is more, devoted to ancient art. Art comes from art is the
he uses sound, pre-Foucault, pre-Derrida distinctions message; and, as the pages turn and the images multiply,
such as 'good' and 'taste'. Will wonders never cease? Is we are led to conclude that art does not exist on its own,
the Cold War of words reallv over?
-- even when presented as a holy of holies in a modern art
Back to the art it is. As Kemp explains, the 'founding museum - in fact, the more holes in its defence, the
principle' has been to use groups of pictures - and for more devoutly holier it becomes.
'pictures' read 'illustrations' - 'to give some sense of Applied art, Elizabethan painting, the humble print
the visual "texture" of the various and episodes'. (the poor speculator's stock in the artistic commodity
This 'texture' describes a rich pictorial brew, which market) and art from beyond the snooty bounds of
includes the creation of 'visual environments' by Europe (Brazilian, Mexican, African) get their due. By
juxtaposition, the illustrations frequently showing the the end of the nineteenth century, the artist has begun
work of art in its setting; dustrations selected to show to vie for attention with the art, a process which today
'the public "consuming" art'; but also illustrations means that the artefact is largely superfluous, as witness
illuminating the text in the traditional way. the Darnien Hirst vhenomenon (also included).
Kemp describes his approach as 'ecumenical'. It is his Photography duly has a section of its own, as do
'conviction' - and he repeats the word for emphasis - industrial design and art museums. The sections on the
that one can have no conviction in the present flux. 'No present day and 'Alternative Centres' mean that Picasso
single approach has a unique claim to rightness,' he and CO are downgraded to share equal status with the
pronounces. 'Each approach, at its best, exhibits its own likes of Canadian and Afi-o-Caribbean artists - though
kind of competence.' Nothing is stable, 'optically or with the whole world now Westernised, why stop there?
conceptually', but recon- In the manner of the
structing- historical situa- notorious Glasgow Gallery
tions and examining of Modern Art, the section
relocations and reinterpre- entitled 'Postmodernism'
tation~will assure 'access to finds a place for virtually
a robust core of visual everything, but then that
communication'. merely reflects what we
Proceeding on a visual know. which is that
tour as directed, the first we have indeed arrived at
illustration in the book the dregs of a- tradition.
provides the key: a view of There is, however, no
the Elgin Marbles in which place for corn circles,
the gallery features more which lie beyond the pale
powerfully than its famous of commerce and therefore
contents, the dominating criticism. So what price or
object nothing more place for art when
elevated than a seat. technology, as is rapidly
Amends are soon made. becoming the case, allows
O n page 46 there is a mar- everyone t o make and
ble (the Esquiline Venus) flaunt their own? Unstated
which raises thoughts ot it may be, but terminal
that old army ditty. dissolution seems Kemp's
'Aphrodite in her nightie'. progn~sis.
or, in this case, without. To order 'The Oxford History
The first of several visual of Western Art' at the special
leaps appears with the jux-
tavosition of a bare-chested. I price o f A 3 5 with free UK
pG.p- call Literary R e v i e w
tdga-draped sculpture of
George Washington b j
Horatio Greenough (1805-
'1 Palazro del Lavoro: melancholy urban vision of de Chirico?
Bookshop on 0 1 8 1 3 2 4
5 5 1 0 or use our form on
page 3 9 .

