Killing the Dead

Paul Ferguson

2QT Publishing

£7.99

When Canada’s Paul Ferguson quit as Eurosport’s ice hockey commentator and then sold his business a short time later, many people thought he was getting ready for life on the beach. Those who really knew him, however, knew he had other plans.

Since stepping out of the corporate world he has become a full time writer with several short films under his belt including the BAFTA nominated My Darling Wife. And now he’s followed up with the publication of his first novel, a fast moving crime thriller, Killing the Dead.

“It feels strange not going to my office in London or picking up a microphone in either an ice rink or American Football Stadium,” says Ferguson. “It just goes to prove, you are never too old to make a career change.”

In Killling the Dead, investigative journalist Leigh Turner is trying to solve the death of her brother alongside that of both her parents in a car accident. Are they connected? And can she persuade veteran police detective Dan Scott to abandon his hostility to journalists and listen to her theories?

Meanwhile, Ferguson’s central character, Joe Tubbs,

a failed actor and script writer, is now puppet master in a string of macabre serial killings. He’s also luxuriating in the fact that, reminiscent of the Zodiac killer and others, the whole of California is talking about him as he finally lives the Hollywood dream.

All of which leaves Scott under tremendous pressure from City Hall to break the case as the bodies mount up.

A true thriller, making this an equally thrilling read. Wayne Hardman

The Resurrection of the Romanovs

Greg King & Penny Wilson

John Wiley & Sons

£23.99

The Grand Duchess Olga always said the woman claiming to be her niece was a fake. Yet for nearly a century, the myth stubbornly persisted that Anna Anderson was indeed Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, and that she had miraculously survived the execution of the rest of her family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.

The Anderson saga began in February 1920 when a distraught woman threw herself into the icy waters of the Landwehr Canal in Berlin and was rescued. Confined to hospital, the mysterious woman refused to reveal her name, giving rise to the legend that she was none other than Anastasia Romanov who she resembled. But was she?

Many wanted to believe that Anastasia had survived, including Romanov scholars Greg King and Penny Wilson who, in their new book, have written what must be the absolutely final word on Anna Anderson and her true identity.

According to King and Wilson, even Grand Duchess Olga wanted to believe it that her brother’s youngest daughter had eluded death. So she sent two separate delegations to interview the woman claiming to be her niece, which led to even more uncertainty. So, determined to know the truth, Olga herself went to Germany to confront “Anastasia” face to face.

Her verdict? The claimant was an imposter, Olga decided, because she did not speak Russian. And the more she looked at the claimant, the less resemblance she found. “My niece’s features could not possibly have altered out of all recognition. The nose, the mouth, the eyes were all different,” Olga concluded, before pronouncing that the claimant’s performance had been “a veritable coup de theatre.”

Yet the world — which wanted to believe the woman claiming to be Anastasia was exactly who she said she was — remained unconvinced, fuelling decades of debate and conspiracy theories. These included claims and counterclaims that the woman known as Anna Anderson, who became the subject of numerous books and films including the 1950s biopic starring Ingrid Bergman, was being denied by the surviving Romanovs because, if proven, she would be the sole inheritor of the Russian dynasty’s vast fortune.

But the story of Anna Anderson had a strong romantic appeal as well, keeping the pilot light burning on a lost world of incalculable splendour obliterated brutally and almost overnight by the Bolsheviks in a tawdry basement where the royal Romanovs were slaughtered in 1918.

Nor was it just Anastasia’s family that died that night. With their opulent era over so spectacularly, most of the surviving Romanovs were faced with a sobering new world, including Grand Duchess Olga who was eventually forced to flee Denmark at the end of the Second World War for Canada where she famously died in 1980 in a tiny apartment above a beauty salon in Toronto.

About Anna Anderson, however, Olga never changed her mind. And now her verdict has been completely vindicated by King and Wilson whose thorough-going research is, in all likelihood, the last and definitive word on the woman who would be Anastasia. Not only does The Resurrection of the Romanovs recount the full Anderson story since 1920 along with all its permutations, it also reveals for all time who Anderson really was and how she managed to fool so many people for such a long time, making this the definitive assessment of an imposter and the final interment of her story which, along with the Romanovs, has finally been put to rest.

Their lively retelling is also one fabulous read, making this a splendid achievement not to be missed even for readers unfamiliar with the original story. Paula Adamick

G.K. Chesterton

Ian Ker

Oxford University Press

£35

Like Leon Edel to Henry James or Martin Gilbert to Winston Churchill, Oxford University theologian Ian Ker has been primarily known as a literary acolyte to John Henry Newman (1801-90), generating not just the most esteemed biography of the man for our times but dozens of supplementary volumes where he addresses this or that aspect of Newman’s thought, introduces contemporary editions of Newman classics, or edits scholarly Newman symposia to which others writers contribute. When Ker published The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845-1961) in 2003 with extended essays on Newman (naturally), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, it was a pleasure to watch this always insightful writer set to work on fields he hadn’t tilled a dozen times before. And I was overjoyed to hear last fall that Ker was set to publish a full length biography of Chesterton (1874-1936) that would give him his due “as the successor of the great Victorian ‘prophets’ or ‘sages’, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and above all, Newman.”

