Fiction: Chris Power
ANTHEM
By Tim Binding
Picador, £7.99
In his 1986 travel book Coasting Jonathan Raban writes: “The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected . . . all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.”
Binding shores up this metastasised fragmentation into a more readily graspable, nuanced unity by way of the Canberra, the cruise liner requisitioned to carry troops to the South Atlantic. Suze, a civilian member of the Canberra’s staff who volunteers to accompany the task force, lives on Anglefield Road, a cul-de-sac in an unnamed London suburb.
Through her first-hand and her neighbours’ second-hand experience of the war Anthem draws the reader into an assessment of what turned out to be, despite Borges’s dismissal of it as “a fight between two bald men over a comb”, a momentous turning point for Britain. Binding limns how and to what extent by way of petty squabbles, affairs, a suicide and catastrophe.
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Slipping with breathtaking ease and grace between the national and the personal, his novel is an intensely involving work of art.
PEYTON AMBERG
By Tama Janowitz
Bloomsbury, £7.99
Janowitz’s inconsistent prose offers as frustrating an experience as Peyton’s marriage of 30 years to the nerdish Barry, her escape from which provides the meat of this novel. Peyton is a mush of contradictions, at one moment a superannuated Valley Girl, the next a walking thesaurus. Janowitz is like a cat with its prey, cruelly allowing Peyton dreams of escape before the claws go in, but the writing lacks the quality to make this dispiriting experience worthwhile.
OPERATION HEARTBREAK
By Duff Cooper
Persephone, £12
Willie Maryngton, a cavalry officer, is eagerly preparing to leave for France when the Armistice is declared. Bitterly disappointed at having missed out on the big show, he meanders through the inter-war years, serving in India and Egypt and trolling about London, falling in and out of love. Cooper, a former Secretary of State for War, never wrote another novel, which, given Operation Heartbreak’s understatedly affecting quality and satisfying conclusion, is a great shame.
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WALES HALF WELSH
Edited by John Williams
Bloomsbury, £7.99
Of a largeish crop of current Welsh or Welsh-dwelling authors Trezza Azzopardi, Tessa Hadley, Sean Burke and Malcolm Pryce are, on the evidence presented by this anthology, worth paying keen attention to. Much else here, from John Williams and Desmond Barry in particular, has the knockabout air of having sat around waiting to be inserted in some collection or another, while Niall Griffiths and James Hawes present further cogent arguments against their own popularity.
MEMOIRS OF A GNOSTIC DWARF
By David Madsen
Dedalus, £8.99
Admirers of the Reformation thriller Q will find much to recommend this republished 1995 romp. The plotting alone is enough to draw one in, as the papal chamberlain Peppe recounts his progression through the ranks of Roman society, from street urchin to religiously conflicted Vatican potentiary. Combined with a gleefully robust prose, by way of which the very smell of Pope Leo X’s suppurating behind snakes from the page, the overall effect is wonderful.
Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson
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SACAGAWEA’S NICKNAME
By Larry McMurtry
Granta, £8.99
You’ve heard of Pocahontas, but Sacagawea? They are the only two Native American women, says Larry McMurtry, to have “left even faint tracings of their personalities on history”. Sacagawea travelled with Lewis and Clark on their 1800s expedition to the American West and, at her insistence, saw the Pacific. Sacagawea’s nickname was Janey, mostly because none of the palefaces could pronounce her real name which was phoneticised on her death as “Sar car Je we a”. The American West is the subject of these witty, literate essays for the New York Review of Books. In 12 easy pieces, McMurtry divides the history of the West into three ages: that of heroes (Lewis and Clark); publicity (Buffalo Bill); and suburbia. He accepts, with a sigh, the “tooning” of the West (the comic strip Texas History Movies is still a basic classroom text) and understands that accurate scholarship has been supplanted by an endlessly imagined West of movies and television commercials. The Marlboro Man rides shotgun for The Lone Ranger and the dust is carefully wiped from Tonto’s teeth.
IRIS MURDOCH AS I KNEW HER
By A. N. Wilson
Arrow, £7.99
Biography as written by Boswell, Suetonius, Johnson and Symons is resurrected with relish by Wilson who worked with Murdoch and, at her request, was her prospective biographer. The result, not what either had intended, is a wittily frank, fantastical (often scandalous) memoir, as much about Wilson, and about literature, as about Murdoch. It’s often funny, but it’s not for the squeamish or those who would respectfully whiten sepulchres.
BUSH IN BABYLON
By Tariq Ali
Verso, £7.99
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The subtitle, The Recolonisation of Iraq, sets the theme: Ali reminds us that Iraqis are more used to colonisation than to liberation and are no less resentful of it now than in their past. He reiterates the modern history of Iraq and evokes, through thought-provoking modern Iraqi poetry and prose, the profundity of popular patriotic thought and the ferocity of national spirit that fuels current resistance. Bush, Blair and the neocons are mercilessly hung out to dry.
THE LAST GOOD TIME
By Jonathan van Meter
Bloomsbury, £8.99
Glitz, gambling, gutter morality and political graft — “Skinny” D’Amato, owner of the 500 Club in Atlantic City, packaged them perfectly in the Fifties and made millions. With fame came scandal, and with fortune tragedy. He was an honorary rodent in the “Rat Pack” but refused to dish the dirt on Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin and Grace Kelly: he died, aged 75, his lips still zipped. So was he connected to the Mob? Van Meter gives the full skinny on the rise and fall of a dirty town.
ANTONIO’S PEOPLE
By Paul Caranicas
Thames & Hudson, £16.95
Antonio Lopez, who died in 1987, is described as “the Picasso of fashion illustration”: I wouldn’t go that far — the heir of Benito, Bouché, Gruau, Joe Eula, the Warhol of fashion graphics, maybe. Lopez adroitly mixed the verve of celebrity with a versatile style of photography and illustration that hit the fashion G-spot in the 1970s and ‘80s. And here comes everybody from Grace Jones to Mick Jagger, Iman to Versace. They’re looking good: sexy, flamboyant, all butts and boobs and lipsticked to the hilt.