26 Books

Richard Nixon’s reputation, or what’s left of it, rests entirely on his foreign policy. Once Dallek has finished with him, he has no reputation left at all.

His partnership with Kissinger – if a relationship as competitive and dysfunctional as theirs can be called a partnership – made them probably the most famous ever American diplomatic duo. Bill Rogers – a longtime friend of Nixon’s – was given the theoretically more important role as Secretary of State, but Kissinger was the only foreign policy wonk with daily access to the President, and before long Rogers had become completely marginalised.

Nixon and Kissinger

Robert Dallek
Penguin 2008, Paperback, 752 pages, £12.99

Of course Nixon’s presidency was defined, consumed and dominated by Watergate. What is clear to anyone who has spent any time reading about his presidency is that Watergate was just the time he got caught, not an aberration in an otherwise honest adinistration. Paranoia, dirty tricks and downright unconstitutional acts were the staple of Nixon’s political strategy. Here are just a couple of examples:

On March 30, Haldeman [White House Chief of Staff] recorded that the polls were showing “us the lowest we’ve ever been.” To combat the slump, Charles Colson [Special Counsel to the President] suggested to Nixon that they try to pay off pollster Lou Harris. “We can buy him,” Colson said.

and, discussing a strategy to deal with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers with Kissinger:

“Goddam newspapers – they’re a bunch of sluts.” Nixon told Henry, “I don’t give a goddam about repression, do you?” Neither did Henry, who said, “No.”

In the context of the history of any other presidency, these would be incredibly damning passages. In a book about Nixon’s, they are run of the mill.

His foreign policy was almost exclusively used as a tool to control domestic opposition to his administration. Little, if anything, was ever done for its own merits, or because it was the right thing to do. Everything was calculated for effect, for personal aggrandisement, for posterity.

The major foreign policy issues of Nixon’s presidency were finding a way to end the Vietnam war, and relations with the communist countries post the Sino-Soviet split. His policy in Vietnam was an ignominious failure. Far from ending the war, he and Kissinger greatly escalated it to the extent that they ordered bombed non-combatant nations like Cambodia. More than anyone else outside Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger were responsible for creating the conditions that made the revolution that brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

In the end, the US quit Vietnam on similar terms to those on offer at the start of Nixon’s presidency, but thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives were wasted in the interim. Kissinger’s role in the negotiations was murky to say the least, and his inordinate personal vanity seems to have played more of a part in his approach than his desire to find a solution to the problem that had beset the US for the previous decade.

The conventional wisdom is that Nixon used a rapprochement with China to force the USSR to the negotiating table. The reality is that he was mortally wounded politically, and needed any success he could get his hands on, even one that was pure gesture, as the meetings with Chou and Mao were. Brezhnev was perhaps equally weak at home, and arguably would have compromised anyway.

Nixon’s presidency was a near total failure, and foreign affairs were no exception. The gigantic failure in Vietnam – almost the only issue anyone cared about in the 1968 election – would be enough to tarnish even the most miraculous of achievements elsewhere. But there were none to provide a counterweight. Chile is but one example of a country plunged into years of right-wing dictatorship, in effect at the direction of the President.

Nixon and Kissinger were both profoundly unsavoury, insecure and cynical men. They would have done anything to ensure their legacy as great statesmen, even if that meant betraying promises to the country, the constitution or any notion of a morality. In the process, they ensured their everlasting ignominy.

It’s all gone a bit Coetzee-tastic around here. He’s the kind of author – Philip Roth is another – who can make you want to read absolutely everything he’s ever written once you get the taste. As well as being a brilliant novelist, Coetzee is also a world-class essayist, and Inner Workings is a collection of his essays from 2000 to 2005, most of them having been written for the New York Review of Books.

Inner Workings

J.M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker 2007, Hardcover, 256 pages, £17.99

Coetzee is that rare thing: a writer who can get to the core of a topic with modesty, insight and economy. Much as I love Kundera’s essays, for example, you do occasionally want to punch him gently in the cock for sheer smugness. This never happens with Coetzee, who is a profound, subtle thinker, blessed with intellectual honesty of the highest order.

There are non duds here, and a few outstanding really essays, some of which I had read before, like his introduction to Robert Musil’s early novel The Confusions of Young Törless. As a linguist particularly adept in German, Coetzee is able to uncover details of various translations that would escape even the most perspicacious reviewer.

It’s pleasing to see that his views on Sàndor Màrai are similar to mine, although of course he gets far closer to the heart of both Embers and Esther’s Inheritance than I managed.