'
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
I
 GENERAL
WHO READ THEM FIRST?
LITERATUREI N THE GREEKAND ROMAN
WORLDS: A NEWSURVEY
* and Roman Virgil's descriptions of a volcano, which
Edited by Oliver Taplin
(Oxford University Press 596pp A25)
ANY TITLE WITH the weasel word 'new' in it invites the
question: new in what respects? A brief editorial biography
provides the answer. Oliver Taplin, FBA, is Professor of
Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford and a fellow
of Magdalen, and a charismatic performer to scholars and
laymen alike. His work on Greek tragedy as performance
art has made scholars entirely rethink how best to
interpret ancient drama, and he has spread understanding
of the ancient world far and wide among the general
public through his lecturing, theatrical consultancies, and
radlo and television work.
It is not surprising, then, that, as a performer himself,
Taplin has a scholarly interest in the reception of perfor-
mance, and this is where the novelty of the survey lies.
.
H e wants to know what ancient readers. svectators and
,
listeners, these 'receivers' as he calls them, made of their
literature. What did they think they were getting from
it? Why did they give it their time and attention? As he
points out, it is easy for us to think we know more
about the ancients than they did themselves (this is the
patronising subtext of much 'sophisticated' modern
critical theory), but it is simply a fact that ancient
literature was produced for receivers located in a specific
cultural context, and their perspectives are worth seelung
out. T h e modern critic will obiect that this is to
<
'privilege' one approach over another. But 'privileging'
is just a pompous way of saying 'according greater
significance to', and I had always thought that exercising
judgement was the purpose of criticism.
Taplin's angle is an important and ambitious one, and
this twelve-chapter survey takes us, by a clever combina-
tion of genre-and period, from eighth-century B C
Homer to classical and later Greek literature and on to
the Romans, ending with the collapse of the Roman
Emvire in the West in the fifth centurv AD. But I have
to say that I am not quite convinced that the package
really works in the stated terms. The reason is simple.
Taplin and his eleven contributors - drawn locally from
Oxford, Cambridge, Royal Holloway and Warwick, and
internationally from Canada and the USA - face a
serious problem in the nature of the endeavour.
T h e basic voint is this: there is almost n o hard
evidence of what the ancients made of their literature,
except what we are told by literary critics like Aristotle
)r
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
l
(Poetics), Longinus (On the Sublime), the Roman professor
of education Quintilian, and ancient textual commenta-
tors. But since this is not a book about ancient literary
criticism, these receive only glancing consideration. I
think this is a pity. Beggars can't be choosers. I miss, for
example, the comparison made by the second-century
AD Greek sophist Favorinus between Greek Pindar's
gives us a telling insight into what an aesthete, at any
rate, expected of his literature.
That leaves one trying to draw conclusions either
from what the authors themselves wrote, by conjuring
up a persuasive picture o f an audience likely t o
appreciate it, or from what those authors said about the
audience they were addressing. These are dangerously
circular waters. Taplin, for example, admits we know
effectively nothing about Homer, or his audience or
context. H e does the best he can with the available
scraps, and concludes that Homeric epic is 'a kind of
opener of discussion, an invitation to think about and
scrutinise the structures and allocations of power and
respect'. But the two great epics are in fact part of a
long tradition of storytelling, and the issues raised by
either poem that may strike us as an 'invitation to
think' may have been commonplace to the original
receivers, part of the fabric of the story.
Some of the contributors d o manage to grapple
seriously with this inherent circularity. Matthew Leigh's
chapter on the Roman comic Plautus, who wrote a
comedy called The Little Carthaginian shortly after
Rome's grim wars against Carthage, is a particularly
heroic effort to walk in a straight line. But on balance, I
think it better not to pay too much attention to the issue
of readers' responses. In truth, most of the contributors
rather guiltily confess that it is very difficult to say
anything definite about them. Rather, one should take
the survey as an introduction to ancient literature with a
greater than usual emphasis on the sort of receivers the
authors seem to have had in mind. Since this is still a
novel perspective from which to survey the whole of
Graeco-Roman literature, the publication and the
subtitle are justified.
Any book of essays is bound to be a mixed blessing.
While there are probably too many 'enactments' and
'discourses' for my liking, only o n e contributor
consistently attempts to torture language into revealing
its meaning, though it rarely does ('Metamorphosis itself
can function not just as an escape route from sexual
penetration, but as the narrative realisation of the
transformation of the female body into an object under
the male gaze', ie women who are transformed avoid
rape and the narrator describes how they are turned into
objects before men's eyes?). I would award special stars
to Chris Carey on Greek oratory and Christina Kraus
on Latin prose literature.
 FICTION
AUSTEN GOES TO WAR
* the beguiling wife of a senior
By Kazuo Ishiguro
(Faber G. Faber 3 13pp A 16.99)
IN DECEMBER 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanking, fell
to the Japanese army, which promptly embarked on one
of the most savage massacres ever recorded. Within a
month, roughly a quarter of a million Chinese people
were slaughtered - machine-gunned where they stood
or hacked to death with bayonets.
It is the kind of resonant historical episode you might
expect to find forming the backdrop to a thriller by
James Clavell or Frederick Forsyth - all that vicious
bloodletting comes fully furnished with diplomatic
intrigues, army manoeuvres and Communist insurgen-
cies amid the decadent opulence of Shanghai and
Macau. But it is just about the last place you would
expect to find Kazuo Ishiguro, OBE, one of the mildest-
mannered and most serene of contemporary novelists. In
the last decade, in works like A n Artist of the Floating
Would, The Unconsoled and the Booker-winning Remains
ofthe Day, Ishiguro has built a considerable and deserved
reputation as a novelist in the tradition of Jane Austen,
composing alert and elegant fables about lives trembling
against breaches o f etiquette and lapses of class-
consciousness. Quite what he is doing plunging into a
war zone all of a sudden is anyone's guess.
But this is what he has done. In the early years of the
twentieth century a young English boy (Christopher
Banks) grows up in Shanghai, blind to the dangerous
machinations i n which his parents have become
involved. When they are kidnapped, and later presumed
dead, he is sent to England to stay (but of course) with
an aunt. H e becomes a noted detective and moves in
high-society circles (which he finds dull, naturally) and
then returns to Shanghai, in 1937, to try to locate his
missing parents. By then, the Japanese army is closing in,
and things are getting hazardous.
It is perfectly understandable that Ishiguro should
want to stretch his wings by straying towards such
explosive material. There are risks, though. Ishiguro's
literary reflexes lure him towards the vague, the oblique,
the muffled - not necessarily the qualities required by
Christopher Banks. Banks is supposed to be a top
detective, but Ishiguro can't help giving him the inno-
cent sensibility of an exchange student. At one point his
escorts take him on a tour of Shanghai night life, and
Banks remarks: 'I can see now my hosts were rather
enjoying shocking me with some of the more lurid
a
establishments.' Even Poirot,
even Miss Marple, would be
worldlier than this, not quite
so easily shocked. Banks is also
a novice in emotional matters.
In a tentative romantic climax,
diplomat throws herself into
his arms, and he agrees, aflame
with ardour, to elope with
her. 'I went to bed that night',
he confides, 'somewhat preoc-
cupied.' Wild and abandoned
passion - it's enough to make
a chap spill his cocoa.
O f course, it is n o t
Ishiguro's intention to be heart-stopping. Indeed, he is
at pains, having strayed into a locale where the bullets
are flying, to carry on as if nothing so coarse as a life-or-
death struggle was on the cards. He talks generally, and
very gently, about worlds trembling on the brink of
some vast catastrophe, but steers clear of the nitty-gritty.
The gunfire is so remote as to be almost notional. But
gunfire is gunfire - and the sounding of these drums of
war, however delicate, does tend to belittle the slightly
prissy remembrances of the narrator.
Ishiguro is an expert conductor of dramatic
monologues, first-person narrations which allow us to
peek through the curtains and glimpse the follies or
pomposities of his narrators. In this case, these follies are
all too easily visible. The first few paragraphs make it
clear that we are in the presence of a fastidious little
Pooter, with his prim Queen Anne tea service and
supercilious conversational manner. Ishiguro has chosen
a careful Edwardian prose for his detective-hero; but he
seems reluctant to establish a sharp or noticeable comic
distance from it. It's like P G Wodehouse without jokes.
His story insists that we sympathise with his orphans; his
style refuses to let us. The result is an uneasy calm
between cross-currents.
I hope I'm wrong - and it goes without saying that
the novel is thoroughly artful and well orchestrated. But
it does feel as though a distinguished author has found
himself in the wrong lane here, an aficionado of the
inside track has found himself on the outside where the
trucks are blaring. Even a writer as cool as Ishiguro can't
quite wrap enough subtle gauze around such noisy mat-
ters. The contrivances seem too blunt by half. Poking
around in the war rubble, for instance, who should
Banks come across among the wounded but his best
childhood buddy? It doesn't soften the blow that it turns
out to be an inconsequential encounter, though it is just
as well. For one awful moment it is almost as if he's
about to burst into song: 'Did you think I would leave
you dying, when there's room on my horse for two?'
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

