Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Literature

(Books) Recommended Literary Fiction

SUMMARIES

. The Redeemed by Tim Pears (published by Bloomsbury for £16.99, 400pp)

YOU don’t need to have read the preceding novels in Tim Pear’s acclaimed West Country trilogy to relish this final instalment – but if you haven’t, it will almost certainly send you scuttling to seek them out.

It’s 1916 and taciturn, working-class Leo is with the Royal Navy while Lottie, daughter of a wealthy landowner, is secretly pursuing her dreams of becoming a vet.

As the years roll, the gap widens yet further between these former childhood friends: Leo joins a private salvage operation at Scapa Flow, then returns to the West Country in search of some land to call his own. Lottie, after an abusive encounter with her veterinary mentor, goes it alone, running a practice from a cottage on the estate.

Pears’ style is methodical rather than exciting (although there are some cracking set pieces) but the steadfast rhythms of his prose are an integral part of his Hardy-esque design, which is to honour ideas of continuity, the elemental relationship between man and beast and even the very soil itself. It’s so deeply, pleasurably wholesome it should be prescribed on the NHS.

. Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich (published by Serpent’s Tail for £14.99, 256pp)

THIS second novel from the Ukrainian author of The Natashas isn’t so much a Marmite novel as a Schrodinger’s Cat one, meaning you’ll likely admire it and find it tiresome at the same time. Jana and Zorka are childhood friends in communist Prague during the 1980s; years later they meet again, at a house party in Paris.

Interwoven with their separate experiences of the diaspora is the story of Aimee and Dominique, the former a young medical assistant, the latter an older, depressive actor who, when the novel begins, has taken a fatal overdose.

The novel lurches about like a drunk, sometimes out of focus, sometimes startlingly sharp, as it switches between perspectives, time frames and ideas of reality itself to explore sexual politics and personal identity forged against a background of intense political instability.

Moskovich’s often stunningly beautiful, artfully cinematic style is deliberately divisive, as perhaps befits a novel seeking to replicate the emotional experience of otherness and late 20th-century dislocation. You might find yourself a mite more confounded than you will be intrigued.

. For The Good Times by David Keenan (published by Faber for £12.99, 368pp)

THIS will blast away lingering January cobwebs: a nastily funny, ultra-violent account of Belfast in the 1970s by the author of the acclaimed This Is Memorial Device.

The narrator, Samuel, is an IRA footsoldier with a psychopathic dedication to the cause, which makes him right at home in the febrile atmosphere of the Ardoyne at the height of the Troubles, where men mutilating, torturing and blasting each other to smithereens has become a sort of daily Grand Guignol.

Delivered retrospectively from a Maze prison cell, Samuel’s hyper-adrenalised narrative blends hallucinatory visions, paranoid delirium and graphic descriptions with a Martin McDonagh-style feel for farce, as he repeatedly bungles executions while out on the rampage with his best mate Tommy, a Perry Como aficionado with a fine line in cultural malapropisms.

Samuel’s voice is shockingly alive and entertaining and, as the body count rises to preposterous levels, almost entirely desensitised to the bloody mayhem.

But then, and as Keenan makes grimly clear, for the perpetrators, exceptional violence is never a means to an end but the thing itself.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, United States

Book Review: Lords Of The Desert

REVIEW

Traditional and conventional wisdom has it that after 1945 Soviet Russia swiftly became Britain’s most deadly foe, while our great ally was the United States.

But this orthodox version of history is now in urgent need of reassessment according to James Barr’s magnificently researched new book. He demonstrates that the U.S. was just as determined, if not more so, to destroy Britain’s global power and influence as Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

The United States wanted to establish itself as the new global hegemon. According to Barr, this meant subverting Britain at every turn and, as the author shows, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. He infers that, while Britain had an official enemy in the shape of Russia, it had, too, a much more insidious and unofficial enemy in the U.S.

This process culminated in Britain’s total humiliation when the United States pulled the plug on Britain’s failed attempt to seize back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Some five years earlier the U.S. had sabotaged a carefully-planned attempt by MI6 to take control of Iranian oil production – a move which sent a message round the Arab world that British influence was severely dented if not doomed.

American contempt for Britain started even before World War II was over, with a disastrous visit to Egypt in 1942 by Wendell L Wilkie, the Republican opponent to Franklin D Roosevelt for the Presidency two years earlier.

Wilkie arrived in Cairo full of vim and admiration for the British. Then he had dinner with a senior British official and was filled with horror: “What I got was Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes,” he recorded.

These men, executing policies made in London, had no idea the world was changing. And Wilkie had no doubt that Winston Churchill was to blame.

His hostility was increased further by a disastrous mix-up when Churchill paid a brief visit to Washington after the United States joined the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Wilkie wanted to meet Churchill to establish his credentials as an international statesman, ahead of the 1944 presidential elections.

Churchill, in turn, was eager to meet Wilkie, then the favourite for the Presidency. He tried to phone Wilkie to arrange a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately, though, the switchboard operator put him through to the wrong extension number. Barr records:

“I am glad to speak to you,” gushed Churchill.

“Whom do you think you are speaking to?” came the reply.

“To Wendell Wilkie, am I not?”

“No,” came the answer. “You are speaking to the President . . . Franklin Roosevelt.”

The President then banned Churchill from meeting Wilkie, who was mortally offended when the event was cancelled.

This was just one of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings which set the tone for Britain’s post-war relationship with the U.S.