There are few slight errors – he describes Michael Hofmann as ‘British’ although he was in fact born in Germany, and his father was the German novelist Gert Hofman. It’s interesting that Coetzee criticises Hofmann’s translations of Joseph Roth’s short stories; I’ve never seen anything other than high praise for them.

This and other tiny niggles aside, this is a wonderful collection, with the essays on Günter Grass’s Crabwalk, Beckett’s shorter fiction, W.G. Sebald, Walt Whitman and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America being particularly memorable.

Coetzee’s essays are every bit as brilliant as his fiction. His literary output is astonishing, both in quantity and quality. He’s fully deserving of the reputation he enjoys, and the lofty prizes he has been awarded. I’d read absolutely anything he wrote.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans is frequently funny and occasionally disturbing. Set in Ashford, Kent, it’s part social satire and part ghost story. There’s little in the way of plot and the resolution left me baffled but that doesn’t stop the book being a success.

What story there is concerns Beede, who works in a hospital laundry, Kane, Beede’s drug-dealing son and Elen, their flirtatious chiropodist. It’s also about Elen’s husband Dory, who suffers from some kind of mental illness, and their son Fleet, who, according to DNA tests, is in fact Dory’s distant ancestor. Then there’s Kelly, Kane’s teenage girlfriend, Gaffar, a Kurd who ends up working for Kane and a forger called Peta Borough.

Darkmans

Nicola Barker
Harper Perennial 2008, Paperback, 848 pages, £8.99

Among all these characters flits the ghost of a 15th century jester, possessing them at times, tormenting them at others. Possession is an important theme, not only in the sense of spiritual possession, which raises questions about the authenticity of identity, but also in the sense of possession as ownership and as strength of character – self-possession. And of course, as a drug dealer, Kane could find himself charged with possession.

The question of authenticity of identity extends to objects too. Peta, the forger, makes her living by faking objects. Beede was involved in a campaign to save local historical buildings marked for demolition to make way for the Channel Tunnel rail link. They planned to save one building by demolishing it piece-by-piece and rebuilding it elsewhere – the authentic building on an inauthentic site. Ashford itself, a town taken over by commuters and the rail link, has lost its ties with the past and therefore its roots.

With the jester knocking about the novel can’t fail to be about history, both its distance and its nearness. Beede is scarred by his obsession with history, Kelly is fascinated by her family history, and Dory lies about his. Peta argues that we have returned to medieval times.

All of this sounds very serious and intellectual but Barker delivers it with such wit that the 838 pages fly by. It’s frequently hilarious. Whether it’s Gaffar’s morbid fear of lettuce or Barker’s biting one-liners (”There are many imponderables in life but one irreducible fact is that people who climb mountains are invariably cunts.”), there’s plenty to laugh at.

Barker’s style takes some getting used to. Her narrator is chatty and prone to interrupting herself parenthetically every few lines. Her characters acquire this habit too, their thoughts tumbling over one another in a way that’s initially confusing but soon feels perfectly natural.

Her characterisation is very strong, something that’s particularly evident as Barker slips between viewpoints. The contrast between, for example, Kane’s view of Elen and her opinion of herself is marked and fascinating.

This is a remarkable novel. It’s thoughtful, funny and a delight to read. I recommend it.

Catherine O’Flynn’s debut novel won the Costa first novel award and made the short and longlists of several other prizes so I was expecting good things. I wasn’t disappointed: What Was Lost is a poignant, funny and entertaining book about loneliness and the way we are shaped by the past.

The novel has an unusual structure, with the first third forming an extended prologue. Set in 1984 it introduces us to Kate Meaney, a young girl who has started a detective agency with her toy monkey. The narrative then shifts 20 years forward to focus on Lisa, the deputy manager of a record shop, and Kurt, who is a security guard in the shopping centre where Lisa works. Kate has been missing for 20 years and her disappearance had a profound effect on the lives of both characters.

What Was Lost

Catherine O’Flynn
Tindal Street Press 2007, Paperback, 272 pages, £8.99

O’Flynn’s inexperience is obvious in a few places. Her observations, though frequently witty and astute, are often a little obvious, like the banal ‘have you ever noticed…’ gags of a mediocre stand-up comic. There are a few too many coincidences in the story’s conclusion, too.

However, her portrayal of a shopping centre as a slightly menacing and unnatural centre of gravity in modern Britain is very good indeed, head and shoulders above JG Ballard’s efforts with the same themes in Kingdom Come, for example. She’s at her most effective when she leaves the real emotions unspoken, sitting below the surface, almost heartbreakingly out of reach.

