Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, History

A Review of Recommended History Books 2018:

SUMMARIES

. Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts (published by Allen Lane for £35, 1,152pp)

ANOTHER Churchill biography? Surely, some might say, that’s as unnecessary as a second Brexit referendum.

But Andrew Robert’s immensely readable and engaging addition to the already vast oeuvre poses a timely question: are sheer bloody-minded grit and bulldog determination really enough to win the day against impossible odds?

They were for Churchill – but now?

For all the failures in his political life – with the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in World War I just one of many – he proved himself equal to a crisis. When the crunch came, he, unlike more timid contemporaries, had the vision to call correctly the biggest issue of the time: that Hitler had to be faced down and damn the consequences.

Just as importantly, he had amassed the political skills, the rounded life experience that comes from both success and failure and the sheer strength of personality to be a leader who, against incalculable odds, could pull this off.

He had the oratory too – that soaring ability to persuade and inspire, to win over hearts and minds to a common cause. (Yes, he told lies, he exaggerated, he talked setbacks into victories – regrettable but necessary for the greater good, he argued.)

Politicians today are sound-bite ciphers, robots or clowns by comparison. This book is a reminder of what greatness is, and how far short of it they fall. Too many, on all sides in the Brexit debacle, believe destiny is calling them, as it did Churchill in 1940. But is there a new Churchill among them at this hour of need? Many will fear not.

. Written In History: Letters That Changed The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore (published by W & N for £14.99, 272pp)

PRIVATE LETTERS are crucial building blocks for the historian, their authentic voices a passport to the realities of the past – and so much more discreet and revealing than today’s emails and texts are ever likely to be. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s entertaining and enlightening miscellany includes Gandhi, Napoleon, Picasso, Mozart and a hundred more across the centuries where rich pearls of their lives can be extracted.

Some are truly revolutionary and visionary – such as Christopher Columbus’s 1493 message to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that he has sailed west across the ocean and discovered “many new islands”. He reassures them that “I saw no monsters”.

Others are very personal – a defiant Mark Antony insists he’s done nothing wrong in sleeping with Cleopatra.

Then there’s Hitler explaining to Mussolini why he’s about to invade Russia, signing himself off with “With hearty and comradely greetings” and unaware that this was the action that would ultimately lose him the war.

Not all changed the world – Leonard Cohen’s farewell to his muse Marianne is not in that category – but all are fascinating, as are the compiler’s comments on each letter, little gems of potted history in their own right.

. Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch (published by Allen Lane for £30, 752pp)

NOR is there anyone with the political genius of Thomas Cromwell, the architect of the original Brexit – England’s split from the pan-European power of the Pope in Rome in the 16th century.

He did this initially so his royal master, Henry VIII, could divorce the queen who had failed to produce him a son, and marry Anne Boleyn. In the process, he established the supremacy of the Crown, national independence from a foreign overlord and the distinctive Protestant nature of the Church of England.

What gave the low-born Cromwell the edge to carry through such fundamental change was that he combined the skills of businessman, lawyer and astute politician to outmanoeuvre the aristocrats of the Tudor court. His meticulous, almost obsessive attention to every last detail was the key to his success, along with a ruthlessness and ambition that helped him acquire positions, wealth, power – and enemies.

He fell in the end because Leaver Henry turned out to be a closet Remainer when it came to religion. Clinging to the Catholic faith and distrusting Cromwell’s brand of Protestantism, he cut off his chief minister’s head out of pique – and promptly regretted it.

The book is, though, a master-class in good, old-fashioned academic history as MacCulloch, professor of church history at Oxford, brings Cromwell to life exclusively from contemporary sources. No speculation or flights of fancy, just superb investigative work in the archives. Hard going at times but well worth it.

. Crucible by Jonathan Fenby (published by Simon & Schuster for £25, 624pp)

THE 13 months from June 1947 to June 1948 are when the modern world as we know it was forged, according to Jonathan Fenby, sadly stacking up more problems than solutions and bequeathing us global troubles that, 70 years on, are still flashpoints.

In the aftermath of World War II, there was flux and change everywhere. It was as if the world were recalibrating and rebooting itself all in one go. Old certainties were discarded; new alliances formed.

The British left India in a hurry and religious groups fought each other for supremacy in a civil war of such violence that the only solution was the partition between India and Pakistan, leaving a terrible legacy of distrust and hate.

At the same time, Israel was forcibly created out of Palestine, in the teeth of deep-seated Arab opposition and displacement. The British Balfour Declaration which created the initial territorial split in Palestine was the precursor to seeding decades of a dangerous conflict which still remains unresolved.

