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undeserved opprobrium from his fellow commandos as they take part in the early stages of Operation Overlord and strive to capture the strategically useful town of Port-en-Bessin. It starts with a faintly implausible chain of events taking Coward from a pleasant seaside hospital, where he’s recovering from some earlier adventure in Burma, to a spot of genteel lollygagging at his cantankerous father’s country pile, and thence to France. There, despite his service history and social standing, he finds himself an ordinary soldier under the command of Sergeant Price, formerly his trusty servant back on the estate. Coward and Price’s aims are to stick one over on Jerry, help bag Port-en-Bessin, and try not to get blown up. But Coward also has a couple of private missions, much derided by Price: to cover himself in enough glory to outshine his ne’er-do-well brother, and to keep the flaky officer Captain Dangerfield from winding up as dogmeat. All the comic devices you’d expect are present and correct – an ill-timed calvados binge with a smelly old Frenchman, a madcap ride on a runaway horse, fellatio inter

ruptafrom a dead Nazi’s mistress, and so on. But there’s more to the novel than that. The terror of the Normandy landings is precisely portrayed, and at times humour plays wingman to the carnage on the beach. Delingpole’s experience in interviewing veterans of the Second World War has obviously influenced the narrative, and there’s a constant play between Coward’s amusing episodes of derring-do and the tragic waste of life on both sides. Flashman was a self-confessed cad, happy to admit that his primary career motivations were whoring, mischiefmaking and personal profit, cheeking off Johnny Foreigner for the sake of it and coming home with a good yarn. Coward is more of a decent chap, angling to do his duty and marry the chick, but also to pass down to his inquisitive grandson something of the last war that truly touched everyone. Whatever the marketing blurb, at this early stage it seems there’s a deeper layer to Coward than mere cheek, spunk and bluster – as further volumes will no doubt reveal. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LETTERS

DROPPEDINTHEGUMBO

Sir, Why decry genius? I challenge Charles Elliott to name a more consequential book publisher of the last century than James Laughlin, who founded New Directions in 1935 and remained its fiercely independent owner until his death in 1997 (LR, July). The fairies must have filled his slippers with thorns the night before he wrote his review of The Way it Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin (‘mysterious’, ‘banal’, ‘would have done better to stay in the files’). Laughlin was six-five, a manic depressive, a poet and lady’s man – not a wheeler-dealer publisher and certainly not a salesman. His first strength, which this book illustrates brilliantly, was that he loved people. His other was his judgement. He had only two misses: Beckett and Nabokov (Lolita and the later novels). There is no sign that he regretted pushing Nabokov and his manuscript towards Girodias. In 1955 Lolitawas a dirty book, no question about it (‘I wrote saying: “Volya, you are so sophisticated, you may not realise the effect this book is going to have on the college community ... Your wife will be ostracised, stones will be thrown at your child.”’) Otherwise he took on all the great ones when no one else would. He kept their books in print and stuck by them through thick and thin, often the latter. The year George Oppen won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the sales of his winning book were negative. A good project would be to print an annotated edition of Laughlin’s trade catalogues. One reason he could afford New Directions was that from time to time he had a hit. At one point Siddhartha was selling a quarter of a million copies a year. The

other reason was that he inherited a steel fortune. This enables Elliott to nail him as a ‘spoiled rich kid’. I do not think he meant it jestingly. His few favourable remarks about the book fail to ring true. He is also exercised by the production. However, no one has worried about ‘gulfs of white space’ since paper rationing ceased fifty years ago. The ‘disorienting’ typefaces are necessary to distinguish between the different voices. When called for, the type is large. And the thickcoated paper stock enables the photographs to shine. I pray daily, God give the book trade another Laughlin. It baffles me why Elliott should talk this book down so. A philanthropist-genius should be stuck up there on a plinth, not dropped in the gumbo. Every reader of this journal should buy The Way it Wasn’t for total unadulterated pleasure and as a protest against ordinaryism. James Fleming Wick, Caithness BLACKMASS Sir, Alan Ryan, in his review of John Gray’s Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (LR, July), quotes the author as saying that ‘...Hitler was the product of the Enlightenment’ and comments that ‘One might think that whatever else Hitler stood for, it was not the values of the Enlightenment’. But in his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell states quite categorically that ‘...Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau’. Can all this be true? I think we should be told. Peter Tallon Geneva. Switzerland

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 FICTION

SIMONBAKERON

FOURFIRSTNOVELS

Gifted (Viking 272pp £16.99), by Nikita Lalwani, is a novel about the awfulness of being a child prodigy. Rumi, who was

