BOOK REVIEWS

[If the innermost righthand slider bar is hidden, you may need to enlarge your window to scroll down, or use Page Down.]

This is a collection of comments on in-print books by Book Case staff and customers. All the books are available at The Book Case and all contributions are welcome. So far we have comments as follows:

1. Fiction (alphabetical by author)

A *Monica Ali

B Julian Barnes

C *Michael Conneely

D Colin Dexter

E Umberto Eco, Valgarthur Egilsson, Kirsten Ekman

F Sebastian Faulks, Fannie Flagg, Charles Frazier, Stephen Fry, Alan Furst

G Amitav Ghosh, Romesh Gunesekera, David Guterson

H I J Mick Jackson

K Matthew Kneale, Milan Kundera

L Ursula Le Guin

M Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth McCracken, Arthur Morrison

N O P Orhan Pamuk

Q

R Ian Rankin, *Eva Rice, James Robertson, Arundhati Roy

S Kurban Said, Bernard Schlink, Jane Smiley, Diane Smith, Darin Strauss, Meera Syal

T Barbara Trapido, Rose Tremain, *Fanny Trollope

U V

W P. G. Wodehouse

X

Y Akira Yoshimura

Z

Monica Ali
"Brick Lane" (£7.99)

Highly readable, entertaining and informative novel about a young Bangladeshi girl who is sent to England for an arranged marriage with a much older man and her personal growth from a passive acceptance of Fate to self-determination as a mature woman and mother of two daughters. I was fascinated to see East End Bangladeshi life from the inside and enjoyed the complexity of the wide range of characters - no sooner do you write someone off than a hidden side comes to the fore and you see them in a new light. It was helpful too to see such a range of approaches to Islam, and to understand that for some sections of this community there is a situation comparable to Hero's in Shakespeare's "Much Ado" - reputation lost irreparably and social exclusion on the basis of small infringements of society's rules; gossip in a closed community has destructive effects. Nazneen's self-important, self-educated, deluded and ineffectual husband Chanu is very well done - annoying as he is, you feel sympathy for him. Hypocritical and hypochondriacal money-lending matriarch Mrs Islam is a Dickensian comic but evil character, and Nazneen's sister's letters from Bangladesh telling of her employer Lovely, an ex-beauty queen, tacitly illustrate the latter's shallow self-absorption. The political meetings are very funny and I enjoyed the young activist Karim's remark that he didn't want to marry a burkha girl because they argue too much.

Good story and narrative, good characters, complex and thought-provoking. I couldn't get on with White Teeth. FP

Julian Barnes
"England, England" (£6.99)

As a child, Martha lives in a world of Counties of England jigsaws and Agricultural Shows. In her late 30s she goes to work for an outsize captain of industry as Appointed Cynic on his project for a Theme Park England.

Most of of the novel is highly enjoyable. Martha’s childhood is atmospheric, Jack Pitman is an outrageous and convincing monster, his Big Idea is enormous fun, and the question of what England has to offer the world these days is an interesting one.

I was disappointed with the last few chapters where the characters and narrative drive seem to be sacrificed to the logic of the ideas, and was left feeling it hadn’t been finished off properly. FP

Michael Conneely
"The Tribe" (£9.99)

'The Tribe' is a book which explores the conflict between two totally opposing belief systems in the aftermath of the destruction of most of humanity during the 'Terrorist Wars'. The one system believes in the survival of the fittest and is reminiscent of all totalitarian regimes which have risen and fallen through the centuries. A reader will find echoes of Roman conquest and Nazi supremacy in the actions of the new rulers who prey on the farming communities. There is also a totally neglected underclass of mutants and outcasts battling for survival in the ruins of the great cities of England. Set against this ruthless ideology is the Tribe who have managed to retain and develop the best of the many spiritual and ethical practices which were both traditional and New Age at the time of the catastrophe. Although the Tribe is very small and has some members who are unable to live up to its ideals nevertheless it does manage to spread its wisdom and collaborative ideas under the developing spiritual leadership of the books main character Liam. Michael Conneely is clearly very knowledgeable about shamanism, eastern religions and American Indian traditions and uses this knowledge to good effect as he develops his theme of the necessity of spiritual practices if mankind is to have any future other than a totally brutal one.

'The Magic Land' (£8.99)

'The Magic Land' is about a young man's rite of passage which he has to find and create for himself against the wishes of his domineering father. Martin begins by falling in love with the peace and power of a stone circle and joining the people who gather there to protect it from the developers. To the society Martin comes from these new friends are troublemakers and riff -raff and his father sees them as vermin to be cleared away. Martin however rapidly begins to see that they have far more important and ancient values than those he has grown up with and starts his own journey of discovery. As with all initiation rites it has its perils and Martin learns that everything has a price. Michael Conneely's deep knowledge of astrology, Goddess rites and ancient traditions gives a firm base to the story. This is a novel that will speak to many people who are beginning to question the accepted Western way of life and its inevitable consequences and they may well find that this book gives them a map by which to begin their own explorations.

Rune - a magical visionary novel (£8.99)

Rune is a story of two young people, Cathal and Lucy, who are taken from this world to a parallel one which is experiencing endless winter. In that world it is the end of time when the Norse Gods are about to fall. Cathal has come not to save the dying world but to become Odin's 'son' and to seize the power of the Runes just as Odin had done. However Cathal has realized all too clearly the mistakes Odin made and he knows he must also find Mimir's Grove and the deep wisdom it contains even as the world they are in disintegrates around them.

This is more than an adventure story - it contains a deep and quite hypnotic re-telling of Norse mythology in a way that makes the spirituality and magic underlying the old stories palpable. It is also a stark warning for our own time - will we find wisdom in time or like the Old Norse Gods create our own Ragnorak?

If a real Cathal were to return with the magic of the Runes and the wisdom of Mimir how would he get us to listen?

Colin Dexter
"Remorseful Day" (The final Inspector Morse Novel) (£5.99)

Finally out in paperback, this much-heralded final Inspector Morse Novel really does live up to its expectations. Followers and fans of Dexter's detective will not be disappointed, as all the usual themes and characteristics are still there - Morse's heavy drinking and love of a good pint, and his brilliant both deductive and intuitive style of detection - leading as usual to gross errors and obvious mistakes.

The action takes place in and around Oxford, which is still amazingly fresh and depicted in graphic and affectionate manner. Dexter's strong sense of place and history is as firm as ever, and Morse is drawn at his infuriating best - pedantic about spelling and grammar, obsessive about his musical tastes, and haunted by his uncomfortable loneliness. Even though Morse is centre stage, Dexter fans will enjoy the development of the character of Lewis and surprisingly Superintendent Strange - previously they were largely foils to Morse's brilliance and obstinacy but now emerge in their own right. Don't worry, Sgt. Lewis still likes his egg and chips!

What of course is the strongest thread throughout is the demise of Inspector Morse. Knowing this will happen before opening the book does not detract, and anyone who has followed Morse through previous investigations will know or guess how he finally meets his end. The story line is by no means secondary to this theme and I read the book in two sittings drawn as usual by the compulsion of the narrative. This is a good "on holiday" read with a number of gory corpses, a variety of shady characters, a revolting adolescent youth and the usual unlikely sexual liaisons that Dexter seems to specialise in!

So, Morse is gone no chance of revival unlike Sherlock Holmes - and we are left at the end alone in the police canteen with Sgt. Lewis. Perhaps Dexter has plans for him? I don't think so! RP

Umberto Eco
"Foucault’s Pendulum"* (£6.95)

Three friends, tongue-in-cheek, reconstruct the secret of the Templars, but things get seriously out of control. This is a gloriously nutty romp through 1960s Continental street politics, Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, numerology, cosmic conspiracies, Brazilian syncretic rites, vanity publishing, psychology, science and computers, set in the framework of the Sefirot,** and with snapshots of Piedmontese rural life.

