Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems about struggling to write a poem

The call for poems about the difficulty of writing a poem attracted a far-larger-than-usual entry. A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye: I’m stuck. Oh ****. Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners below earn £25 each for their travails. Brian Allgar I struggled with my verse time after time, Yet somehow I could never make it work. It scanned quite well, but there’s no use pretending My couplets had a satisfactory finish. The words at their conclusion never matched; They would not rhyme, however hard I rubbed My head. The wretched quatrains fell apart, And I

Thursday

John Burnside

An epic quest

Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit, never mind The Lord of the Rings), anyone who falls asleep while watching a tedious Joseph Campbell-formula flick such as Star Wars, anyone saddened by the 2014 BBC poll of adult readers that included six fantasy books among its top ten British novels of all time may well approach Marlon James’s latest offering warily. With a cover puff from Neil Gaiman that invokes Tolkien (as well as Angela Carter) and comparisons elsewhere to George R.R. Martin and Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro books, (but also to Beowulf and classic fairy tales)

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 21 February 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the centrepiece of the theatre’s summer season this year. The second half of April will see openings for Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V; and on ‘Trilogy Days’, theatregoers with especially resilient bottoms will have the chance to see all three in a single day. Let’s start with Henry IV, Part

Anne Sebba

A life in pieces

When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried on walking through the wall until she emerged as a plaster statue: At that moment I realise… that Budapest is absolutely crammed with statues that were once people, people who had simply walked through the walls and become stylised allegorical figures, that this was their fate, hers, and mine too, come to that. This exquisitely

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Cardinal sins

The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as a ‘bombshell’ that will ‘blow apart’ the summit. We shall see. Certainly many Catholic priests are more interested in Martel’s exposé than in Francis’s initiative. The author spent four years researching the subject of high-ranking gays in the Catholic church. Forty-one cardinals spoke to him. That seems brave, given that Martel is an LGBT campaigner

Ian Sansom

Big, bold, beautiful ideas

I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall: He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!’ For Gaffer’s handbills, I have my copies of

Kate Womersley

Who’s aping whom?

For a practical at medical school on the subject of the nervous system, it was thought unwise to wire students up to a live electrical circuit, so we used worms instead. The task was to measure lumbricus terrestris’s giant neurons as they fired. My worm’s bruise-coloured rings concertinaed in a final effort to escape before I made the necessary incisions, stuck pins through its body, and connected its extremities to the electrodes. The paper instructions suggested: ‘You can if you wish cut off the worm’s head.’ I guess we were lucky; apparently similar lessons used to be taught using live dogs. I’ve always disliked the spirit of historical re-enactment involved

Thursday

Nick Spencer

The strange birth of liberal England

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones. We like to imagine otherwise. We are rational, sensible, moral creatures. If we only think scientifically and apply ourselves, we can achieve anything. Hence the recent secular historiography of the Enlightenment and modern world, which, at least according to Steven Pinker’s latest offering, can be explained straightforwardly by the emergence of science, reason and humanism. Alas, history is not so neat, as real historians know. Good things often come from bad intentions. That is the argument of James Simpson, a medieval historian who has turned his attention to the Reformation

Anne Margaret Daniel

Running on empty, and on and on

Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February 2005 Thompson, 67, killed himself with a .45 at home in Woody Creek, Colorado, freethinkers and lovers of his savage, beautiful words grieved the world over — and we still do. Thompson was a Southern boy from Louisville, Kentucky, whence comes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Fay, later Buchanan. After a sally into higher education and military service, both marked by varying degrees of brilliance and insubordination, Thompson moved to New York City and worked as a reporter. His specialty was, initially, sport, and his forte was observation. He was 21

Boyd Tonkin

Mocking the mandarins

Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of machinations within the European Commission in Brussels, readers may fear that the writer who pulls the trigger wields no more than a pop-gun. Yet the Austrian author Robert Menasse has scoured these corridors of power — and powerlessness — to furnish a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas. For sure, Menasse has an agenda. His nicest characters tend to believe in the ‘post-national democracy’ of EU integration. Still, their efforts to sell the Brussels system as ‘the moral of

Claire Kohda

Dialogue with the dead

When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never write or be published in it again. She has described this decision as being like a suicide. In languages, she suggests, we form our identities. Leaving one behind is a death of a version of our self; and starting afresh in a new language is a kind of rebirth. In Where Reasons End, the English language, in which Li has made her name as a Chinese-American author, has transformed into something the narrator can no longer depend upon. She stumbles over words, recognising that she no longer knows, or perhaps