HOLY WEEK IN HAMPSTEAD
EASTER
* story gathers pace; and all the while the action is surveyed
By Michael Arditti
(Arcadia 400pp A1 1.99)
THE BISHOPOF EDINBURGH, Richard Holloway, has
urged his colleagues to read this novel because it
captures 'the truth about the Church of England'. His
endorsement was picked up the other day by the Times
diary, which wondered what the Archbishop of
Canterbury would make of a book which deals so
fearlessly with the issue of homosexuality among the
Anglican clergy. Actually, I think the diarist missed a
trick here: I want to know what Dr Carey would make
of the dream sequence on page 178, in which a young
curate finds himself in a restaurant that, to his horror,
serves only cannibal fare:
Finally, the maitre d' brings in the p i k e de rbistance:
a head, flambCed like a Christmas pudding and
garnished with a sprig of holly, which spreads rapidly
into a crown of thorns ... As the face comes into
focus, I recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury.
'Have a shce of tongue,' the maitre d' says. 'It's particular-
ly tender. Or perhaps you'd prefer the parson's nose?'...
He pierces one of the eye sockets with a fork and
holds my glass to the gush of gore. 'The blood of
Carey', he proclaims.
Dr Carey is a busy man who probably has no time to
search out improving novels: how thoughtful of Bishop
Holloway to save him the trouble. Perhaps he will also
enjoy the scene in which an Anglo-Catholic archdeacon
persuades a rent boy to crucify him in a grisly parody of
the Good Friday service. No doubt it will confirm his
evangelical mistrust of bells and smells.
But by picking out the shocking bits I'm in danger of
misrepresenting this book. It's true that, as in his
excellent earlier novels, T h e Celibate and Pagan and her
Parents, Michael Arditti is deliberately provocative: he
reads at times like the unlikely love child of Derek
Jarman and Barbara Pym, presenting a story of parish
backbiting against a bleak backdrop of lust, corruption
and dsease. But this is a novel of such moral seriousness
that, before long, one reaches out for grander models. In
the scale of its aspirations and the savagery of its satire
Easter reminds me of Charles Dickens.
It is set in the parish of St Mary-in-the-Vale,
Hampstead, during Holy Week. The vicar is married,
liberal and tormented by epistemological doubt. His curate
is radical, gay and impulsive, and on Thursday he drags the
parish into the meda limelight by shouting at the Queen
I
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
during the distribution of Maundy money in Westminster
Abbey. The hss turns into a national scandal with darkly
sexual overtones. Beautihlly drawn minor characters -
grubby tabloid hacks, snobbish old ladies, African
&migrants, a Holocaust survivor who movingly rehcovers
her Jewish roots - drift in and out of the pews as the
by the forces of conservatism and hypocrisy, represented
by an evangelical bishop, a corrupt but staunchly Anghcan
businessman, and the aforementioned archdeacon.
You might gather fiom this that Easter has its polemical
moments: and the whole story is infused with egalitarian
fervour. But it doesn't seriously detract fiom the novel's
achievement because Arditti, unlike almost anyone else
writing today, fits his caricatures into a panorama of the
wholesociet$
The plot of Easter is built around three stylistic
devices, each so ambitious that if any of them failed to
work the structure of the book WO-uldcollavse like' a
rotten rood screen. First, the story mimics the action of
the Passion itself - but unobtrusively, so that you hardly
notice. Second, the story is shaped like a medieval
triptych, so that the same territory is seen fiom different
vantage points, like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. And
third, most of the action takes place in church services.
This is the first novel I've read that takes the risk of
describing the rubrics of the altar accurately and in
detail. Because it's done so well it is never boring, and
the shock is all the greater when the choreography
is suddenly disturbed.
Not everyone wdl enjoy Easter's dangerous mixture of
liturgy, lyricism and Manichaean satire. I think it is
Arditti's masterpiece and one of the first important
English novels of the century. Dr Carey should summon
up the nerve to read it.
MODERN MOSCOW
BABYLON
*
By Victor Pelevin
(Translated by Andrew Bromjeld)
(Faber G Faber 250pp A9.99)
FOR THE PAST decade, publishers have been peering
eastward, in the hope that the end of Communism in
Russia might produce novelists to rival the pre-revolu-
tionary greats. So far, the post-Soviet writer to have
done best in the West is Andrei' Malune, whose nostalgic
tale of provincial life Le Testament Fran~aisdeservedly
won the Prix Goncourt in 1998. Victor Pelevin is
relatively unknown over here, despite a cult following at
home - the Greens tried to recruit him as a candidate
in last autumn's parliamentary elections - and a
Russian Booker for a collection of short stories. Babylon,
his fourth novel to have been brought out in Enghsh,
deserves to change that.
If Malune's gentle melancholy makes him the twenty-
first century's Chekhov, Pelevin is its Bulgakov, relishing
the chaos and absurdity of contemporary Russia in prose
as snappy as a Moscow mobster's shiny suit. His spot-on
eye captures the drab, disorientated times quite brilliantly:
the fortified kiosks made of welded sheet-metal,
enigmatic company name-plates screwed to lifeless,
semi-derelict buildings, smudges of raucous newsprint,
sagging chain-link fences circling anonymous, potholed
lots. In Bulgakov's equally transient post-revolutionary
world, characters mutate into cats and dogs. In Pelevin's,
they turn into insects, wolves, or - in the case of his
latest hero, a shy institutnik who scrapes a living doing
'word-for-word translation from the Uzbek or the
Kirghiz that has to be set in rhyme by the next deadline'
- advertising executives.
Named Babylen in dual homage to Lenin and to the
dissident poem Baby Yar, Pelevin's neophyte copywriter
must bridge the tragicomic gap between the dream-
world of the billboards and vodka-spattered Russian
reality. Perusing an American advertising handbook, he
concludes: 'Its essential message was absolutely inapplic-
able to Russia ...there was no battle being waged by
trademarks for niches in befuddled Russian brains; the
situation was more reminiscent of a smoking landscape
after a nuclear explosion.' Commissioned to adapt
Western brand concepts for the home market, he comes
up with straplines like: 'Gucci For Men. Be a European
- Smell Better'; and for Gap chinos: 'Russia was always
notorious for the gap between culture and civilisation.
Now there is no more culture. No more civilisation.
The only thing that remains is the Gap.'
Exuberantly surreal, Babylon defies plot summary. By
the final chapters, digs at mafiosi, anti-Semites and
nouveau-riche consumerism have expanded into a mad
and marvellous satire on the whole of Russian society.
With the aid of mushroom-induced trances and the spirit
of Che Guevara, Babylen realises that the country's
entire public life is the creation of an advertising agency,
which uses computer imaging to render 'up to one hun-
dred primary and four hundred secondary politicians' at
a time. Duma members are allotted minimal computing
power, since 'it's less hassle, and it keeps their faces more
folksy'. American consumer-goods firms pay for product
placements - R J Reynolds sponsors General Lebed's
Camels, provoking a crisis when they are mistakenly
replaced with Gitanes - and control the storyline by
rationing computer power. As Babylen's boss complains,
'they cut us back by two hundred megahertz for
Chechnya'. American politics are a fiction too - but
not so well written: 'Alltheir political creatives are pure
shit...the best they can come up with is a blow job in
the Oval Office... Nah, our scriptwriters are ten times as
good. Just look what rounded characters they write.
Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Lebed. As good as Chekhov.'
Although Faber has sensibly cut some of Pelevin's least
translatabie wordplay, much bf his humour will go over
non-Russian heads. In his earlier novel O m o n R a ,
characters take their names from the acronvms for the
interior ministry police and for a chain of labour camps.
In Babylon, the agency employees who report sighting
of politicians in bars and caf6s - thus reinforcing the
public's belief that they actually exist - are called &er
the anarchist group that assassinated Tsar Alexander 11.
The Lefortovo Confectionery Combine - whose boss
dies strangled with a telephone cord, complete with
'traditional electric-iron marks' - shares a name with a
famous prison. Nor will everyone get the joke behind
Pelevin's sometimes overlong spoofs of Russian-style
academic ~seuderv.
But eve; withdut footnotes, this is a gloriously sharp
and evocative book, saying more about modern Russia
than a dozen pundits' treatises. Congratulations to
Harbord Publishing, the small Moscow-based imprint
that first spotted Pelevin, and to Andrew Bromfield for
his stylish translation.
SOME GOOD BOMBACLAATS
*
By Diran Adebayo
(Abacus 352pp k9.99)
THEREARE NOT enough young black novelists around.
And those there are ought to be much better known to
the general reader: Courttia Newland is one, Diran
Adebavo another.
Adebayo's second novel is set in a London of the near
hture, under a new-old regime of hardliners in velvet
doves. where the estates in the outer darkness of SE19
"
and environs are policed nightly by helicopters and
searchlights, and the colour/money division is ever more
firmly demarcated. The narrator is Boy, a black Philip
Marlowe, who runs a Private Investigation business
called Reality Rules ('cos the city ain't pretty'). But
business is not going too well at present, and Boy is
spending his nights on the office floor.
Then a tall, dark stranger walks into his life, and offers
Boy ~100,000 to find him a perfect wife, plus forty more
big ones up b n t for expenses. He is experiencing prob-
lems finchng a girl of the appropriate hue, because he lives