With an intriguing storyline and likeable characters, Umberto Eco takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through a kaleidoscope of temporary connections between systems of belief, science and politics. You need some stamina and a good memory, and I confess to skim-reading the later permutations of The Plan, but the denouement is well worth waiting for. You also learn a great deal en route about all sorts of things! The few women in the novel take a very proper and sensible attitude to the whole affair. FP

*Foucault’s Pendulum has been displayed in Paris in various locations and because of its size, visually demonstrates the rotation of the earth through the displacement of its swing.

** The ten creative forces, represented by Hebrew symbols, which intervene between the infinite, unknowable God (Ein Sof) and our created world, according to the Jewish mystical doctrine, the Kabbalah (“Tradition”). See http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Sefirot/Sefirot.html for more information.

Valgarthur Egilsson

"Waiting for the South Wind" (£11.99)

Published in Iceland, but written in English by an Icelandic doctor/poet, this is a powerful evocation of life on the North coast of Iceland during WWII, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. Hard work is ceaseless, even for the children, and so is observation of the natural surroundings, interpreted with an eye to survival: the sound of the rivers which changes as they rise and fall, migrating birds, a lamb in trouble, the different winds with their promises or threats. Because life is hard and simple, sometimes unavoidably brutal, people are kind and cooperative, discussing shared knowledge of their ancestors and history. Local supernatural beings (huldu-folk and elves) form as important a part of many people's world view as God and Fate. Finally manmade progress intervenes with destructive results. Meanwhile the author, with his knowledge of the wider world and physiological training, observes and comments, often with a dry humour. ("Bishops are not sure-footed," he says, commenting on pastoral neglect of the Fjorders in their neck-breaking home territory.) An unusual, thought-provoking and fascinating book. You can also learn the 33 non-compound Icelandic words for wind and some of the 22 for snow!FP

Kerstin Ekman
"Blackwater" (£6.99)
"The Forest of Hours" (£6.99)

Both books are deeply evocative of the wild and remote northern forests of Sweden. In both there are descriptions of the humidity and the midges that I can hardly bear to read. Blackwater is a disturbing thriller; depicting an isolated village, set in its ways, holding to its secrets, containing its own oddball characters and uneasy in its relations with off-cumdens. A woman and her daughter arrive one Midsummer Eve to make a new life. Unexpectedly alone and belonging neither to the village nor to the neighbouring hippy community, the woman becomes embroiled in the unexplained violent deaths of two people. Eighteen years later she believes her daughter to be in the arms of the killer. A complex and gripping book.

The Forest of Hours is a mixture of a magical tale with strong roots in Swedish history. I believe it to be very learned and erudite but I know little of the facts, language or references contained in the book so can’t comment on that aspect. Fact, folklore and fancy combine. For my taste the delight is all in the early years as the magical forest being (a troll?) grows wise in the ways of the human world. As he ages (far more slowly than his human companions) he learns alchemy and medicine. He wins and loses. Alongside his wiliness, set in cynicism and disillusion, experience and worldly wisdom. I couldn’t stop being fully engaged by the book although I found the later years less beguiling than the earlier parts of the book and not a little depressing. A powerful, long read. NP

Sebastian Faulks
"Birdsong" (£6.99)

A young Englishman trained in commerce and textiles visits 1910 Amiens to study manufacturing and falls in love. He returns to the same area as an officer in 1916. In the late 1970s a 38-year-old woman rediscovers some of the characters and events of that time.

The atmosphere of early twentieth-century provincial France is well done, the stifling social atmosphere contrasting with the anger and resentment of the striking textile workers. What I already knew about the First World War came from Graves, Sassoon, Owen and other war poets, films and plays, but the meticulous research in this novel comes through especially in the descriptions of the sappers and the terrifyingly claustrophobic conditions of their cramped and dangerous tunnels. I have previously read descriptions of bodies decaying in shell-holes but those here are quite horribly realistic. Interaction between the Tommies and local French civilians is convincingly done, and we see the appalling slaughter at Thiepval unfold from the original plans and hopefulness through growing misgivings to the doomed advance into the German machine guns, relentlessly pursued through to its aftermath.

I found the men in the book more convincing than the women: the main character Stephen, his friend Weir, Jack Firebrace the sapper with his stolidly cheerful letters home, and the embarrassing New Man Stuart are all completely believable. Elizabeth was adequate (but seemed to be the same person as Martha in Julian Barnes’s England England - what is it about feisty 40-year-old women created by male novelists? Unless it was just that I read the two books too close together). I just got annoyed with Isabelle but then I have no idea what early twentieth-century Frenchwomen were like.

There were several parts of the novel where the reader’s knowledge of subsequent events gives extra impact to otherwise insignificant passages: Stephen’s vision of decay at the water-gardens and the ethnicity of the lieutenant eating pea soup when jolted by Stephen’s explosion had me wondering wildly if the Yanks had suddenly arrived on the scene before I remembered this was the First World War.

The Duke of Wellington's Regiment arrive on the scene a couple of times in the book; I happened to be looking at their memorial in Halifax Parish Church when I'd just finished it and there indeed is Thiepval amongst the list of engagements. A good, educational and gripping read. FP

"Charlotte Gray"

Saw the film, was surprised and annoyed at its silliness and boringness. Then I read the book. Well, very few similarities really.

Film = Michael Gambon doing his usual + Pretty Faces 1, 2 and 3; the one in a dress generally riding bicycles scenically cross-country in high heels in order to arrive disastrously too late yet again. And getting half the French resistance exterminated by being loudly incompetent whenever there are Gestapo around. Oh, and the wicked Brits cooperate with the Germans in getting the French Communist Party machine-gunned. Obviously made for the American market. Surprised Mel Gibson wasn't in it. Did the author agree to all this?

As with Birdsong, the book is excellent at many levels; the characters, including the airman, the Michael Gambon character (actually an artist) and a number of Frenchwomen - even odd passing Germans - are well-developed and believable, with personal histories and preoccupations. You now understand why Charlotte Gray is doing all this. The surroundings are detailed and atmospheric, the historical parts informative and harrowing and the story is complex, gripping and almost unbearable in places. And quite different from the pointless film. Highly recommended. FP

Fannie Flagg
"Welcome to the World, Baby Girl" (£6.99)

I loved it. I want to read another by the same author. (She wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe) It keeps you in suspense but it is more than a thriller. It's a good story with really interesting characters and you just want to know what happens to them next. It's about a woman facing a deep tragedy that happened when she was a child, and by facing it changing her whole life. It can be funny and a bit sad but not depressing. Hannah Mallatratt

Charles Frazier
"Cold Mountain"

Set towards the end of the American Civil War, this novel tells the parallel stories of a soldier slowly making his way home through the sporadically violent American countryside, convincingly and evocatively portrayed, while the educated, awkward woman he loves is learning how to run her father’s farm with the help of a young local countrywoman. Both of the stories are satisfying and involving; Charles Frazier obviously knows his stuff, and mountains, forests, farmland and scrub all come vividly to life along with the characters and animals. FP

Stephen Fry
"Making History" (£5.99)

Currently doing the rounds in a large group of English-starved Brits in Japan, this book came highly recommended and didn’t disappoint. Fry’s style of writing is very similar to his TV persona - highly intelligent and very funny in a very British way.

The concept behind the novel - using time travel to meddle with historical events and the consequences - means it takes time to understand initially where Fry is heading with it all, but once established, this idea repeatedly raises fascinating questions. Fundamentally, how would post-WW2 history rewrite itself if Hitler had never been born?

One of those rare books that’s not only good for the brain but a lot of fun too. Good stuff! ACP

Alan Furst
"Dark Star" (£7.99)

Andre Szara is a Russian Jew, born in Poland, and working as a journalist for Pravda,and posted to Paris and Berlin in 1938 - not much going for him there. As war gathers, and he becomes a dispensable pawn in the manoeuvres of various factions in the Soviet NKVD, the Gestapo, British intelligence and even the Zionist movement, he becomes more and more desperate to survive, whatever the cost.

