Book Review : Capital by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber 2012)

The residents of Pepys Road, South London, are an eclectic mix. 82 year old Petunia Howe has lived there all her life, yet most of her neighbours are incomers. Roger and Arabella Yount bought their upmarket property from the proceeds of Roger's job as an Investment Banker. Freddy Kamo is a Premiership footballer. Ahmed Kamal runs the corner shop with his wife and two brothers. Meanwhile, Zbigniew the Polish builder is putting up Arabella's shelves, whilst Quentina Mkfesi, a political refugee from Zimbabwe, is walking Pepys Road in search of parking infringements.

When the residents begin to receive postcards of their houses with the sinister message "We want what you have", the relationship between them and their material possessions are placed under the microscope. The appalling Arabella Yount has completely objectified herself in material terms. Roger needs a £1million bonus to meet his family's extravagant requirements. Freddy's father Patrick wishes that he was back in Senegal where life was poorer but simpler. Petunia's grandson Smitty is a Banksy-style artist whose anonymity is a commodity. Zbigniew monitors his share portfolio so that he can return to Poland to set up in business with his father.

Overlying the material relations are typically modern physical threats. The postcards turn nasty. The Kamal's brother is arrested as a terrorist. Freddy is injured playing football. Quentina is interned. Petunia has cancer. Roger is caught up in the banking crisis.

Yet despite these pitfalls, this is a surprisingly warm-hearted book. These tribulations are generally redemptive, underscoring the importance of family, love, friendship and respect. Only Arabella Yount is too far-gone in her materialistic cocoon to be able to contemplate the opportunities that Roger's change in lifestyle may offer, and whilst the fate of the admirable Quentina gives little to be optimistic about, she knows that Zimbabwe will not be ruled by a tyrant forever.

John Lanchester has succeeded in writing an immensely enjoyable State-of-the-Nation novel. The way in which each set of characters' lives impinge on each other only very tangentially is exactly how a modern street works. Admittedly most characters are not sketched in much depth and the novel lacks complexity - yet it is this lightness which captures the superficial freneticness and interconnectivity of modern life so well.

Book Review : Churchill by Roy Jenkins (Macmillan 2001)

Is greatness entirely contingent on being the right man in the right place at the right time? If, when Churchill was struck by a car in New York City in 1931, the injuries had proved fatal, then he would be remembered no more than as a colourful actor on the British political stage, whose positive contributions, such as the introduction of Labour Exchanges and Employment insurance in 1909, were more than overwhelmed by his political disasters - such as his advocacy of Gallipoli, the return to the Gold Standard (against his better judgement and on the advice of John Maynard Keynes, no less) and his emerging opposition to the end of British rule in India.

He was a controversial politician, crossing the house twice and apparently disliked on both sides as a result. Yet, like Gladstone and Lloyd George but probably no others, he could speak. Members filled the chamber to hear his meticulously prepared speeches, his rhetoric usually soaring even if they disagreed with his content.

Yet, Churchill's time came in 1940. He had been consistent in opposing Naziism throughout the 1930s, and the fall of Chamberlain and Churchill's ascent to power is meticulously detailed in this fine autobiography. Chamberlain wanted to hand the Premiership over to Halifax, who, as a peer, demurred. Power passed to Churchill. As Halifax favoured peace with Hitler, who knows what the world would look like today if Halifax had not declined the chance of power.

As Premier, Churchill reinvigorated the faltering war effort, brought in some talented ministers from all sides of the House and from Industry, and galvanised the population with his keynote speeches.Yet for long periods he was absent. Amazingly, in the year from 12 January 1943, he was out of the country for 172 days, plus a further 35 days absent from Parliament due to pneumonia contracted whilst travelling. No-one can doubt the importance of his meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin, nor the bravery of travelling huge distances by air and sea at great risk to himself, yet to be away for half the year displays inordinate confidence in his deputy, Attlee.

Yet the War coalition was surprisingly unpopular. Bye-elections were lost with a surprising frequency, which was a foretaste of the upheaval of 1945. But by this time, Churchill's star had stated to decline. He was a poor leader of the opposition, and his second premiership, marred as it was by ill-health, was undistinguished. His much-delayed departure was anxiously awaited by more than just Eden.

Roy Jenkins' biography is exemplary. Based on copious secondary sources rather than original research, it is an admirable and compendious work of synthesis. Jenkins can turn a phrase almost as well as Churchill himself, though with less extravagance, and the result is a compellingly readable account which presents Churchill as gifted, wildly ambitious, egotistical, infuriating but always touched with greatness. In the final analysis he may be too kind to Churchill's final administration which in my opinion led Britain to a damaging period of stasis, yet overall he is admirably balanced throughout. He is respectful and admiring, yet this is no hagiography. And that is how it should be. Churchill was a flawed character in many ways - a drinker, a gambler, an egotist of frequently flawed judgement, yet when Britain faced its darkest hour, he was the one who to whom we turned, and he delivered.

Book Review : Mr Phillips by John Lanchester (Faber and Faber 2000)

There are some books that one underestimates at one's peril.

Mr Phillips is a very ordinary man. An accountant, a London Commuter, a daydreamer about sex, he wakes up on Monday morning and readies himself for the office as he does every day. Except there is a difference today, as he was made redundant on Friday, and hasn't yet brought himself to tell his wife or family.

Over the course of the day, he meets his son for lunch, he chats with a pornographer, he sees a minor celebrity and gets involved in a bank robbery, reflecting all the time with his interior voice on the nature of his former job, his family, the memory or prospect of sex, or whether the probability of death between purchase and draw of a lottery ticket outweighs the probability of winning the jackpot.

Meanwhile, his life as an office-working, commuting wage-drone is dissected sliver by sliver, and is immediately recognisable to all who trudge up to London each day. "Like most experienced commuters, Mr Phillips has a variety of techniques for seizing somewhere to sit, sneaking around the side of the door and sliding into the jump-seats or barrelling down to the far end of the compartment, through the thickets of passengers, briefcases, newspapers, outstretched legs...The battle for a space prepared you for, was an allegory of the daily struggle. You could argue that those who fought their way to the seats were the people who needed them least. To them that hath shall be given, that was the deal." It is this juxtaposition of the quotidian with the interiorised faux philosophy which makes this book so funny and identifiable.

Mr Phillips is vaguely lustfully following D-list celebrity Clarissa Colingford into a bank, when crash-helmetted shotgun-wielding robbers burst in. As Mr Phillips lies on the floor he reminisces on his previous near-death experiences, mortality rates of lottery-ticket buyers and speculates of the reaction of his family to his death. And then he stands up.

Later, he helps an old lady with her shopping. It turns out that she is the wife of Mr Erith (as the rhyme goes, there are men in the village of Erith that nobody seeth or heareth), his fanatical old RE teacher. She shows Mr Phillips a book where several sayings, including one by Paul de Man, are embroidered. "Nothing, whether deed, word thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only is a random act whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence." Has Mr Phillips' day been the confirmation or refutation of this and the other observations? Or is Lanchester subtly saying, pace de Man, that as a work of literature "Mr Phillips" means nothing, due to the irrelevance of human matters.