i LITERARY REVIEW April 20(
 FICTION
in the country. And as
he drily out, 'In
the country, there are
few of our kind.' With
that begins Boy's
odyssey through the
megalopolis, with the
stranger's words very
much in mind: 'I found
one man amongst a
thousand. but a woman I
amongst all those have I
not found.'
Adebayo's satirical
wit ignites with the
invention of Ice
Cream, 'the state's first
exclusive, all-inclusive L~,,,ayo: invigorating
black lifestyle resort',
where you - mostly white - can go and enjoy the
stuff of black culture without danger, so avoiding -
any. of
the unpleasantness you might encounter 'should you, ah,
sample the product in its naked form'. Here, well-heeled
West Enders can go and play at being black and hip for a
night, in a secure, dome-like structure. Boy himself
regards the proceedings with a suitably jaundiced eye,
tinged with mild racism. He refers to the whites trooping
into Ice Cream not as white but as 'grev'.
" , This must be
racism of a sort, I suppose, and very amusing it is too:
risk-taking, spiky, and invigorating.
It's not all laughs, though. Echoes of Troilus and
Cressida prepare you for the less than upbeat ending, and
there is the same pervasive odour of corruption, and
with it the urgent enquiry: how, in corrupt times, does
one keep one's integrity? The novel depicts society as a
giant web, all its parts interconnected. Boy knows that
'the connecting threads [are] here, right here, if I [can]
just understand it right.' His search for a perfect wife for
his client is also a search for connections to other
people, to humanity itself. But the last thing that
Adebayo does is preach. He's far too skilfil a storyteller
for that. Instead,-he teases, provokes, entertains, alarms,
frightens and delights.
So too does his prose, which is a joy - confident and
swinging, but never swaggering or -ostentatious. And
there are whole pages of dialogue that I found myself
reading out loud, in what I fondly imagined to be a
fruity West Indian accent. When Hope, one of the gang
from down South East way, tells a story of how he
almost slept with a lady-boy one night by mistake, he
summarises: 'Me jus' box the girl so and kick him
bombaclaat out!' I still don't have a clue what 'bomba-
claat' means, and the OED is no help. But it's a fine
word. The contemporary English novel needs more
bombaclaats,.just as it needs more Diran Adebayos.
W
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
BACK TO SCHOOL
THEABOMINATION
*
By Paul Golding
(Picador 515pp 916)
IN 1988. ALANHOLLINGHURST'S The Swimminp Pool
Library was the first Enghsh gay novel to cross overio the
mainstream. It was deservedly praised both for the origi-
nality of its perspective and the delicacy of its prose. Its
combination of sex and sensibility was quickly established
as the template for gay literary fiction. But the acceptance
of such work, far from expressing a new liberalism, ofien
seems to exhibit a hidden homoGhobia. In lace of earlier
books where gay characters were punished for their
tendencies by coming to a sticky end (thereby confirming
King George V's declaration that 'I thought such men
shot themselves'), these new novels permit their characters
to engage in the most outrageous practices, so long as
they record them exquisitely. Gayness is justified by style.
Paul Gelding's The Abomination is the latest in this line
U
and it makes for a grim read. On the first page, James
Moore, the narrator, standing in a sweaty London club,
contemplates 'cruising the pissoirs'; on the second page,
he has an unsatisfactory encounter with a self-hating,
prematurely ejaculating young man; and on the third, he
rings up Big Uncut Man, a prostitute from a contacts
magazine. Meanwhile, his literary credentials are
established on the same page by a reassuring reference to
Hamlet. It is small wonder that, at the book's conclusion,
the prostitute describes him as 'jaded'. James expresses
surprise. The only surprise is that a narrator who is so
self-conscious should not be more self-aware.
Although
" the novel is framed - and coloured - bv
James's adult proclivities, the bulk of the narrative
concerns his childhood on an island off Spain and his
boyhood and adolescence at a Catholic prep and public
school in England. The model for the long, meandering
memories of childhood is clearly Proust, but Golding
misses Proust by a wide margin. His literary antecedent,
if anyone, is Huysmans, whose arid, airless prose-style
and materialistic concerns he shares.
The public-school novel has become unfashionable of
late, although WiUiam Corlett's Now and Then breathed
.,
new life into the genre with its de~ictionof adolescent
passions reignited after thirty years. The problem with
The Abomination is that it is both plotless and pointless.
Goldine:" seems unaware that the ex~erienceshe describes
- the misery of leaving one's parents, the sense of
isolation in a crowd, the h u d a t i o n on the sports field
- are totally unexceptional. The only distinctive note is
 FICTION
sounded by the narrator's surprise that other nine-year-
old boys mock his obsession with eau-de-Cologne.
Homosexuality has been an overt feature of public-
school novels since Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth and
a covert one since as far back as Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Once again, Golding's lengthy treatment of it is
predictable. True, he is primarily interested in relation-
ships between staff and pupils, and has James seducing
one master at prep school and being seduced by another
at public school - while still finding time to 'relieve'
most of the boys in his dormitory (the name of which,
Leviticus, is by far the best joke in the book).
I have no way of knowing whether The Abomination is
Golding's own story, whether he was indeed born of a
wealthy Anglo-Spanish family and educated at
Ampleforth, and now spends his time in nightclubs called
'Fist or Shlt, something like that', or if he was born in
the North East, went to a comprehensive in Sheffield
and is now happily married and living in Grimsby. If I
incline to the autobiographical view, it may have less to
GHOSTS AND GUTS
LAURABLUNDY
* Innocent. Myerson's account
ByJulie Myerson
(Fourth Estate 224pp A15.99)
I WOKE AS if from a dream after reading this strange,
raw-edged novel, which opens with Laura Blundy
beating her husband to death with an ornamental dog,
and finishing him off with her crutches.
Blundy, who narrates her own story, has one leg.
Ewan, her surgeon husband, amputated the other after a
road accident. The book is 111 of u&ness and dismember-
ment. The reader is caught unawares by the horror,
drawn along by the crazy logic of the narrator and tossed
out at the end, in my case, a little bemused about what
was real and what was not. It is an odd kind of ghost
story, but to say why would be to give too much away.
This is a slim novel and yet so densely structured it
feels substantial. Scenes from the present and past pile up
on each other, all vivid with the texture and guts of
Victorian London. Myerson has a wonderful eye for
grotesque (and often food-related) detail: the crunch of
bone like sugar, the blood on the skirting board like jam
and cream. The river winds and stinks its way through
the book, mud-choked and filled with ghastly floaters:
dead gulls, stillborn babies, a shoe with the foot still
inside - and this is before Ewan, in several pieces and
weighted down with bricks, is tossed in too.
Perhaps the central point of the novel is the scene
do with the authenticity of the prose than with the
arrogance displayed by both author and narrator. Why
should he suppose that we wish to read long descriptions
of his central character's depilatory habits as an adult any
more than of his lavatorial habits as a boy? They are not
interesting in themselves, nor psychologically or
sociologically revealing, nor relevant to the story.
The Abomination has no story any more than it has
either developed characters or sustained ideas: father is a
buffer in the James Robertson Justice mould, mother a
remote and idealised 'silent film star', the two masters
twin poles of gay frustration, and the other schoolboys
ciphers. What it does have is a sensibhty (five hundred
close-knit pages of it), but it is one with a singular lack of
appeal. It is impossible to comprehend what led Picador
to puff as 'one of the most outstanding literary debuts of
recent years' a novel with so few redeeming features. At
the end, a second unsatisfactory encounter with the Big
Uncut Man leaves James depressed and frustrated:
precisely the feelings of the reader on finishing the book.
where Laura cuts up Ewan's
body with his own surgical
tools, in a scene reminiscent
of Ian McEwan's famously
chilly and detached dismem-
berment episode in T h e
crunches and squelches with
blood, and has an eerie kind
of relish: 'the knife slid into
the fine bones under his chin
and snapped them like barley
sugar.' There's an awful Myerson: brave
humour in the disjunction
between what she does and the emotion she feels.
The settings - the cluttered drawing rooms, the
seedy interiors, the muddy streets and the squalid
wasteland - feel very Victorian, but the dialogue could
come from a present-day novel: 'God's a joke, yeah?';
'Jesus, Laura, I mean, what sort of a person are you?'
This modern quality is oddly juxtaposed with the
atmosphere of Victorian melodrama, but brings
something fresh, a sense of voices defying time.
The key to the book - I think almost the excuse for
the grotesqueries, the wilful nastinesses - is maternal
love, not sweet and self-sacrificing but savage and visceral,
a kind of madness. '[Tlhe truth is .you carry a child in
you and it seeps into your bones and infects you for ever
and you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back.'
Myerson confronts the pain and dirtiness of frustrated
maternal love without a drip of sentiment. She shows a
love that defies convention, morality, even the normal
laws of human existence, in a brave, a d , frightening
book that will haunt me for a long time.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 FICTION