I look forward to reading whatever she does next.

Hotel de Dream imagines the last days of American writer Stephen Crane. He spends it passing in and out of delirium as he dictates what will turn out to be his last story.

Hotel De Dream

Edmund White
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2007, Hardcover, 240 pages, £14.99

The story is woven around a real-life encounter between Crane and a fifteen year old boy he encountered on the streets of fin de siècle Manhattan. I don’t remember much beyond these bald facts; this is another book that’s been sitting in a pile waiting to be reviewed.

There seems to be an urge to try to categorise certain authors as ‘gay’ authors – White, Hollinghurst, Waters and so on – but this pigeon-holing does them a disservice. Writing should stand or fall on its own merits, unaided and unburdened by the issue of the author’s sexuality.

I remember the writing in Hotel de Dream as having a beautiful polish to it, and in parts at least recalled Kafka’s weird novel, The One Who Disappeared (which was published and is now universally known under the title Amerika).

William Gibson’s been on an interesting voyage from science fiction to thrillers, while keeping the same tone and subject matter. The world’s been catching up to him, and now it seems to have overtaken.

Spook Country feels like a period piece. It was set in the exact present when it came out, full of details about various products, notably iPods and televisions. Now that both of those have gone ahead a generation or two it’s receding into the past.

It’s a thriller. A very good one. It’s well paced and stylishly written. Gibson really can write exceptionally well.

There are three main story strands. Hollis Henry, who used to be in a bad but now writes about art and technology, is looking at a new genre of sculpture. Locative virtual figures are fixed in space using GPS and hacked-open grids from Wifi, mobile phones and shop security systems.

There we have the second strand, Hubertus Bigend, head of the Blue Ant advertising agency who has created a fictional magazine for Henry to write for and wants to use the locative artists for commercial purposes. Art, media, advertising and technology blend together under Bigend’s patronage. He’s a great big Belgian metaphor for creativity and the modern world. In the hands of lesser writers he’d be unbearable but Gibson makes me want to read about him, for which I’m thankful.

Then we have Tito, an information courier who works for his uncle’s shady Chinese (or Cuban or something) criminal organisation. He’s being investigated by Brown, who’s keeping Milgrim prisoner to translate the volapuk (text messaging mixed with Cyrillic characters) codes they use.

As Gibson’s a modern sort of a guy he doesn’t feel the need to tie everything together as defined at the beginning of the book but there’s progression and unexpected twists and turns. It’s satisfying to read if a little less demanding than I’d like. I’m not sure what it is, I just seemed to whizz through it without touching the sides as much as I have with previous Gibson novels.

It’s a good read, witty and fantastically well observed. The cyberspace future that he predicted long ago has arrived and moved into the real world, and he’s moving with it.

The Gathering is a beautifully written, mournful novel about an Irish family coming to terms with the death of their brother Liam. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2007.

The Gathering

Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape 2007, Hardcover, 260 pages, £12.99

I read it months ago – in March, I think – and my memories of it have faded. One powerful impression remains though. I finished the book lying in my bed in a hotel room at Gatwick Airport as I prepared to head for Gibraltar for a meeting. I read, astonished as the fiction of the book started to overlap with my own reality: the book ends with the narrator describing herself lying in a bed in a hotel at Gatwick Airport. Each word that I read became increasingly improbable the more it corresponded to my situation. A very bizarre feeling indeed.

Aside from this, I am left with the memory of beautifully crafted prose, and a fine observation of ordinary family life in crisis.

Ann lent me this after I was intrigued by her review of it earlier this year. It’s the story of the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo in 1939 but rather than being a factual account, it’s dramatised by the author in novel form. Normally, I’m not keen on this kind of thing: I find it muddies the water, creating an alternative reality that can only be confusing. However, in this case, I not only enjoyed the book but found the gradual unfolding of events and discoveries exciting and moving, despite the fact that there’s a definite fictional element to the former.

The Dig

John Preston
Viking 2007, Hardcover, 240 pages, £16.99

John Preston tells the story as a series of accounts ranging from that of local archaeologist, Basil Brown, who supervised the original dig, to those of Mrs. Edith Pretty, the owner of Sutton House, and Peggy Piggott who joined the excavation after it was taken over by a senior archaeologist. These different voices lend a personal quality to the narrative that allows the reader to share in what must have been a truly extraordinary sequence of events: from Mrs. Pretty’s original decision to excavate the earth-mounds on her property, despite the fact that most such mounds were known to have been robbed centuries before, to Mr. Brown’s discovery of the bolts that indicated the possible presence of a burial ship; from the first treasure unearthed, a piece of gold jewellery in the shape of a flattened pyramid decorated with garnet and lapis lazuli, to the coroner’s hearing that determined the rightful owner of the find.