Europe before and during the Second World War is Furst's historical period, the atmosphere of the time and place is drawn very convincingly, and his intellectual territory is that of moral ambiguity, treachery, intrigue and desperation.

I found this book a compulsive page-turner, but not in the 'Harry Potter' way - "What's going to happen next?"; I kept finding myself thinking, "Oh no, don't let that happen," and turning the page to find that it does, while Szara squirms and dodges to preserve some sort of life.

This is a good, grim, gloomy read. I would recornmend it, as a serious book with a history lesson thrown in, not a run-of-the-mill spy novel. John Kerrane

Amitav Ghosh
"The Glass Palace"

Begins with the British advance on Mandalay in the 1880s and takes us through three generations to the 1990s via the teak plantations of Burma and Malaya’s rubber plantations, the exile to India of the Burmese royal family, the advance of the Japanese in the Second World War and the differing reactions of Indian soldiers to their British overlords. Lots of fascinating detail about how the Empire worked at the grassroots, and the swift and overwhelming changes through the twentieth century. The British characters are presented fairly and with understanding, the torn loyalties and damaged self-image of the Indian soldiers treated with subtlety. I got a bit confused over the identities of some of the sketchier later characters, but Rajkumar, the Indian street boy who recognises the sound of the British guns on page 1, takes us through to the end of the book. Highly recommended.

Romesh Gunesekera
"Reef"

A young Sri Lankan boy goes to work for a lonely, eccentric marine biologist who is concerned about the damage being inflicted on the island's coral reefs. The boy discovers a passion and talent for cooking; his employer falls in love. But in the background Sri Lanka's terrible civil war is growing in intensity. Beautifully written, with a lot going on beneath the surface.

David Guterson
"Snow Falling on Cedars" (£6.99)

Set in a fishing village on the North west coast of America just after the war. A man dies at sea and a Japanese man is accused of his murder. There's lots of different strands, it's a love story, a murder story, the story of a good man of integrity and the story of a man being healed and moving on in his life, but it is particularly brilliant in what it has to say about racial prejudice. The weather, the snow and cold permeates everything. It's very wise but mostly a really good read that you don't want to put down. EOB

Mick Jackson
"Five Boys"

Mick Jackson’s Booker short-listed novel, The Underground Man, about the eccentric 5th Duke of Portland and his love of tunnel-building, was an unusual and enthralling book, so I had great hopes of the nicely-packaged Five Boys. It begins well, with the wartime evacuation of an East End boy to a Devon village, where he meets Miss Minter, the Captain and Aldred, falls foul of the Five Boys, and makes a place for himself. The work could really have ended there because we hear little more of him and he vanishes in the middle of the book, leaving us with a series of comic rural episodes, Last of the Summer Wine-style, and an irritating quasi-mystical new arrival called The Bee King, who instructs us and the suddenly featureless Five Boys in bee-keeping for the rest of the book. I could make no sense of the violent episode at the end at all. FP

Matthew Kneale
"English Passengers" (£6.99)

Some luckless nineteenth-century Manx smugglers have wares to sell, and a party of Englishmen are bound for Tasmania where they variously plan to discover the Garden of Eden or proof of an unpleasant theory of racial types. Meanwhile small groups of indigenous Tasmanians are struggling to survive in their native country against both the casual brutality of violent and ignorant seal-hunters and settlers and the equally ignorant and destructive good intentions of administrators and clerics.

The story of the progress of these quarrelling parties is engrossing, dismaying, funny and exciting. The ending is as satisfactory as it can be, in the circumstances. A large element of true history lies behind the fiction. FP

Milan Kundera
"Immortality" (£7.99)

This book, despite having won the 1991 Independent Award, seems to divide its audience : readers either love it, hate it, or in most cases, both! The novel’s structure is similar to that of an eclectic series of Psychology Essays, joined together somewhat tenuously with the help of the unhappy, charismatic heroine, Agnes. Kundera takes one of his many initial thoughts as a starting point (e.g. how to achieve immortality within today’s society values?), then runs with it for a couple of chapters before finding a new tangent introducing a different historical figure to lead us down another discordant thought-path..

I personally really enjoyed reading it - the fiercely intellectual style of writing crammed with highfalutin/large-scale ideas could come across as a self-absorbed (pretentious) psychology student. Instead however, if the reader will let it, the novel takes them on an intensive thought-provoking journey, encouraging them to think through an astounding variety of concepts and ask their own questions each time they put the book down.

The characters in this book and the issues raised have stayed with me long after the last page. And though many people have been unsure of his style, everyone seems to come away with something valuable from this novel/reading experience. ACP


"Immortality" (£7.99)
The author, in Paris, invents his characters before your eyes and proceeds to introduce them to each other and himself in order to discuss a whole series of ideas and questions, many of them very interesting. I know, I know, it won a prize and got all sorts of critical acclaim, but I'd just as soon have had the ideas presented in essays or Sunday newspaper articles and skipped much of this rather long novel and its tiresome characters. The conflicting sisters Agnes and the unspeakable Laura come to life temporarily. Ideas discussed include the sharing of gestures, the nature of fame, the view of the self, imagology replacing ideology, love as obsession, Goethe, his unglamorous wife and glamorous stalker Bettina, Goethe vs Beethoven, our choice of presents, the glorification of emotion, whether Shakespeare and Columbus would have been mighty in other eras, love vs sex, the image of a clock or zodiac cycle applied to European art, sex, mores. All very interesting but why encased in self-conscious fiction? FP

Ursula Le Guin
"Earthsea Quartet" (£10.99)

This is a marvellous and satisfying book. She has such an ability to create convincing places, each with its own living atmosphere (there's a lot of journeying about). I found the twilight dusty land of death with its strange unmoving stars immensely powerful. Splendid dragons. The second book, The Tombs of Atuan, is the weakest, but the complaint that the first three books are too male-dominated is convincingly rectified in Book 4, Tehanu. Earthsea is one of those split-level books you can read at any age.

"Left Hand of Darkness" (£5.99)
Another excellent book. The hero, a rather conventional male, gets caught in the court intrigues of a cold and remote world where gender doesn't exist except during mating - so anyone can be a mother or a father or both. Enthralling plot involving loyalties, escapes and misunderstandings set against a moving and tragic background. The other main character, the otter-like Estraven, seems straight out of a Renaissance court, and the feeling of an old, rich culture, with the brilliance, sophistication, discomfort and personal danger of Renaissance court life is well conveyed. FP

"The Telling" (£9.99)
Again on the theme of the destructive effects of intercultural intolerance and misunderstanding, as well as of religious bigotry and repressive state cultural homogeneity, but this time of a twentieth-century kind. Scholarly, widowed Terran Indian Sutty is working as an Observer on the recently modernised planet Aka, where an ancient, complex and subtle civilisation has been obliterated by an enforced Cultural Revolution. As usual, the characters, surroundings, cultures and landscapes are splendidly realised.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Love in the Time of Cholera" (£7.99)

In late nineteenth-century coastal Colombia, beautiful, poised Fermina Daza, from a dodgy background, makes a marriage without love to a charming upper-class wealthy doctor. Despite his demanding and autocratic character and her temper, they mostly live affectionately together until his death in old age. Since her girlhood, another man, obsessive Florentino Anzio, has been stalking Fermina, and calls on the elderly widow immediately after the funeral.

I don’t get on with Marquez as well as the critics do. By the middle of his fairly lengthy novels I’ve worn out any interest I can raise in his characters and am counting pages to the end. This novel does have the advantage of having a historical and geographical setting, and behind the main story we see brutal civil wars, epidemics and pollution; technological progress attempts to tackle these last two but also leads to the deforestation and ecological destruction of the great river at whose mouth the town is set. But all this is presented fairly briefly and superficially. The real emphasis of the story is on “love” and I found it very depressing.