So is it trivial or profound? What is sure is that it is very readable, funny and full of blasts of recognition that this fortysomething office-worker found uncomfortably familiar.

Book Review : The Chancellors by Roy Jenkins (MacMillan 1998)

The prospect of a survey of all the Chancellors of the Exchequer from Randolph Churchill to Hugh Dalton from the unique perspective of someone who was not only a notable incumbent of this position himself, but also one of our finest writers on the politics of the period in question, seemed replete with possibilities. Firstly, we would be able to chart the evolution of the role from its high-Victorian incarnation in its current form through the troughs in its status during the wars, to its current position second only to that of the Prime Minister himself. Secondly, we could chart the evolution in economic policy through a turbulent century where the economics of Empire and Free Trade were turned on their heels by two world wars, the Great Depression and the rise of the Welfare State. And finally, we could examine the types of person who became Chancellor, and the success or otherwise of these types in the role.

Roy Jenkins' book attempts tentatively to address these questions, but only in the latter is he successful, and then only up to a point. The book's shortcomings, if such they be, are those of organisation and ambition. Certainly one cannot fault the sonorous, slightly orotund flow of Jenkins' prose, of a type that one rarely encounters nowadays, or the clarity of biographical exposition. Parallels with the current credit crisis are of interest, such as the Barings crisis of 1890, where overexposure to Argeninian and Russian Bonds nearly brought Barings Bank, and with it the whole city of London, to its knees - perhaps if this book had been written today and not 14 years ago, these parallels may have been made more overt (although the coincidence of Barings' misfortunes in recent times is underlined).

However, Jenkins has used his own work as frame of reference for determining the scope of the book, which is understandable but unfortunate. He sees Randolph Churchill as a natural continuation from the scope of his work on Gladstone, and Dalton's successors were all the subjects of essays by Jenkins. Churchill, Lloyd George, Asquith and Baldwin are the subjects of abbreviated essays as Jenkins has written at length about them elsewhere. Yet these choices encumber the subject as a whole. The modern Chancellorship was the creation of Gladstone and Disraeli, under whose tenures the position was elevated to that of of second in the cabinet and budget day became a national institution. This is only hinted at in the introduction. Instead, the first incumbent we meet is Randolph Churchill, biographically interesting but certainly not the most typical or successful holder of the office, and by concluding with Dalton partway through Atlee's landmark administration, there is a sense that we have ended with a story half-told which, once commenced, should have continued through to Gaitskill at the very least.

The second shortcoming is one of ambition, and this is partly caused by Jenkins organising his material biographically. Chancellors such as Harcourt, Hicks Beach and the Chamberlain half-brothers had more than one term of office, yet their records are looked at in the context of single biographies, so it is very difficult to get a continuous sense of how economic policy evolved in context, or of how the position of Chancellor itself changed over time.

This biographical approach does place emphasis on the type of person who succeeded as Chancellor, yet in the cases of Churchill and Lloyd George you have two of the most influential Chancellors of the 20th Century, but in these critical cases the biographical details relevant to their Chancellorship is skimped over. As a consequence, there is no discussion of the relationship in Asquith's administration between Lloyd George as Chancellor and Churchill as President of the Board of Trade, how Churchill's unemployment pension and labour exchanges complemented Lloyd George's Old Age Pensions, and how this contrasted with Churchill's performance as a Conservative Chancellor fifteen years later. This is a major shortcoming.

This is unfortunate, as a comprehensive overview would be very illuminating. As it is, biographical attention is given to some of the forgotten names of British politics such as C.T Richie and Sir Robert Horne - which is very worthy, and the resulting vignettes are interesting in themselves, but I can't help feeling that this book as a whole should be seen as an opportunity lost.

Book Review : The Time of My Life by Denis Healey (Penguin 1990)

When one thinks of Denis Healey, one tends to remember a rumbustious character who never shied away from a confrontation, and whose troubled Chancellorship included inflation of 27%, interest rates of 15%, industrial strife and an IMF bailout. What is less familiar is the lover of poetry and theatre, the fluent linguist who broadcast on BBC World Service in French, Italian and German,who made deep and lasting friendships with so many people in so many walks of life around the world. In this splendid political autobiography, Healey attempts to put the record straight, and prove that there was more to him than the political bruiser that he was often taken for.

There is an element of self-justification in how he presents his time in office, but in his biggest battles history looks quite favourably on the outcomes he achieved. His first love was International Affairs, and one senses that the fact that the Foreign Secretaryship eluded him was a cause for regret. As defense secretary he oversaw Britain's withdrawal from unsustainable commitments East of Suez, whilst maintaining a nuclear deterrent with a degree of independence from the United States.

As Chancellor, he claims that if treasury PSBR forecasts had been accurate, he needn't have had to go cap in hand to the IMF - and indeed the loan was repaid by the time that Healey left office. After the traumas of 1975 and 1976 the economy had been dramatically turned round. By 1977, the Balance of Payments was positive, the pound was worth more than $2, interest rates had fallen to 5% and both inflation and unemployment were falling.Yet from that unnaturally propitious position, Callaghan's government persisted with an income policy too far, and the result was the Winter of Discontent. Healey is understandably scathing on the asinity and self-interest of  Union chiefs such as  Moss Evans and Clive Jenkins, who failed to show the leadership of their predecessors and whose dogmatism and lack of foresight indirectly led to twelve years of Thatcherism.One of the great pleasures of this book is its incisive pen-portraits - Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and Vic Feather are accorded deep respect, but his scorn for those implicated in Labour's implosion following their loss in 1979 is withering.

This great pleasure of this book is to accompany such a warm and engaging companion through his rise from a relatively humble background through Balliol and up through the ranks of the Labour party to the highest offices of state. His perspective from the inside of negotiations with the likes of the Americans on nuclear detterence, is eye-opening, his analysis of the events in which he was involved acute. Yet it is the characters that he has met which make this book special, many names with which one won't be familiar but all described with a warmth when deserved and a brutal dismissal when not. Everyone knows his description of Geoffrey Howe - who he liked and respected- from the House of Commons, yet not nearly as savage as his dismissal of his old foe Tony Benn in this book: "It is ironic that Tony Benn's ministerial career should have left only two monuments behind - the uranium mine in Namibia that he authorised as Energy Secretary which helps to support apartheid...and an aircraft [Concorde] which is used by wealthy people on their expense accounts, whose fairs are subsidised by much poorer taxpayers." Like the man himself, insightful, uncompromising but ultimately fair.

