Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Tomiwa Owolade

There’s nothing a white person can do about racism, says Dr Kehinde Andrews

After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is one of the hot-button issues of our time. And, according to Kehinde Andrews’s new book, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, it is embedded deeply in the West: A central thesis of this book is that White supremacy, and therefore anti-Blackness, is the fundamental basis of the political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas. Andrews maintains this uncompromising tone throughout. The book is partly a historical account of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism; it is also

James Hawes

Will the next generation wonder what the fuss over Brexit was about?

Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good, and we pick it up expecting much insight, because its predecessor was so wonderful. In The English and Their History (2015), Tombs, a scholar of French, not English, history, boldly saw the wood where specialists saw only the trees. Surely, he said, England should have a history of its own. The election had just signalled that England-and-Wales might soon be a separate polity for the first time since 1707. Tombs delivered a timely and gripping investigation of this land, so filled with marks of continuity, yet prone to occasional, apparently

Ali Bhutto

Cruelty and chaos in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society. In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived

David Wootton

An English 17th-century double portrait holds many clues to its meaning

This is a big book about a minor painting — a double portrait of John Bankes, aged about 16 (the son of the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes), and his tutor, Dr Maurice Williams. It was done in Oxford in 1643-4 by Francis Cleyn, a court painter. At the time, Oxford was the headquarters of the royalist army, and painters were busy recording for their loved ones Cavaliers who would soon be dead. In the left corner of the painting there is a copy of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in its Latin translation, open at the frontispiece, along with a globe and

Brian Martin

On the cowboy’s trail: Powder Smoke, by Andrew Martin, reviewed

Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway policeman investigates a supposed double murder, tracing a young fairground sharpshooter, Kid Durrant, through the Yorkshire countryside. The action takes place over five days in early December 1925, but is interspersed with flashbacks to the previous summer. At the York Gala, Stringer sees Durrant perform his fairground act, quick on the draw and deadly accurate with his pistol and rifle-shooting. His entertainment persona is a Wild West cowboy, presented with appropriate Western colloquialisms, spoken with an American accent acquired by way of Sheffield. The gala is observed by a rare

Gillian Reynolds

A burnt-out case: the many lives of Dr Anthony Clare

Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t know the half of him. Its authors are Brendan Kelly, professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry and Muiris Houston, a columnist for the Medical Independent and the Irish Times. Theirs is a meticulously sourced, clearly arranged, carefully assembled account of Clare’s packed life and multiple achievements. Yet through it thrums a sense that you can only really understand him if (a) you are a psychiatrist and (b) you are Irish. Born in Dublin, Clare was the youngest of three

Christopher Howse

God’s many mansions: a guide to the world’s greatest churches

The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain in 1964. ‘It takes an intimate knowledge of the place to find it.’ Today, the street running north-west from the Galata tower on the far side of the Golden Horn is quite chic. Turn right at the end and, above fig trees and trumpets of bougainvillea, you glimpse the lead-roofed spirelet of the church. It is by G.E. Street, the architect of St James the Less in Vauxhall Bridge Road, which also has stripes across nave walls and chancel vaulting. The competition to design the church in Istanbul demanded that

Suzi Feay

The Generic Asian Man: Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, reviewed

Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most crucial is that he has occasional small roles in an American TV detective series, Black and White, set in Chinatown. In a group of similarly complexioned jobbing actors, his scope is limited to Background Oriental Male, Striving Immigrant or Generic Asian Man. His dream, like everyone else’s, is to rise to the athletic heights of Kung Fu Guy. Printed in the form of a script, with a typeface that looks as though it’s come straight off a manual typewriter, Interior Chinatown comically charts Willis’s progress through the ranks of extras.

Viv Groskop

The art of the short story: what we can learn from the Russians

This is such a superb idea that it’s a wonder a book like this has not cropped up before. Here we have a critically acclaimed, best-selling novelist, who also happens to be a highly sought-after creative writing teacher, setting out the curriculum of his over-subscribed ‘How to Write’ class in a way that is accessible to anyone… and the book reproduces the texts under discussion. Wow. This has to be the best York Notes ever, flawlessly designed for the exam we all sit without realising: life. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain you get all Saunders’s commentary (which is both charming and addictive) and the original (translated)

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird: Good Grief

43 min listen

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are the writer and Women’s Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter — but a year ago they became ‘sister widows’, as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new book is called Good Grief: Embracing life at a time of death, and they join me to talk about grief in the time of Covid, how social perceptions of widowhood put pressure on the bereaved, and what they think needs to change at a societal and personal level with regards to how we treat death

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision. I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Dolly Parton represents all that’s best about America