I didn’t care for either of the main male characters, and was dismayed at men’s limitless power and irresponsibility in the society portrayed and at the author’s presentation of a poor and naive 14-year-old schoolgirl’s ecstasy at having sex with her elderly legal guardian and of the child Leona Cassiani’s bliss at being violently raped by an anonymous stranger.

Someone who likes Marquez, please write a counter-balancing positive review! FP

Cormac McCarthy
"All the Pretty Horses" (£6.99)

Laconic Texan boy, gifted with horses, heads south for Mexico with a friend when his ranching family breaks up. Good story written sparingly and atmospherically: landscapes I’ve never seen, and the particular feel of dusk, or midday, or night, spring vividly to life. The book reminded me of a James Stewart/Anthony Mann Western, hero, plot and scenery included - and that’s a recommendation! I don’t know about you, but I needed my Spanish Gem dictionary. FP

Elizabeth McCracken
"The Giant’s House" (£6.95)

Convincing and moving story, set on Cape Cod, of a sort of love affair between a cool and competent career librarian and a quietly humorous boy suffering from giantism. All extremely well-written, with sudden unexpected truths and perceptions which stop you in your tracks. FP

Arthur Morrison
"A Child of the Jago" (£6.99):

the story, published in 1896, of Dicky Perrott, growing up amongst the violent and semi-criminal underclass of the Jago, a compact fictional area of East London between Shoreditch High Street and Brick Lane, and based on the real Old Nichol of the time.

Morrison was writing on the basis of personal experience and meticulous research (he was a journalist) and the book is a highly believable, educational and gripping read. No lovable capering Cockneys here; the streetwise and brutal survive best and intermittent warfare with the next district and drunkenness are the only entertainments for men and women both, despite the best efforts of the well-intentioned middle classes. Major sources of income are the coshing and stripping of strangers, sometimes lured in by the women, shoplifting, pickpocketing, and the mass robbing of unguarded carts. Men who don’t drink and beat their wives are thought soft and snobbish, neighbours foolish enough to leave their belongings available are fair game, and Dicky’s confidant, a wretched old donkey, gnaws the wood of its stall for lack of food.

The remarkably robust Reverend Sturt who throws his energy into trying to improve the area is based on the real Reverend Jay of Shoreditch who invited Morrison to write the novel. Morrison was posing the question whether a child can escape such a background. (Jay later proposed that the criminal underclass be confined for life to humane Penal Settlements and prevented from reproducing, a solution which Morrison endorsed - perhaps because, as P J Keating suggests, he knew only too well the desperate struggle faced by the honest poor of the time. His description of Dicky’s incompetent and defeated mother trying to make a living by gluing and assembling matchboxes at twopence farthing a gross while the her small daughter steals the foul paste to eat is memorable.)

Despite this grim setting, the story rattles along, full of lively and turbulent characters, pungent dialogue and the cramped, noisy, smelly, brawling atmosphere of the place. The first chapter plunges us straight into a hot and violent summer night with the sky lurid and flickering from a fire in Shoreditch.

Unlike Dickens, of whom V S Naipaul says in The Enigma of Arrival that his simple non-specific descriptions make, or made, him popular the world over because readers with no knowledge of London can imagine their own, known, local settings, Morrison is very specific in his descriptions of East End streets, yards, passages and buildings and evokes the sort of grimy Victorian brickwork still to be seen in some places. Mr Grinder’s respectable and well-stocked shop on Bethnal Green Road, where Dicky works briefly, comes vividly to life but on the whole we see nothing that the Jago doesn’t know, which adds to the feeling of claustrophobia and resignation. We get a glimpse of the dandyish Dove Lane market-porters with their love of “bang-up kicksies, cut saucy, with artful buttons and a double fakement down the side” supplied by a local Jewish tailor - but only as possible prey for marauding gangs from the Jago. The confined world of this book feels so all-embracing that it came as something of a shock to read that Morrison (himself East End working-class in origin, but with a solid background and a love of art) was meanwhile buying cheaply from sailors and foreign immigrants not far from “the Jago” the valuable Japanese prints which he went on to study and collect, later presenting many of them to the British Museum - and also to reflect that many of Hebden Bridge’s terraced streets which feel so “historical” were only just being built on open fields at the time of the writing of this vivid book. FP

Orhan Pamuk
My Name is Red (£10.99)

The fastest seller in Turkish history, this novel is set in late-sixteenth-century wintry Istanbul, and begins with the murder of one of the skilled miniaturists engaged in creating a special secret book for the Sultan. Centuries of tradition and the rigid following of set rules in art, following the dictates of Islam, are being challenged by the more realistic approach of Western art promoted by the Venetians: each of the remaining miniaturists has a different outlook on this. Meanwhile a man called Black returns from exile in the hope of winning the doubtfully widowed love of his life, the daughter of the miniaturists' supervisor.

The story is told in turn by each of the participants, including Death and some of the items depicted (a dog, a horse, a gold coin, a tree).

The style gets a bit of getting used to, but you soon get caught up in the story, personalities and scenery. Each of the characters’ personalities comes out clearly, along with the important issues being debated, and everyday street and indoor scenes of the period are vividly portrayed. Black’s quest carries you along as you constantly try to identify the murderer.

413 pages, with a brief chronology at the back from Darius the Great to Sultan Ahmet I - who destroyed an elaborate clock sent to him by Elizabeth I of England. Super cover. Some odd phraseology in the translation (“dearly departed” for “dear departed” is common).

A fascinating insight into the background of the detailed and colourful pictures of Islamic culture. FP

Ian Rankin
"Hide and Seek" (£5.99)

Do you often find yourself feeling that life is grey, grim and miserable, that the poor are self-destructive, the rich are self-seeking and manipulative, and all authority is callous and indifferent? If so, then Ian Rankin is the writer for you.

His central character, Inspector John Rebus, is a flawed and damaged detective working for Lothian CID, doggedly determined to pursue unpopular cases in the face of opposition from all quarters, while desperately trying to hold his own life together. If this sounds a little predictable, what makes the Rebus novels stand out is that the character is credible in his context, the dialogue is convincing and the portrait of Edinburgh is very much like my own impression - snobbish and sordid by turns, with a continuous biting wind, carrying bitter rain as often as not. The plots are tough and believable, contemporary Scotland is well drawn, and not the least attractive aspect is Rebus's attempts to face the ethical dilemmas of his work.

I picked Hide and Seek, the second of Rankin's Rebus novels, to comment on, rather than the first, Knots and Crosses, as I feel the latter is perhaps the least satisfactory of the series. The plot in Hide and Seek follows the discovery of a drug addict apparently crucified in a squat on an Edinburgh housing estate - Rebus's tenacious investigation leads him to uncover good old Edinburgh corruption and sleaze. All the Rebus novels are compulsive reading, but I have one caveat - Scottish Television recently televised two of the novels as serials for ITV; John Hannah is not my idea of Rebus, nor that of anyone else I have discussed it with. The Tom Bell of 20 years ago would have been ideal, except, of course, that he's not Scottish. John Kerrane

Eva Rice
"The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets"

I have just finished reading The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice and I feel compelled to tell you that this is the finest novel I have read in a long time. I don't know if it qualifies for your historical novels recommendations!

Rice has captured the essence of 1950s Britain exactly. How well I remember the excitement of the new music that was sweeping the country and the feeling that something momentous was about to happen--something that only the younger generation could understand. I identify with Penelope, but also with Talitha because, now, as a mother myself, I fear for my kids and the changing times. Charlotte, of course, was the forerunner of Mary Quant of swinging London and stirs my memories of the miniskirt and high boots of the era. Anything was possible in those halcyon days!

