BOOK REVIEWS

By Ed Needham www.strong-words.co.uk

NON-FICTION

IN PRAISE OF FAMOUS HORSES

By Sean Magee (W&N, £9.99)

This is a compendium of equine celebrity from track, history and fable, arranged in classic A-Z format, from ‘Aaron’ to Zippy Chippy’. Aaron was a horse that once belonged to DH Lawrence, and although the novelist was not much known for his elegance in the saddle, he was supposedly so fond of Aaron that on the horse’s death he had its hide crafted into a duffel bag. Zippy Chippy was a “famous loser” on American tracks: 100 races, no wins. In between, one might find the hapless Mister Chippendale, which failed to win a walkover (a one-horse race) when his jockey forgot to weigh in; Hercules, winner of Carthorse of the Year at the fictional 1937 Acton Gymkhana and which provided the locomotion for the Steptoe’s rag and bone cart; Apocalypse, Four Horsemen of the; and Occident, the horse captured for all eternity in the famous Edweard Muybridge photograph. This was the image that proved the assertion of Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of California and founder of Stanford University, that at one point in the stride of a galloping horse all four hooves are off the ground, thus demonstrating that generations of equine artists, unable to imagine such defiance of gravity, were mistaken. Among the more detailed entries are a biography of Ronald, the horse that carried the Earl of Cardigan in the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. Being a little skittish, it required a slug of laudanum to help it lead the Earl’s funeral procession in 1868. And not forgetting Whistlejacket, subject of the 1762 George Stubbs masterpiece. The catalogue for a 1985 Tate exhibition claimed that Stubbs, having almost completed the painting in a yard where a stable lad was leading the horse up and down, took the picture off the easel and leant it against a wall to “view the effect of it.” On seeing its own oversized image, Whistlejacket began to “stare and look wildly at the picture” then tried to attack it, at which point Stubbs had to beat it off with his palette. A whistlejacket, Magee helpfully informs, is also a cold treatment made of gin and treacle.

AFTERMATH

By Harald Jahner (WH Allen, £9.99)

Before the Second World War, Germany laid claim to being the planet’s most cultured nation. After, it found itself back in the Stone Age. Or at least, the rubble age. The fighting left 500 million cubic metres of debris, among which “over half the population of Germany were neither where they belonged nor wanted to be, including 9 million bombed out people and evacuees, 14 million refugees and exiles, 10 million released forced labourers and prisoners, and countless millions of slowly returning prisoners of war.” How were they even to make it to the next day, let alone “become ordinary citizens again”? It became known as “no man’s time, laws had been overruled, yet no one was responsible for anything. Nothing belonged to anyone any more, unless they were sitting on it. No one was responsible, no one

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was ensured protection.” The author describes four Berliners, including an orchestra conductor, emerging from an air raid to find a white ox in the street. Starving, yet lacking abattoir skills, the conductor has enough Russian to seek guidance from a Soviet soldier, who helpfully shoots the animal. As the Berliners tentatively get to work with kitchen knives, hundreds of men, women and children emerge from basements and tear the carcass to pieces. “So this is what the hour of liberation looks like. The moment we have spent twelve years waiting for?” wrote one woman in her diary. First, though, the residents had to meet their liberators: the vengeful and rapacious Russians, and the unreal Americans, with their spectacular teeth and unthinkably casual style of lolling in their seductive vehicles. Also heading into this Year Zero rebuild was the Heimkehrer, or homecomer from the war, “barely recognisable, scruffy, emaciated and hobbling. A stranger, and invalid.” Women and children had survived and run the cities in their absence, and did not welcome these bad-tempered, ungrateful derelicts. Yet as the wreckage ebbed, one idea refused to take hold. Germany could not accept itself responsible for the war’s victims, preferring that role for themselves: their loss, their hunger, their rubble.

GLOSSY: THE INSIDE STORY OF VOGUE

By Nina-Sophia Miralles (Quercus, £12.99)

