Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Everybody hates you – except for me

It’s unusual for musicians to become writers. The trajectory of yearning is meant to be the other way around. When I was a teenager working at the New Musical Express I was bemused by the number of men there who had won the greatest prize on earth — being paid to write — but nevertheless dreamt only of being crooning cretins, singing the same songs over and over again. The fact that Chrissie Hynde (who once, pre-Pretenders, tried to recruit me to a biker-themed girl group, telling me that my stage name would be Kicks Tart) had once been their colleague only served to fuel the poor suckers’ self-delusion as

Michael Henderson

Down by the bayou

The king of crime fiction doesn’t need a crown and sceptre. Every page proclaims his majesty. James Lee Burke has now written 22 books about Dave Robicheaux, but readers will never grow tired either of him, his friend, Clete Purcel, or the bayou. The New Iberia Blues should be greeted with a fanfare of trumpets: it is a masterpiece. As his admirers know, Burke is no mere crime novelist. His lifelong subject is the fall of man, and Louisiana is his demi-Eden. The swamp maples and mossy oaks, the pinks of dawn and the crimson hues of twilight are all here again, though the mood is autumnal, for Robicheaux’s sand

Laura K. Jones

Get me out of here

‘If your time ain’t come, not even a doctor can kill you’ — so goes the proverb that best echoes the dilemma of an ageing humankind as we glimpse the harrowing vista of decrepitude to come: a panorama that first takes in the custard-stained wingback chairs of a soul-extinguishing care home, then yaws off nauseatingly to a vision of the demented and the drooling as they hobble into that good night. How can you swerve incarceration and indignity when you just won’t die — and, more pertinently, when no one is allowed to kill you? How to be the auteur of your own death when ‘self-euthanasia’ proves so tricky you

Cressida Connolly

Something sensational to read in the train

Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been gained. It’s always easier to fill in the ‘lost’ column, since boasting is discouraged; sadness gets more attention, too, as it’s generally supposed to be more interesting than contentment. Sophie Ratcliffe includes an actual list of her losses in this wonderful and highly individual book. The items include an Australian opal her uncle gave her, a purse snatched from her at St Petersburg railway station, her father, and the exact memory of a lover’s face. ‘Not that your face was much to write home about,’ she adds. ‘Not that I

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 7 February 2019

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Though the new production of Richard II we’ve been discussing here is taking place at the Globe, it’s perhaps worth remembering that the original didn’t. The play precedes the building of the first theatre by half a decade or so. It is thought to have been written in 1595; its first recorded staging is from the winter of that year in a private house in the presence of Queen Elizabeth’s privy councillor Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury (who would go on to be a pivotal figure in her reign and the early Jacobean era). Its first appearance

Rose George

The kiss of death

I once threw Tony Parker’s Lighthouse across the fo’c’sle of a ship at sea when I read that his characters were composites. Oral history should be historical, or it goes into the ocean. So it is a shame that I sometimes question Xinran’s authenticity in this account of the loves and lives of four generations of Chinese women. I question conversations recalled verbatim when they clearly weren’t recorded; and perfectly rendered speech when only notes were taken. Is this too severe? Then it is appropriate, because severity is something you must get used to, though this is a book about the Chinese concept of ‘talk love’, defined as ‘the process

Andy Miller

… and The Comedy of Errors

The phrase ‘Shakespeare comedy’ is an oxymoron with a long pedigree, one which perhaps stretches back to the late 16th century; and a running joke in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow is that no one finds the comedies funny except their author, who thinks they’re hilarious. So it is a brave writer who, in a bid for laughs, bases a Shakespeare comedy on a Shakespeare comedy — in this case The Comedy of Errors. Fortunately, Marie Phillips has the wit, and sufficient wisdom, to pull it off. In Oh I Do Like to Be… Shakespeare is reborn in a grotty English seaside resort, not once but twice. Billy and Bill are

Emily Rhodes

A violent, surrealist world

Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral when the New Yorker printed it in December 2017, becoming the second most read article published by the magazine that year. Told in an apparently simple, confessional voice, it recounts 20-year-old Margot’s courtship with 34-year-old Robert, beginning when she flirts while selling him sweets at an art-house cinema, building via text messages, culminating in a night of terrible (for Margot) sex from which she can’t quite be bothered to extricate herself, and continuing in the nasty afterlife of Robert’s increasingly aggressive texts. Everyone read it and everyone argued about

Adam Nicolson

The land beneath the sea

Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book is bog’.And Time Song itself is a kind of beautiful bog, a memoir-cum-meditation focusing on the stretch of land that once connected Britain to the Continent but was drowned by the rising waters at the end of the Ice Age. It is a subject for now — where for God’s sake would Brexit be if Essex and Yorkshire were still parts of the lower Rhineland? — but Blackburn’s thoughts run deeper than that, to the long and subtle conversation between the present and past, to the preservations of time and

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

Kazakhstan is about the size of Europe — but we know almost nothing about it

Kazakhstan, say signs by the side of the road in this vast Central Asian country, is ‘a land of unity and accord’. Few outside pay a great deal of attention to a state that is almost as large as Europe, and home to eye-popping natural resources, chiefly — but not only — oil. One who does is Joanna Lillis, who used to work in Russia and then for the BBC Monitoring Service in neighbouring Uzbekistan, and knows the region as well as anyone. Her book, Dark Shadows, is astute, refreshing and revelatory; it is also surprisingly tender, showing not only her affection but her care in trying to make sense

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A tall story from Thanet

Maggie Gee has written 14 novels including The White Family, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize). Blood, her latest, is a bizarrely misfiring black comedy. The setting is Thanet, which was the only Ukip-held council in Britain until March last year, when almost half of its councillors resigned and formed a breakaway group. The choice of Thanet is not accidental, and one’s initial hope was that this might be the first great Brexit novel. Brexit is mentioned, but the narrative is dominated by 38-year-old ‘buxom bruiser’ Monica Ludd, an unconventional deputy head at a local secondary school, who we are repeatedly told is six foot.