Book Review : Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins 1992)

History has not been kind to Harold Wilson. His administrations are remembered primarily for their crises - devaluation, In Place of Strife, rocketing inflation and the turmoil of the seventies. The circumstances of his resignation were strange, the only British Prime Minister last century to leave office at a time of his own choosing, when not forced to do so by political events, illness or electoral defeat. The infamous lavender list left a nasty taste in a country recently rocked by Poulson.

Yet it the achievements of Wilson's governments were significant. They represented a sea-change from the previous administration (13 of Macmillan's cabinet had gone to Eton) which was much more in tune with a rapidly changing society. Wilson's famous words on the "white heat of the technical revolution" stuck a chord with the voters, and Labour was swept to power in 1964 with a mandate to modernise. Whilst the its attempt to direct investment more efficiently through a National Plan created by the new Department of Economic Affairs was a failure, its attempt to create a fairer society through the expansion of university education was undoubtedly of lasting significance. Capital punishment was abolished, abortion and homosexuality were legalised, the Lord Chancellor's censorship of the theatre was swept away. Later events were to show that the ideas behind In Place of Strife were undoubtedly correct, and the subsequent emasculation of the Trade Union movement under Thatcher indicate that the Trade Union movement's opposition to the White Paper was misplaced.

Wilson's administration redefined the nature of Britain's armed forces, reduced defence spending from 8% to 5% of GDP in keeping with Britain's post-colonial role, whilst withdrawing from traditional commitments "East of Suez". Perhaps his greatest achievement was to keep British troops out of Vietnam despite intense pressure from a United States government on whom Britain was dependent for economic support during recurring balance of payments crises. Only a funambulist with the skill of Wilson could have achieved this balancing act.

Yet Wilson's tragedy came in two electoral shocks - his unexpected defeat in 1970, and his equally unexpected victory in 1974. He was shaken to the core by his loss, and when he regained power in 1974 the drive and attention to detail was no longer there. Pimlott shows conclusively that Wilson was planning his resignation almost as soon as he had taken power, thus dispelling rumours of lurking scandals or MI5 conspiracies to unseat him.

Pimlott's is a classic political biography: comprehensive, detailed, sympathetic but not uncritical. He presents Wilson as a highly capable administrator, whose mercurial brilliance allowed him to paper over the deep divisions between right and left in the labour party. He felt deeply betrayed by his protégée Anthony Wedgwood Benn's swing to the left, and the widening chasm between him and the Jenkinsites of the right contributed to his deepening sense of disillusionment. Wilson was no ideologue, but Pimlott gives a sense that in Wilson's final administration he no longer believed that he was capable of transforming Britain into the fairer, more efficient and better run state that he had worked for all his life.

Book Review : State of Emergency - The Way We Were : Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook (Allen Lane 2010)

I was born in 1963, so the period covered in this book, 1970-1974, coincides with my first proper memories of a world outside my family. I don't remember the election of 1970, but, being brought up in an SNP-supporting household I do remember Margo McDonald winning Govan in 1973, and the SNP's subsequent successes in the 1974 elections. Decimalisation impacted the sixpence in my pocket directly, and what schoolboy could forget the excitement of having to huddle round candles during the power cuts of the miners' strike and the three-day week.

My perspective was Scottish. The Ibrox disaster (dismissed in this book in a sentence, in one of the few misjudgements of perspective) was traumatic as my father was at the game - waiting with my mother for him to return home from the game as news of fatalities mounted will always stay with me. Jimmy Reid only became a  hero once I was old enough to understand the nature of the UCS work-in, and how it differed from ordinary industrial disputes. However, the horrors unfolding in Northern Ireland were distant, despite Glasgow perching precariously on the edge of the same sectarian precipice.

My memories of the period are patchwork, and necessarily underinformed. I remember Slade and The Goodies, but not Lord Lambton, and I was too young to understand the fuss about Poulson. Yet it made the experience of reading this book different from that of reading its splendid predecessors, Never Had It So Good and White Heat. With respect to  these, the past is definitely a foreign country as one has little context with which to refer except for what one has read in books. However, reading State of Emergency allowed me to affirm my experiences and to better understand the context of the events which had unfolded around me.

When discussing the book with a friend, he said that it was too soon for a proper perspective on the events of the seventies, but I don't agree. What Sandbrook has achieved is a masterly summery of the major movements of the period - political events, social, cultural - and brought it together in a synthesis which is highly engaging. There is something Tragicomic about the Heath administration, and Sandbrook manages to capture Heath's gaucheness and rudeness (of the Leader of an Orchestra who said "if you don't stop being so rude to us, Sir Edward, we might start following your instructions") but is also willing to give him credit for much which is today forgotten.

It is a top down book and despite its length it is of necessity superficial in a lot of ways - his earlier books contrast sharply with David Kynaston's bottom-up surveys of the forties and fifties in Austerity Britain and Family Britain which are largely compiled from dairy observations and Mass Observation. Sandbrook does use such sources (the frequent references to diaries of upper-class reactionary James Lees-Milne are particularly entertaining and illuminating, calling Captain Mark Phillips, for instance, "barely a gentleman") but more of his sources are from a dizzying variety of books, newspapers, government papers, film and television. It is the skill with which he manages this mass of information which impresses. Above all, he achieves a nuance of tone which allows him to switch seamlessly from high political drama to carnage in Ulster to the permissive society and Woman's Lib, whilst maintaining a uniformity of clarity, humour and insight. It is quite brilliantly done, and I look forward to further volumes.

Book Review - Vanished Kingdoms : The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies (Allen Lane 2011)

When I was a child in the 1970's, the map of the Europe seemed immutable. Ongoing decolonialisation granted statehood to pre-existing territories of the major European powers, and new states had sprung forth from violent conflict in far-flung corners of the globe, but Europe's boundaries, fixed in the aftermath of the Second World War, were constant. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovia. Europe's states suddenly became fragile entities, as centrifugal forces started to impinge on even long-established Western states like Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. The old certainties had vanished, history had not ended.

Yet this is no new phenomenon - thirty years of post-war stability is the exception in European history, not the rule. The map of Europe has been like a kaleidoscope, borders shifting as the wheel of time turns. Yet when we analyse these patterns, so often our perspective is shaped through the prism of contemporary states, so when we look at Prussia, it is through the context of modern Germany, or Burgundy through that of modern France. What Norman Davies has done in this brilliantly conceived and executed book is to look at snapshots of European history from the perspective of those states which have failed to survive the test of time.

The result is a startling series of cameos.What is the relationship between medieval Aragon and modern Catalonia? How did a remote region of what is now Poland and Russia give its name to the State from which modern Germany sprang (and why does its name no longer exist)? Why are there two separate Galicias in Europe, and are they linked? (No, they aren't). Why did the mayfly state of Carpatho-Ukraine exist for just one day?