population of Muslim Egypt, and, unconvinced by gov-

ernment figures, does his own private census, counting

UPPER-CLASS CAIRO mystified passers-by; another has been made honorary

* It is worth noting that several Egyptian writers
By Robert Soli
(The Harvill Press 375pp A15.99 hbk A10.99 pbk)
Birds of Passage is a vastly entertaining history of a
sophisticated and cosmopolitan Egyptian family, the
Batrakanis. By the 1920s, Georges Batrakani, the
bustling patriarch, has made the Cairo family wealthy
through the manufacture of the tarboosh. Similar in
appearance to the Turkish fez, this wasn't just a colourful
piece of headgear, but a vivid barometer of the political
changes that convulsed Egypt during the first half of this
century. 'He doesn't have the head for a tarboosh,'
Georges complains in 1952 of the new general, Naguib.
'You never know where you are with such people.' It
was a proud symbol of national identity, worn by
politicians and humble clerks alike, but by the time of
Nasser Egyptian newspapers were claiming that getting
rid of the 'feudal' tarboosh would rid the country of all
its as. Georges's fate is clearly written on the wall.
To compound the irony, the Batrakanis are not 'real'
Egyptians but Syrian Christians who fled the Damascus
massacres of 1860. Soon these 'birds of passage' have
established themselves as influential merchants closely
allied with the French and British administrations.
Georges sends hls children to French Catholic schools in
Cairo, but instead of turning into tarboosh magnates they
embrace different kinds of eccentricity: Andri., the
eldest, becomes a pious Jesuit, and Michel turns into a
dilettante scholar obsessed with the late Sultan Hussein
and the works of La Fontaine. Other family members are
equally odd: one is concerned solely with the swelling
Egyptian consul in Liechtenstein, an undemanding post
which allows him the title of Count, an honorific which
Georges soon corrupts into 'Count-My-Backside'.
(Naguib Mahfouz, Albert Cossery and the Cairo-
educated Edward Said) have given us similar satirical
portraits of the privileged but purposeless Cairo upper
classes. Soli is no harsh satirist, however. What gives his
writing real distinction is its humorous, compassionate
tone, which, while pointing up the characters' foibles,
passes no ultimate judgement. The novel is cleverly
pivoted around extracts from Michel's whimsical diaries,
Maggi Batrakani's uninhibitedly erotic anecdotes, and
the sharply contrasting memoirs of a disgruntled Arab
soldier, Hassan. Soli. employs extended passages of
political argument at the Batrakani dinner table as a
means of connecting the family story to the larger story
of twentieth-century Egypt, and it is a tribute to his dla-
logue that this never comes across as artifice. Also, while
a warm and generous writer, Soli is no sentimentalist.
There are harrowing, almost unreadable descriptions of
the Damascus massacres, when Syrian babies were roasted
over fires by Muslim mobs, and there is an equally
sickening account of a Cairo camel slaughterhouse.
Born in Cairo in 1946, Soli. is the same age as his
fictional narrator Charles Yared. The tragicomic story of
the Batrakanis reads as if it might be based on the
author's own family history; if so, it is a mature,
triumphant elegy. A resident of Paris since 1964, Soli is
now ombudsman for Le Monde and won the coveted
Prix Miditerranie for this novel. Harvill last year
published his later novel, The Photographer's W$e, a vivid,
startlingly original study of an early Cairo feminist. After
you have raced your way through Birds of Passage, you
will certainly want to read that as well.

fri:I:
~ ~ o U " , " ~ O r ~ a ~ f l i ~ e O LESLEYMCDOWELLLOOKSAT SOME RECENT McEwen skilfully inter-
weaves vast and present, a
tragedy, Scots-born Helena techni&e also &used by
McEwen's personal history Maggie O'Farrell in her
has attracted media atten- assured and seductive tale of
tion. .The Big House (Bloomsbury R12.99) is a beautifully adult loss. After You'd Gone (Review L12.99) begins with
written, moving, yet surprisingly joyful portrayal of one a distraught Alice stepping off the pavement into the path
woman's experience of the loss of both her brother and of a passing car. Accident or deliberate act? As Alice's
her sister: Tames shot himself and Kittv drowned: both story is told in flashback, O'Farrell moves from the recent
tragedies occurred in the grounds of'their old family past to childhood experiences, showing the consequences
home. When McEwen's protagonist, Elizabeth, revisits both of placing duty over love and of f a d y deception.
her childhood home. memories-come flooding: " back and Alice, like McEwen's Elizabeth, has been denied impor-
the child's perspective takes over - the sights and tant family information concerning her identity. Her
sounds of childhood are recalled as she brings her inability to deal with the loss of her husband stems from
childhood playmates back to life. her childhood relationships with her mother and

LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

grandmother. In sensitive and almost blood-curdlingly
honest detail, O'Farrell has constructed a love story deal-
ing with the need to mine the past for clues to the present.
This process of excavation links women who have
suffered familial loss in potentially devastating ways, as
described in Polly Samson's amusing, often tragic novel
about child-woman Lizzie, O u t of the Picture (Virago
E9.99). Lizzie has always known that her real father
wasn't her mother's husband, but a bohemian artist, the
absent Jack Seymour. However, it is only when she
embarks on an abusive relationship with Tony, her
fortysomething boss, that she begins to search for him.
Less expertly crafted than either McEwenS novel or
O'Farrell's, Samson's nevertheless taps into the dangers
of searching for the truth and the emotional damage it
can cause.
Young Australian writer Julia Leigh's spellbinding first
novel, The Hunter (Faber E9.99), is similarly fiamed by
the compulsion of the search, but, in a move away from
the women-centred narratives of the other novels
reviewed here, the investigation is conducted by a
research scientist, known only as M, or by his alias,
Martin David. Origins are as muddy as the tracks David
is following through the Outback - we do not know
who he is working for, where he has come from or
what his intentions are. All we know is that he is hunt-
ing the rare Tasmanian tiger, a creature more of fable
Du Cote de chez Smrth Duncam CIuff
than of real life.
Leigh gives us glimpses of David's possible past (his
essential loneliness, punctuated by a relationship which
ended in pregnancy. and abortion), as well as his
occasional interaction with his hosts in the Bush. a
young widow and her children. A classic romance narra-
tive - both in the promise of a relationship with the
widow and in the search for the legendary animal - is
finally subverted in shocking circumstances.
In Merilyn Simond's collection of short stories, The
Lion in the Room N e x t Door (Bloomsbury E14.99),
closelv linked so as to read more like a novel. the lion of
the title represents the threat of a sudden revklation.
Beginningwith a little girl's view of her family and
world from their hotel room in Brazil, many of these
quiet, lyrical stories contain a sexual threat to the young
girl's innocence, and, later, to her ability to mature.
Finally, the saddlebag in Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's novel
of that name (Bloomsbury E14.99) is really a kind of
Pandora's Box to all who lav hands uDon it: a thief,
whose main pleasure in life is the romance of language,
finds only words within; to a little bride it reveals only
the good in a cruel chieftain's savagery. Nakhjavani
displays a love of storytelling almost for its own sake.
As many of these writers demonstrate in their characters'
search for truth, the search for identity and the self is as
important as ever in women's writing.
I
LITERARY REVIEW April. 2000
 CRIME