I was vaguely reminded of I Capture the Castle as I read this story of a family seeking escape from a moldering, decaying mansion, but I enjoyed this novel much more. I am tired of reading books filled with angst and unhappy endings, and yet I want to read literary (and literate) prose and this novel was a genuinely enjoyable escape to another world. While I knew all would end happily, the ending was not predictable and the book kept me turning pages for the whole of a 10-hour flight from Argentina on Friday. In fact, I was so engrossed in the novel that my husband has now picked it up to see what kept me enthralled me for the flight. E.O.

James Robertson
"The Fanatic":

A book that interweaves two time periods - 1997 and 1674 - when a young man, Andrew Carlin, is employed to be the 'ghost' on a nightly tourist walk of Edinburgh of Major Weir who was a religious extremist burnt at the stake in 1670 for incest and bestiality. Andrew Carlin himself is an extremely disturbed young man whose struggle to find a sense of his own identity becomes more intense as he gets caught up in his research of this extremely turbulent and cruel period in Scottish history. 1674 is a time when one religious faction is losing the struggle for power and Justice means different things to different people - there is also a sense of the Middle Ages dying away as the Enlightenment is born. By the end of the book you are unsure where any truth lies and yet have a sense of exploring reality very deeply. Edinburgh itself is one of the main 'characters' of the book and James Robertson manages to create a sense of the past and the present superimposed in time - both periods seem solidly there and simultaneously flickering 'ghost-like' . Not an easy read but I think a very rewarding one.

Pauline Stephenson

Arundhati Roy
"God of Small Things" £6.99

Booker Prize winner. Highly acclaimed international bestseller.

Told in a series of scenes, which jump backward and forwards in time, this is the story of the destruction of a small Southern Indian family at the hands of prejudice, conformity and misunderstanding. The writing is skilled and fluid, the surroundings, both rural and urban, highly observed. Nevertheless I didn’t like the book. We see the action from the point of view of the twins, insistently pathetic victims. Any sympathetic adult figure is sure to come to a particularly nasty end, described in detail; the ones who survive and are powerful are gross monsters. There is a lot of thick saliva and vomit. The story is tragic but my final feeling was of exasperated relief when I got to the end.

(In contrast, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, another novel set in modern India, overwhelmed me with sorrow and respect for its suffering but battling protagonists.) FP

Kurban Said
“Ali and Nino” £6.99

First published in German in 1937, this novel was probably written by Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Baku who converted to Islam, left Azerbaijan for Berlin during the Russian Revolution, subsequently fleeing Nazi Germany for Vienna, then Italy where he died under house arrest in 1942. Paul Theroux calls it “a bravura display of passionate ethnography” that “could only have been written by a brilliant outsider”; the Azerbaijinis, he says, consider it their national novel.

It’s a most readable and informative book set in early twentieth-century Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, and tells the story of the relationship of a young Shiite Muslim from an important warrior family and a high-class Westernised Christian Georgian girl against the background of an ethnic and cultural cauldron (under pre-Revolutionary Russian rule) where Arabs, Russians and Armenians mingle, and where it is unclear who is a trustworthy ally. The Turks are Muslims, but they are Sunnis. The Armenians talk of alliance but are they reliable? The old-fashioned effete upper classes of Iran see the British as useful idiots who can safely be employed to defend their frontiers.

Ali cannot give up his desert and his martial heritage; high-spirited educated Nino can’t bear the restricted life forced upon her by traditional Islam. (The exchanges between Nino and the conscientious eunuch in charge of the Iranian harem she is confined to are hilarious.) Meanwhile history moves on and terrible decisions have to be made. A gripping read and highly educational too. FP

Bernard Schlink
"The Reader" (£6.99)

A German teenager falls in love with a down-to-earth older working woman whose occasionally strange behaviour comes to be explained in the course of the book. A subtle and thought-provoking read on the legacy of the Holocaust and how it is dealt with by different strands and generations of German society, as well as asking difficult questions about shame and social responsibility. Beautifully written and very absorbing. FP

Jane Smiley
"1000 Acres"
King Lear set in Iowa, told from the point of view of Goneril. Starts off fine, you learn a bit about farming in Iowa and have fun spotting the Lear parallels; the different ways the girls have of relating to their demanding father are also interesting. Then it turns out that in addition to being autocratic and self-centred, the Lear character has also sexually abused all his daughters. I felt this was rather over-egging it. Far from intensifying the story, it reduced it to the Jerry Springer show, and I lost interest in a plot that could otherwise have worked very well. The only reason I can think of for this interpolation is that child-abuse is so common in Iowa farming families that it would have been dishonest to leave it out. Let’s hope not! FP

Diane Smith
'The Naturalists'

If you want something light to read that is also well written and quite fun then this book might suit. It is written in the form of letters from a party of scientists doing field research in Yellowstone Park in 1898. One is the young Alex Bartram who to the consternation of the rest of the party turns out to be female. The party is then subjected to a number of pressures both from nature and the world of commerce which heighten the tensions between them.

However for me the book failed to give a sense of that period - the sensibilities seemed very late 20th-century for all that the author claimed in an interview to have closely studied letters from the period. I have a sneaking suspicion that he colleagues from her own field of science ( up to now her books have all been scientific ) might just recognise themselves in the gender struggles - a issue which judging from recent books such as 'Molecules of Emotion' by Candice Pert is still alive and well in scientific research today. I suspect that she may have used an historical situation to highlight a current issue which is often overlooked as we think we have gone past that stage of the struggle rather than just having become more careful as to how prejudices are expressed.

Pauline Stephenson

Darin Strauss
'Chang & Eng'

A book which is one of the most satisfying that I have read in years. Darin Strauss takes the bare historic 'facts' of the lives of the Siamese Twins and turns it into a novel which is very physical. Impossible although it would be to really 'know' I was left with a strong sense of what co-joining might be like both physically and emotionally.

Starting with the Twins arriving in a small American town where they meet their future wives the question of how do they manage sexual relations - surely the most difficult physical feat of all if your stomach is joined to another - is immediately there but not addressed until midway through the book. By the time the author deals with the marriage night, he has created a strong physical sense of how the Twins move together in space.

He also has given you their background from their birth, to the period spent at the court of the King of Siam where death is never far away, to their ruthless exploitation by American showmen. The Twins are very different personalities linked physically in a way that forces them to endlessly battle and compromise until finally the death of the weaker one inevitably leads to the death of the stronger.

Whilst in many ways a sad book, it is also a book of quiet courage and endurance.

Pauline Stephenson

Meera Syal
"Anita and Me" (£6.99)

I enjoyed this story of a girl growing up in the 1960s in a small Midlands community, torn between her respectable and affectionate Punjabi family and the exciting company of the charismatic but unscrupulous local bad girl Anita. The story really gained shape and pace for me with the arrival of Meena’s exuberant grandmother halfway through the book; after that it all takes off.

Meera Syal is good at subtly different shades - both of colour: the different blacks of the night destroyed by the sodium lamps of the new motorway, and of behaviour; the English neighbours’ various reactions to their Asian neighbours are beautifully and subtly portrayed. The foul Anita and her luckless younger sister are both realistic and memorable, and even though I don’t know the accent so couldn’t “hear” it, so is 1960s Tollington. which comes vividly to life.

Other threads run behind: the different awareness and memories of the Asian older generation, combining memories of the horrors of partition with a philosophical acceptance of racist attitudes in their host country; the muffled attraction between Meena and the confused racist Sam; “Uncle Alan”, the curate, trying to raise political awareness in the local yobs.

