Beware nightcap needlework
The Finger: a handbook Angus Trumble
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 256PP, £18.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £17.10
A 01420 592974
ngus Trumble has a way of looking at hands that will leave you examining your own, and other people’s, in intense detail. His survey of fingers begins with a chapter of art history exhorting you to study the hands of the Old Masters as nineteenth-century scholar Giovanni Morelli did, using them as a guide to a painter’s own personal style – the key to whether or not a work is by a master or his pupil. He encourages viewers to look at the hands of the figures in Picasso’s Guernica, for example, and to find in them a distillation of the horrifying eloquence of the picture’s whole. In spite of such scholarly beginnings,
Trumble’s history of the hand then veers off in any number of entertainingly divergent directions. He anatomises the hand in all its muscles, joints, digits and arteries. He runs through a linguistic history of phraseology relating to the finger, and so we learn that “to put the finger in your eye” meant to feign weeping, leading persons suspected of doing this repeatedly to be known as having a “wet finger”. He considers the hand of God, from the Sistine Chapel to the writing by Jesus, on the ground, followed by the famous phrase from St John’s gospel: “Let him who is without sin …”. His interests aren’t confined to the digits themselves but also to their accessories. There’s a chapter on gloves, in which we are told that, “Charles IV, King of Spain, was apparently so much under the influence of any lady who wore white kid gloves that the use of them at Court was strictly prohibited.” There’s a chapter on nail polish, which contains the best quote of the book. According to the Pall Mall Gazette of 1886: “The hand with small nails buried in flesh is like a face with sightless eyes … The nearly nailless may be kind, useful people, but they discover no Utopias.” In the same chapter, we discover that, in 1934, a Dr Menninger from Kansas presented a case to the American Psychiatric Association stating that “‘bobbed hair and tinted nails’ were a form of self-mutilation no less harmful than … starving oneself to death”. Here are injured fingers, such as that of the eighteenth-century actress Mrs Billington, who had to cancel a London appearance because of a pinprick to her thumb, “an accident sustained while sewing a yellow chin-stay to her husband’s nightcap”. There are communicative fingers, such as those of the tenth-century Benedictine monks at Cluny, who signed, in order to bypass the rule of silence. (Trumble also notes that the gesture for “trout”, a
seconds a minute. All these are said to derive from the Babylonian count of the 30 finger joints of both hands. Trumble is clearly an erudite and
entertaining guide. The book is filled with finger-related puns and endless asides. In some cases, you wish he would expand further (“Incidentally,” he remarks at one point, “everything with a pulse scratches”) but, more often, readers may be left wanting less rather than more, as is evidenced by his riffs on, say, parallel parking or the modern mania for producing coffee in grande, venti and doppio-sized servings where once there was just a
rippling fishy motion of the hand, also meant “woman” – a fact which is partly explained by its derivation from the fall of a distinctive type of headdress worn by Frenchwomen of the period.) There are counting fingers, like those of the ancient Babylonians, who divided the physical world into 360 geometrical degrees, relating to measurements of time divided into 360 days a year, and further divisions into 60 minutes an hour and 60
NOVEL OF THE WEEK Scotland the brave
And the Land Lay Still James Robertson HAMISH HAMILTON, 688PP, £18.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £17.10
Four years in the writing, it spans 60 years and three generations, is divided into six parts and many voices, styles and perspectives, while dallying around the central enigma of modern Scottish identity. Some undertaking. Each page creaks with cultivated detail; the landscape, dialect and all manner of curious cultural footnotes are powerfully and plainly evoked. We begin with a refracted glance at the authorial dilemma; Michael Pendrich, son of a famous photographer, is given the task of curating a new exhibition of his father’s work. He struggles repeatedly to put his thoughts in order, but the first passes are trivial, dry and affected. As he mulls over the images, the narrative passes from person to person, sometimes obtusely, until we realise that each new face is caught somewhere in the frame of one of the photographs. Throughout the novel we move between
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his is the sort of novel for which words like “sprawling” were first invented.
“cup”.
The Finger is informative, wide-ranging and fun, if not particularly academic. It may be none the worse for that, but if you want a study of the subject with greater intellectual rigour, pick up a copy of Raymond Tallis’ Michelangelo’s Finger. And do remember to pause, while you’re doing it, and appreciate the wonder of having opposable digits. Nicola Smyth
war veterans, politicians, radicals and criminals. Moments and characters overlap and the same key questions recur: devolution, independence, control, class and destiny. The size of the novel reflects its grand concerns. In spite of this, the characters are never ciphers for authorial opinion. The writing comes most powerfully alive when they emerge from the shadow of their histories: the unfortunately named James Bond, an alcoholic spook with a hundredweight of grudges, arrives in clipped, noirish sentences, perfectly reflecting the extent of his paranoia. The complex inner life of Jack, a survivor of the Japanese prison camps, committed nationalist and inveterate wanderer, is wonderfully caught in the split between the other characters’ observation of his brusque exterior and the interspersed passages in which the reader is with him, striding through the landscape and thrilling to each new discovery. As with many books of this scope, there is a thrill in teasing out the connections or spotting characters most likely to return. Robertson allows this in abundance and there is something acutely Dickensian about the manner in which the manifest threads are pulled together at the final unveiling of Michael’s exhibition. He does, however, avoid the cleanest of resolutions and leaves us dangling on the point of history. Some stories, he seems to suggest, cannot be ended on the page. Nick Garrard
6 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 25
Handy work: a study by Nicolas de Largillière in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York
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