Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Jay Elwes

Liberty depends on a delicate balance between state and society

Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have been rigid, brutal and despotic. Freedom for the masses is a historical rarity. It arises only as the product of a fine balance between competing interests. That balance is the subject of this book. According to the authors, both of whom are American economists, the first of those countervailing forces is the state, or what Hobbes called the Leviathan. The second is society. For liberty to exist, the state and society must achieve equilibrium. If one dominates the other, the result is a slide away from liberty towards despotism. Conversely,

Nick Spencer

When atheists stole the moral high ground

In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, a formal logical argument for the existence of God. Du Perron, formerly a Protestant, was now well on his way to becoming a cardinal. He was a highly intelligent and rhetorically gifted man and he performed his task well, to the great pleasure of the assembled nobility. Flushed with success, he then turned to his audience and announced that, if they wanted, he could prove the opposite case too. The king was not amused. Most of us like to believe that we believe what we believe because rigorous reasoning

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Rescuing the great British Cheddar

Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the depth of your Camembert-calcium-enriched bones (I have, and do). In my Year 2 classroom near Paris there was a poster with the most famous cheeses of France on it: heart-shaped Neufchâtel, orange Mimolette; Reblochon, Roquefort, Comté and Cantal. You were considered a cretin if you couldn’t tell your Crottin from your Pélardon, or the age of a Tomme at first bite. The poster which hung alongside that one was of Charles de Gaulle broadcasting during the Resistance. In Britain, we are less good at celebrating our native foods, and we’ve

The Spectator

Books of the year – part one

Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate, £17.99). These days, novels are often praised for the gravity of their subjects, but what elevates Whitehead’s treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance of its style and the satisfying inventiveness of its form. Meek’s book is an astounding linguistic fantasy about the advent of the Black Death. French, Anglo-Saxon and Latin collide in a world of fake news, uncertain sexual borders and the dread of a catastrophe which looks in some ways very much like our own. The other novel I thoroughly

Leyla Sanai

There’s no end to the wonders of the human body, says Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable, avuncular and amusing as ever, but his subject matter has broadened over the decades to cover nearly everything, from science to Shakespeare. His modus operandi, however, has not changed. He absorbs reams of facts, the most interesting of which he presents liberally sprinkled with mischief, wit and lateral thinking. On seeing this book’s title, I prepared myself for the arid science I ingested when I studied to be first a doctor, then a hospital physician and then a consultant anaesthetist. But I needn’t have worried. Bryson feeds the pith, pulp

Ursula Buchan

A tribute to the grandes dames of gardening — Beth Chatto and Penelope Hobhouse

There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry in years gone by. Those colourful, cheery, cheap volumes have been superseded by trustworthy websites, such as that of the Royal Horticultural Society, which can quickly answer any query you have about cultivation, plant identification or pest damage. Gardening books these days must offer something not to be found online, if readers are to shell out their precious British pounds: deep, hard-earned knowledge, elegant writing, attractive illustrations and, preferably, all three. This year, at least, there are a number that pass the test. There hasn’t been a decent book on

Tom Chivers

How to message a Martian

Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of vaginal contractions in ballerinas. According to Daniel Oberhaus’s Extraterrestrial Languages, the artist Joe Davis beamed the information from an MIT radar installation towards the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1985. A USAF colonel shut the transmission down when he discovered what the content was. Never mind the difficulties of communicating with aliens; sometimes it’s pretty hard to understand what’s going on in the minds of humans. The question of how we’ll talk to extraterrestrials, as and when we eventually find some, is an old one. Oberhaus, a writer

Honor Clerk

Picturing paradise: the healing power of art

Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’ by Antonello da Messina, the painter of the beautiful ‘St Jerome in his Study’ in the National Gallery in London. It was hard enough to persuade anyone that the gallery was meant to be open, and what staff there seemed to be about (a couple of deeply suspicious museum guards) had clearly dedicated their lives to saving the gallery’s electricity, rationing us in a succession of deserted rooms to a few seconds in front of any one painting, before plunging the room into darkness, and hustling us into the next.

James Walton

It’s a dull world in which children don’t challenge their parents

On the Shoulders of Giants consists of 12 essays that the late Umberto Eco gave as lectures at the annual Milanesiana festival of culture between 2001 and 2015. Judging from the book, seeing him deliver them must have been like going to a concert these days by Van Morrison or Bob Dylan. Sometimes he’s on top form, all the old magic thrillingly intact; quite often he seems to be rather going through the motions. And while he can always be relied on for a generous smattering of his greatest hits — conspiracy theories, William of Ockham, the Rosicrucians, Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite — these too are performed with noticeably varying amounts

Philip Hensher

Vladimir Nabokov confesses to butterflies in the stomach

Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter, Ronald Firbank and Henry Green. And those novelists who do have opinions aren’t always worth listening to. But Vladimir Nabokov’s views are of compelling interest — paradoxically, because he regularly insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case and presented no argument. The beauty of his views on literary and other matters rests on his openness to laughter. He used to complain that his lectures to undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell were greeted in silence; he was sure that if he had heard them he would have

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: is meritocracy a trap?