Meena mentally reproaches Mireille and Harindar for staying hidden in their own private world and “wasting their gifts and zest for life instead of sharing them with people whom they could have inspired and entertained”. Clearly her family could have done with the moral support of having other foreigners around but here’s a generous and positive suggestion that it’s the responsibility of “the exotic and the different” to educate the hidebound. FP

Barbara Trapido
"Brother of the More Famous Jack"
"Noah’s Ark"
"Temples of Delight"
"Juggling"
"The Travelling Horn Player" (all £6.99)

I read one and immediately bought each of the others as they came out in paperback. Can’t wait for the next one! All the books can stand alone. All but one (Noah’s Ark) overlap characters, albeit from a different generation. My favourite has to be ‘Juggling’. It contains all the Trapido magic – a giddy, infectious joy in language and literature, laugh-out-loud wit, intelligent and bolshie children, a very humane touch; realistic and surrealistic happenings alongside deep and shocking pathos. The whole sexy and delightful package rollicks along. Shakespearean comedies provide the framework for the bizarre rush to the end. Everyone must be paired up for the final curtain call! I defy you to predict who ends up with who. In fact I might read it again just to check on that. VP

Rose Tremain
'Music and Silence'.

The easiest thing to say about this book is that if you enjoyed 'Restoration' you will almost certainly enjoy this one. However if it is your first visit to Rose Tremain's writing than you may have to be patient while the stories slowly build to take you into a world that is both solidly real and yet has a sense of fairy tale or legend about it.

Her characters' lives - even when she uses the device of a journal - are seen in such a way that the everyday and the mythic sit hand in hand. A motif which probably adequately sums up the whole book is the amazing and angelic music which floats up from an unseen source into the room in which the King of Denmark entertains. The unseen source are the court musicians in a freezing basement which they co-habit with neglected and imprisoned chickens. Thus the apparently exquisite and magical comes from discomfort and stoical acceptance of that discomfort. Similarly a silver mine which never yields anything other than death, traps the local inhabitants in a restless dream of wealth which completely destroys the meagre but adequate lives they had lived before the King attempted to open the mine.

The destructive qualities of desire run through the whole book as well as the healing quality of love tempered with compassion.

Pauline Stephenson

Fanny Trollope
"The Vicar of Wrexhill" (Not currently available but Nonsuch intend to reprint it soon.)

Anthony Trollope's prolific mother is now almost completely forgotten, apart from her non-fiction Domestic Manners of the Americans. This is a great shame, as she is such a fantastic read and would adapt for television superbly. She has gripping plots, humour and excellent observation, and excels in high-status characters admired by society but actually scheming and unscrupulous, to the detriment of the humbler and more perceptive members of the cast.

In The Vicar of Wrexhill, a charismatic and good-looking man takes over the rectorship of an idyllic village whose good old traditional vicar has just died, and cuts a swathe through the local women of all classes with his highly emotional evangelicalism and personal endearments and caresses. He has soon wrecked the happy family whose celebrations open the novel, the recent widow and young teenage daughter falling prey while the more perceptive two older girls look on in horror. Most of the village is soon joining in frequent emotional prayer services, convinced that they are the elect bound for heaven, while non-members will certainly go to hell. Families are split down the middle and family relationships and friendships ruined. Poor little Fanny, who takes it all seriously, turns from a naive writer of poems into a nervous wreck, getting terribly distressed about the doctrine of "works" - this particular sect believes that it is heretical to believe in doing good as only "faith" is pleasing to God. Anyone not toeing the line, not falling on their knees in prayer when requested, girls allowing curls to show from under their severe caps - all are damned to hell. Happily there is a wonderfully entertaining and eccentric elderly aristocratic couple across the Park who can't be doing with all this and are strong in support of common sense and old-fashioned values, and all ends happily, for most of the characters. Some branches of the current Born-Again movement and also the Taliban's pernicious values came to mind while reading the book. The Victorian establishment of the time hated it!

It's thought that Mr Cartwright was the inspiration for Anthony Trollope's Mr Slope.

Jessie Phillips

Published in 1843, this one tells of the sad downfall of a village girl who believes the squire's son when he says he will marry her, and the attempts of two upper-middle-class girls to help her. Fanny Trollope is on the warpath both about the Poor Law Amendment Act, which replaced the old locally-run workhouses with the centralised Unions, and its Bastardy Clause which prevented pregnant women from naming the fathers and claiming support; in fact she says in the last paragraph of the book that she received "a multitude of communications" while she was writing the story, on the basis of which the story was considerably expanded. We are shown a respectable, hardworking and deserving old woman mocked by a member of the Board who does not know her history (rather like Alderman Cute later in Dickens's "The Chimes") while friends of members of the Board are shown favouritism. Fanny Trollope includes interesting details - that the rooms of the new Unions were virtually windowless and the inmates forbidden from working, going out at all, ever, or receiving visitors, their hair was cut short, the food was of low quality (as in "Oliver Twist") and the only seating was a narrow ledge 9" wide and rather too high for some of the inmates who had to sit on the floor.

Jessie herself and Ellen, one of her supporters, suffer an awful lot and are rather prone to fainting, weeping and collapsing with brain fevers, but hurrah for eccentric and strong-minded young Martha Maxwell. The author is forced by her times to continually point out the sin of Jessie (in being seduced) and the wrong-headedness of Martha in kicking up a rumpus, but it is clear where her sympathies lie!

P. G. Wodehouse
"Joy in the Morning" (£6.99)

Jeeves and Wooster and jolly top hole it is - in fact quite a "good young potato" as Wooster might say. Great to read aloud to an amiable companion on holiday! VP

Akira Yoshimura
"One Man's Justice"

Like everyone else, I knew of course about the US use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the latter because the intended target, Kokura, had too much cloud cover). I've visited the bomb museum in Nagasaki and seen its photographs. I didn't know about the prior sustained intensive fire-bombing, carried out by waves of American B-29 bombers, in 1945, of the civilian populations of the cities of Japan's southern island of Kyushu. The novel, translated from the Japanese, follows the psychological and physical transformation of an educated and conscientious Japanese army officer who witnesses the air-raids and their devastating results, participates (under orders) in the execution by beheading of captured US air-crews, and is then relentlessly hunted with other army officers, high and low, by the US and their Japanese postwar agents, as a war-criminal. The penalty is death by hanging. The argument by one of the defendants that the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities and towns by the US Army Air Force was a violation of international law is unheard.

The book is a gripping read as Takuya stays ahead of his pursuers, psychologically convincing and highly informative. The difficult postwar conditions of the ruined country are well conveyed and the description of burning Fukuoka is terrifying: "Huge swirling towers of flames reached skyward from a seething conflagration covering an almost endless expanse below him."

The complexity of the issues explored and Takuya's recognition of his own psychological transformation are handled well and subtly. For Takuya, it is the memory of an interrogated American smiling as he said the crews would listen to jazz and look at pornographic pictures after unleashing devastation on thousands of civilian families that spurs him on to participate in the beheading of a prisoner. He is much struck by the mismatch between the relaxed and genial bearing of the US forces and their malign behaviour. The uncontrolled behaviour of US troops currently in Iraq (and indeed still on Okinawa) comes to mind: this is not what Hollywood likes to show us. Takuya also notes that the application of "justice" has little to do with impartial law, and more to do with the current interests of the occupying power.

Prolonged fear of capture and death takes its toll on all the fugitives as do the reprisals against their families. The once-proud officer is uncomfortable seeing his revered commanding officer weeping and grovelling, now a pathetic old man.

The destruction of civilians in wartime, whether in Fukuoka, Nanking or Dresden, raises longterm insoluble problems. I'm putting here a link to a short memoir written in a spirit of peace and reconciliation by Japanese potter Hisao Nakano, who was a child in Kyushu at the time of the B-29 bombings: http://www.isahaya-cc.ac.jp/~oomurakk/nakano.htm

FP

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Top

2. Non-Fiction (alphabetical by title)

Backpacker's Guide to the New Spirituality - Michael Conneely, £9.99

Michael Conneely writes in a way that is not just informative but also very intimate. It is like having a conversation with a far-travelled and experienced friend who is introducing you to a landscape he knows well. The reader is left in no doubt of Michael's own views on the ten paths to New Spirituality that he describes so competently. This is quite unusual as so often in books there is no way of knowing exactly what is based on the writer's own experience and what has been cut and pasted from other sources. However in this very interesting book there is no doubt that the opinions are first-hand and authentic. The often complex and diverse paths to spiritual awareness are described very clearly and in a language that is easy to understand. A complete novice would be well guided as to what their first steps might be (including possibly taking one of Michael's own courses) and someone who already knows something of the subject is likely to find some of their existing views expanded or challenged in the light of Michael's considerable research and experience.