The fortunes of states ebb and flow. Who in the early 1980s could have envisaged that by 1991 the Soviet Union would have imploded? Yet its demise is no more surprising than that of medieval Byzantium, or of the mighty Dukedom of Burgundy. We are left with faint traces, palimpsests of what went before - Byzantine complexity, Prussian blue (which would have been Brandenburg Blue if it had been synthesised in Berlin five years earlier).

Fifteen vanished kingdoms are analysed, each in three parts. The first gives a contemporary context in the form of a short travelogue (necessary for some of the more obscure parts of Eastern Europe). Then the rise and fall of the state in historical terms is described, followed by the memory sites, the cultural traces of the vanished kingdoms which resonate to this day. We progress according to a rough chronology, and in the earlier chapters there is a slight tendency for the historical sections to resolve down to unfamiliar names of kings, places and battles, but the broader contexts largely offset this. By the time we come to more familiar historical territory (for me anyway) this is no longer an issue.

Davies attempts to analyse the reasons why kingdoms vanish. Some are absorbed or destroyed by bigger neighbours, some disintegrate from within. Others merge together to make a greater whole. Looking at the examples of Piedmont-Savoy, Aragon and the Soviet Union, he puts forward the case that Kingdoms which come together from distinct constituent parts have a greater tendency to split apart over time. Small nations such as Estonia can exist successfully under the umbrellas of Nato and the European Union, so he believes that the separatist forces acting on the United Kingdom will one day win through, forcing Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales down the path trodden early last century by Ireland. Whether you agree with this analysis or not, this compelling, beautifully written book is vital reading for all with an interest in European history or contemporary politics alike.

Book Review - The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Virago Press 2006)

It's 1947, and lives are reaching out for normality after the dislocation of war. For some this is difficult, unable to replicate the adrenaline rush of falling bombs and saving lives. For others, the relationships which made sense in the unnatural intensity of the war years no longer provide security and satisfaction. 


Sarah Waters' novel follows the interlinked lives of five people in these dismal years. Helen and Viv work in a dating agency. Helen lives with the sophisticated Julia, whilst Viv has been having a long-term affair with Reggie. Viv's brother Duncan works in a factory and lives with Mr Mundy, but is hiding a secret in his past. Kay lives alone and walks the streets without purpose. But why does Viv become so animated when she sees Kay walking in the street?


Structurally, this book is a bit like a classic detective novel. You are introduced to the story in the middle at the scene of crime, and the action unravels both forwards towards dénouement and backwards as the criminal and their motivations are revealed. In 1947, you learn about the characters, but subsequent sections are set in 1944 and 1941 and as we rewind backwards we find out why the characters are who they are and act how they act.


Sarah Waters is adept at creating a sense of time and place, and her picture of wartime London is highly evocative. The ebbing and flowing of relationships is sketched out with care and sensitivity. Yet there is something at the heart of this novel which didn't fully work for me. It's as if it were somehow not a true story of a series of relationships, but a technical exercise in showing how a book about relationships could be written in reverse chronology. 


Perhaps that's unfair, perhaps one is just too conditioned to the unflowering of the plot, of the novelist's relentless drive towards a conclusion. Certainly, there are many novels where one has appreciated the storyline but the ending leaves one disappointed, and by this device of reverse chronology Sarah Waters has avoided having to finish with her characters facing the humdrum normality of peacetime at the end of the book. But because of the structure of the book, we know who survived the falling bombs, the back-street abortions, and the slow reveal of why Helen has silk pyjamas and Viv wants to give Kay a ring does not provide an adequate motive force for the book as a whole - which is unfortunate, as many sections are compelling and the period and interrelationships are delineated with such care.

Book Review - The American Future : A History by Simon Schama (The Bodley Head 2008)

In 2008, America stood on the cusp of a change which even just a few years earlier would have been unthinkable. Barack Obama, a black American, had a realistic chance of being elected President of the United States. His vision of change was providing an inspiring alternative both to a discredited Republican regime and Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party machine. Establishment politics had failed - the long years of easy credit and economic boom had come crashing to an end, whilst American troops struggled to make an impact against nebulous foes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If ever there was a potential political watershed, this was it.

Simon Schama's TV series and book were an attempt to take a long perspective on America's most pressing issues, mixing historical aperçus with contemporary analysis to brilliant effect.

When West Point Academy for officers was founded, the study of French was compulsory for the practical reason that many of the textbooks were written in French. But the principles of mathematics and engineering that were instilled allowed the Army to play a major role in the Civil Engineering of the new nation. They helped create, for instance, the levées that protected New Orleans until contemporary negligence contributed to their breach  in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Switch to the retired General who, when asked if the Army could have done more to fix the infrastructure of Iraq, said that that is not what the Army is for.The Union's success in the American Civil War was largely due to the success of West Point graduate Montgomery Meigs' clear-headed and incorruptible approach to logistical management. Switch to Iraq, where "Construction companies awarded no-bid contracts had bungled the job after pocketing front-loaded operational budgets". No explicit contrast is made - none is needed.

For a country founded on immigration, America's attitude to new immigrants has often been ambiguous. Discrimination against Chinese workers in the West is contrasted with American migrants to Mexico in what is now Texas. The first part of the American history is the search for land, as settlers pushed further and further west, and the American army made gains to the South. Treaties with American Indian tribes are torn up with impunity by Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Mexican war. Rewind to Schama's meeting earlier in the book with Generals Freddy Valenzuela and Ricardo Sanchez, all-American heroes in a Hispanic military café in San Antonio, Texas.

For the American history is a complex history, ebbing and flowing from highest ideals to naked greed and corruption. What Schama manages to do is to select examples that not only encapsulate how America came to be what it is today, but also to underline its complexity. He moves easily back and forward through the history of the Meigs family and the history of the nation, but eschews easy answers. As the past four years have shown, the problems that contemporary America faces are too deep-seated simply to be solved by well-crafted words, but this book is a fine attempt to shed some understanding on its most intractable issues.

Book Review : The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago Press 2009)

It may be an exaggeration to say that British novelists write of little else but class, but it is certainly the case that a number of significant recent novels have examined  class-incompatibility and the decline of the English gentry over the course of the 20^th Century.  Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” charts the decline of one part of a wealthy family through the rise and fall of its poet-son’s reputation. The crux of Julian Barnes “The Sense of an Ending”  arises essentially out of a sense of class-based inferiority. Meanwhile, Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger” charts another gentry-class family’s decline in the immediate aftermath of the second world war through the unusual medium of a ghost story.

As a child, Faraday had visited the Ayres family at Hundreds Hall where his mother was in service. Now that he is a doctor in the local town, he is called to examine Betty, a young servant, and strikes up a friendship with the members of the family. Mrs Ayres is now widowed, and has two surviving children, her eldest daughter having died from diphtheria. Her surviving children are now in their twenties. Roderick was badly burned during the war, whilst Caroline is rather plain and unmarried. Hundreds Hall itself is badly in need of repair – the income from the estate has diminished, and financial anxieties are crowding in on Roderick who has taken over the running of the Estate since the death of his father.