time for the Cobray M-11/9, 'the

* gun that made the Eighties roar, a
B y Colin Hamixon brick of black steel about the weight
(Bloomsbury 438pp A9.99) * of a newborn baby'. Others go for
EX-VIETNAMFLIER turned tycoon., B y Geovge P Pelecanos the Smith & Wesson Model 29, 'the
Charlie Ravich, single-minded (Victor Gollancz 299pp AY. 99) Dirty Harry gun, a .44 Magnum,
survivor of Cong imprisonment, seeks FOURTH I N A fine series of novels chamfered cylinder, full lugged bar-
new heir in his old age as his first grittily rooted in Washington DC, rel, drilled and tapped for scope
f a d v dwindles and &es out. Possible relating hard times i n difficult mount. with a nine-inch snout that's
choice of prospective mother turns decades. Drug trafficking was the pure show, the blue steel penis and
out to be lissom organisational whiz, crime profile of the Eighties. Now all that', while another punter sticks
just released fiom j d at the behest of Pelecanos moves the action into the to his Browning Hi-Powers, which
criminal Mr Big who believes, rnistak- mid-Nineties with a restaurant he's nicknamed Siegried and Roy. A
enly, that she knows where multi- robbery going murderously wrong. breathless, runaway read which rein-
d o n booty is concealed. Harrowing Five members of staff are killed in vents syntax and shrugs off the body
developments when Ravich becomes cold blood, the gunman's brother is count. Visuals which may remind
involved in Mr Big's bid to retrieve
U
shot by a suspicious cop and the you of Sam Peckinpah at his goriest
the loot. Torture scenes all the more getaway car runs down a small boy. or, more to t h e point, Chester
horrendous for being so well and Three years later, while the victims Himes at his most apocalyptic.
calrnlv described. HOW-to nad a man's and their families are trying to mend
foot to the floor. How to saw his arm their lives, the gunman - still at WALKIN'THE DOG
off. Rather more attention paid to large, still unpunished - plans to *
detail than you are hkely to require. In avenge his brother's death by killing B y Walter Mosley
all respects, though, a brilliantly everyone involved. Will he succeed (Seyent's Tail 260pp A14.99)
imagined book; immaculately organ- or will he too get his comeuppance? W I T H BLACK, SEXAGENARIAN ex-
ised; hlly fleshed; dark as night. Pelecanos tells a tale in which justice convict Socrates Fortlow ('twenty-
is no sure thing. His characters (not a seven years, four months and sixteen
stereotype among them) are rich in days f o r murder') framing t h e
* the sort of bruised humanitv whose questions, author Mosley suggests
By Joolz Denby consciences are too close for com- new ways of dealing with deep-
(Collins Crime 290pp A9.99) fort, whose desire to make things down racism that blights hopes,
TALL,TOUGH,RECKLESSLY original better for themselves and their world hearts and generations. Time is not
female stand-up comic Jamie Gee either grows strong or goes bad. This on Socrates' side. Nine years out of
(touted as Lenny Bruce in a Dress) is vital stuff, urgently written, exciting jail, he lives with his two-legged dog,
shares cosilv rundown house in in all parts, including the heart. in a shack salvaged from the scorched
Bradford with exquisite Indian gay, streets of Watts, where local cops still
Mojo, and loyal manager, Lily Carlson. RUN keep him under close surveillance.
Sadly (as Carlson relates) Jamie falls for * ~ e - b a groceries
~s for a living and
psychotic hunk - secretly a serial B y Douglas E Winter dreams of changing the world. With
luller, known as the Night Creeper - (Canongate 243pp A10) his huge, stone-breaking hands he
fixated on SAS weaponry and murder PERCUSSIVEG A N G L A N D FABLE knows a hundred wavs to kill a man
with S&M trimmings. Happiness and recounted by larcenous Burdon (almost regretfully he clubs a mugger
lives in peril when he brings h s nasty Lane, assigned by double-dealing to death). But violence is not the
ways home. Denby, a poet and per- arms dealer to deliver consignment answer. Protesting with a sandwich
former herself, tartlv relavs the hustle of weapons to black Mafia com- board against a rogue cop who robs,
and the hype which flavhur the shal- manded by Dr Death. A scary cus- rapes and terrorises at will he risks
lows of nouveau show business. Her tomer: 'He orders killings like they're touching off a riot, spills no blood
characterisation is strong: " and convinc- pizza'. Slaughter and double crossings and makes world headlines. A
ing, her dialogue gamy and she has a when the deal goes wrong, leading surprisingly optimistic conclusion;
bold hand with melodrama. What she to blood bath at arms dealer's wed- exciting, exhilarating, truthful and
finally f d s to do is follow through to ding where all scores are settled. Lots touching. Maybe touch too much of
absolute catharsis. Peo~ledle and-~eo- of passion, but virtually no sex; the cracker-barrel philosophy, but the
ple change, but not shiciently. ~ o s t love affair pervading the book is con- compelling narrative eats it all up.
impressive, though, especially for a ducted with guns. A Glock is Lane's Mosley has created an epic hero for
debut novel. Two-thrds good isn't bad. weapon of choice, but he also has our time who still has miles to go.

LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 CRIME

THEOFFICEOF THE DEAD whose last (the book under review) is as to why Taylor found the idea of
* set in the 1950s. Explanations as to reversing the normal order of truth
By Andrew Taylor why David Byfield, handsome and consequences so enticing. A
(HatperCollins 34Opp &l 6.99) widower-priest, and his disturbed skilful, elegant novel, sometimes
THE END - OR, you might say, the daughter (both encountered in Book exasperating, powerfully atmospher-
beginning - of Taylor's back- Two, The judgement of Strangers) are ic, in which ancient evil shimmers
to-front Roth Trilogy, whose first so mired in guilt and premonitions of like images trapped in a corridor
volume begins in the present-day and death. Reasons increasingly apparent of mirrors.

I SILENCED VOICES I
ALTHOUGH TURKEYIS once again the SIOBHANDOWD spoken in the vernacular - not the
country in question, the tragic fate of traditional Arabic; and that women
Konca Kuris cannot be laid at its KONCAKURIS should be allowed to pray alongside
door. Konca's body was found in men. While she wore a traditional
February, one of two female bodies lying naked in a headscarf herself, she declared that head covers and the
mass grave in the basement of a Hezbollah residence in full black robes worn by some women should be
the Central Anatolian town of Konya. Nineteen months optional: she was defending women's right to choose. In
earlier, she had been ludnapped by Hezbollah militants her many writings - books and articles - and in her
in her home town. Mersin. It was widelv believed that numerous TV appearances and lectures she argued that
her criticism of fundamentalist Muslim circles was true Islam was a religion that honoured, rather than
directly responsible for her abduction and murder. There curtailed, women's rights.
was chllling evidence - a videotape of her last hours - Her teachings were anathema to the Turkish Hezbollah.
that she had been brutally tortured before being killed. In early 1998, she began to receive anonymous telephone
Konca Kuris, was, according to her fellow woman calls. One Turkish paper reported that a caller aske'd
writer Ayse Onal, a 'great influence on Turkish whether Kuris thought she was inventing a new religion.
women', who 'showed that it's possible to be completely In July that year, she was ludnapped in fhnt of her home
modern and still be faithful to Islam'. She was born in by three armed assailants. The only witness was her
1960, married at the age of seventeen and was the husband, who was knocked unconscious during the
mother of five children. According to the New York encounter, but he said afterwards that he had no idea who
Times, she became interested in 1slam at a young age, the kidnappers were. An extensive search for her began,
but left the first group she joined on being asked to involving the police, the press, and women's groups and
wash its leaders' clothes. She then briefly joined human rights groups. After six weeks, when no trace of
Hezbollah ('Party of God'): a radical group that aims to her could be found, the police concluded that if she was
overthrow the secular Turkish state and replace it with still alive. she would come home herself. as there had
an Islamic state (it is not thought to be conLected to the been no 'ransom demands. The Turkish Human Rights
Hezbollah fighting Israeli occupation of southern Association held a candlelit vigil for Kuris at about that
Lebanon). She travelled with the group once on a dele- time; but with no news of her, dscussion of what could
gation to Iran. However, she later disassociated herself have happened petered away.
from it, declaring that it was imposing an interpretation Then, last February, the mass grave was discovered on
of Islam that encouraged the subjugation of women. a Hezbollah residence in Konya. There were dozens of
She undertook her own investigation into Islam, reading male victims and two females; but the females, as with
- - --
- -
the Koran, related texts and traditional Muslim practice,
'

