Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Keith Lowe

The road to firebombing Tokyo was paved with good intentions

In the 1930s, a group of American airmen had a dream. Air power, they believed, would do away with the need for armies and navies. The aeroplanes of the future would be able to drop bombs so accurately that there would be no need to kill soldiers in their millions: a handful of strikes on a few key factories would be enough to cripple an enemy’s economy and force them to sue for peace. It did not take long for this dream to turn sour. When the second world war broke out, the Americans soon discovered that their precision bombing was not nearly so precise when they were being shot

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Lauren Hough: Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

29 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Lauren Hough – author of an outstanding new collection of autobiographical essays called Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing which describe a life that took her from growing up in the Children Of God cult via being discharged from the US Air Force and jobs as a bouncer in a gay bar and a “cable guy” on the road to being a writer. She tells me about not writing a misery memoir, what elites don’t know about working class life, “lesbian drama”, and the benefits of revising your work on magic mushrooms.

Thursday

Simon Winchester

An orange or an egg? Determining the shape of the world

Thirty-two years ago the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage in dugout canoes and boarding a Quito-bound steam train through the Andes, run by the estimable Empresa de Ferrocarriles Ecuatorianos. Their journey had its moments: at one stage both parties were to be found at 13,000 feet, crusted with ice and huddled overnight from the gales inside a pair of plastic rubbish bags; they then

André Van Loon

The sweet smell of success: the story behind Chanel No 5’s popularity

This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt, begins by stating he didn’t know anything about his chosen subject of perfume beyond going into department stores and duty-free shops to encounter a ‘peculiar mélange of scents… the light and sparkle of crystal, the rainbow of colours, mirrors and glass’. Although he always felt this to be an alien environment, he was also repeatedly captivated. Then by chance he discovered a link between Chanel No. 5 and the Soviet perfume Red Moscow. Intrigued, he went on an intellectual journey to find out the shared and distinctive histories of France

Peter Pomerantsev

Russian memoirs are prone to a particular form of angst

Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and German the pluperfect describes actions completely completed at a definite point in the past… Early Russian had such a tense, but it was erased. This grammatical lack costs its speakers dear. Russian history never becomes history. Like a stubborn page in a new book, it refuses to turn over. Thus wrote the Soviet dissident and writer Igor Pomerantsev, my father, during his exile in London in the 1980s. When I returned to Russia in the 2000s I had the sense that beneath the Potemkin democratic veneer, Putin’s Russia was actually

Emma Beddington

Good luck enjoying eating salmon ever again

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly. That is the paradox he sets out to unpick in this densely factual and intermittently horrifying book: how a world in thrall to cuteness, endlessly compelled to click on videos of kittens and owls having a special friendship, can remain indifferent to the suffering of almost all other animals, whether farmed, in captivity or in the wild. That’s a tough brief. I’m not sure it’s a book I would choose off the shelf, because the subject matter is deeply unpalatable. The facts and figures — intensely researched and carefully woven

Lee Langley

Brave new virtual world: The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, reviewed

Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a computer scientist, Asha Ray, the narrator of The Startup Wife, her charismatic husband Cyrus and best friend Jules are nervously pitching their app platform — Asha’s cutting-edge algorithm aimed at people yearning for ritual without religion. Drawing on dreams, obsessions and secret desires — an Odyssey wedding, Game of Thrones funeral, pharaonic celebration — the app will create micro-communities of users; a virtual parish. Their startup gets the crucial nod, and they join the cool, shiny Utopians who are pursuing projects to support humanity ‘when there’s nothing left’. ‘You’re planning

Graeme Thomson

The foghorn’s haunting hoot is a sad loss

Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill near Birkenhead, in a cottage which houses the archive of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers. In a small bedroom long since surrendered to the past, she is handed a homemade CD of 90 foghorn recordings of ‘uncertain provenance’. Let’s call them Bootleg Blasts. She sits on the end of the single bed, craning her neck, ‘listening for more than what is there, listening for answers, listening for meaning’. Allan is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster with a passion for experimental music: I have had a long affair with ‘weird’

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Bird-brained: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, reviewed

This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness — that belong to the nameless narrator of Brood. That is incidental. It is a novel about a miscarriage — ‘our baby had been a girl’ — and, because it is a novel about the loss of a child pretending to be a novel about chickens, it is a brilliant novel about chickens. They have a biographer now, but they can’t be grateful, and that is why she loves them. ‘By the time a snowflake has landed, snowflakes are all a chicken has ever known.’ Or: ‘Gloria is wedded to

Anthony Sattin

The empire that sprang from nowhere under the banner of Islam

When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America, they already had many centuries’ experience of foreign involvement. One of the most remarkable aspects of the force that reshaped Eurasia 1,000 years earlier is that there was no prelude: the Arab conquests, and the Islamic empire that they created, came out of nowhere. By the time of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 most of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula had united under the banner of Islam, some out of faith, others from expediency. But few people outside Arabia knew who Muslims were or worried about