Betty has claimed that the Hall frightens her, but there is no evidence of any malign force until a dinner party where Gyp, Caroline’s docile Labrador, suddenly savages a neighbour’s child. After this, strange occurrences take place with increasing frequency. Roderick is convinced there is an evil spirit in the house – but could this just be the strain of his injuries and the family finances taking their toll? Mrs Ayres agrees there may be a spirit – could this be her beloved daughter trying to reach her?

Meanwhile, Faraday has struck up a tentative relationship with an uncertain Caroline, and is becoming more involved in the problems of the house. His medical experience is invaluable as he deals with the consequences of the strange manifestations in the house. As an educated man, he is sure there is a rational explanation for what is occurring. Could it be psychoneurosis, or has Roddy's subliminal self somehow broken loose from his conscious personality and returned to the house, as his colleague Seeley suggests?

The narrative is told from Faraday's perspective, but could he be more implicated more than he reveals in the narrative? Before each major crisis, he has been in the vicinity of the house, sometimes drinking, always upset and on the morning afterwards has suffered bad night’s sleep? Who is the “you” to whom Caroline refers? He is not entirely a pleasant character, having a temper and a suspicious nature, and has clearly not got over the perceived disadvantages of his poor upbringing. He is getting more frustrated with the barriers to his relationship with Caroline. Has he fully resolved his feelings towards the family for whom his mother spent time in service?  A mischievous spirit or a rational explanation? - Sarah Waters leaves conclusions to the reader.

Coming from the doctor’s perspective, the book is written in flat, businesslike prose. Description  is kept to a minimum, yet the time and place are brilliantly evoked. The sparseness means that when the crises occur, the description of them is all the more shocking – and I can guarantee that once you get into the book it is so gripping that it almost impossible to put down. Yet the class-based ambiguities at the heart of it mean that this is no mere page-turner but an extremely sensitive, thought-provoking and intriguing story.

Book Review : A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes (Picador 1990)

On first sight, this is not so much a novel as a collection of disparate short stories linked by recurring motifs but not linked by any big idea or common themes. But Julian Barnes has insisted that the book was conceived as a whole, and in actual fact you need to stand quite far back to appreciate the architecture of the whole.


This is a history of the world from Noah until the end of time. In the first chapter we encounter a cynical, all-knowing woodworm which has stowed away on the Ark, decrying Noah and his drunken exploits. In the final chapter, we discover an afterlife in which all desires are satiated to such an extent that the dead eventually tire of the state of bliss that they exist in, and opt for nothingness instead. In the intervening 8 1/2 chapters, we encounter the woodworm gnawing through the legs of the throne of the Bishop of Besançon,  trying to eat the letters sent by an actor in the South American jungle and possibly destroying the remains of the Ark on Mount Ararat. Reindeer which on the Ark had a sense of foreboding are buried in the fallout from a nuclear catastrophe. Meanwhile, the Ark recurs in the guise of an Achille Lauro-type liner stormed by Arab terrorists, who execute the prisoners of the unclean nations two by two, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, some logs tied together in the South American jungle and a possibly delusionary craft in the Pacific.


The overarching theme is similar to that of his recent Booker-prize winning novel A Sense of an Ending. It is the fragility and unreliability of the historical narrative and how it is framed by the perspective of the narrator. The woodworm, who, as a destroyer of narratives par excellence exemplifies Barnes' theme, relates his worm's eye view of a biblical narrative that is unreliable per se. The deaths of the terrorists deprive Franklin Hughes of the justification of his behaviour and his girlfriend never talks to him again. Kath Ferris's journey across the Torres Strait could have been a fantasy or delusion - or the consequence of sunstroke. The story of the Medusa is the story of the survivors.


There are two significant exceptions to these stories about the fragility of history. The first is the tragic story of the ship St Louis, which sailed to the United States carrying 937 Jewish refugees but was denied access at numerous ports in the Americas, finally returning to Antwerp. This is a shocking fact: only the ultimate fate of its passengers as they are dispersed once again throughout Europe is unknown. 


And then in the half-chapter, Parenthesis, Barnes finally confronts the reader directly and brings everything together. In the midst of a disquisition on the nature of love, he states that "History isn't what happened - history is just what historians tell us." They impose a pattern, plan, connections. 
   
   "The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn   for a few centuries then fade; stories, old stories that seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections... We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them."


As short stories, each Chapter would stand up well by itself. Written in a variety of styles, voices and tones, they are exemplars of the short-storyteller's art. Yet don't let the engaging nature of many of these tales and the accessibility of Barnes' style deceive you - this is a deadly serious and hugely ambitious book.

Book Review : Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre 2011)

1785, and the French state is rotten, putrefying. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer, is summoned to a decaying Versailles to be given a task by a government minister, the clearance of the cemetery of les Innocents by Les Halles in Paris, which is full to overflowing and filling its surrounds with stench and disease. Apparently there is an elephant somewhere in Versailles.

The elephant is the impending French Revolution, whose presence looms over this book whilst only ever being acknowledged in the prophetic street graffiti of the mysterious Bêche. And, as wide-awake readers will note Jean-Baptiste is preparing the way for the upheaval, and that "Baratter" means to agitate vigorously, they will realise that we are in the realm of complex extended historical metaphor. However, don't let that put you off - this is page-turning book, cleverly written, engaging and entertaining, and one can enjoy immensely it without all the cleverness. But dig away at the surface like Baratter's men from Valenciennes, and so much more opens up...

The title announces the theme: purification - of the graveyard, of the district, of the state, of la pute autrichiènne with whom Baratte will live. A day is coming when the last trompette-stop of the organ will sound and the innocents shall rise up from their graves. Jean-Baptiste travels to Valenciennes via Amiens (incidentally home to relics of John the Baptist) to employ Flemish miners, working men, simple but loyal, to excavate the bones of les Innocents and transport them to the catacombs below Rue d'Enfer. Miller captures the sights and smells of this unpleasant task in brisk, tight elegant sentences whilst continuing to toy with us.

Salome-like, the naked daughter of Jean-Baptiste's hosts tries to sever his head. Fortunately he is rescued by all-seeing Marie before he has shed too much blood. Call on Dr Guillotin who has expertise in such cases. It can be possible to over-interpret. As fire rages all around them, Jean-Baptiste finds Flemish miner Block (=stone = pierre =Peter??), gives him a key and tells him to take his followers to the river.

As a novel, it is not without its flaws. Structurally it is unkempt, events occur for little apparent reason, Jean-Baptiste is the only character of interest.Yet as an entertainment, an exciting read, historically astute, well-written and playful, it excels. Since finishing it, I've found myself musing on the theme and the apocalyptic parallels it develops, which is worthy tribute. And the elephant? - it was lying dead in Versailles, rotting away.

