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Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
by Joe Gallagher
Everyman; 224 pages; £16.99
2000 has seen a large number
of high-quality works emerge from UK chess publishers, and whilst many of these
books, such as the BCF's book of the year, Sadler's Queen's Gambit Declined,
will greatly help their readers to improve, they are hardly something enjoyable
to tuck into over Christmas and New Year. Fortunately, and right on cue for
the Christmas market, comes this work on Tal by Joe Gallagher.
The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, Tal's autobiography covering his career up until 1975, was reprinted by Cadogan (now Everyman) in 1997, thus enabling many more to enjoy Tal's wizardry and to do so in algebraic notation. Gallagher has no wish to recover this ground and has instead decided to cover Tal's career from 1975-1992. This may seem a slightly surprising task until one remembers that Tal was in the world top 10 for much of the 1980s, finished third in the 1988 Reykjavik World Cup event, and, most importantly, was capable of brilliance right up to his death in 1992.
Gallagher is generous towards those who for some strange reason have still not read The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, as he devotes an introductory 28 pages to covering Tal's career up until 1975. Gallagher gives few games in this section, but does provide quite a full biography of all the major tournaments and matches in which Tal competed. This chapter is very enjoyable, partly because Gallagher's prose here flows well and also because he has included a number of stories, such as when Fischer tried to read Tal's chess fortune at the 1960 Leipzig Olympiad. Gallagher's admiration for Tal is very evident, whilst he also deals with all Tal's health problems in a very understanding and admirable manner.
The main bulk of this work is split up into six chapters: '1975-1978: Ups and Downs', '1979: Some Great Results', '1980-1984: Mixed Results', '1985-1986: Improvement - A Candidate Again', 1987-1988: Playing with the Good Guys Again' and '1989-1992: The Final Years'. When one looks at the list of Tal's tournament results at the end of this book it becomes hard to question the grouping of the material into these chapters, and all the more so when one has read the biography and seem the games. For instance 1979 was certainly a very successful year for Tal (2nd= at Tallinn, 1st= at Montreal and 1st in the Riga Interzonal) and one in which his magic was evident in a large number of his games.
For his six main chapters Gallagher has selected what he considers to be Tal's best 34 games, although he does also give other part games at times, such as to show how well Tal was playing in a certain tournament. These main 34 games are annotated in some depth, with often five or six pages being devoted to just one game, and Gallagher does a good job at trying to explain Tal's thought processes during a game. There are lots of variations, but these never become too long and fanciful, whilst Gallagher always ensures that he intersperses variations with text so that weaker players will still be able to appreciate Tal's genius. Many game collection works skip over theory, but not so Gallagher who not only explains the state of theory at the time of the game, so as to help readers to put the opening into context, but also explains the current view of a line, which is very useful if one is inspired by Tal to take up a certain opening. Gallagher's variations are fully Fritz-checked, whilst, although many of the selected games are quite famous, the annotations are very original as Gallagher initially annotated each game on his own, only later going back to amend with annotations, usually of an inferior standard, from other works.
The biography aspect of the six chapters dealing with Tal's career from 1975-1992 is very thorough, with the chess incidents of each event in which Tal competed being fully explained. Gallagher also gives some interesting insights into Tal's choice of lines and how he fazed some opponents, whilst there are still some interesting anecdotes included. Readers will quickly come to like Tal the chess player, but after a while will wish for a few more stories and maybe some more information on Tal the man. Gallagher ends his work with a short section devoted to 'What They Said About Tal', which mainly emphasises just how high the regard is in which both the chess world and Tal's rivals held him.
In his preface Gallagher writes, "it has been a great pleasure for me to work on the games of Mikhail Tal", and that, as Tal could not annotate these games, he has "done his best". As usual with books that authors enjoy writing here the final result is of a very high standard, and will fully help readers to appreciate and enjoy Tal's magic over this Christmas or whenever they read this work. This really is a book written by a large Tal fan for other Tal fans, and also a work which should create many more Tal admirers. I leave Gallagher to give the final reason, on top of his high quality analysis and good biography, as to why readers should want to purchase this book, namely as Tal was "a man who had no equal in bringing chess games to life".
Richard Palliser