Alex Clark

An impossible guest: Second Place, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial. For the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, whose most recent creation, the ‘Outline’ trilogy, attempted a savage blending of the two forms, risk comes frequently in the form of sailing dangerously — and, for her admirers, thrillingly — close to the parodic. Second Place, which in bare-bones description tells of what happens if you invite

Craig Raine

Poems are the Duracell batteries of language, says Simon Armitage

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’. Simon Armitage saying the same thing, memorably, genially, metaphorically, democratically: ‘How much power and force could be stored in — and retransmitted by — such compact shapes. Poems as the Duracell batteries of language.’ Both poets go straight to the point. But a shift has taken place — in tone, in attack — which can be illustrated also by the photographs Armitage found as a ‘sleep-walking’ teenager leafing through Worlds, a sampler of seven contemporary poets, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield: ‘Norman MacCaig watched television and smoked fags.’ We are in

Simon Ings

Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined it: a place of pre-established harmony, whose patterns are accessible to reason. It’s an optimistic world, and a theological one: a universe presided over by a God who does not play dice. It’s most decidedly not a 20th-century world, but ‘in any case’, as Gödel himself once commented, ‘there is no reason to trust blindly in the spirit of the time’. His fellow mathematician Paul Erdös was appalled: ‘You became a mathematician so that people should study you,’ he complained, ‘not that you should study Leibnitz.’ But

Alex Diggins

A draining experience: Insignificance, by James Clammer, reviewed

Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a plumber and the hero of James Clammer’s arresting novel, is having a pig of a day. He’s slept poorly. It’s the umpteenth day of a heat wave, and the biscuits left by his client Amanda Margaret Hollander are ‘a dispiriting selection, childish and sugary… unmanly biscuits’. Plus, despite her tight, ‘iridescent’ trousers, Amanda Margaret seems uninterested in a ‘little dallying, a little flirting’ and dashes off, leaving him to the job. Which, it transpires, is far more difficult than promised: ‘Truly, if it isn’t one thing it’s the other.’ For

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Julian Sancton: Madhouse at the End of the Earth

43 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Julian Sancton, whose new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, documents the crew of men who were the first to experience an Antarctic winter trapped in the ice, in an attempt to reach the South Pole. Sancton tells me about the background of some of the eccentric characters that made up the Belgica – and the stomach turning cuisine that is penguin meat.

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Stirling Moss’s charmed life in the fast lane

‘Who do you think you are — Stirling Moss?’ a genially menacing traffic cop would ask a hapless motorway transgressor. At the peak of his popularity as the most successful English motor-racing driver, Moss personified the glamorous daredevilry of racing at top speed. Richard Williams, the author of this sympathetic, exhaustive anatomy of an international sporting hero, part-time playboy (‘chasing crumpet’) and ultimate family man, is a veteran sportswriter for national broadsheets. He has also written critically acclaimed books, including one with the wonderfully comprehensive title A Race with Love and Death. This new portrait of Moss is based on close acquaintance with all sorts of people involved in motor

Joanna Pocock

The many contradictions of modern motherhood

There are few certainties in life. Death and taxes are the ones regularly trotted out. However, there is another that rarely gets mentioned: the fact that every single human who has ever existed has come out of a woman’s body. This act of creation, while being a marvel, has also become banal. In Motherhood, Eliane Glaser deftly juggles the wonder and boredom, the joy and pain and the many profound contradictions that attend modern motherhood. Philosophers, child psychologists and anthropologists from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Donald Winnicott and Margaret Mead provide cultural and social contexts for how our attitudes towards motherhood have changed throughout history. ‘There is enormous diversity in the

James Walton

Haunted by the past: Last Days in Cleaver Square, by Patrick McGrath, reviewed

At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in a particular author’s work to say? (For one of Irvine Welsh’s, a single word of four letters might be enough.) In the case of Patrick McGrath, I’d suggest, the answer comes on page 55 of his new novel: ‘I confess I feel that my sanity is under threat.’ McGrath famously grew up in the grounds of Broadmoor, where his father was the medical superintendent, and his consequent lifelong interest in psychiatry is reflected in pretty much all of his fiction. As a rule, if you’re a McGrath protagonist, you’re likely

Adam Sisman

Arthur Bryant: monstrous chronicler of Merrie England

If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops. Obsolete volumes rest undisturbed on their shelves. The more popular they once were, the more unwanted copies accumulate. An almost inevitable presence nowadays is Sir Arthur Bryant, in his time a bestselling writer on historical subjects but now slumbering among the Great Unread. To browse in one of his books is a nostalgic experience. Their very titles — English Saga, for example, or Set in a Silver Sea — are evocative. They tell ‘our island story’, of an idealised agrarian past populated by merry monarchs, honest yeomen farmers, sturdy John

Clare Mulley

Out-scooping the men: six women reporters of the second world war

Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced them to dive for cover. What the hell were they doing trying to cadge a ride when ‘war correspondents have their own jeeps and drivers?’ an American officer barked at them as his car screeched to a halt beside the shallow crater they had commandeered. ‘We happen to be women,’ Ruth Cowan replied steadily, as she straightened up and shook off the dust along with his words. Cowan was the first female journalist attached to the US army but, as a woman, she was denied the official facilities provided for