Book Review : Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (Picador 1987)

In his recent Booker Prizewinning The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes' middle-aged character tries to make sense of a pivotal event in his life many years ago. Barnes had written about an elderly character looking back on a life once before in Staring at the Sun, one of his earlier works written in 1985, and the difference between the two books is instructive. Both are massively ambitious. Whereas The Sense of an Ending explores the nature of history, Staring at the Sun tries to tell whether you can "tell a good life from a bad life, a wasted life."

Jean Sargent did not lead an exciting life. Brought up before the second world war, she drifted into a loveless marriage. It was only the prospect of her son's birth that made her leave her husband and drift around various poorly paid jobs and rented flats. Looking back on her long life from a vantage point in 2020, she reflects on her dodgy Uncle Leslie, who fled to America during the war, and fighter-pilot Tommy Prosser, who was grounded when he lost his bottle.

She looks back on bringing up her son, Gregory, whose existential crisis causes him to interrogate the General Purposes Computer's Absolute Truth module why he is afraid of death. And she reflects on travelling in her middle age, when she went to China. There someone asks how you can tell good jade from bad and is told "you look at it and by looking you can tell its qualities."

There are two main problems with this book. The first is that it is over-determined, a bit too writerly. Significant metaphors recur with a clunk. As a child, Jean sees a print of a mink with the caption that "the mink is excessively tenacious of life," and the phrase returns to Jean at all of life's major junctures. Similarly aeroplanes - Uncle Leslie takes her on an aeroplane to cure her whooping cough; Tommy Prosser gives the book its title by flying into the sun; Gregory makes model aircraft that cannot fly.

The second is a problem of tone in the final section of the book. After two largely realist parts which follow Jean in her youth and as a mother, we suddenly fast-forward to 2020. The General Purposes Computer is a fine example of why writers must always take care when writing about the future, since Barnes obviously hadn't envisaged as all-encompassing a vehicle for the sum of human knowledge as the Internet. Gregory's interrogation of the GPC makes for interesting intellectual cut and thrust, but it is out of tune with the rest of the  book.

By the end, as Gregory and his mother embark on an aeroplane and all the metaphors come together, one feels as if one has completed a particularly complex intellectual jigsaw and not a work of literature. This is a shame, as the book is beautifully written, as is always the case with Julian Barnes, and genuinely thought-provoking. However, when compared with The Sense of an Ending one can see how the mature Barnes has dealt with equally weighty issues with so much more subtlety yet directness.

Book Review : The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape 2011)

2011 has been topped and tailed by two very similar short novels, both by experienced master-craftsmen, both looking back on events of the protagonist's youth which weren't fully understood at the time, both written with a taut, spare economy and barely a word out of place.


Philip Roth's Nemesis was a simpler piece of story-telling; Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending is an altogether more ambitious work. Within its slight frame it dissects the unstable nature of history. As Adrian Finn says, quoting Lagrange, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." Barnes' book is an exploration of this thesis.


Tony Webster and his friends Colin and Alex are ordinary schoolboys in the sixties, intellectually curious and hung-up on girls. They are joined at school by Adrian Finn, whose intellectual fire-power immediately marks him out as Scholarship material. Tony looks up to Adrian, as do both his friends and the Masters at his school. 


When Tony goes to Bristol University he starts to go out with Veronica, his first girlfriend, He is taken to meet her parents and their solid middle-class self-confidence immediately makes him feel inferior. It turns out that Veronica's brother is at Cambridge with Adrian, and after Tony and Veronica split up he gets a letter from Adrian requesting his permission to go out with Veronica.Tony's reply has unexpected consequences.


Fast-forward to today, and Tony is surprised to receive a bequest from Veronica's mother on her death. Veronica has some documents which have been left to him but which she is reluctant to release, so he tries to track her down in order to understand what happened when she split from him - yet his memory is unreliable and he is shocked to discover the picture of his younger self which emerges.


Barnes' characterisation has the precision of a stiletto. Tony is not naturally reflective, he is selfish, complacent, stolid and insensitive, yet cannot see it. He has caused damage that he cannot start to contemplate, but despite everything thinks he is an inoffensive nonentity. Veronica tries to penetrate his shell, but her pain is too great. The mystery is Adrian - to what extent does his theory of individual responsibility mean that he is unable to ascribe blame where it is due?


This is not a large book - only 150 pages - but its themes are massive. It does not feel slight, but rather it is as fully satisfying a read as many much larger novels - in fact, any further development would only detract from its key themes. Just as in Philip Roth's Nemesis, the sparsity engenders an emotional intensity and focus on a theme that would be lost in a bigger book. Both these master-craftsmen have the experience to know exactly when less is more. 

Book Review : The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury 2011)

I hesitate to start to write this review, as I feel a bit like Treslove, the main character of this book. Julian Treslove is a disappointed unmarried middle-aged man working as a celebrity look-alike whose two best friends are both Jewish, and both have recently lost their wives. Samuel Finkler, a friend of Treslove since school, is a successful philosopher, academic and TV pundit, writer of "The Existentialist in the Kitchen". The elderly Libor Sevcik was their teacher. Both may be Jewish, but they have conflicting attitudes to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Libor supporting the Israeli government's position, whereas Finkler takes the lead of the ASHamed Jews who are opposed to Israeli aggression in Palestine.


Julian has always had an ambiguous relationship with the confident, successful Finkler, defining his attitude to Jewishness through him (to Treslove, all Jews are "Finklers"). However, after being the victim of an possibly antisemitic attack in London, he starts to learn more about the religion before striking up a relationship with Hephzibah, Libor's niece. Nevertheless, despite trying to learn Yiddish, contemplating circumcision and recognising rising antisemitism on London's streets, Treslove never quite manages to fully reconcile himself to his nascent Judaism.


This is such an intimate, affectionate portrait of the varieties of Judaic experience, that, like Treslove, the gentile reader feels as if they are an onlooker, peering in to lives that are similar yet different to our own, trying to understand yet always conscious that there is a gap - religious, political, cultural, historical - that is impossible to transcend. In Treslove's case this is partly because he seems emotionally deficient at times, but a non-Jewish reader can only imagine the complexity of feelings and responses generated in Jews by the Palestinian conflict.


This is also a book about families and of death. Finkler and his wife Tyler coexisted up until her death in what was basically mutual enmity driven by Finkler's numerous infidelities (Treslove is surprised to learn that she  wasn't originally Jewish, but converted on her marriage). Libor, on the other hand - and despite being intimate with Hollywood's most beautiful actresses - was always loyal in his heart to his beloved Malkie. Both find it difficult to come to terms with their loss. Treslove, meanwhile, fantasizes about a beautiful woman dying in his arms.


It is not easy to summarise all the themes of such a sensitive, intelligent novel. Jacobson eschews easy solutions and trite answers. Themes are argued back and forwards but none of the characters find easy resolutions and neither does the reader - questions are simply raised and left hanging. All this is done is the most beautiful prose by a master of the well-turned sentence and ironic juxtaposition. This is not laugh-out-loud funny like previous works by Jacobson, but it demonstrates a wry humour throughout.