Europe split into the armed camps of western capitalism, led from Washington, and Soviet communism, led from Moscow. Lands were fought over and divvied up between the super-powers. Germany was divided. A Cold War ensued.

Fenby plots these changes month by month as, across the globe, a brand new world emerged – one every bit as fragmented, perhaps even more so, than the one it replaced.

. Arnhem by Anthony Beevor (published by Viking for £25, 480pp)

WHAT turns battles is often not the enemy but the overreaching egotism and dubious motives of the commanders who plan them.

Arnhem was far-fetched from the moment Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery proposed flying Allied paratroopers to eastern Holland, seizing the bridge across the Rhine and launching a surprise attack through the back door into Hitler’s Germany in September 1944.

It was a product of his self-obsession with getting one over on the Americans. He felt slighted that they were grabbing pole position for the invasion of the Third Reich. I’ll show them how it’s done, was his response.

High-risk even on paper, to have any chance of success the operation depended on precision, coordination and good luck. But when boots were on the ground, none of these happened.

The result was a shambles, with communication lines hopelessly overstretched and those at the forefront of the assault outgunned and outflanked.

With his telling eye for personal detail, Beevor’s roundly researched account of the battle is overladen with gloom that so many men fought heroically but went to their deaths or into captivity for no good reason. He quotes a despairing officer who watched his men fall one by one to sniper fire and could only hope that “the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.”

. See also Book Review – Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944

COLD WAR

. A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps (published by Bodley Head for £20, 448pp)

TWO things never cease to amaze about the Cambridge spy ring exposed in the 1950s.

First, that these closet communists who sold their souls to the Soviet Union were allowed to reach some of the most sensitive positions in British government circles; second, that their indiscreet personal behaviour never raised any doubts that they might be security risks.

Donald Maclean was given two monikers at the Foreign Office – “Sir Donald”, because he was an exceptional Whitehall mandarin tipped for the top job as Permanent Secretary, and “Gordon”, after the gin he was often inebriated on. This incompatibility should have triggered red-flag warnings.

Instead, since he was so palpably “one of us” – aristocratic air, MP father, public school education, first from Trinity Hall – the deluded, self-serving Establishment failed to realise that, in reality, he was “one of them”, a mole working undercover for Stalin.

Drawing on classified government files not released until 2015, Roland Philipps reveals the truth about the troubled toff who was a genuine convert to communism in his student days and recruited by the Russians with the deliberate intention of infiltrating the Civil Service.

As this superbly written tale unfolds, you find yourself screaming in exasperation – how did no one within the security and intelligence community notice until it was too late?

. The Spy And The Traitor by Ben Macintyre (published by Viking for £25, 384pp)

LIKE Maclean, Oleg Gordievsky was a believer who switched sides – though in the opposite direction. A senior KGB officer, he came to detest the dour Soviet regime in Moscow and its denial of freedom.

Seeking its downfall, he took the huge personal risk of dangling himself in front of MI6, who (cautiously at first) snapped him up and made him its most successful double agent.

The story – of his recruitment, his spying activities as he rose to be the top KGB man in the Soviet embassy in London, then his grim encounters with the Moscow spy-catchers and hair-raising escape from Russia under the noses of suspicious Soviet minders – is told with the panache of a spy thriller. And it’s all the more gripping because this is real life, not fiction.

But, as well as the drama, what is fascinating is to discover what the West learned from Gordievsky. He passed on a deep, insider’s knowledge of the inner sanctum and workings of the KGB and the paranoid mindset of the Kremlin. This was invaluable to the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in deciding how to stand up to the Soviet leadership without frightening them into precipitating World War III.

More than 30 years since his defection in 1985, Gordievsky still lives in hiding for fear of a revenge attack. His caution is wise, given the attempt to assassinate a more recent double agent and defector, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury. Though the Skripal event should properly rank more as current affairs than history, it is, nevertheless, the latest phase in the lengthy spy war between the West and Russia.

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Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Agatha Christie’s Golden Age

REVIEW

WHAT a fiendish and villainous person Agathe Christie could have been, had she chosen to commit crimes instead of only writing about them.

When asked about her approach and methodology, she said: “You start with the wish to deceive and then work backwards.”

John Goddard, the author of this forensic examination of Christie’s complex puzzles and tightly constructed dovetailed plots, stands amazed at her satanic ingenuity. He relishes, as many readers will have done , the arresting opening lines such as “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”, which have (to date) hooked more than two billion readers.

There have been many studies of the Queen of Crime, who died in 1976 – full-scale biographies, accounts of her world travels and archaeological excavations, editions of her notebooks, picture books featuring her big house in Devon, cookery books and even a scholarly investigation of her days as a dispensing pharmacist and nurse.