After the storming of Congress last week, numerous American commentators looked at the Proud Boys, the QAnon Shaman and Trump himself and said, in so many words: ‘This is not who we are.’ Undoubtedly true. It raises, however, an interesting supplementary question: who, in fact, are you? Looking through the ranks of those who might represent the best values of America, we arrive quite quickly at Dolly Parton. She came from a family in rural Tennessee of both grinding poverty and honest, decent aspiration. Sacrifices on their part, and a 30-hour bus journey to Louisiana, let her make her first recording in 1959, at 13. Her first LP, in 1967,

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Dreading demobilisation: The Autumn of the Ace, by Louis de Bernières, reviewed

The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and his protagonist Daniel Pitt appear reluctant to leave warfare behind. Pitt is a flying ace, but so nervous about returning to civilian life that he argues against handing back his service weapon. Eventually he capitulates. During the war, he lost two toes after being tortured by the Gestapo but he nonetheless appears to prefer physical peril to the prosaic dysfunctionality of his family life. His mother and one of his daughters are dead, his marriage has disintegrated and he has fathered two children by his wife’s bohemian sister. His son

Hugh Thomson

Exotic and endangered: Madagascar in peril

Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the way the ocean currents work it was mainly settled by people from Borneo, 3,700 miles away — what Jared Diamond has described as ‘the single most astonishing fact of human geography’. For similar reasons, it is a biodiversity hotspot; more than 90 per cent of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth. And as one of the world’s largest islands, the sheer size can make it hard to assimilate. If ‘the Republic of Madagascar’, its formal title, were stretched out across Europe, the country would reach from London to

Allan Mallinson

Old men remember: reliving the horror of Tobruk

‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter Hart quotes the St Crispin’s Day speech aptly, for as an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, he’s done his bit over the years to record memories. By the 1980s the IWM’s sound archive had amassed an impressive collection of interviews with veterans of the first world war, and so began on those of the second. At Close Range weaves the recollections of 50 veterans (an unusually high number for a single unit) from what, as Hart puts it, some might consider a relatively obscure regiment, into a continuous

Clinton Heylin

‘There were no rules then’: Dana Gillespie’s 1960s childhood

Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the first 170 pages I remained convinced she should have taken a leaf from John Cleland and called it Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. For hers has been an extraordinary life (or perhaps half life, as the trail of hi-jinks runs its course by the end of the 1970s). And so, despite reading at times like a cross between Terry Southern’s Candy and Confessions of a Window Cleaner’s screenplay — but with A-listers the ones shaking their sticks — as an evocation of the 1960s SW7-style, Weren’t Born a Man

Jenny Colgan

House of horrors: Girl A, by Abigail Dean, reviewed

If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and losers (in a just world, Piranesi would still be at number one), January is a less frenzied time for new writers to launch. Even so, there are often hyped and hot new books — among which this year Girl A is one. It comes with excitable reports of huge international sales and an insistence that it will be everywhere. The accompanying blurb also manages to mention repeatedly that the author got a double-first at Cambridge, which, frankly, in these days of being ruled by Oxbridge inadequates who think that being

Chloë Ashby

The plight of the evacuee: Asylum Road, by Olivia Sudjic, reviewed

Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future. It begins and ends in a car — a couple ‘side by side, in motion with a change of view’ – and all the while the reader too is in a state of flux, unsettled. That’s a state Sudjic’s protagonist, Anya, is familiar with. Along with other unaccompanied children, she was evacuated from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Sent to live with her aunt in Glasgow, she’s been searching for a sense of belonging ever since.

Daniel Rey

Born out of suffering: the inspiration of Dostoevsky’s great novels

A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible manic depression. Few writers endure such dark lives or possess such bright creativity as Fyodor Dostoevsky. His incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes, from accounts of innocent suffering and crazed revolutionaries to nightmarish epileptic fits. He intended to reflect on his traumatic life by writing a memoir but, aged 59, he died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. In 1867, Dostoevsky had four months to write two novels (which amounted to 752 pages) Noting this literary vacuum, Alex Christofi challenges himself to write a sort of third-person memoir

Scott Bradfield

Murder most casual: why Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers are so chilling

Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief attraction of this third biography in 18 years (released to commemorate her 100th birthday) may be its brevity. From the time Highsmith was born (after a failed abortion attempt by her parents), her story starts off dark and then gets much, much darker. Raised in Fort Worth, Texas by the granddaughter of former slave owners, she survived the Spanish influenza to become a smart, hard-drinking student at Barnard, where she exploited, at every opportunity, her affections for pretty, well-bred girls. She wrote comics for a while (even going on a