Book Notes
The Emperor of Misfortunes
It seems impossible that a man who was once the supreme leader of an entire nation could disappear from history. For 80 years, Bahadur Shah II, the Mughal Emperor of India, wielded a power that would be unimaginable today. A humane man, Bahadur Shah was also a sensitive soul who wrote poetry. How and why this most benevolent of rulers was erased from the collective memory of his race is the mystery William Dalrymple has solved in a new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857.
Piece by piece, Dalrymple uncovers the mosaic of Bahadur Shah's life, obscured by a century-and-a-half of destruction. Born into fantastic luxury, Bahadur Shah made it his spiritual mission to unify the Hindu and Muslim faiths. Unfortunately, Bahadur Shah's reign became a catalogue of misfortunes, mostly due to the machinations of British Imperialists. These disasters culminated with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when attacks on British colonists were used as an excuse for genocide. William Dalrymple is one of the greatest living authorities on Indian history and The Last Mughal completes the final chapter in the story of a wise and noble dynasty.
Premium Bond
Like it or not, James Bond is one of the most inflential icons in modern culture. Now that Daniel Craig has acquired the black tuxedo, misogynist outlook and licence to kill for the 21st movie in the series, it seems inevitable that a whole new generation will be caught up in the frenzy of this lucrative franchise. Coinciding with the release of the new Bond movie, Casino Royale, is the publication of The Art of Bond, the definitive visual guide to the James Bond movies. A massive coffee-table book, it contains interviews with all the key Bond figures and is illustrated with hundreds of colour stills, posters and on-set photographs. Also reproduced are conceptual drawings by the legendary set designer Ken Adam. Enthusiasts will also find character profiles including the various 007s, the glamourous Bond girls, M, Q and, Book Notes' favourite, the bald white cat-stroking megalomaniac Blofeld.
Casino Royale is supposed to be a return to the Bond envisaged by creator Ian Fleming. Those who want to judge how authentic Craig's performance is should hunt down the original Fleming novels, all of which have been stunningly reissued and are at last considered serious literature.
The Smell of Success
German writer Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume is one of those books that is not supposed to be possible. First published in 1985, it was internationally praised as a brilliantly intriguing and unusual work of fiction from a writer with a unique, if grotesque, view of human nature and the obsessions that corrupt it. Suskind's tale concerns Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an 18th-century madman whose superhuman sense of smell allows him to become king of the city's perfumiers. Perfume sold by the cartload. Despite film producers thrusting juicy offers under his nose, Suskind refused to sell the movie rights until last year.
The film adaption of Perfume, starring Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, is due in cinemas between now and the new year. As for the reclusive author, Suskind has recently published On Love and Death, an 80-page meditation on the artistic connection between these primal themes. Drawing on the Greek myths, the writings of Goethe, Jesus of Nazareth and Heinrich von Kleist and written in Suskind's inimitably morose and mordant style, On Love and Death should have them rolling in the aisles. Fortunately, things are not all bleak since Suskind agrees with Oscar Wilde that "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death".