However, this is not meant to be a funny book - it's a deadly serious one. In Treslove's terms The Finkler Question is nothing less than the Jewish Question, a fundamental set of issues for a Jewish writer such as Jacobson. With its subsidiary reflections on life, love and death, this is as serious as it gets.

Book Review : The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (Harvard Secker 2011)

I remember receiving The Name of the Rose as a Christmas present back in the 1980s and finishing it around 5am on Boxing Day, captivated by the cleverness of it all, so allusive, playful, dark and learned. After Foucault's Pendulum was released, a fellow Eco-afficianado and I rushed to the Musée des Arts et Métiers at lunchtime whilst on a training course in Paris in order to gaze at the Pendulum itself, and the site of the novel's dénouement.


Since then, Eco's works have frustrated as much as entertained. All have displayed his vast erudition, yet none has captured the energy and inventiveness of his earlier narratives. His last book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, even sought to recapture this lost elan through discarding medieval texts in favour of the cartoon storybooks of Eco's childhood, with only partial success.


The Prague Cemetery, however, promised to be a return to familiar territory, the conspiracy theories and secret societies so effectively spiked in Foucault's Pendulum. It is the tale of a spy and master-forger, who is responsible in part for all the most important conspiracies of the late nineteenth century from the reunification of Italy to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Being Eco, all the characters except for Simonini, the antisemitic protagonist, really existed. Being Eco, though, one needs a fair knowledge of 19th century history in order to separate fact from fiction from conjecture and invention.


The historical parts of the novel are great: they race along engagingly, and, as Dan Brown knows, there is a ready appetite for even the most bizarre conspiracies, factually based or not. Simonini plots with the Carbonari, follows Garibaldi's troops through Italy, is the mastermind behind Leo Taxil's antimasonic Satanic fantasies and writes both Dreyfuss's incriminating letter and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whilst introducing us to several of the most unsavoury peripheral characters in France and Italy in this period. In actual fact, Eco carefully charts the links between Freemasonry and the movement for Italian reunification, and how it  subsequently become linked with anti-jewish propaganda through the works of Maurice Joly via novelists Dumas and Sue, and Taxil's wilder fantasies, culminating in the Protocols. Even allowing for some flights of fancy, notably some murders and a racy black mass, this is heady stuff.


The problem, though, is with the novel's superstructure. It is supposedly the recollections of Simonini, interspersed with the diary of a Jesuit priest by the name of Dalla Piccola with whom Simonini shares a flat but who may only be an alter-ego or a figment of Simonini's imagination. You know that there is an issue here when Eco presents us with a table in an appendix to try to tie together the diaries, recollections and actual events. It simply doesn't work, and detracts, especially in the first part of the book, from the otherwise engaging narrative. There is a sense that Eco actually has several themes he wants to write about - il Risorgimento, the Paris Commune, Freemasonry and the anti-Jewish conspiracies, and this is the only way that he can shoe-horn them together, when in fact it is unnecessary. Eco doesn't generally do character much and this is no exception, and ultimately the endless successions of names becomes overwhelming. Which is a pity as the material unearthed by Eco is fascinating, and with better organisation it could even give Dan Brown a run for his money, perish the thought...

Book Review : The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador 2011)

Five celebrations, five portraits of a family, five windows on the passing of time. Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel is his most ambitious yet, a dissection of the impact of the passing of time on a family as their reputations rise and fall, but also on the nature of biography as family secrets are withheld or revealed - or could they even be fabricated? - as the past is picked over.

Cecil Valance is a poet, beautiful, carefree, charismatic, who just prior to the First World War visits the suburban house of his friend and lover George Sawle and kisses his young sister, Daphne. He celebrates the visit by writing a poem to Daphne, “Two Acres”,  which later becomes much anthologised. Like Rupert Brooke, on whom Valance is clearly based, his poetic reputation is enhanced by his heroic early death in the trenches. Churchill quotes “Two Acres” in his obituary. His body is brought back and entombed in the Valance’s private chapel in their house at Corley Court, whilst cabinet minister Sebastien Stokes reaches out for the memories of his friends and family in order to write his memoir.

Yet time is a harsh critic, and as it passes Valance’s poetic reputation is re-evalated and his Georgics, seemingly so elegant before the War, seem insipid beside the masters of his age. He is remembered as a dashing romantic figure, a breaker of hearts and for his tragic early death,  not for what he wrote. Ironically, his unattractive brother Dudley, whose insensitive alterations have ruined the interior of Corley Court, emerges initially with the stronger literary reputation on account of his acerbic memoirs. Meanwhile shy, suburban George has the sad fate of being known to a generation of schoolchildren thanks to a history textbook he wrote with his wife.

A generation later, and biographer Paul Bryant is trying to uncover the truth about the Valances. He pieces together information from his own boyhood, from a reticent Daphne, from an increasingly senile George. But what information is to be trusted, and can Paul be trusted himself? “And year by year our memory fades”...

Hollinghurst plays with the reader as with a powerful fish – successively letting out line collusively, then reeling in sharply. He writes so carefully with subtle phrases, little hints, that one feels complicit when a character reveals his weakness, shocked but not surprised at the manner in which it is made manifest. Yet, as one moves to each new period, characters from the past are revealed only reluctantly, from their hiding place behind married names and titles, as the reader has to reconstruct their backstories from sparse hints and snippets of information, though at the same time the reader is knowingly aware of information that the new characters are not privy to, such as when the schoolboys reveal Sir Dudley’s sword for their museum, one recalls what use Sir Dudley put his sword forty years before. It is a style at once both subtle and explicit, one cannot escape the sense that one is being playfully manipulated.

The truth is never quite as simple as it appears on the printed page - all the memoirs of the family are unreliable in some way, everyone has an angle. Much is hinted at but little is explicit - not even Hollinghurst's trademark gay sex. But there is an unmistakable sense of sadness and decline that pervades the whole book. It is only latterly that you learn that the mighty Vallances, with such a Norman sounding name, have only received their baronetcy as a result of the fortune created by the first baronet in grass seed. Within three generations the family heir is living in a ramshackle cottage, but apparently not without means.  

But their is also a counterpoint - the book is also a celebration of the liberation of gay men over the course of the twentieth century. The hints and occlusions in the early memoirs are an attempt to hide the illicit secret of Cecil Vallance's bisexuality. Harry's love for Hubert is never fully understood until many years later and the George's marriage of convenience to the unappealing Madeleine contrasts with the apparent satisfaction of later relationships such as Peter and his civil partner Desmond.

Hollinghurst never gives his readers the satisfaction of an easy resolution. The trajectory of the family, of their reputations, their properties and the instability of the means of their evaluation all remain elusive right to the end, and you are immediately wanting to go back and reread, to search for further clues. To reread would be a fitting reward for an exceptional book.