Goddard, though – a former partner in a firm of City solicitors called Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – looks at Christie’s work from the viewpoint of a lawyer. He spots how key information in the tales is extracted from the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1923, particularly in connection with insanity as grounds for divorce.

 

THE Legitimacy Act of 1926 has a bearing on Christie’s many plots about lost or unwanted children and those born out of wedlock, and how this ties in with the laws of inheritance, intestacy, and the Wills Act of 1837.

Christie knew the difference between the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1908 and the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1933 and thus on what the average killer could lay his (or her) hands.

She therefore created stories revolving around the effect of bromide on a solution containing strychnine, what happens when you inhale prussic acid, the effect of phosphorus on the liver (it mimics liver disease) and how a quick injection of apomorphine can function as an emetic.

Christie often made use of the double jeopardy loophole – only closed in 2003 with the Criminal Justice Act – whereby once a person had been acquitted, they can never be tried again for the same offence.

As Hercule Poirot points out, “It’s not enough to be arrested.” There has to be a full jury trial, as in The Witness For The Prosecution.

In addition to the innumerable short stories, Christie published an impressive 66 crime novels, beginning in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles. This is where we first encounter Poirot, this “queer little foreigner”, a World War I Belgian refugee and “fusspot for whom specks of dust are more painful than bullet wounds”.

Obsessed with neatness and symmetry, he wears button boots and sports an absurd moustache, though not as farfetched as Kenneth Branagh’s in the latest film.

“I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” says Poirot, modestly.

Whilst he claims to be an exacting intellectual – “It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think” – Poirot’s little grey cells do, however, always need a bit of help. He examines stains, looks under mats, finds charred fragments of paper and spots the importance of candle grease, cigarette cases, discarded kimonos, brooches or a thornless rose. We, the readers, are, says Goddard, “skilfully deceived as to their significance”.

Whoever saw the importance of the repaired Dictaphone in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, or the fish paste sandwiches in Sad Cypress?

As awkward in company as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot nevertheless always interviews several suspects, “sometimes in a pleasantly disarming manner, sometimes threatening”.

David Suchet was always good at the curdled courtesy, followed by a sudden snarl of rage. Poirot’s general belief is that “there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation”, an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde.

The more Goddard probes Christie’s work, the more psychological – indeed, subjective and impressionistic – is the approach.

“When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is,” says Poirot in the ABC Murders, sounding more like a novelist than a cerebral policeman.

As a legal practitioner, Goddard can see how clues support, but do not actually always prove, the solutions given.

These often rely on intelligent supposition – that is to say, sheer guesswork – as in Murder On The Orient Express, where “one cannot complain of having no clues in this case. There are clues here in abundance.” There are also five plausible versions of events, until it is revealed they all did it.

The bustling, busy approach is the particular realm of Miss Marple, the heroine of 12 complete novels.

Far from being a sweet, harmless little old lady, Miss Marple has an instinct for recognising wrongdoing and she mistrusts each and every person she encounters – who do, in fairness, all seem to be gossips, liars, adulterers, cheats, frauds, bastards, stranglers and poisoners.

“I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little,” she says, understandably. St Mary Mead is rampant with bodies in libraries, on the golf links, in vicarages and under rhododendrons.

 

GODDARD points out that Christie makes her venues – cosy and comfortable studies, resplendent drawing-rooms, train compartments, paddle-steamers – take on “a tense or sinister atmosphere”. She was particularly keen on placing horror in settings of picturesque Thirties luxury, such as the railway carriages belonging to the Calais to Nice “Blue Train”, which went via Paris and Lyon.

The Middle Est turns up a lot, too. This is an area and region Christie had explored with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan. She made extensive use of the Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island in Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon – it became the Jolly Roger Hotel on Smugglers’ Island.

Instead of explaining Christie away with his analytic exercises and legalistic assessments, Goddard’s superb take should serve to deepen and enrich her success and mystery.

We are shown how Christie can formulate characters we dislike, but who may be wholly innocent, and characters whose side we take – yet who are then unmasked as villains. Christie always saw through the perils of charm.

As a connoisseur of evil and ego, Agathe Christie is as great an author as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark or Jean Rhys.

Christie’s Golden Age brilliantly shows how she wove particular tales around the universal themes of greed, lust, hate, redemption and atonement.

That said, Goddard the lawyer does, however, catch her out just once in the dock. In Lord Edgware Dies, a character arrives home in Piccadilly at 8.30, changes for dinner and gets to Chiswick at 8.45.

This is simply not possible, is it, Miss Christie?

