Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Anna Aslanyan

Gothic horror, German-style

Many of our favourite folk tales have lost much of their original Gothic horror in later versions. By contrast, Daniel Kehlmann’s retelling of the legend of Ulenspiegel, moved to the 17th century, is full of nightmares. Worse than imaginary fears awaiting travellers in the forest are real ones: hunger, cold, war, plague, torture ‘more refined and dreadful than anything the great painters of the inferno had dreamed’. These descriptions invite comparisons with Charles de Coster’s famous 1867 novel; but if in the latter the hero fights for freedom, here he juggles many things, sometimes literally. Tyll the folklore character becomes an itinerant entertainer and court jester able to provoke and

Norman Lebrecht

Prepare to be amazed: the story of Birmingham’s Symphony Orchestra

Those who conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra may not be aware that musicians fill in a form after they leave marking them out of ten, sometimes with an acerbic comment on their performance. Industrial democracy is alive and well in the West Midlands, along with a Red Robbo urge to biff the bosses, as Richard Bratby’s centennial history of the CBSO entertainingly reveals. Democracy can foster great leaders and, in this sphere, the CBSO is the envy of the world. Three of its last four chief conductors, chosen by the players, have gone on to the highest peaks — Simon Rattle to the Berlin Philharmonic, Andris Nelsons to

Christopher Priest

Was Dresden a war crime?

The literature of second world war bombing campaigns is surprisingly extensive. The books written in Britain largely focus on the night sorties by RAF Bomber Command, but the equally destructive second world war campaigns by the US 8th Air Force (daylight raids on Germany) and the Luftwaffe (the Netherlands, the Blitz on the UK) are covered too. There is little or no equivalent literature from Germany, although in recent years there have been several deeply researched books by German authors about the destruction of their cities. The RAF books take all forms. There are authoritative personal histories (pilots, air chiefs, politicians), as well as vernacular accounts (WAAFs, ground crew, rear

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The Joy of Waterboiling and Noah Gets Naked

Your latest challenge was to submit an extract from one of the following books: Noah Gets Naked: Bible Stories They Didn’t Teach You at Sunday School; Ending the War on Artisan Cheese; The Joy of Waterboiling; Versailles: The View from Sweden. These genuine titles have all been contenders for the annual Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, an award invented in 1978 by Bruce Robinson and Trevor Bounford to relieve the tedium of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Joy of Waterboiling — a German-language guide to cooking meals in a kettle — scooped the gong in 2018 and proved to be top choice with competitors too, followed

Saturday

Diana Hendry

Does questioning women about their sex lives constitute harassment?

Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure, first published as a short story in the New Yorker, and issued it as a very short hardback novella — 15,000 words, large print, lipstick kisses on the cover. Already described by the Guardian as ‘an incendiary volume’, the book is a response to, and questioning of, the #MeToo movement. Quin Saunders, the longtime head of a respected publishing imprint, is accused of harassment by the many women who work or write for him, is ultimately stripped of his career, boycotted and humiliated. He’s the Harvey Weinstein of the publishing

Anthony Sattin

Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao

Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes. Like punters to the other red light districts, we tend to stick to what we know we like, to our own kind. We travel vicariously with voices that are familiar, or at least intelligible, whose behaviour we can understand, whose narrators we believe we can know. That belief allows them to take us to places we have never seen. How, then, can we follow a foreign author’s account of travelling to, or living in, a place we don’t know? I thought this would be an interesting problem while reading Sanmao’s

Christopher Priest

How did the infamous Josef Mengele escape punishment?

The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that Auschwitz could exist in modern Europe. The history of the camp is a comparatively recent one: construction began in April 1940, less than 80 years ago, and the first victims died there, or were killed, not long after. Some of the people who were transported to the camp managed somehow to survive the war and a few of them are still alive today. Perhaps we shy away from knowing too much about what they suffered because the totality of awfulness is beyond description and the world is still contemplating that.

John R. MacArthur

In this golden age of corruption, it takes much courage to be a whistleblower

Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to cry out for help: first in saving the country from the profound and corrosive corruption that is so well chronicled in this volume, and then finding a seasoned editor to cut the book down to readable size and scope. Mueller’s reporting and insight about the unusual breed of civic-minded citizen willing to risk his or her career by exposing government fraud and corporate malfeasance are extraordinarily detailed and vivid. But he does himself and his readers a disservice by overloading this work with lengthy disquisitions about behavioural theory and inflated

Boyd Tonkin

Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease

Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you his meaning directly. Always left it to you to puzzle things out.’ That verdict surely applies not only to the trio of gnomic novels that ends with The Death of Jesus. It fits the entirety of John Coetzee’s utterly lucid yet fiendishly elusive work. The South African Nobel laureate, resident in Australia since 2001, began his weird, stark but oddly hypnotic series of stories about an immigrant to a Spanish-speaking land and the ‘exceptional child’ he adopts with The Childhood of Jesus in 2013. The Schooldays of Jesus followed, and

Brian Martin

Desperate to preserve her sister Jane’s reputation, Cassandra Austen lost her own

Poor Cassy. The Miss Austen of this novel’s title is Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister. She was to have married Thomas Fowle, but he died of yellow fever in 1797 on an expedition to the West Indies. Before he left, she vowed to remain faithful to him and, if he didn’t return, never to marry anyone else. It would be her undoing. In later life when she herself falls ill, Tom’s sister Isabella remarks: ‘It will take more than a fever to undo you, Cassandra.’ Yet, by Tom’s death, she was already undone. The narrative moves back and forth between the 1790s and the 1840s. Towards the end of her life