Ker’s just released G.K. Chesterton is advertised as “the first comprehensive biography of both the man and the thinker and writer.” He certainly carries the day as far as the second claim goes but I think this volume falls a little short in portraying “the man”. And, if I may be so bold, I think the same can be said of his great Newman tome which was updated and expanded in 2009.

As a reasonably intelligent and well read Catholic, I was only able to appreciate the scholarship in Ker’s John Henry Newman after supplementing it with other writers’ accounts of the life – particularly Sean O’Faolain’s study of his early years, Newman’s Way, and Meriol Trevor’s two-volume biography comprising The Pillar of the Cloud and Light in Winter. From my perspective, even the biography of a life as ascetic, as religiously devoted and outwardly uneventful as Newman’s (I mean, good luck making a movie out of his life), needs a solid grounding in the world and the times of its subject. And this goes double for Chesterton.

So Maisie Ward’s two Chestertonian volumes from 1947, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and 1952, Return to Chesterton, still give us the fullest and most coherent account of the life. As a near contemporary, a friend and his publisher, Ward knew Chesterton the man in a way that no subsequent biographer ever will. Ker falls particularly flat whenever he recounts Chesterton travels – to America, Ireland, Rome, the Holy Land and Poland – producing little more than itineraries.

There are, however, a few occasions where Ker’s less involved approach pays happy dividends. Ker doesn’t get stuck in a few tar babies that have snarled up previous biographers and gives blessedly (and deservedly) crisp, objective and comprehensible accounts of the Marconi affair (Chesterton’s role in which gave rise to the unjustified charge of anti-Semitism), and his part-socialist, part-Medieval and totally boring theory about the equal distribution of property called Distributism. He was led into both those thankless quandaries more at the behest of his brother, Cecil, than himself and thus wasn’t following his own better instincts.

However, Ker’s great strength is his genius for critical exposition and, for this alone, this 788 page opus is invaluable.

In it, more than 75 books are given the peerless Ker treatment – their essence distilled, particularly noteworthy passages quoted, their significance noted in the development of his thought. The maddening thing about Chesterton is that while everything he wrote isn’t equally good in its entirety, there is greatness to be found somewhere in virtually every book. Decades ago I read an early monograph Chesterton wrote on the Victorian allegorical painter, G.F. Watts, and was thrilled to have some of its best bits recalled to me here in Ker’s write-up.

Ker claims that, “Perhaps the most serious way in which Chesterton has been underestimated is as a literary critic: this may be because, apart from his book on Browning, his best criticism is not of poetry but of prose. Whatever the reason, it is my hope that I have set out enough evidence to show that Chesterton is one of our great literary critics, to be mentioned in the same breath as Johnson.”

As far as great literary criticism goes, one calls to mind the old saw, “It takes one to know one.” Herman Goodden

The Last Colonial

Christopher Ondaatje

Thames and Hudson

£19.95

Sir Christopher Ondaatje is a man of many interests, talents and careers: an athlete, explorer, businessman, publisher, writer and patron of the arts. In Britain he has become celebrated chiefly for his patronage of the visual arts – in particular for his support of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the creation of a splendid new wing named after him at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and his original private museum and gallery on the northern Devon–Somerset border. But despite these achievements, it is literature I suspect that remains his favourite art (one of his beneficiaries has been the Royal Society of Literature, of which he is an honorary fellow).

This mosaic of essays, resembling non-fiction short stories, is probably the nearest we will get to reading a complete autobiography and it will be of considerable value to any future biographer. The book gives us glimpses of the author’s early adult life in Canada (revealing his passion for jazz and a wonderful Boy’s Own adventure as a member of the Canadian bobsledding team which won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in 1964). There are vivid and dramatic sightings too from his childhood days in Ceylon which have imprinted themselves on his memory and imagination. We are also taken on his extensive travels, quests, explorations and discoveries – journeys which reveal the stories behind his full-length studies of Sir Richard Burton, Ernest Hemingway and Leonard Woolf, as well as his search for the source of the Nile and his famous book The Man-Eater of Punanai.

Non-fiction writers, we are told, tend to embellish or exaggerate their facts, slightly shifting time or place ‘so as to make a narrative more evocative or more exciting for the reader’. Ondaatje does not indulge in such wayward devices, though he sometimes uses direct speech to make his effects more immediate. Essays and short stories have recently occupied an unjustly neglected corner of English literature. Many people have praised them, though few were to be seen reading them. But reading habits are changing – and changing fast. Those massive, well-regarded volumes of non-fiction scholarship which stood so proudly like galleons hugging the coast of Britain, as if defending her island culture from foreign vessels, have been becalmed and are retreating into harbour. In their place, moving with ease and elegance across the waves with the trade winds filling their sails, are fleets of smaller craft: fantastical and historical fictions, experimental hybrids and speculative non-fictions which travel with speed and ingenuity and are welcomed by other countries. We are less insular than we were.