ALICE, THE HEROINE of Julie Maxwell’s darkly comic debut, You Can Live Forever (Jonathan Cape 288pp £15.99), is a member of the Worldwide Saints of God, a Christian sect which promises immortality to its followers. Their leader, William P Pope, is the author of such books as Christian Life on Other Planets, and of a monthly bulletin, ‘The Plain Truth’, which contains all the latest prohibitions (mostly onanismrelated). Alice’s horrid mother and dull brother are dedicated ‘Worldwiders’, but her father, who married Alice’s mother before she converted, is not. He is a cheerfully amoral Irishman, devoted to Alice but willing to cremate murder victims in his incinerator for the right fee. Recently, Alice has begun questioning the truthfulness of The Plain Truth. She is a bright Oxford student who struggles with a religion which does its members’ thinking for them. However, she fears that apostasy might be met with damnation, and so tries (without much success, naturally) to reconcile her religion with her wider views. This is a very promising first novel, in which Maxwell demonstrates wit, elegance and great insight. On several occasions she takes a familiar phrase or notion and observes it anew, sometimes to hilarious effect. There are some unsubtle touches – the religion is so insane that Alice’s adherence to it seems improbable; also the language of a character who is Spanish is of 1970s-sitcom standard – but overall this is an excellent debut work. Another youngster tries to grow up in Zoology (HarperPress 291pp £12.99), by Ben Dolnick. Henry Elinsky, a teenager living in a comfortable East Coast suburb, drops out of college for a year and, rather than live with his parents, moves to his brother’s New York apartment, to develop his saxophone playing into a profession – something his sax-playing father never did. Unfortunately, things don’t work out smoothly. Henry takes a mundane job in the children’s zoo in Central Park, and later discovers that he doesn’t have the talent to make it as a musician. His brother’s girlfriend resents his being in the apartment, and his parents’ marriage becomes shaky. All this could be rescued by Margaret, a girl living in the same block, whom Henry falls for. However, Margaret has a boyfriend, and while she encourages Henry’s affection to a point, she never allows it to progress. Henry’s problems may mount up, but each alone – jobhatred, unrequited love, downsizing of dreams, dissolution of family – is the kind of knock experienced by many people, and Dolnick sensibly acknowledges this in the tone of the novel. For the most part, Henry remains balanced and good-humoured in the face of his trials, and the novel’s tenor is conversational and wry rather than despairing. Near the end the author briefly moves the beleaguered Henry into slightly darker territory, but with less success. However, while Dolnick may write deeper, more textured work in future, this is a controlled, well-paced, enjoyable start.

born in Cardiff to Indian parents, was five when her talent for mathematics was discovered. Since then Mahesh, her father, a mathematics lecturer, has regimented her life around study. The results are, first, that she takes A-level maths at fourteen and enrols at Oxford the following year and, secondly, that she is utterly depressed at having her childhood and her natural exuberance crushed: at one stage, while sitting a mock exam set by her father, she walks out and dials 999 simply to hear a human voice. What makes this novel successful is the author’s ability to sympathise broadly. Mahesh is not a monster; he is a solicitous father who believes that for Indian people in 1980s Britain, success comes only to those with preternatural talent. Unfortunately, in trying to do his best, he alienates his daughter and creates a life far worse than the one of mediocrity from which he tries to liberate her. Rumi herself is superbly drawn, far more interesting than the standard idiot savant of fiction. She is genuinely fond of maths, but in other respects is unspectacularly childlike: addicted to sweets, longing for friends, therefore destined never to be fulfilled by sitting in front of a mountain of past papers. Her gift is a curse, because it keeps her in isolation but is not enough on its own to sustain her. Rumi’s plight is touchingly drawn in this likeable novel. Goodbye Lucille (Jonathan Cape 320pp £11.99), by Segun Afolabi, is narrated by Vincent, a Nigerian photographer working freelance in licentious mid-1980s Berlin. Vincent longs to be a famous photographer, but is far too lazy to be anything other than average; he therefore drifts from nightclub to nightclub, living a life of empty hedonism among friends including Tunde, a Nigerian playboy, and Clariss, a gigantic transsexual. Home is a shoebox apartment with an empty fridge. Early on Afolabi captures the ennui of a directionless life very well. The sweaty clubs, throbbing to Michael Jackson and Shalamar, are effective examples of noise without emotion – all disco but no soul – and you can sense the crisis bubbling under in Vincent. However, the author does not move on from this, and the novel becomes repetitive. There are ways in which it might have gained greater purpose. Vincent has hang-ups relating to his childhood, and his relationship with Lucille, his London-based girlfriend, is decaying; meanwhile, a politician whom he photographs is murdered. None of this, however, is brought in with conviction. Lucille remains in the background, and the lack of chemistry between her and Vincent makes the plausibility of their relationship questionable. At the same time the darker aspects concerning the murder are likewise kept on the margins of the action, so the narrative soon simply meanders from club to club, much like Vincent himself. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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