If ever a magazine understood the special relationship between women and shiny paper, it is Vogue. Launched as “a dignified authentic journal of society, fashion and the ceremonial side of life,” its pages have drawn the curious to its privileged glow since 1892. Whether they come to gawp at the hilarious prices or are genuinely seeking handbag silhouettes for autumn/winter, Vogue is fashion, and Glossy tells a jaunty story of elite relationships, business acumen and alluringly strange individuals. The great magazine entrepreneur Condé Nast bought the title in 1909 and aimed it squarely at a new market: extremely rich women. Using the finest editorial ingredients to create a luxuriant home for advertisers became the Condé Nast brand, and Vogue was its flagship. Nast, with his forensic socialising, deserves a book of his own, but the real stars are the outré terrors who plotted their way into the editor’s chair. The ultra-snooty Edna Woolman Chase (1914-52) told a poor staffer who had attempted suicide, “We at Vogue don’t throw ourselves under subway trains, my dear. If we must, we take sleeping pills.” Diana Vreeland (1963-71) took fashion to a new level – of expense (once spending the equivalent of $7m on a single shoot) – while also “providing extravagantly insane advice such as ‘Why Don’t You . . . wear violet velvet mittens with everything?’” Good question. Not even WWII dimmed the madness, with Hermès’ “exquisite leather cases for gas masks” a key Blitz accessory in the UK. The reign of Anna Wintour will be taught to business students for centuries to come, and one wonders what will remain when she retracts her personal nuclear core from the company. But even more urgently, does Vogue, unthinkable of unthinkables, risk falling out of fashion? Can an elitist brand make new friends in an age when diversity and inclusivity are the big credentials? And as Vogue has never shown the slightest interest in what anyone else thinks, will it have a go at “listening”?

FICTION

LAST DAYS IN CLEAVER SQUARE

By Patrick McGrath (Penguin, £8.99)

Cleaver Square is the Kennington, south London, address of the elderly Francis McNulty, to whom the last days of the title in part refer. Beneath this rambling old boy’s roof are a Spanish housekeeper called Dolores and a cat named Henry Threshold, plus temporarily McNulty’s daughter Gilly and sister

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Finty, who appeared “at dead of night in heavy rain dressed all in black, such that I was convinced she was the incarnation of Death Itself.” Also causing alarm is a spectral presence in “the uniform of a highly decorated military officer.” It is filthy, stinking and sometimes lurks in the garden, but at others stands weeping in McNulty’s bedroom, causing him to bring the bedsheet to his nose.

This disintegrating veteran is the generalísimo Francisco Franco, who at the same time is lying insensate on his deathbed in Madrid, a pathetic intubated husk, also running down his last days. McNulty has a sharp interest in the old fascist’s demise, having driven an ambulance for the Republicans at the siege of Madrid in the Civil War, and has plenty to share about his service, including rescuing an eight-year-old Dolores from a bombed-out house. To his daughter and sister though, the appearance of the old dictator is a clear indication of something else: that Francis is losing it.

Yet keen to harvest his more distant recollections is journalist Hugh Supple, seeking “context” for a piece on “the slim volumes of Romantic poetry” prompted by McNulty’s experiences under bombardment in Madrid. These memories are still robust, and this mixture of domestic squabble, furtive apparition and war reminiscence are a lively mix in McNulty’s charming voice; not the mutterings of an old nutter, but the prologue to a long-concealed revelation of beloved companions and firing squads, and the entourage’s decamping to Madrid, where old grievances will be addressed in a most original and satisfying fashion.

KITCHENLY 434

By Alan Warner (White Rabbit, £9.99)

K

itchenly 434 is the phone number that would at one time have connected a caller to Kitchenly Mill Race, the serene stately home and rural recording base of guitar hero Markus ‘Marko’ Morell. Mr. Morell is far too busy fulfilling the touring duties of a late seventies prog rock legend to spend much time at his mansion. Yet the vast pile must be held in permanent readiness, should the alert ever come through that the Morell Roller is heading for Sussex. Leading the team at Kitchenly, in his own mind at least, is Marko’s old childhood chum Crofton Clarke, who expounds in unintentionally entertaining detail on the complexity of his “retainer” role: the timer on the gates, the curvature of the drive, the curtain-pulling schedule of the house’s 55 windows; no aspect of his job description is too mundane to withhold. When once confronted with an empty fridge, Marko and his Scandinavian model girlfriend Aurelie took themselves off to Bali rather than face the unknown rituals of the village shop.

But when two local girls appear at the gates seeking autographs, the outside world intrudes, and Crofton slowly reveals himself to be utterly devoid of clue. His social skills require a far more urgent upgrade than any rock star’s inability to find a light switch, and his surreal and inappropriate interpersonal style comes to dwarf his employer’s vanities. The workplace can be rich and fertile soil in which to cultivate delusions of grandeur, and Crofton, while keeping the moat clean and the lawn clipped, has let his personal botanical garden of lunatic self-deception run to spectacular and uncontrolled seed. n