"Beyond the World of Pooh: selections from the memoirs of Christopher Milne", ed. A. R. Melrose (£7.99)

The first source-book of the above, The Enchanted Places, which is the only one I have read, was published in 1974, and in it the man who was Christopher Robin perceptively fills in the background to the Pooh stories and poems and takes the opportunity to put the record straight. The long hair and strange outfit was his mother’s idea, the happy childhood spent climbing trees, exploring and playing imaginatively with toys is quite true and so is Nanny, with whom he spent his first nine years - but not the offhand Alice of “Buckingham Palace”. Anne, Tattoo, Alexander Beetle and the Ottoman really existed; Rabbit and Owl didn’t but Owl’s house did.

Christopher Milne saw relatively little of his parents through his childhood, but had to spend the rest of his life having people either gush or snigger at him because of his father’s use of him in some unexpectedly popular children’s books. The reconstructed portrait of A. A. Milne is a complex and interesting one; from the son’s description he was clever, subtle, reticent, honest, funny, gifted and possibly Eeyore too. (Mrs Milne blithely assigned the darkest, smallest, nastiest rooms to her husband and retained the large, light and colourful ones for herself and Christopher. This chapter is omitted from the above compilation.)

Reading about the real background of poems and stories first heard as a small child is rather an odd experience, especially the ones you haven’t read since. In “Us Two” CR and Pooh go looking for dragons, but Shepard has drawn poultry, which was too adult a joke for me at the time and the poem had lain undigested in the back of my mind. In fact there was a poultry farm across the river, which the boy Christopher used to cross (no doubt with Pooh) via a dragon-shaped tree. Problem finally solved!

Christopher Milne challenges the myth in particular on three counts. “Vespers” (“Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”) was famously a source of later suffering to its subject, especially after its recording as a song. But misunderstandings are thick on the ground. Christopher Robin, instructed by his Nanny, was actually quite a devout child. He really would have been saying his prayers. The child in the poem looks angelic, but his mind isn’t on the job. It’s as if the unbelieving A. A. Milne is saying, “After all, I know boys better than these silly religious women do” - he intends the joke to be on the believers. Disastrously for his son, these subtleties were missed by the public, who only saw the “cuteness” and naivety and either simpered or gleefully put the boot in.

The public also failed to understand that the scenes on which the stories and characters were based were just a temporary stage of a real boy’s life. Well-wishers persisted in sending models of Pooh and Piglet long after the recipient could be expected to retain an interest in childhood toys: “If I am asked, ‘Aren’t you sad that the animals are not in their glass case with you today?’ I must answer, ‘Not really,’ and hope this doesn’t seem too unkind. I like to have around me the things I like today, not the things I once liked many years ago.” “But my Pooh is different, you say: he is the Pooh. No, this only makes him different to you, not different to me. My toys were and are to me no more than yours were and are to you. I do not love them more because they are known to children in Australia and Japan.”

A. A. Milne was notoriously clumsy but Christopher was clever with his hands and resented “The Engineer” where author and artist show a boy meddling ineptly with a toy engine. The retort is impassioned: “I may have been a bit undersize. I may have been a bit underweight. I may have looked like a girl. I may have been shy. I may have been on the dim side. But if I’d had a train (and I didn’t have a train) any brake that I’d wanted to make for it - any simple thing like a brake - WOULD HAVE WORKED.”

The adult Christopher Milne had to fight for the right to be himself; he served in the army and finally, with his wife Lesley, set up and ran a bookshop in Devon. He died five years ago. FP

"Chosen by a Horse" - Susan Richards

If you like horses, you'll love this book (and cry at the end). If you don't, I imagine you'd still enjoy it. It's the story of how a 40-something woman with a horrendous childhood and alcoholic early adulthood behind her finds herself taking in a derelict and abused Standardbred trotting mare - and her furiously vindictive foal - and is bowled over by the mare's cooperative and affectionate personality. Meanwhile her three other horses, and their reactions to the newcomer, are unforgettably and entertainingly portrayed, as is the author's experiment with rejoining the conventional world when she dates a non-reading property-developer (and buys a lot of new underwear). The developments are beautifully described, funny and moving. FP

"From an Antique Land" - Amitav Ghosh (£7.99)

"A magnificent, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm". While researching the life of a 12th-century Indian slave or agent, the author lodged at a small village in Egypt, and the fascinating progress of his studies - a 12th-century letter from an Aden merchant full of practical details and personal interest, a building in Cairo packed with centuries-old Jewish books and papers and their dispersal, the medieval agent's travels to India on business - is paralleled by the change in the village from a place of sheep, ducks, adobe houses and mopeds to one of bungalows, televisions and washing-machines financed by construction work in Iraq. Shares with the author's novel above (Glass Palace) an eye for detail and the effects of externally imposed change on traditional ways of life. FP

"From the Holy Mountain" - William Dalrymple (£8.99)

Using "the great masterpiece of Byzantine travel writing", sixth-century monk John Moschos's The Spiritual Meadow, as a basis, William Dalrymple travels through modern-day Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Egypt, visiting the great sites of early Christianity and talking to their present-day occupants.

He finds ancient traditions and chants still in daily use, ascetic desert-dwelling monks, pillar-dwelling stylites, magnificently-preserved Byzantine remains, unexpected links between the early Coptic church in Egypt and Celtic Christianity, places of worship amicably shared between the Christian incumbents and the local Muslim population in want of divine assistance for their personal problems - but the overall impression is that despite the fervour and dedication of the monks, priests and worshippers, their numbers are in general rapidly diminishing in the face of fanatical Muslim or Orthodox Jewish aggression and official apathy.

A deliberate ethnic cleansing and rewriting of history is in evidence both in eastern Turkey and in Israel. The Turkish government has been systematically eradicating all traces of ancient Armenian Christian churches and monasteries: "'Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.'"

On the West Bank, the remaining Armenian Christians are being purged from Jerusalem, and the remains of Christian Palestinian towns bombed to smithereens in 1953 are passed off as Roman ruins to credulous American tourists.

"'I and my father dug a well,' said Wadeer. 'Now there is a sign there saying that it was built by someone called Yohanan of Bar'am at the time of the Romans.'"

Meanwhile the Egyptian government permits the violent elimination by young fundamentalist Muslims of the remaining Coptic Christians of Upper Egypt.

William Dalrymple is at pains to point out the complexity of the picture - the obnoxious Maronite Christians of Lebanon were largely to blame for the disastrous civil war, and back in 392 AD fanatical Coptic monks burnt the library of Alexandria and lynched the brilliant woman philosopher and mathematician Hypatia.