Colin Greenwood

A pawn in a deadly game

On 7 November 1938, the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris. Claiming to have secret papers, he was shown into the office of an embassy secretary, Ernst vom Rath. Drawing a tiny revolver — the price tag still attached from that morning’s purchase —  he fired five shots, shouting: ‘You’re a filthy Kraut, and in the name of 12,000 Jews, here is your document.’ Two of the bullets struck Vom Rath, who died two days later. The previous month, close to 18,000 Polish German Jews had been dumped by train on the Polish border. Among those  rounded up in Hanover for the Aktion were Grynszpan’s family:

Alex Renton

Old school ties can’t last forever

Deplore it or revere it, you cannot but respect the private school industry’s wart-like survival in modern Britain. Has any other institution outlived its confidently predicted demise so robustly and for quite so long? It is getting on for 80 years since the liberal establishment turned against its own educational system. And yet the crusty old monster clings to Britain’s public face, now prettied up with the fittings and facilities of five-star hotels while offering one well-trained teacher for every 8.6 children. An anachronism of the 19th century has been revitalised in the 21st, thanks to brilliant advertising by Harry Potter and the injection of zillions of Russian and Asian

Katrina Gulliver

The healing art

In this unusual book, part memoir, part history, Clare Hunter offers a personal meditation on the textile arts. Sewing and its associated skills have been coded as female, and the expertise required to master them has been trivialised. Hunter describes how when women demonstrate intricate embroidery or stitching, a man can be guaranteed to crack a joke about how his trousers need hemming or a button needs sewing on. But embroidery was not always so devalued. Royal families commissioned it for clothing and wall hangings to demonstrate their wealth and power. During the high point of medieval English embroidery (Opus Anglicanum), it was desired all over Europe. Gold thread created

Andrew Taylor

Heavies in a new light

Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would collapse without them. Without the threatened or actual violence they so selflessly provide, the streets would not be mean and a private eye’s career would be only slightly less risky than an estate agent’s. Yet we rarely glimpse the private lives of these men (heavies are almost invariably male), or explore their hinterland of secret traumas and guilty pleasures. Alan Trotter, then, gets bonus points for originality, from his choice of title onwards: this novel is all about the muscle who supply the heavy weaponry of the criminal world. The

Daniel Swift

Daydreams in the outback

Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or even character, and it is hard to tell the narrator from the writer, so that all his stories might be essays; his sentences are weirdly flat but interrupted occasionally by wild visions. Try this, for example: There in a room with enormous windows a man with a polka-dotted bow tie broadcasts radio programmes to listeners all over the plains of northern Victoria, telling them about America where people are still celebrating the end of the war. Where are we? Who can see the bow tie on the radio announcer, and

A.S.H. Smyth

More dystopian futures

Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an appeal to buy the writer coffee. The author of just two previous published novels (about a multilingual child prodigy, and an encyclopaedia salesman turned sex-peddler, respectively), DeWitt keeps a pure flame, and doesn’t want to hear why others won’t. She and her characters inhabit an intellectual, emotional and physical triangle between New York, Berlin and Gloucester Green bus station, Oxford. ‘It would mean a lot to me to work with [an editor] who admired Bertrand Russell,’ one of her narrators remarks… about her children’s book. Another one has ‘views on

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The biggest story on the planet

One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too many people,’ she said. From among the many other piquant factoids in Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, I was unnerved to learn that ‘Hitler was obsessed with demography’ too. Whether you also suffer from this unhealthy preoccupation or are simply shopping for a new way of looking at the world, this is a readable, trenchant, up-to-date overview of the biggest story on the planet — one in which we’re all actors. The author has a moderate bent, and doesn’t claim that population — its surging, contraction and migration — explains

A.N. Wilson

Uncle Tom Wedgwood and all

Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of D.H. Lawrence and somehow it never got written. In the course of the story, however, we travel to many of the scenes where Lawrence lived and wrote, and a hilarious  journey it is. Emma Darwin, namesake and descendant of Charles Darwin’s wife, alludes to Dyer’s book at the end of this charming ramble round her family. It begins with a conversation with her agent. Inevitably, the agent wants her to play safe and to write a straight biographical account of the marriage of the famous Victorian biologist. This author, the

Richard Davenporthines

Eric the Red

Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts in his books, the evidence of an inexorable mind incessantly at work, the knock-out blows that he has dealt to adversaries from David Irving upwards — they all characterise authoritative books by a hard-man among scholars. But in retirement, it seems, the great man is mellowing. His latest book — a biography of his friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm — is a masterpiece of gentle empathy. Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, where his father (a naturalised British citizen of Polish origins) worked for the Egyptian Post & Telegraph