Book Notes 18-01-07

Idi and I; Partners in mind; Genderbender

Idi and I

The seductive power of evil is a theme that literature has constantly revisited. One of fiction's great attractions is that it allows us to move disturbingly close to the kind of figure we hide from in reality. A novel that plays brilliantly upon this dark facet of human psychology is Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland, in which a young Scottish medic named Nicholas Garrigan forms a terrifying friendship with Idi Amin in 1970s

Uganda. A sensation when it was first published in 1998, The Last King of Scotland has made a protracted transition from page to screen but the result seems to be worth the wait. The film, which stars the exceptional young actor James McAvoy as Garrigan, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson and the always excellent Forest Whitaker as Amin, has just been released in Europe after winning outstanding reviews in America. The screenplay is by Peter Morgan, one of the most acclaimed new British writing talents, whose play Frost/Nixon became the biggest success of last year on London's West End. Book Notes usually approaches anything that claims to be ‘based on a true story' with a measure of apprehension but it seems impossible that Amin could be portrayed as any more cruel or insane than he actually was.

Partners in mind

Philosophers are always depicted as solitary minds, outsiders who consider the world only in abstract terms and rarely descend from their higher plane to engage with other people. As usual, this assumption is based upon nothing. As thinkers go, philosphers are an especially rowdy breed and love company. The gregarious Greeks enjoyed lengthy drinking sessions, David Hume had a reputation for going on the tear when on the continent and even the dreaded Schopenhauer was a ladies man. Most notorious of all was the fraught-yet-fruitful relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In a new book called Tête-a-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Hazel Rowley looks at how the two philosophers lived and worked to develop existentialism, one of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th Century. Sartre, the brain behind cheerful books like Being and Nothingness, was dimensionally deficient and had a squint and de Beauvoir, the author of The Second Sex, was frosty. Together they formed a creative dialectic which began in the 1930s, enjoyed massive attention in the 1950s and 1960s, ending only with Sartre's death in 1980. The cafés of Paris have never been the same without them.

Genderbender

Imagine paradise. Conceive in your head a world of cloudless skies, tranquil lakes and emerald fields that have never known a winter. Now imagine that this sublime world is populated only by females with nothing to do other than lie back in the sunlight and sleep. Before you begin to think that Book Notes has carelessly invited you to share a favourite daydream, or the details of one of Ken Russell's lost film scripts, let me explain that the above is in fact the premise of The Cleft, the new novel by Doris Lessing. It may sound like the fantasy of some nerdy sci-fi nut, but Lessing is convinced there was a time in this planet's history when there were only females, even if they were a race of porpoises. The Cleft is the record of an early Roman scientist who, being the last person to remember the ancient legend of man's first appearance on the Earth, has decided to commit it to paper. Without plot, setting or dialogue, The Cleft examines the fear and violence that accompanied the emergence of this new gender. If a more unusual story can be imagined, Book Notes would like to hear about it.