Stuart Kelly

Spot on target

This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt and Elmer Gantry) and John Kennedy Toole. Sam Lipsyte certainly hits his prime target — the cultish behaviour around mindfulness, motivational speakers and pallid spiritual beliefs — but one of the joys of the novel is that over and above that there is a scatter-gun sniping at various fads. Although it is laugh-out-loud funny, it swerves towards the end (the reasons would be too much of a spoiler) into slightly more melancholy and mystical modes. At the novel’s centre is the eponymous Hark, a strange, naive man who has developed

Simon Ings

A man of great magnetism

Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it, and in the middle of the wall, insert a tiny shutter. Conjure up a tiny critter who can open and shut this little door at will. When a hotter-than-average air molecule careers towards it, the creature opens the shutter and lets the molecule pass to the other side of the room. Colder-than-average molecules are allowed to pass in the other direction. Soon enough, one half of the room is sweltering, while the other half is distinctly nippy. Magic? Not yet. A fridge performs exactly this trick, pumping heat out of

Leyla Sanai

Tormented by guilt and desire

James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling. His eye-boggling psychological thrillers are understated, yet perspicacious and hilarious. By ‘psychological thriller’ I don’t mean they contain newsworthy physical violence. Lasdun is too English for that (although he now lives in New York). I mean the kind of dilemmas that would have your average, settled individual writhing in empathetic angst: secrets and lies in a kaleidoscope; knuckles-in-mouth mortification. Unwittingly (because he started them before the furore), Lasdun has written two superb novellas for the #MeToo age, published together in Victory. Both explore themes of lust, transgression, self-delusion and male friendships. In the first, ‘Feathered

Sara Wheeler

Ninety degrees north

Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast. Michael Bravo promises to reveal something of that enigma, claiming at the outset of his book: ‘I will treat the mysterious power and allure of the North Pole in a way you will not have seen before.’ The volume is one of an interesting series on the cultural history of natural phenomena, that includes a title on Fire, and another on Swamp. Bravo structures his book around the struggle of navigators and philosophers to make sense of the strange powers of the North Pole, beginning with the ancients of Greece,

Ian Thomson

Moving images of Christianity

The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of his life in around 1990 he determined to film Dante’s Inferno for national television. The brimstone poem appealed to Fellini for its comico-grotesque scenes of mass writhing human nudity amid firecracker detonations. He was not the first filmmaker to take on the work of the medieval Florentine poet. In the early 1970s, Fellini’s compatriot Franco Zeffirelli persuaded Dustin Hoffman to star as Dante Alighieri in his own version of the Inferno. Hoffman, dressed in a medieval coif hat and Tootsie-red robe, was supposed to wander through a sulphurous underworld accompanied

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Only connect | 14 February 2019

At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself’. He was a landmark — more or less literally. You could visit Brantwood, where he had his Lake District home in later life, and buy postcards of him. There were ‘Ruskin ceramics, Ruskin linen and lace products and Ruskin fireplaces’ available. In New Jersey, undismayed by the great man’s loathing of tobacco, there was a company that sold ‘John Ruskin’ premium cigars. Postmortem you could get Ruskin souvenir brassware or toasting forks and a scale model of the Ruskin monument near Keswick. But that,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Deborah Lipstadt on anti-Semitism and what you can and can’t say about Israel

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Deborah Lipstadt — the historian who herself made a piece of history when she defeated the Holocaust denier David Irving in court. In her new book Antisemitism: Here and Now, Professor Lipstadt returns to the fray to look at the worldwide uptick of anti-Semitism in our own day and age. I ask her why she felt the need to write this book and frame it in the way she did, how anti-Semitism differs from other forms of prejudice, and what you can and can’t say about Israel.

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Reading the reeds

In 2016, after some unseemly back-and-forth between the Commons and Lords, it was decided that Acts of Parliament should no longer be printed on calfskin. Instead, new acts are now recorded on paper, though, in a classic parliamentary compromise, they will still be bound between vellum covers. Since the first paper mills appeared in Britain at the end of the 15th century —and paper almost immediately became the dominant medium for print — this means that parliament has managed valiantly to hold back the paper tide for over half a millennium. (To be fair, they only stopped writing acts out by hand in 1849, four centuries after Gutenberg.) Meanwhile, over

Michael Tanner

A true labour of love

This is a fascinating example of a small genre, in which the author decides at an early stage in his adult life that he would like to devote himself to a great figure whom he idolises, but who needs help of one kind or another to continue with his work, or at least for what he has done to be more widely appreciated.  The classic case in the recent past is that of Robert Craft, who in his early twenties offered his unlimited services to Igor Stravinsky, and can plausibly be claimed to have enabled the Master to create the works of his last decade, but who also fought against