Suzi Feay

The wanderings of Ullis: Low, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed

Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in a multiplicity of voices, was a tub filled with delicious things. It also contained quite a lot of bran. His follow-up, Low, is slimmer and more condensed, its scope just a few days rather than a lifetime, with a sole narrator, a troubled Indian poet named Dominic Ullis. We first encounter him on a plane to Bombay (his preferred name for the city). He has spent the flight from Delhi in a haze (‘The Ambien bloomed soon after take-off, all 20 milligrams at once’) and awakes to find his bejewelled

Patrick Skene-Catling

We were highly amused: the Queen — and Mrs Thatcher — thought Ken Dodd tattyfilarious

Doddy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of tickling sticks. So also hath the rest of the UK. At this time of political uncertainty, laughter is the one reliable panacea for all anxiety. Louis Barfe’s industriously thorough, entertaining biography of the late Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd, written with admiration verging on hagiography, portrays the comic genius who was the last performer to uphold this country’s tradition of vaudeville in music hall, on radio and television. Dodd was born in 1927 in Knotty Ash, as the village was developing to become a suburb of Liverpool. He was brought up, with an older brother and a younger sister,

Alan Judd

The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable. MI6’s first report of prewar Germany’s secret U-boat building programme was withdrawn from circulation at the request of the Foreign Office, reluctant to alarm Whitehall’s appeasers. Action Likely in Pacific exemplifies that tendency in spades. Here we have explicit, documented warnings of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the Americans into the second world war, of the construction of Japanese super-submarines, of the Japanese attack on Nationalist Chinese and American forces, of the subsequent Sino-Soviet coalition, of the Soviet atomic bomb programme

Andrew Lambirth

Rembrandt remains an enigma

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one of the greatest painters of all time. His work — as painter, draughtsman and etcher — continues to fascinate and move us like none other. He has been the subject of innumerable books, from novels to weighty volumes of art-historical analysis and argument, and even some films (remember Charles Laughton as the heavily moustachioedartist?). Now we are offered a book which deals specifically with his early years, attempting to explain how the young man became an Old Master. It is heavily illustrated, with 100 colour photographs placed throughout the text,

Andrew Scull

How a fraudulent experiment set psychiatry back decades

In January 1973, Science (along with Nature, the most influential general science journal in the world) published an article that immediately captured major media attention. David Rosenhan, a Stanford social psychologist, reported that eight pseudo-patients had presented themselves at a variety of mental hospitals, 12 in all, complaining that they were hearing voices saying ‘hollow, empty and thud’, but otherwise behaving completely normally. All of them, he reported, were promptly admitted, and all but one diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia (the other receiving the somewhat more hopeful diagnosis of manic depressive psychosis). It took weeks for them to be released, though they were instructed to show no symptoms once admitted.

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Adlestrop revisited (Yes. I remember Germolene…)

The latest challenge, to submit a poem beginning ‘Yes. I remember…’, was suggested by a reader who was very taken with Adrian Bailey’s poem ‘First Love’, a clever riff on Edward Thomas’s much-loved ‘Adlestrop’, published recently in this magazine. The winners, in an entry that provided a bracing blast of new year nostalgia, earn £25 each. D.A. Prince Yes, I remember Germolene — the densely-pink tinned-salmon hue, its smell, round tin, unwonted gloss like warm and antiseptic glue. It soothed each graze from roller skates. Those tumbles from the playground swings? — anaesthetised. It smelt of care, did Germolene. And other things. One of the family: its strength was ways

Saturday

Emma Byrne

Whores of phwoar: women talking dirty

Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such as ‘bell-polisher’ and ‘bitchin’. In Sounds & Furies he sifts English slang from tosheroons as diverse as the Wife of Bath to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Green’s passion for his subject is infectious. His corpus of 110,000 slang words and phrases, published in 2010 as Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is filled with coinages both common and rare. In his latest volume, he’s set himself the challenge of unlocking women’s love-hate relationship with slang. As he says at the beginning, we know plenty about the status of women in slang,

Max Décharné

The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge

A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving his images of animal and human locomotion a strangely modern appearance, despite their being products of the 1880s. The lines also anticipate those adopted in the 20th century against which US criminals appear in police identification parades — which seems appropriate, given that a decade prior to taking these images, Muybridge himself was convicted of murder. Had the small-town jury not delivered a verdict of justifiable homicide — despite the fact that Muybridge deliberately sought out and gunned down his unarmed victim, and showed no remorse thereafter — then these

Peter Carty

Zimbabwe’s chaotic history has at least produced some outstanding fiction

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. She is now in mid-career, prominent among those writers who have emerged since independence, who include Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo and Tendai Huchu. The reason for this flowering of talent cannot be nailed down, but it is clear that Zimbabwe’s turmoil provides plenty of dramatic material. It is noteworthy, too, how many of these novelists are female — and they have abundant subject matter all of their own. Regardless of their country’s independence, liberation for most Zimbabwean women remains a distant prospect. This Mournable Body is set in 1999,

Lee Langley

Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?

‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered literature or travelled to another continent.’ Magic mushrooms in Dublin, opioids in Thailand and San Francisco, hallucinogenic cactus in Bolivia and Peru, ketamine in India… he encounters terror, near-death and ecstasy by every means available, including MDMA — Ecstasy itself. This is no glimpse through the doors of perception; it’s free-fall down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Or hell, depending on how the trip goes. Rob Doyle’s first novel, Here are the Young Men, was a savage picture of a bunch of Dublin losers on their school-leaving summer: a bildungsroman