Along the way, the author plays with character and plot in such a way as to make this the literary equivalent of a page-turner, the reader being as much concerned with the feelings of the protagonists as with any plot developments. And what feelings they are! Sutton Hoo is a hotbed of repression and stiff upper lips: from Mrs. Pretty’s stilted relationship with her young son to Peggy Piggott’s sexless honeymoon with her archaeologist husband and subsequent attraction to Mrs. Pretty’s nephew, an attraction which can never be acted upon. All this is heart-rendingly sad and the fact that it comes on the eve of the Second World War only serves to strengthen the sense of a society locked in a time-capsule. Much like the ship, in fact, an irony the author plays on throughout.

The Dig is a charming, thought-provoking novel and, whatever else, it has made me determined to visit the Sutton Hoo display at the British Museum. For those who have been following, I promised to reveal the answer to my Anglo-Saxon riddle in my last post so perhaps it’s appropriate that I do so while discussing an Anglo-Saxon archaeological find (though one that dates from considerably earlier). It’s an onion.

Feeling the need for something brainless yet racy, something with inch-high gold letters and words like protocol in the title, I snuck into to the boyf’s office and pulled this off the shelf. It’s the new Robert Harris novel, the second I’ve read, and on balance I prefer it to the first, Pompeii. Somehow it’s easier to go along with a lot of old nonsense about impending disaster and plots that shake the very foundations of blah blah when they take place in the modern world. Shoehorn them into first century Italy and you lose me.

Anyway, having got that off my chest, on to The Ghost. Hmm. Well, I said ‘prefer’ but that’s about as far as it goes. About halfway through, I was telling the boyf what a great page-turner the book was and how much I admired Harris’s craftsmanship. I waxed lyrical about his ability to write sparingly and to build tension. All this is true but it means little in the absence of a decent plot. What’s the point of turning pages if all they lead to is, well, a dénouement so anticlimactic it devalues the whole book?

The Ghost

Robert Harris
Arrow Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 416 pages, £7.99

The Ghost is the narrator of the novel: a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies and a character so inconsequential he doesn’t even have a name. His predecessor having drowned, he is being paid a fortune to redraft the memoirs of Adam Lang, erstwhile British PM and a dead ringer for Tony Blair. So far so good. Lang is holed up on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife, Ruth, and long-legged PA, Amelia, when the shit hits the fan – he’s being investigated by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes in The War Against Terror. Suddenly he’s big news and the only thing stopping our Ghost from cashing in is his conviction that there’s more to his predecessor’s death than meets the eye. Thus begins the unravelling of Lang’s life which culminates in the distinctly underwhelming dénouement mentioned above.

I’ve since read the hype about The Ghost: how Harris stopped work on his next Roman thriller after Blair’s resignation in order to rush it out; how Ruth is Cherie and the out-of-favour minister who shops Lang to the ICC is Robin Cook. If this is indeed the case then all I can say is they needn’t fear for their reputations. This might be a page-turner but with such a damp squib for an ending, and indeed such a daft plot throughout, it’s hardly gonna change the world – contrary to what the inch-high gold letters and overblown blurb would have you think.

This is an odd book. It’s the translation of an Italian writer’s reworking of an Italian translation of The Iliad. If it’s difficult to understand why a translation should be reworked (rather than revised), it’s even more difficult to figure out why that translation should then be rendered into yet another language.

An Iliad

Ann Goldstein (Translator)
Canongate Books Ltd 2007, Hardcover, £10.99

We have fine translations of Homer’s epic into English, none better than Robert Fagles’ version in my opinion, so is this worth it?

Baricco takes some liberties with Homer’s story, the most obvious of which is the elimination of the gods as participants in the narrative. Instead, the story is told in sections, roughly corresponding to the books of Homer’s poem, each narrated by a different protagonist. Thus, Chryseis tells us the story of her own abduction and release, which leads to Achilles’ epic sulk. Achilles is the only major character not to narrate a section, which is perhaps a strange decision. Aren’t we most interested in his feelings, never more so than when he hears of the death of his friend Patroclus?

These reservations aside, the book is well enough written, seemingly well translated and would serve as a decent introduction to the original work. But if you want a genuinely brilliant modern take on The Iliad, look no further than Christopher Logue’s brilliant War Music.