works of modern analysis. - I

Her conclusion was that
head-covering, the separation
of the sexes in school, and
other aspects of many of
today's Islamic practices
were not a requirement of
Islamic faith; rather they
were hallmarks of a patriar-
chal system. A devout
woman, she believed that :
prayers in Turkey should be
:
were buried in a different
SPEAK TO
corner to the men. The
USANDS THROUGH police reported that they
REVIEW CLASSIFIEDS had found dozens of video-
mera, For Sale, tapes which showed her
being tortured before her
Interesting Books, Wanted, killing by suffocation. The
Services, Not Wanted, contents of these tapes can-
Literary Lonely Hearts, not be confirmed, but the
Turkish newspaper Milliyet
Accommodation has reported that the abduc-
Telcphone:Ol7l4379392orFw:01717341844 torsstuffedapictureof

-
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 1 - SILENCED VOICES I

Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk - the founder of Turkey as a
secular state - into her mouth. They are reported also
to have taunted her, saying she was trying to be another
female Salman Rushdie (the other being Bangladeshi
writer Taslima Nasrin who was forced into hiding in her
country but is now living abroad). It is believed that
Kuris was hlled two weeks after her abduction.
Female commentators, whether writing in the secular
or Islamic press, are horrified at Kuris's death. 'One more
person paid with her life for being dfferent and searching
for her own voice', lamented Sibel Eraslan of the Islamic
paper Akit. Throughout the press, a debate has been
launched about the very issues Kuris herself wanted aired
- so perhaps her death was not in vain. Even during her
funeral, an argument broke out among her friends and
family about whether women and men should attend it
side by side. Predictably, the dispute split along gender
lines. Kuris's eldest daughter Sirma said she intended to
carry out her mother's last will by standing in the men's
section of the Mosque; but the men denied her entry.
Then, as the ceremony was coming to an end in the
graveyard, another woman relative succeeded in pushing
her way through the men so that she could stand by
Kuris's coffin for one last time.
The Turlush authorities are actively investigating her
murder and have stated their determination to appre-
hend and punish those responsible. However, readers
may wish to write, urging the Turkish government to
do everythmg possible not only to bring Kuris's murderers
to justice, but also to protect other writers who are
threatened by extremist groups.
Please send your appeals to:
His Excellency Bulent Ecevit
Prime Minister of Turkey
Ofice of the Prime Minister
06573 Ankara, Turkey

EXCITING IDEA
Sir,
The Royal Society of Literature has an
offer to make a penurious, city-weary
author who likes the idea of living and
writing for a year, or possibly two, in a
spacious, thick-walled, eighteenth-
century cottage in the Mendip Hds.
Applicants in any literary form -
poetry, history, drama, fiction, travel,
biography - w d be considered but
they must have been already published
in book form, or have been cornmis-
sioned by a reputable publisher.
T h e cottage, which the Royal
Society of Literature inherited from
the Russian-born novelist
E M Almedingen, stands in a large
and beautiful garden, bordered by a
stream. It would house a family of
four o r five comfortably, and the
Royal Society of Literature will be
letting it out at minimal rent. Any
authors who are interested should get
in touch with Maggie Fergusson,
Secretary, T h e Royal Society of
Literature, c / o the Royal Literary
Fund, 3 Johnson's Court, off Fleet
Street, London EC4A 3EA.
Victoria Glendinning
London W 8
NOT FORGOTTEN brevis ...', with its immortal refrain
Dear Sir, 'They are not long, the days of wine
It's n o t true to say, as Thomas and roses', has even greater celebrity
Hodgkinson does in his review of than the famous 'sin poem'. Miss
Madder Music, Stronger Wine, Jad Joan Collins has borrowed a line from
Adams's biography of Ernest Dowson thls masterpiece - 'Love and desire
(LR, February), that Dowson's poetry and hate' - for the title of an erotic
is no longer read. There is a legion of novel. Proof that Dowson lives on!
Dowson enthusiasts - vide the vari- Yours faithhlly,
ous websites - w h o remain Roger Dobson
passionate about his work, and these Oxford
are not solely restricted to incense-
burning, patchouli-wearing, POLITICIANS ARE WORSE
Beardsley-worshipping Nineties Dear Sir,
fanatics. Since Dowson has won the I was intrigued to see that Richard
admiration of such diverse figures as Crossman did admit t o your
Yeats, T S Eliot, John Betjeman, correspondent, James Hughes-
Kingsley Arnis, Barry Humphries and Onslow ('Better Liars', LR 'Letters',
Michael Moorcock, he is unlikely February), that he was in fact drunk
ever to lie completely unread. His at an official conference in Italy in
subject matter may be limited, but he 1957 as the Spectator's correspondent,
is a master of his crafi, and his verses Nancy Nicholson, had reported in
demand to be learned by heart. His that magazine that year and for
work has a classical richness almost which she was sued successfully for
entirely absent from late-twentieth- libel (and which cost the Spectator a
century poetry, whose creators seem walloping big sum for a small
uninterested in, or embarrassed by, magazine and the times - A8,000).
the concept of beauty, and whose While on honeymoon in R o m e
poems teem with hackneyed four- with my then husband, Brian Inglis,
letter words and allusions to tabloid in 1960, I met Nancy Nicholson,
culture. Nor is Dowson remembered R o b e r t Graves's eldest daughter.
solely for 'Cynara'. His 'Vitae summa Brian had wanted to take her and her

LITERARY REVIEW April 2000

 LETTERS

husband, Patrick Cross, Reuters
correspondent, out to a slap-up meal
so as to compensate in some small
measure for all the unpleasant
kerfuffle of the lawsuit and the
magazine's embarrassing loss (Brian
had just taken over the editorship).
Throughout the meal, Nancy
spoke of the lawsuit, her unhappiness
at this result, her feelings of reportorial
inadequacy (though she wasn't sure
she'd been right). She pointed out
that her ~iece-hadn't even been Dar-
ticularly ;nflattering about the dele-
gation consisting of Messrs.
Crossman, Aneurin Bevan and
Morgan Phillips (she had indeed
written in her report in the Spectator
of 1 March 1957 that the Italian
contingent found the Brits to have
'immense political acumen').
Nancy Nicholson wrote very little
subsequently and died not long after
this slightly melancholy dinner.
Looking back, I think I was witness-
ing what has surely grown with time:
the view of journalists as purveyors
of sleaze and persons economical
with the truth. We are too often
maligned.
Yours faithfully,
Ruth Inglis
London E10
FOREIGN SPICE
Dear Sir,
From your Pulpit (LR, March) you
express your belief that 'the poor
British public, once famous for its
moaning, has more or less given up
complaining about anything'. No
wonder: the poor British public
cannot successfully compete with
such sermons fiom the Pulpit.
You go on, 'Perhaps the hopeless-
ness of the book trade should be seen
as part of the collapse of Britain in
general, and London in particular, as
witnessed by transport, post,
telephones, and foreign invasion.'
Fortunately the Literary Review,
from London, W1, exposes your
little joke. In the same March issue,
of some thirty reviews of non-fiction
books all but six are by or about
foreigners or lands from which you
(but not I) might claim foreigners
invade London.
It seems that even a devoted moaner
can appreciate the spice of life.
Best wishes,
Michael Rubinstein
Hertfordshire

