BOOKS OF THE MONTH

IT HAS been said that James Carroll's Prince of Peace (just published by Hodder's at £9.50) "is the Catholic Church in the USA since the 1950s." It is an outstanding book, but a depressing one.
It weaves the fictional lives of two young men of the KoreaVietnam generation into the history of American Catholicism during that period. Cardinal Spellman is, if not the villain, the anti-hero.
The drama centres on the painful revolution of Catholic thought when embracing peace as against the mounting evil of a supposed "crusade" against communism which involved the same sort of brutality that inspired the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. The characters leap brilliantly to life in this all to realistic recreation of a painful chapter in modern "civilised" living.
Had it not been for the death of Bobby Kennedy, all might have been different.
The book, as I say, was so realistic as to be depressing. It
was a relief to turn to John Julius Norwich's spectacular "anthology" of the architectural gems of one part of our country. It is called The Architecture of Southern England (Macmillan £25.00) and is the fruit of seven or eight years of visits to more than a thousand houses, churches, stations, colleges, and palaces, et at.
In some cases village streets are described and if you happen yourself to know the spot in question, you can be in no doubt that every single entry is the fruit of genuine and meticulous personal investigation by this charming "courier."
It is a masterpiece of its kind full of penetrating observations and much wry wit.
John Julius takes us of course to Oxford. So does John Wilson (Lord Moran) as part of his quest for Fairfax (John Murray £13.50) a biography of that paradoxical military genius of the Parliamentary cause in the Civil war who first commanded Cromwell and was then
overshadowed by him.
This was largely because Fairfax was a thoroughly nice as well as a thoroughly good man; a man of balance and therefore an enigma to so many who have attempted to encapsulate his complex contribution to British history.
He did not want the first Charles killed and helped the second Charles back to the throne. He also knew that his country was sick, but desired a form of healing less horrible than that deemed "cruel necessity" by Cromwell.
He was, one might say, a martyr to the cause of moderation, and thus in need of a pen as sensitive as that of this urbane former diplomat — who wrote such a masterly life of Campbell-Bannerman — to give us this most attractive, but basically sad, portrait of "a moderate, common-sense puritan and a gentle person . . . who sought always to resist extremists and fanatics."
Would the Russian Revolution have escalated to the scales of hlarror which it did had some Fairfax figure been present to resist such similar pressures? It is true that there was Kerensky, but he came too late.
Behind the tragedy of it all Anthony (Lord) Lambton, in Elizabeth and Alexandra (Quartet Books f 10.95) turns his hand to the same genre as that used by James Carroll, namely "fraction."
His historical novel into whose researches he has poured enormous industry, tells of the pathetic tale of the Empress of Russia and her sister, Ella, who married the monstrously cruel Archduke Serge after whose assassination she started a remarkable order of nuns.
No one will ever know the real truth behind the legends of this confused period. But Lambton has got a new theory which is as compelling as his style and the perfectly measured tempo of his narrative.
No more gripping way of rereading this slice of history is easily imaginable.
GN