For this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In his new book The Meritocracy Trap Daniel advances an argument that will seem startling to partisans of Left and Right alike: that meritocracy isn’t the solution to our social and political discontents, but the central part of the problem. Our notion that hard work and proven ability should be the route to wealth and success has, he says, created a miserable underclass and a comparably miserable overclass — and is responsible for a damaging and eventually unsustainable reorganisation of Western economies. Among other sophisticated questions, I ask him: how so?

Thursday

Stephen Phillips

As well as being a mythic tale, Moby-Dick is a superb guide to oceanography

Anyone who has read Moby-Dick will recognise the moment, 32 chapters in, when their line of attention, hitherto slackly paying out, snags. Having spirited us briskly through Manhattan, New Bedford and Nantucket, and having flushed Ahab from his lair on to the deck of the Pequod, Herman Melville divagates into a disquisition on whale taxonomies. In Ahab’s Rolling Sea, Richard J. King asks: ‘What happens to the story if Melville had an editor who convinced him to just cut cetology?’ Melville might have died rich and the rest of us would be all the poorer. ‘Cetology,’ writes King, lodges ‘a bone in the reader’s throat’. But, here, Ishmael is transmogrified

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Children’s literature has become horribly right-on

There was a spat the other week about a children’s book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, which is about an encounter between a little girl called Ama and the nation’s pin-up, Brenda Hale. The book’s author is the Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch. It’s written in vague rhyming couplets with the worst illustrations I’ve ever seen in a book for children. In a newspaper report about the book, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, was quoted saying ‘This looks like deliberate propaganda to bend the minds of children’, while MP Andrew Rosindell said that ‘she is being painted into some kind of hero in this book

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The daring curiosity of Blondie’s Debbie Harry

My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a septuagenarian has an air of juvenile delinquency about her — got me into trouble as a teenage writer on the music press. Sent to review the hot new American group Talking Heads, who were in London for the first time, I raved instead about the unknown support band, Blondie, in effect ending up: ‘And then these really boring preppies came on and spoilt everything.’ I was subsequently sent to review Gilbert O’Sullivan in Croydon as punishment. I normally skip the start of showbiz memoirs (childhood is so common), but I

Mark Cocker

Spooky stories for Halloween

It is surely significant that Ed Parnell’s first novel The Listeners was an updated examination of themes latent in Walter de la Mare’s famously spooky poem of that title. The author credits this predilection for the macabre to an aunt’s VHS recordings of the Quatermass stories in the 1970s, when he was just a small child. Since then he has become an aficionado of the genre, and in his latest book makes a journey through Britain, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, to pin down his own passion for ghost stories while exploring our national obsession with writings on the supernatural. Ghostland includes many of the genre’s key exponents, such

Mark Bostridge

My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel

In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character of Jo March, the tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Jo, it will be recalled, is the sister who marries a professor, years older than her, a German immigrant called Friedrich Bhaer, who is tender and warm and encourages her writing. In many ways it’s a model modern partnership. Light found her own professor in the shape of Raphael Samuel. In 1987 she married him, following a whirlwind courtship. He was in his early fifties, from a Jewish communist family that traced its roots back to Russia and Eastern

Marcus Nevitt

The real villain of the House of York was Richard III’s elder brother

Trying to describe the outcome of the Wars of the Roses — the fall of the House of York — in genre terms has long been an uncertain business. When Shakespeare completed his first tetralogy with Richard III, which ends with the collapse of Yorkist hopes at Bosworth Field, the printers of the earliest quarto editions of the play were confident that the work they were hawking was The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. After Shakespeare’s death, however, his friends and colleagues from the King’s Men weren’t so sure; while the play they printed in the first folio of 1623 had an individual title page that still referred to

Emily Rhodes

Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility

There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when the author trains her binoculars on an animal in the distance. She is on an archaeological dig in Quinhagak, a Yup’ik village in Alaska. Unsure as to what the creature is — perhaps a bear, or perhaps a woman picking berries — she waits for it to move: ‘After long minutes, my woman-or-bear spread two black wings and took to the air. A raven!’ She wonders: Maybe it showed how readily, in this unfixed place, the visible shifts. Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can

Jeff Noon

Crime fiction: a sole survivor is haunted by a family tragedy on a remote Scottish island

James Sallis has a modus operandi: never to waste a word. Sarah Jane (No Exit Press, £8.99) follows this stricture well, using a sparse yet poetic style to tell the story of a woman born on the wrong side of town to bad parents, who wanders from one lowly job to another, one unsavoury man to another, one trouble to another, living a life of chaos, until, led by some curiously twisted route, she takes a chance and decides to join the police, working small cases in a small town. When the local sheriff, Cal Phillips, disappears, Sarah Jane Pullman assumes the task of tracing his whereabouts, an undertaking that