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LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 FOR THE FIRST time in the R E P O R TB Y A U B E R O NWAUGH
long history of the Literary
Review's Grand Poetry
Prize, the judges were unable to agree on an outright
winner. Perhaps Wednesday was a foolish subject, inviting
facetiousness just at a time when we are trying to
discourage it. My own favourite, Paul Griffin's 'The
Colour of Wednesday', was judged too far-fetched to
receive A350; Edward Murch brought us back to the
Crucifixion, which I would have thought almost impos-
sible; Colonel G H Peebles's delightful account of wash-
ing his wife was too mad; and J M Turner, although of a
high standard, as usual, was not quite good enough. So
we decided to divide First and Second prizes among the
four of them, awarding A125 to each, with the usual
SECOND PRIZE
THE C O L O U R OF WEDNESDAY by Paul G r 9 n
Come, my love, and search for meaning
In the colours of the days
While the blades and leaves are greening,
Soil's forsaking idle ways.
Thursday's purple long receded,
Friday's yellow out of sight,
Saturday no longer needed
With its image of pure white,
Sunday's gold and Monday's crimson,
Tuesday's orange, passed away;
What's in Wednesday to sing hymns on?
What's the colour of today?
Wednesday's brown, the bare earth's colour,
Soon for covering with green.
What, you ask nie, could be duller?
Better to be never seen.
Rather let our gaze entwining
Meet brown eyes, as deep as day,
Each to each in love inclining,
Soft brown hair in disarray.
Till our skin is browner. firmer.
Summer sand or polishid wood;
Hold me tight, my love, and murmur,
Wednesday's honest brown is good.
SECOND PRIZE
THE QUIET AND THE STORM by Edward Murch
That Wednesday was the quiet before the storm.
We spent the day relaxing. It was warm.
Our musicians played particularly well.
The poet had a spicy tale to tell.
But Friday drove all thought of Wednesday out.
I stdl can hear those wretched natives shout.
The wrong man &ed, of course: what could I do?
The custom of that land required him to.
I hope you understand my point of view.
Thus, Pontius Pilate in an interview.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
A10 to everyone else.
Back to the traditional
prizes, I hope, for June's
competition (entries must be received by first post on 25
April), whose subject is London. We thought of setting
the mayoral elections, but they will not be decided by
25 April and will be old hat when the June issue comes
out at the end of May. So make of it what you will.
Personally, I would like some rolling, Tennysonian stuff
but I am only one judge among many. Above all, keep it
short. Twenty-four lines are often too many. Usual rules.
Poems must rhyme, scan and make sense on the set sub-
ject, 24 lines max, 2 entries max. Entries, with 'London'
written on the top left-hand corner of the envelope, to
Literary Review, 44 Lexington Street, W 1 R 3LH.
SECOND PRIZE
WEDNESDAY, SORT O F by J M Turner
The concept of WEDNESDAY has puzzled us all,
From Aquinas and Nietzsche to Cannon & Ball.
New Labour, bright-eyed, say they'll sort this one out
And resolve it beyond any shadow of doubt.
A committee composed of the great and the good,
Lord Melvyn, Lord Jenkins, Victoria Wood,
Lord Archer, and Sooty...whoever they be,
They wdl get this thing right by two thousand and three.
With the taxpayers' cash and a lottery perk
They will not hang about, they will go straight to work.
O n a fact-finding tour, every Wednesday, they'll sweat
In Bermuda or Venice (LA if its wet).
O n returning, much wiser and browner, they'll say
We must do more Research, which will show us the way.
Every Wednesday we'll fund several students from Keele
To accost total strangers and ask how they feel.
These results, classified from a huge questionnaire,
Will establish such Truths as eluded Voltaire.
With input from gays, single parents, and teens
We'll determine what, crucially, Wodin's Day means.
Is it middle-week crisis? Does Freud have a point?
Is it bangers and mash or the leftover joint?
Your Bridge Night? The Masons? The Rotary Club?
But, look, this is Friday! I'm off down the pub.
SECOND PRIZE
EURO-WASH by Colonel G H Peebles
I wash my wife on Wednesday.
I often wonder why.
I think it's that: till Saturday
Her hair has time to dry.
Oh! Wednesday! Oh! Wednesday!
The middle of the week.
I wash my wife on Wednesday
And kiss her steamy cheeks!

I fill the tub right to the brim,
Likewise a glass of brandy:
So when it's time to push her in
I'm feeling rather handy.
O h Wednesday! O h Wednesday!
Mitten in der Woche.
I wash my wife on Wednesday,
Ordentlich and proper.
Her slippery extremities
My foamy fingers fumble,
Each protuberance and crevice
Endures my rumble-tumble.
Oh! Wednesday! Oh! Wednesday!
En milieu de semaine.
I wash my wife on Wednesday
Encore! Once more! Again!
EARLY CLOSING DAY by Alison Prince
The green day, the glory day,
the golden afternoon
when pigeons fly in a racing sky,
and I am as high as the moon
with the tedium stopped in the Wednesday shop
and the waxwork boys set free
to follow our will on the windy hill
with its glimpse of the distant sea.
For some it's the call of the whistle and ball
but Maggie and I will climb
to where we look down on the smoke of the town
in a happiness so sublime
that the invoicing gods of accountancy's odds
can never require me to pay
enough for the bliss of my sweet Maggie's luss
on Early Closing Day.
ASH WEDNESDAY by Frank MCDonald
With childish faith we stood in line
Before a priest, in part divine,
Who marked our foreheads with a sign
O f humankind's mortality.
'Remember, children, you are dust,
To God alone accord your trust,
Forget your adolescent lust,
For everything is vanity.'
We tried, we tried with no success,
To love our brief existence less,
And stumbling, prayed that God would bless
Our weakness and our apathy.
A lifetime on, and short of breath,
What would we give to have that faith
That looked with love and hope on death
That very first Ash Wednesday?
WEDNESDAY by Maureen Brampton
That evening I travelled, as always,
Unsuspecting what fate had supplied,
O r was that a vague premonition
As I gazed at the darkness outside?
Speak of love to your dear ones and always
Give them cause to remember with pride
All the things you accomplished together.
Ask forgiveness for times when you lied.
The front door was open, as always,
But where was the welcome inside?
Instead of his smile there was silence
O n that Wednesday in March when he died.
WEDNESDAY by Beverley Nightingale
Wedsnesday's a whats-it day
of indecisive scraps.
When-is-the-day?we might, we may;
let's wait and see; perhaps?
Wednesday's a day adrift;
Set woefully between.
Not fore, nor aft - it sits mid-rift
the work and weekend scene.
Out of step - out of sorts;
prime-time for lovers' sports;
little noolue; steal a quiche;
Wednesdays can be rather tricky.
Wednesday's a park-it day;
phonetically a gaffe.
It should have stayed a market day
to cut the week in half.
Wednesday's a what-if dash -
indefinite intent.
Without panache this day of Ash
starts melancholy Lent.
WEDNESDAY'S CHILD by John Lord
'Wednesday's child is full of woe!';
- And saying it may make it so.
Fill me from my earliest years
With despondency and fears;
Say, with sympathy or scorn,
'Who could live a full life, born
In such circumstances?' Teach
Me to think I'll never reach
Goals on which I set my heart,
With so handicapped a start;
Rob me, with this barren creed,
O f the hope I so much need;
Then with satisfaction see
Your beliefs confirmed in me.
LITERARY REVIEW April 2000
 I Literary Review Classzj?eds
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