Book Review : The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters (Martin Secker & Warburg 1991) / The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke (Sutton Publishing 2004)

Compared to the conventions of Victorian morality as presented in the literature of the time, many Victorian novelists had private lives which may have raised some eyebrows. Dickens separated secretly from his wife in favour of the young actress Ellen Ternan, George Eliott lived openly with G.H. Lewes who was already married to someone else, and Thackeray confined his wife to an asylum in France due to her mental illness. But none had as unconventional a private life as Wilkie Collins. From 1858, except for a brief period, he lived as man and wife with the widowed Caroline Graves, and from 1864 he set up a second household with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children. Caroline did leave Wilkie in 1868 to marry Joseph Clow (Wilkie attended the wedding) but by 1871 she had returned to him.Caroline managed the bills and paid Martha's rent, and the Martha's children were welcome visitors to their household. Yet this remained a secret to Wilkie's reading public.

Not that Wilkie Collins was a conventional ladies' man - he was short with tiny hands and feet, an odd misshapen forehead, overweight and unfit. Yet he loved women and they loved him in return - he was kind and charming, and, in his own way, very honourable.When Wilkie, his brother Charles Collins and John Everett Millais heard a woman scream whilst walking by Regent's Park, it was Wilkie who went to investigate what was wrong. It may be that this was when he first met Caroline Graves, but it is more likely that it provided him with the genesis of the dramatic first meeting with Anne Catherick in The Woman in White.


Throughout the 1860s, Wilkie Collins was the most influential English novelist barring Dickens alone. The Woman in White defined the sensation novel which dominated this period, The Moonstone gave the genre its most lasting modern incarnation in the shape of the detective novel. From 1870 onwards, Collins' powers started to decline, partly due to the loss of his close friend's Dickens' influence; partly due to an increasing desire to write issue-based novels (Swinburne wickedly wrote
            What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition
            Some demon whispered - 'Wilkie! have a mission' (Peters pg 313));
partly due to an increasing dependency on Laudenum to alleviate the pain of "rheumatic gout". Whatever the cause, he never recaptured the heights scaled in the 1860s.

Two contrasting books examine his life in detail. First published in 1988, William Clarke's The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins focusses almost entirely on the man, his life and that of his family. Clarke, who died earlier  this year, was a leading financial journalist whose wife was a great-granddaughter of Collins. This family connection enabled him to access Collins' bank accounts and to try to explain why, despite the careful construction of his will in a manner worthy of one of the plots of his novels, both sides of his family saw little benefit from the wealth that he had accumulated. Clarke shows that in all probability the family was swindled by his lawyer/son-in-law Henry Bartley.

For all its meticulous research and in some cases the first-hand testimony of elderly family members, the Secret Life largely passes over the novels themselves. The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters remedies this shortcoming. Peters sets out the thesis that Collins was haunted by a second self, a double that was often behind him, especially in his later opium-influenced years. This double manifests itself in his novels which are primarily concerned with questions of identity. Certainly, doubles feature largely in his works, from Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, to the multiple Alan Armadales, to the twin brothers Oscar and Nugent Dubourg in Poor Miss Finch. And even when doubles are not involved, the novels usually resolve round questions of identity, literally in The Law and the Lady, or as a question of legitimacy of birth in The Dead Secret or No Name, or of marriage in Man and Wife.


Peters combines a perceptive reading of the novels with a thorough and well-researched construction of Collins' life, and, whilst she doesn't have all the access that William Clarke has obtained, her use of the texts of the novels to illuminate the biography is much superior. As an example, Peters describes three aspects of Collins' own character revealed in The Law and the Lady. Physically he is akin to husband Eustace Macallan, with his gentle eyes, beard streaked with grey and limp. As a ladies' man, he is represented by the elderly roue Major Fitz-David, and as a writer and fantasist by Miserrimus Dexter. She goes on to show how further extreme aspects of this his most bizarre creation were to be seen in his temperamental actor-friend Charles Fechter, who was also a heavy-drinking, food-loving extrovert. Clarke, however, dismisses The Law and the Lady in a paragraph.

Yet Wilkie's private life ultimately remains a mystery. The circumstances in which he first met both Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd remain matters of speculation. Why Caroline Graves should choose to get married in 1867, and then return once again to Wilkie, is also out of the reach of the biographers. And most mysteriously of all, why should someone who dedicated his life to writing about identity, illegitimacy and the problems inherent in legal ambiguity choose not to attempt to legitimise in some way the two families for which he was responsible.Both Clarke and Peters attempt explanations, but in the end, Wilkie's own life proves the one intricate plot incapable of resolution.

Book Review : The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins (Oxford World's Classics 2008)

Having introduced the Victorian reading public to the professional detective in Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, in The Law and the Lady Collins turns to what is probably the first full-length novel to feature a woman trying to unravel a mystery. Valeria Woodville has recently married, but she discovers that Eustace, her husband, is hiding a secret from her - in fact, she may not be married at all, as he has been using a false name. Naturally concerned, she starts to investigate Eustace's past, and discovers that he has been tried in Scotland for murder of his previous wife, and found not proven. Convinced however of his innocence, Valeria sets out to clear his name.


This is also the second of Collins' novels to try to address what he saw as being the iniquities of the Scottish legal system. The verdict of "not proven" is a distinctive feature of Scottish justice, indicating that the jury felt that there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Whilst the accused on receipt of this verdict is free to walk from the court, it was perceived that it was not without a certain stigma.Collins felt that this ambiguity was a weakness in the Scottish legal system, yet does not examine the probably fatal consequences for Eustace if the jury had found him guilty. The "not proven" verdict had in recent years been topical due to the notorious  Madelaine Smith trial in Glasgow, where the pretty upper-middle class woman had been accused and found "not proven" of poisoning her lover.

As Valeria feels her way towards the truth, she meets Miserrimus Dexter, one of Collins more extraordinary creations. Strikingly handsome with long flowing hair and beard, yet born without legs, Dexter hauls himself around in a chair that he is capable of moving with great speed. He lives in a bleak mansion cared for by his devoted, subjugated sister with learning difficulties. Dexter has come straight from a gothic novel - he is a poet, improvisational actor, cook and aesthete, yet bizarre and unstable, given to extreme behaviour and mood swings which culminate in a clumsy attempt to kiss Valeria, who must nevertheless control her revulsion if she is to uncover the secret of the death of Eustace's wife.

As ever with Collins, this is a gripping, fast-paced and intriguing adventure, the labyrinthine plot creating sufficient false leads to fool at least this reader for part of the novel. Collins gave his female characters more independence and autonomy than most of his male contemporaries (compare with Dickens' anonymous heroines) and although Valeria is not as well-defined as Marian Halcombe or Magadalen Vanstone, she is yet another strong, stubborn headstrong female lead from this great unconvetional Victorian.