March 2018 book review

Welcome to part 1 of this month’s media review. Please see later blogs for more

BOOKS

FORTUNES OF WAR, by Olivier Manning
Cairo, 1942. Rommel’s desert army is carrying all before it and has now crossed the border into Egypt itself. Either Britain’s 8th Army makes a heroic last stand or the Germans will be in Cairo soon, the Suez Canal will fall into enemy hands and from this unassailable position could go on to win the war.
          Manning peoples her highly authentic-feeling account of Brits at war with a young soldier who has never seen action but is keen to have at the Hun, a beautiful young tart who is the arm of a different man each night but is really after snagging a man with a title, an academic who is keener on making friends and influencing everyone than he is on nurturing his own marriage, and lastly, but most centrally, his wife Harriet, around whom the book revolves.
           Olivier Manning has written a fine account of soldiers and civilians in the turmoil of imminent destruction with this book, which almost feels like a movie  screenplay. It has been televised, and in a world where they love to do remakes, they could do worse than have another go at this. I for one would see it.

THE GIFT, by Vladimir Nabokov
A young writer hears from a friend that his latest slim volume of verse has received rapturous acclaim from the critics, but when he turns up to a party held ostensibly in his honour, he finds it was all a hoax, and remembers the date: April Fool’s Day. He pulls himself out of his disappointment and presses on with his writing, because the “Gift” the title refers to is his own talent. He settles down to write a life of Russian writer Chernyshevsky, whose book What is to be Done? Is now regarded by many as being even more influential on the architects of the Russian Revolution than Marx’s Das Kapital. 
         I love Nabokov’s writing. Fluid, stately, smooth as silk on a beautiful woman’s skin, there is no one who builds a better sentence than he does. But here, in one of his least approachable books, I struggled to stay afloat. His last book written in Russian when he was still living in exile in Berlin, even his publishers refused to include the chapter which is in essence a condensed form of the book on Chernyshevsky the fictional author is writing, and in one sense you can see why. Now restored, it seems completely separate from the remainder of the narrative, while at the end of the book there is a lengthy afterword by Nabokov’s brother Dimitri, on the subject of their lepidopterist father.
          Strictly for Nabokov enthusiasts.

THE BEST OF SAKI, by H.H. Munro
Being a presentation of strange but sometimes hilarious tales from the pen of one of Britain’s most notable short story writers. Here you will meet Clovis Sangrail, whose sense of humour can be bizarre to put it mildly. In one story, he hears someone showing off that he learnt from a Siberian shaman how to transform people into animals, and arranges to have the demonstration work only too well. In another, a baby goes missing, and he goes off and finds it, only to be told it is the wrong baby. Then the right baby is found, leaving the family with one baby in excess of requirements...
          Largely forgotten now, Saki’s quirky, surprising little gems of short stories should not be overlooked by anyone interested in that most tricky of formats.
          Definitely worth a couple of hours of your time.

OUR MAN IN HAVANA, by Graham Greene
A British expat is selling vacuum cleaners in Cuba when he is somewhat reluctantly recruited into MI6. The training is minimal; he doesn’t really have a clue how to go about garnering information useful to the Home Country. Then he has the idea simply to make it up. He imagines a secret factory in the Cuban hinterland, and sends plans which resemble a vastly enlarged version of the vacuum cleaner he sells. To his astonishment the high-ups back home swallow the whole thing and beg for more of the same. Then an assistant is sent out to Cuba to assist him...
          Greene put this book in the category of what he called “entertainments”; light-as-air divertissements as opposed to his “proper” novels, such as The Heart of the Matter. But even this tale has a dark edge. A friend is murdered simply for being his friend, and the local security chief who has earned the moniker of the “Red Vulture” for his cruelty, has designs on his beautiful teenage daughter.
            Certainly an “entertainment”, and a damn good read too.