Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

William Cook

Never a dull sentence: the journalism of Harry Perry Robinson

Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing biography, I was struck by how much they have in common — especially in their early lives. Both men went to public school, then on to Oxford, then into journalism, where they proved incapable of writing a dull sentence. They both divorced and remarried — and were also American citizens, for a while. Both dipped a toe into politics, but while Boris took the plunge, Harry stepped back and remained a jobbing hack until his dying day, the finest journalist of his generation. The biggest difference, however, is that Harry

Amy Wilentz

Toussaint Louverture: the true hero of Haiti

In Haiti you have to be careful which founding father you admire. The average Haitian will think first of Toussaint Louverture when talking about their island’s revolt against France in the late 18th century, and about the original idea of a full-fledged Black republic: Toussaint the stable, the intense, the military genius, courageous, careful. But for others, the real hero of the revolution is Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or Papa Dessalines, who is said to have connived with the French to remove Toussaint from power. Once France had exiled Toussaint, Dessalines turned on the French, rejecting their ‘peace’ and authority. He prosecuted the revolution to its bloody end, but without the restraint

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

41 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare – which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of what the form meant to our greatest poet-dramatist. They tell me what sonnets meant to Elizabethans, why so much of what has been said about ‘the sonnets’ has been wrong – they’re not a sequence, and it’s vain to look for a Dark Lady or Fair Youth in these candidly bisexual poems – and how

Thursday

Amanda Craig

Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed

Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality. Her original black comedy (Crooked Heart) concerned Vee, a middle-aged suburban scammer, and the prodigiously bright but orphaned Noel, who join forces in north London’s urban village during the second world war. Evans then went back in time to tell the story of Noel’s Suffragist godmother Mattie founding a disastrous girls’ club on Hampstead Heath during the 1930s (Old Baggage). In V for Victory, the story moves forward again. It’s 1944, and Hitler’s rockets are falling all over London. Mattie is dead. Vee is pretending to be Noel’s aunt and

Roger Lewis

Beauty and the beast: Jane Birkin’s love affair with Serge Gainsbourg

I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward plays and a cabaret singer who’d worked with Charles Hawtrey, and when I invited her to a party once she drove her Mini up the steps and into the hotel lobby. Jane’s father, David, had a good war, his boat picking up pilots and spies hidden by the Resistance on the Breton coast. He told me ’Allo ’Allo wasn’t a comedy, it was documentary realism. He endured many operations on his optic nerve. A piece of hip bone was grafted to his eye socket. His lungs, as Jane says, were

Ian Thomson

Should we all be prepping for the end of days?

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody believed Noah until it was way too late. Bunker: Building for the End Times, a hybrid of reportage and philosophical musing, considers contemporary survivalist culture in all its manifest craziness, from the doomsday realtors who sell bomb-proof, virus-free bunker space to the Bible-belt survivalists who pack their INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home) and bug out to bunker encampments in Wyoming in anticipation of the Final Judgment. In the modern concrete bunker Bradley Garrett sees an extreme expression of our fear of nuclear, chemical, biological and climatic calamity. Never before

Justin Marozzi

In just eight years Selim I became ‘God’s Shadow on Earth’

Faber must take a rather dim view of British readers’ historical awareness these days. This is a biography of one of the greatest Ottoman sultans in the empire’s 600-year history, yet the publishers cannot bring themselves to mention his name in the book’s title. Perhaps they thought Selim I was too obscure, and maybe they’re right, but their reticence is not shared by Alan Mikhail’s American publishers, who rightly give the sultan his due. Never mind. Mikhail, chair of Yale’s history department and a specialist in Ottoman history, makes it his mission to demonstrate how this utterly compelling leader helped define his age, bending the world to his will. And

Max Fletcher

A rainy day in the Highlands: Summerwater, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of Lake Semerwater. A beggar comes looking for alms but is turned away by everyone, save for a poor couple. As he is leaving, he curses the proud townspeople and water rises up and floods their houses, leaving only the couple’s hovel high and dry. In Summerwater, her seventh novel, Sarah Moss moves this tale north to a holiday resort by a Scottish loch and transforms it from a moralistic parable into a complex reflection on the contemporary situation. But she retains the haunting images of rising water and strangers being

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sport, for the English, has always been a defiant assertion of liberty

The English cannot be understood without some appreciation of their attachment to their games, and yet this is an area of their story often overlooked by historians. Or perhaps it is simply considered beneath their interest. This is the central message of Robert Colls’s superb account of England viewed through the medium of its sports and pastimes. Sport is ‘woven into almost everything else we do’ and it is about something much larger than merely chasing or hitting a ball, for it is bound up with playing the game, enjoying the land, sensing the liberty, respecting contestation, valuing home, showing a bit of heart, recognising it in others, knowing that

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Loyd Grossman: An Elephant in Rome

37 min listen

In this week’s books podcast, my guest is that man of parts Loyd Grossman. Loyd’s new book is An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope, and the Making of the Eternal City, which explores the titanic influence of Bernini on the Rome we see today, and his partnership with Pope Alexander VII. Loyd tells me why you couldn’t bring Italian Baroque home to meet your parents, about Bernini’s far from congenial character — and why you’d stick an obelisk on top of an elephant anyway.