At bottom, both countries were determined to gain access to oil, already known to exist in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.

In an underhand move, the U.S. tried to hire Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer, to guide them in finding oil reserves. Thesiger stayed loyal to the British: he was in fact hard at work on their behalf, at one stage carrying out oil exploration under fake cover for an organisation called the Anti-Locust unit.

 

THIS is a splendidly written book. It demonstrates the early perspicuity of a young Tory researcher called Enoch Powell who sought out Anthony Eden (then a highly regarded former foreign secretary) shortly after the war to give him advice.

“I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans,” the young Powell told the elder statesman.

Eden looked at him as if he was mad. But Powell had the last laugh. Eden was later to reflect: “I had no idea what he meant. I do now.”

– Lords Of The Desert by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster for £20, 416pp

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The Guinea Pig Club

REVIEW

IN the summer of 1940, during the early stages of the Battle of Britain, 21-year-old Geoffrey Page’s Hawker Hurricane was hit by several stray bullets from a German bomber. The gas tank behind the plane’s engine exploded and turned the cockpit into a blazing inferno.

“Fear became blind terror,” he recalled, “then agonised horror as the bare skin of my hands gripping the throttle and control column shrivelled up like burnt parchment under the intensity of the blast furnace temperature.

“Screaming at the top of my voice, I threw my head back to keep it away from the searing flames.”

With instinctiveness, Page’s tortured right hand groped for the safety harness and it was only as his parachute descended towards the sea that he noticed: “The colour of my burned flesh was so loathsome that I wanted to vomit. But there was too much to attend to.

“The coastline at Margate was just discernible six to ten miles away. Ten thousand feet below me lay the deserted sea . . . I began to laugh. The force of the exploding gas tank had blown every vestige of clothing off my thighs downwards, including one shoe.”

After Page hit the water, pieces of his flesh flaked off and floated away. His blood ebbed into the brine. His pain worsened after he had been rescued by a British merchant ship and he felt “acute misery” as “the salt dried about my face injuries and the contracting strap of the flying helmet cut into the raw surface of my chin.

“Buckle and leather had welded into one solid mass, preventing removal of the headgear.”

On arrival at the RAF’s main hospital in Halton, Page looked away as the medics injected morphine and, in doing so, caught sight of his reflection in the mirrors of the overhanging light.

“My last conscious memory was of seeing the hideous mass of swollen, burnt flesh that had once been a face.”

 

BUT Page was lucky. Before World War II, most serious burn victims died within days from a particularly virulent form of shock or unchecked infection. They were not even admitted to teaching hospitals for fear the hopelessness of their plight would dent the young medics’ morale.

But, by 1940, a series of clinical breakthroughs in the treatment of both burn shock and infection prevention saw a surge in the number of men surviving long enough to require the services of the four plastic surgeons then practising in the UK.

Chief among them was the extraordinary Archibald McIndoe, who treated casualties such as Page at a special hospital in East Grinstead. To be played by Richard E. Grant in a biopic scheduled for release this year, New Zealand-born McIndoe was not only a brilliant and innovative surgeon, but a hugely compassionate – and rather eccentric – character who never lost sight of the human beings within the battered bodies that he repaired.

McIndoe was ahead of the game in helping these men find comradeship. He often told jokes and encouraged his nurses to serve beer on the wards and by taking the time to chat. His 649 RAF patients were equal partners in their own treatment, invited to view operations, give honest feedback and support each other as part of a “Guinea Pig Club” (GPC), who continued to meet right up until 2007.

In this updated edition of her short and tender account of the GPC, Emily Mayhew reminds us that World War II changed Britain’s view of heroism.

Before 1939, we celebrated great battlefield victories. After 1939, we learned to celebrate the quiet, gruelling valour of those who pushed on with civilian life, despite the horrors they had seen and the horror they saw in the eyes of those shocked by their burned bodies.

“Those first sorties into the world outside the hospital were painful,” remembered Bill Simpson. “Without hands, for instance, it was embarrassing to have someone pouring beer down your throat, wiping your mouth, blowing your nose, handling your money. It was even more embarrassing to have to make for the gentlemen’s cloakroom in pairs.”

“Before 1940,” writes Mayhew, “the Armed Forces contained their most disfigured casualties away from the public gaze.”

However, Archibald McIndoe changed that: he made sure that his patients were treated with warmth and dignity by the people of East Grinstead.

His Guinea Pigs were served in cafes, invited to dances and billeted in local houses.

The community was considered so therapeutic that patients were actively discouraged from going home sooner than necessary.

McIndoe fought, too, for the employment rights of his patients. Prior to the war, the convalescent period was restricted to 90 days with full pay, after which the patient had to return to active service or leave the RAF.

This rule was quickly scrapped and, eventually, airmen undergoing plastic surgery remained on full pay until the end of their treatment.

McIndoe also refused to give his patients the regulation Convalescent Blue uniforms, encouraging them to dress in regular uniform in acknowledgement of the battle that they were still fighting.

Many Guinea Pigs did return to active service – Geoffrey page among them. After two years of treatment, he headed back into combat, determined to shoot down an enemy plane for every one of his 15 major operations.

At his funeral in August 2000, Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxlee-Norris declared: “Even by the Battle of Britain standards, he was the bravest of the brave.”

– The Guinea Pig Club, by Emily Mayhew, is published by Greenhill for £17.99, 240pp

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