– Agatha Christie’s Golden Age by John Goddard is published by Stylish Eye for £18.99

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Arts, Books, Literature

An obscure and impenetrable winner of the Man Booker 2018

CRITIQUE: MILKMAN

THE Man Booker has got itself into a frightful twist. In 2013, it was announced that the prize, previously open only to UK, Irish and Commonwealth writers, would widen its remit to include any authors writing in English. Senior British novelists protested, and rightly so. It wasn’t hard to foresee what would happen when the juggernaut of US creative writing was allowed to bear down on the awards. Since then, two Americans have won (Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings and George Sanders for Lincoln in the Bardo) while the longlist and the shortlist are jam-packed with US novelists.

Two Americans were on this year’s shortlist – Rachel Kushner for The Mars Room, a punchily brilliant account of life inside a women’s prison, and Richard Powers for The Overstory, a densely branched eco epic that was the favourite amongst many critics. But it couldn’t win, and neither could Kushner. Even if either had been a worthy victor, that would have sent the wrong message for a prize that now has to fend off accusations of American dominance.

Because of this, the 2018 winner of the Man Booker went to Milkman by Anna Burns, the first Northern Irish writer to take the prize. Milkman is the oddest, most impenetrable choice since Keri Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985. Not only is it not the best book on the longlist where Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight cast its spectral magic and Sally Rooney’s Normal People told a love story that had critics swooning.

Set in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, Burns’ experimental novel is narrated by an 18-year-old girl who finds herself persuaded by a sinister, much older, paramilitary figure – the Milkman of the title. Burns writes in long, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and there are no names to help the reader navigate or by aiding their bearings. The narrator is known as “middle sister”; other characters are perversely described as “third brother-in-law” or “first brother-in-law”. Good luck to any reader trying to tell the difference. And then there is the welcome, chirpy presence of car-obsessed “maybe-boyfriend”.

Chairman of the judges-panel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: “None of us has ever read anything like it before.” Which is strange as you would hope those paid to assess one of the world’s biggest literary prizes would have a working knowledge of two other rather well-known Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Burns certainly belongs in the school of Joyce and Beckett, although not yet in their class of writing. You might say “middle sister” is Molly Bloom with bombs.

Those who consider themselves to be rather good and passionate readers will, undeniably, find Milkman hard work. Appiah acknowledged as much when he admitted the book is a challenge, “but in the way a walk-up Snowden is challenging”. You’re not likely to see that appearing on one of those staff endorsement cards in Waterstone’s bookstore (are you)? “Really quite enjoyable if you like ascending a Welsh mountain in driving rain and mist. Pack a kagoule and Kendal Mint Cake!” Pity the poor booksellers.

Appiah’s contention that Milkman “is enormously rewarding if you persist with it” sounds more like homework than great literature. You shouldn’t need to persist with a great book; you shouldn’t be able to put it down. As for his suggestion that it might be helpful to sing some of the paragraphs aloud… really? Most people, I would presume, don’t purchase a novel to do their own audio-book. The language should make its own music as Roddy Doyle did in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, his glorious Book winner of 1993. Like Burns, Doyle was working in the headlong, harum-scarum humour of Irish vernacular, but he opened that world to outsiders, always welcoming us in with a helpless generosity. Milkman, too, has wonderful shafts of wit, as when our heroine (no name, of course) is mulling over moving in with “maybe-boyfriend”. “If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do is leave.” Too often, though, the scintillating observations are muffled by the engulfing blanket of words.

Burns is at her best when she is clearest. The book tells you everything you need to know about what it’s like to be “brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?”

Paranoia was the air they breathed in Belfast back then, when Burns herself was growing up in the Ardoyne area. In one superb scene early on, “maybe-boyfriend” is cock-a-hoop at getting hold of rare parts from a Blower Bentley, which are laid out on his living room floor. As the neighbours turn up to witness this treasure for themselves, the mood is curdled by one visitor who snarkily wonders who got another part of the classic car, “the bit with that flag on”. In a viciously tribal society, where giving your baby the wrong name could lead to a knock on the door from men in balaclavas, being in possession of a car part that didn’t have a Union flag on, but which might have had that flag “from over the water”, is enough to create an ominous atmosphere.

Even the blameless-sounding Milkman is a dark joke: the IRA delivered petrol bombs in milk-crates to doors at the corner of every street. The way the enforcer insinuates himself horribly into the young woman’s life, the way she is powerless in that ultra-masculine world, unable to tell him to go away, feels all too relevant and pertinent in the era of #MeToo.

Milkman is no Tristram Shandy, although its author shares many of Sterne’s startling gifts. One day Burns may well write a great comic novel that will find a huge and satisfying readership.

This year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize is, sadly, not it.

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