Despite the bleakness, the book is a fascinating, learned, humorous and informative read. As the Spectator's critic remarked, "Time and time again … I found myself asking: why do we not know this?'" FP

"In Search of Zarathustra: the first prophet and the ideas that changed the world" - Paul Kriwaczek (£8.99)

Zarathustra taught of a single universal god, the battle between good and evil and the eventual end of the world. The author traces the Zarathustran legacy under layers of Islam in Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere, discusses its relationship with Manicheism, Mithraism, Judaism and the Parsees amongst much else, and shows how its moral vision and revolutionary religious ideology survived in the world of the Cathars (and also Nietzsche). An engaging, geographically and historically wide-ranging and informative book. FP

"A Passage to Africa" - George Alagiah (£7.99)
George Alagiah was the BBC's Africa correspondent during its most important recent history, and was present at the US's disastrous intervention in Somalia in 1992-3; he barely escaped with his life from drugged-up Somali soldiers, saw some of the horrors of Rwanda, experienced the ethical problems involved in the aid workers helping the post-massacre Hutu refugees in Goma, saw Mobutu speak just before he fled Zaire, saw Mugabe degenerate from intelligent and inspirational leader to mad old dictator, interviewed Museveni of Uganda, talked to child soldiers and explains the complex problems of the new South Africa. The framework of the book is his own journey from Ceylon, where his own family's race (Tamil) were seen as the elite minority to be ousted, to the dawn of a new Africa in Ghana, a dream disrupted by the coup of 1966. He brings to vivid life situations in African streets, villages, hotels, farms, bush and airstrips and looks for positive ways forward for the continent. A gripping read. FP

"The Railway Man" by Eric Lomax (£6.99)

The biography of a man fascinated by engines from his Edinburgh childhood on. Eric Lomas joins the British Army as a signaller in 1939, is trapped by the Japanese with tens of thousands of other soldiers in Singapore in 1942 and assigned to one of the notorious Japanese POW camps. Despite the lack of food, filthy conditions, exhausting physical work in full tropical sun and casual or deranged brutality of some Japanese and Korean guards, the men are full of resourcefulness in trying to alleviate their plight in small ways, in escape plans, hobbies and concealed minor skiving. Eric Lomax continues to derive joy from glimpses of steam engines.

With some colleagues, he is arrested for constructing and using a makeshift radio and drawing maps, and handed over to the Kempitai, the Japanese Gestapo. Eric Lomax carefully and dispassionately describes the forty-minute beatings with pick-axe handles inflicted on each of the suspects; two of the men die; he himself suffers a smashed wrist and damaged hip-bones. In Kanburi, he is imprisoned in a small ant-infested cage in full sun, given only heavily salted rice to eat, interrogated and tortured. For most of the rest of his time in Japan, he is in Outram Road punitive jail in Singapore, his condition by now skeletal.

Like many other Far East POWs, Eric Lomax was psychologically damaged for years after the war. When he returned home, his beloved mother had died and his father remarried, his young religious wife was uncomprehending and dismissed his attempts to talk about the horrors suffered by the soldiers, being full of the annoyances of civilian egg-shortages.

With the help of his second wife and Helen Bamber of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, Eric Lomax finally managed to bring his experiences to the suface - and, movingly, to meet the hate-figure of the young Japanese interpreter who had been present at his torture, now a contrite and dedicated anti-war campaigner.

Eric Lomax is scrupulously fair and accurate in his detailing of his experiences; he documents the more humane of the Japanese guards, meticulously observes his own thought processes and emotions, and tries to excuse the civilian indifference to which he returned.

The book is highly informative and absorbing. One can only be filled with respect and admiration for him, for his uncomplaining resourcefulness and that of his fellow prisoners - and for Nagase Takashi for having the courage to devote the rest of his life to an unpopular project. FP

"Stalingrad" by Anthony Beevor (£12.99)

This is an epic and must surely be the authoritative work on the battles in and around Stalingrad in 1942/3 arising from the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. Anthony Beevor spent two and a half years researching his subject and this lends the firmest of grasps on the complexities of invasion and counter-invasion, supported by clear and helpful maps, and well selected photographs. Stalingrad is a straight account and analysis of comparatively recent events, and readers of Second World War history and politics will not be disappointed. Beevor suggests that the German defeat was the fulcrum of the change of fortunes for Hitler and provided the momentum for Russian forces to drive into Eastern Europe and eventually overrun Berlin.

Beevor is not only a very thorough researcher and historian; he is a writer of some note. His ability to combine records of senior military planning meetings, "snapshots" of both Hitler and Stalin in various moods, and very personal first hand accounts of soldiers in the thick of the fighting is flawless, and stimulates what could otherwise become a relentless narrative. Beevor manages to maintain a "neutrality" attributing appalling brutality and mindless cruelty to both sides, but he is uncompromising in highlighting Hitler's obsession with the taking of Stalingrad and his determination that the Sixth Army would not surrender. This book is not for the squeamish, and the accounts from field hospitals close to the fighting make for bleak reading.

What I found of interest was the aftermath what happened to the German prisoners of war and the vastly different treatment for officers and soldiers, and the way in which the propaganda machine in Berlin somehow managed to make capital out of the tragedy.

The book earns its title as a best seller. There are hugely salutary lessons for readers in the 21st. Century - the political map of Europe may have changed dramatically since the 1940's, but it is not hard to trace a route from there direct to Kosovo, Rwanda, the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland. Books like Stalingrad confirm the futility of war and harden the resolve of "never again!" in case in the subjectivity of current events we forget that lesson. RP

"The White Masai" by Corinne Hofmann (£15.99)

I was put off reading this book by the title, thinking it would be some self-congratulatory and deluded account of how a Westerner had managed to "go native", as a Masai of all things! In fact, once I started reading, I couldn't put it down, the author is so honest and clear-sighted about her own strengths and failings and those of her Masai partner. The book is an autobiographical account of the love story and turbulent marriage of a highly practical young Swiss-German woman and a Masai warrior steeped in traditional ways. "He doesn’t understand in any case why I need a stamp. He’s married me, hasn’t he, and that makes me a Leparmorijo and a Kenyan. The others agree, and I’m left sitting there wondering how to explain bureaucracy to them." She certainly does her darndest to fit in with the society which she joins, giving her health quite a hammering in the process, and to use her own savings and expertise to help solve some of the problems presented by the village's poverty and lack of resources: ultimately she finds herself forced to retreat. Inevitably, one of the major sources of conflict is the role of the sexes laid down by tradition. Apart from the human story of conflicting cultural expectations and the terrifying mishaps which occur, the book gives fascinating insights into everyday Kenyan village life & attitudes, and one gets a backstage glimpse of how things work at tourist shows and shops. The title has not proved a problem in Germany where the book has been in the bestseller lists for years.

"Yorkshire English" by Edward Johnson (£1.99)

This is one of many similar amusing lists of Yorkshire dialect words or phrases, the sort of book which finds its way into the bathroom in our house. One of its chief merits is its price.

However, the most intriguing part of the book is its last page, on which there are two lists, one of language glossaries, the other of quiz books on well-known literary figures of the past, printed in such a way as to suggest that the latter are the authors of the former So, American English/English American appears to have been written by Jane Austen, Lancashire English is attributed to Gilbert & Sullivan, and Shakespeare seems to have dashed off Yorkshire English in his spare time.

Unfortunately, A Queer Companion ("A rough guide to Gay slang") lacks any attribution. We wonder which literary giant might be responsible for this title. John Kerrane

Contact us at The Book Case, 29 Market Street, Hebden Bridge, West Yorks, HX7 6EU, UK. e-mail bookcase@btinternet.com All reviews welcome!

To order any of the above books, PHONE 0800 69 89 666 (free - UK only) or +44 (0)1422 845353, FAX +44 (0)1422 844295, or E-MAIL bookcase@btinternet.com

Other pages:

Quizzes: Every month The Book Case produces a literary quiz around a different theme. For the current quiz, go to http://www.bookcase.co.uk/thebookcase.htm For past quizzes, with answers and background info, click here.

Forthcoming: For news of coming publishing highlights, click here.

Backlist: For a collection of favourite childhood books remembered, taken from our Children's Newsletter, click here.Additions welcome if e-mailed.

Commonplace Page: for entertaining, interesting or useful bits and pieces to do with books, click here. Includes quotations, Richard Parfitt's wicked verses, facts and figures and things on the psychology of reading

Links: for the books or otherwise interesting links page, click here.

Top

The Book Case, 29 Market Street, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 6EU, UK