Thursday

Claire Kohda

Who is telling the truth in Kate Reed Petty’s True Story?

This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’ is billed as one story told in four different genres: memoir, horror, noir and thriller. It even has four covers. There is a reason for this, as Kate Reed Petty explains in an author’s note: In borrowing these forms from popular culture, I was looking for ways to push against the simplistic assumptions we too often make about power, abuse and gender — assumptions that lock us into the same stories, again and again and again. She raises certain questions. Who does a story about assault belong to? Whose version

Peter Pomerantsev

The power of disinformation is that it’s so readily believed

On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a leaflet from the Ku Klux Clan: A foul stench spreads out from the East River and hangs over New York like a pall — the greasy sweat of the Black Races and the Yellow Races of Asia which have invaded the United Nations. It is enough to make every White Protestant American vomit. It ended with a threat: the delegates better stay close to the UN buildings and the ‘brothels of Harlem, and not defile the hotels and restaurants of the White City’. FBI officers investigating the correspondence noted a

Diana Hendry

Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed

Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard Francis’s 12th novel, is a retired history professor who fears that ‘chunks of his life might go missing’. Laura Laura describes a year in his life which, in seamless flashbacks, encompasses most of his past. It opens with Gerald’s late-night encounter with a homeless, possibly suicidal, waif called Laura. She revives his suppressed memory of a previous Laura, a research student with whom he’d had an illicit fling, best forgotten. This is an amusing study, with a serious underlying theme, of the tricks memory can play, particularly if, like Gerald,

Patrick Marnham

When Paris was the only place to be

For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The enchantment dates back to the end of the 19th century, when ‘le bordel de l’Europe’, in words quoted by Marie-José Gransard, was transformed into ‘la capitale de l’amour’. In Twentieth Century Paris she traces the growth of the community of mostly foreign artists and writers who created this international brand. By the 1890s Paris had recovered from defeat by Prussia and the atrocity of Bismarck’s bombardment in 1870 and had become the capital of more than ‘l’amour’.It ran a colonial empire powerful enough to deprive the Kaiser of his ‘place

Ian Garrick-Mason

The crusaders were not such incompetent zealots after all

One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to as our civilisation’s mentalité is the almost complete attenuation of memory about what the crusades were, why they were fought and what part they played in a multi-century struggle between two successful, expansionary and universal religions. Though this struggle is still being waged today, we’ve become expert at not noticing it. Even at the level of military history, the crusaders have been written off with a hastily scribbled judgment that amounts to: ‘Invaded the Middle East and captured Jerusalem. Eventually driven into the sea by the brilliant generalship of Saladin.’

Clinton Heylin

When the King of the Delta Blues came home — the family life of Robert Johnson

Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was certainly a life that mattered, but it was lived at a time when black lives mattered not a jot to white America. The circumstances of his death in 1938, at the age of 27 (he was probably poisoned by a jealous rival), demonstrate the disenfranchised existence of any peripatetic black performer in Depression-era USA. The murder was never investigated and his body was dumped in an unmarked grave. And that would have been that had he not recorded 29 songs that represented the paradigm of delta blues for pale young

Leaf Arbuthnot

Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a Chinese industrial town in 1979, it opens with one woman’s death and closes with another. The pages in between are jammed with misery meted out by scalpel: treacherous friends, underfed children, craven officials, all have their turn upon the stage, while school choirs sing unfalteringly in praise of the communist party. Her latest book, Must I Go, is more cheerful, if only by a whisker. It’s the first time Li has set a novel squarely in her adopted America, with a faded Californian babe as its heroine. Lilia Liska is

Alex Diggins

Magic and miasma: Mordew, by Alex Pheby, reviewed

Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages of lung worm, then they could stray into the Living Mud — a foul, oozing substance that spawns barely animate beings called ‘dead-life’. That’s if they avoid being packed off to serve the Master, the city’s Grand Inquisitor, who broods in his Manse, demanding regular tributes of children, his magic twitching throughout Mordew. The world of Alex Pheby’s fourth novel is dizzying. But stick with it, and his splicing of Dickensian social satire and rackety, steampunk fantasy is beguiling. The titular city is exuberantly realised, the sort of setting H.P.

Hugh Thomson

The pleasures — and trials — of knowing Bruce Wannell

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete penury, he would dress in perfectly tailored cashmere and, with a shawl swept over his shoulder, fix his attentive listeners with a glittering eye and a voice that could sweep dangerously low when he was about to cast aspersions on someone else’s cooking or scholarship. As this affectionate compilation of tributes by friends and admirers shows, Bruce himself ‘not only spoke Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili, be amiable in Amharic, Spanish and Greek and could lecture in French, Italian or

Stephanie Sy-Quia

A toast to brotherhood: Summer, by Ali Smith, reviewed

The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the past three novels find themselves flung together at the eroding eastern edge of England. Daniel Gluck, our centenarian from Autumn, now 104, has been moved out of his care home (thank God, given that we know what’s coming — this is February 2020) and into Elisabeth’s mother’s house in Suffolk. There are some fresh faces too. Sacha and Robert are two children who tag along with Charlotte and Arthur (whom we came across in Winter) to meet him. The children’s parents voted differently in 2016, so now their dad lives