In his Prologue, Ondaatje tells us of the ‘carefree wilderness’ of his childhood in Ceylon and how it was brutally followed by the unkind and gratuitous discipline of Blundell’s, the English public school to which he was sent in 1947 at the age of thirteen in the expectation of him being turned into an Englishman. In 1950, in what was to be his last year at Blundell’s, he received a letter from his mother in Ceylon, telling him that the family could no longer afford his school fees. ‘It was a shock’, he was to write in his book Woolf in Ceylon: ‘I had no idea of our financial troubles.’ He had left home as a member of a privileged colonial family with his father, a charismatic figure who ‘could lead anybody anywhere’ and ‘sell anybody anything’, presiding over the management of a prosperous tea estate.

But in 1948 Ceylon won its independence from the British Empire and this had a disastrous effect on the export of tea. The end of a political era was to produce a family upheaval. ‘I was obliged to start from scratch,’ Ondaatje wrote. He found himself at the age of seventeen in a London bank and afterwards emigrated to Canada, not returning to Ceylon (which by then had changed its name to Sri Lanka) for forty years.

For his colonial childhood Ondaatje retains an emotional sense of nostalgia though acknowledging that it is a lost world and that the dismantling of the British Empire was inevitable. The writer who now travels the modern world is a dedicated post-colonial, full of curiosity and a willingness to deal with the unexpected challenges. He is still the outsider who at Blundell’s learnt the wiles and strategies of cricket as a method of, and a metaphor for, escaping ill-treatment, overcoming inconvenience and transforming his outsider status into an asset. I do not know which team he supports these days when England plays Sri Lanka at cricket. What I do know is that he transferred his cricketing ingenuity to international finance, making good all that was so shockingly lost in his young adulthood. He has also, as it were, taken over the position of a beneficent colonial power in his role as patron. At Blundell’s he had learnt to find happiness though his love of English literature. It is this happiness, illuminating The Last Colonial, which he has pursued all his life. Michael Holroyd

Delectable Lie

Salim Mansur

Mantua Books

$25

UWO professor of political science and Sun Media columnist Salim Mansur has written a challenging new book, Delectable Lie, which he classifies as “a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism.” Its central contention is that, “although multiculturalism once seemed a very good idea, at least to politicians and others smitten with the ambition for unity, it is increasingly shown to be a lie – a delectable lie, perhaps, yet a lie nevertheless – that is destructive of the West’s liberal democratic heritage, tradition and values based on individual rights and freedoms.”

In a bid to be inclusive and welcoming to new citizens, Mansur argues, the liberal democracies of the West have developed multiculturalism programs which are founded on the proposition of another lie, that all cultures are equal and readily compatible with one another.

It is Mansur’s contention that the various multicultural initiatives put in place in the 1970s as a means by which to minimize the hardships of immigrants by making the break with their country of origin less total too often leave us not with new committed citizens but with dual citizens, migrant workers and spongers who have no intention of assimilating with the Canadian way of life and sometimes even hold it in contempt and work toward its destruction.

In one of the most fascinating chapters, Mansur contrasts the modern experience of immigrating to the West with the old which “involved considerable expense for travel by way of trains and ships over many weeks. The decision to make the journey required psychological preparation on the part of immigrants in both leaving their native land with some certainty of never returning, and of anticipating the new country with challenges ahead of settlement and assimilation.”

Today those life-altering journeys, increasingly drawn from Third World countries that may not share fundamental Canadian values, can often be made in a day at much less expense — financially, psychically, emotionally. And thanks to developments in global communication, many new Canadians no longer feel the same compulsion to take up residence in any sense except the physical.

This is an explosive expose that might have been rejected as a xenophobic rant if it hadn’t been written by a Muslim who himself emigrated to Canada in 1974.

“In Canada I found safety, support and the opportunity to begin a new life with all the promise my adopted home held forth for me,” he writes. “In time I came to feel uncomfortable with the notion of being a hyphenated Canadian. The part of me that belonged to the wider Indian culture I inherited at birth without any effort on my part. But the part of me, the much greater part, through the university education I acquired and the air I breathed as I mingled with the people around me at school, in work, and in politics, became by choice and conscious effort Canadian.”

Unlike some commentators who take on these hotly contested issues, Mansur never resorts to cheap shots. However wrongheaded he believes the architects of multiculturalism to be, he takes them at their word and respectfully presents their claims before convincingly repudiating them. Mansur does not eviscerate his opponents with the intoxicating glee of a Mark Steyn. And an occasional professorial clunker of a sentence requires a few readings to extract the sense, ie: “This deprecates the consequence that liberal democracy’s core principle of individual freedom is undermined by extending recognition to groups defined through collective identity opposed culturally to it.”

But you don’t set this book down with an uneasy sense that the author has been less than fair to those he disagrees with. Herman Goodden