Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: how to be happy

The latest challenge was to write a poem taking as your first line ‘Happy the man, and happy he alone’, which begins the much-loved eighth stanza of poet-translator Dryden’s rendition of Horace’s Ode 29 from Book III. At a time of year when we traditionally take stock and have a futile stab at self-reinvention, you came up with prescriptions that were witty, smart and wide-ranging. The best appear below and earn their deserving authors £20 each. Basil Ransome-Davies Happy the man, and happy he alone, Who dwells securely in his comfort zone, Disdaining the temptations of success While relishing the fruits of idleness. Lightminded indolence preserves the soul From slithering

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 24 January 2019

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON I quoted last week that rather Brexit-flavoured passage from John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II — noting how it chimed with the times. I didn’t mention that the Globe’s forthcoming production, opening at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 22 February, has an unusual distinction: it will be the first Shakespeare production on a major UK stage to feature a company – directed by and starring Adjoah Andoh — entirely made up of black and minority ethnic women. That adds an extra layer of irony to the play’s treatment of national identity. Is that, as

Christian Wolmar

A great track record

Monisha Rajesh wrote lovingly about the Indian railways in her previous book, Around India in 80 Trains; but her new one set her wondering whether the train journey had lost its allure elsewhere — for which there is a strong case to be made in Britain, at least. The constant outpouring of anger in the media about the horrors of modern travel seems to have captured the public mood: the delays, the cancellations, the overcrowding, the fatuous announcements, the garish logos of the privatised companies and the overspending on major projects all seem set to undermine our love of the railways. Rajesh, however, muses that the greater threat might in

Claire Kohda

Treacherous Old Father Thames

While its shape is famous — prominent on maps of London and Oxford — the Thames is ‘unmappable’, according to Diane Setterfield, because it not only ‘flows ever onwards, but is also seeping sideways, irrigating the land to one side and the other’. In Once Upon a River, she redefines the boundaries that separate land and water. The Thames ‘finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and to be boiled for tea’ and ‘from teapot and soup dish, it passes into mouths’. Setterfield places the Thames all around, underneath and inside her characters — it nourishes their crops but also destroys them; it hydrates people

Philip Womack

Be careful what you wish for

Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession. In previous novels he has been interested in exploring the limits of perception and knowledge. Here he examines, with beautiful, forensic attention, the minds of a young, thrusting English actor, Henry Banks (a mix of Dan Stevens and Henry Cavill), and Kristin, an American divorcée with a stalkerish crush on him from the other side of the world. She writes letters, decorated with butterflies: ‘He was the key signature in which the music of her life was played.’ This is a novel about celebrity and its consequences, with Henry

William Leith

A deadly box of chemicals

Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here. In March 2009, 60 people died in Mexico. The cause: a flu-type virus. The Mexican government ‘closed schools, banned public gatherings, and ordered troops to hand out face masks at subway stations’. This flu crossed the border into the United States. The media monitored the outbreak with grim enthusiasm. Soon, people in 74 countries were infected. The WHO ‘declared it a pandemic’. Or perhaps you don’t remember the swine flu panic of 2009. Not many people do. The main reason I do is that I met an epidemiologist on a

Paul Levy

Lies born from fantasy

What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ At school I bought the myth of Hemingway as the master craftsman of American letters, teaching us to keep our sentences short and our syllables few. At university, however, I was privileged to be taught by R.S. (Ronald Salmon) Crane (1886–1967), the doyen of the Chicago Aristotelian school of literary critics, who showed the 1954 Nobel Literature Prize-winner’s lack of art by a close reading of his most celebrated and enigmatic ‘Nick Adams’ short story, ‘The

Jamie Bartlett

How we lost to Big Brother

There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately — to reveal things. Apparently, readers like to feel they’ve got the inside track, even when there are no secrets to uncover. Perhaps this drove Yasha Levine to call his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. It promises to shine a light on the close and ongoing relationship between state surveillance and Silicon Valley. There are two problems with this. First, most of it is not secret. Second, I don’t think it’s right. For all its later ubiquity, the internet started life as a niche project

William Cook

Another blessed Waugh memorial

Auberon Waugh was happy to admit that most journalism is merely tomorrow’s chip paper but, of all the journalists of his generation, his penny-a-line hackery seems most likely to endure. What made him so special? Like all great writers, it was a combination of style and substance. He had a lovely way with words — he could write a shopping list and make you want to read it — and his libertarian diatribes were wonderfully unorthodox, lambasting pompous humbugs on the left and on the right. Yes, he could be outrageous (and often gloriously rude), but even his most outlandish opinions contained a grain of truth. Above all, he was

Nicola Barker

A never-ending mystery

In an age where ‘authenticity’ is prized above all things (even if what this actually means is that — like, say, Trump — you are just celebrated for being authentically narcissistic), it seems a rare kind of delight to investigate a spiritual/mystical philosophy of which it is airily claimed that: ‘It’s meaningless to speak of authenticity.’ Wow. Double-blink. Welcome to the curious but fascinating world of Harry Freedman’s Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul, a cheerfully non-partisan, no-frills attempt at demystifying one of the world’s most mysterious, opaque and esoteric spiritual traditions. Yes. Kabbalah… or…um… Cabala. Freedman certainly has his work cut out here. As if explaining the rudiments (and

Anthony Sattin

In the realms of gold

A thought kept recurring as I read Toby Green’s fascinating and occasionally frustrating book on the development of West Africa from the 15th to 19th centuries: that the money in my pocket was just a piece of polypropylene. And what is that worth in the greater scheme of things? The thought occured because money and its predecessor, barter goods, play a central role in the story Green has to tell in this monumental volume. The shells of the title are cowries, which for centuries were accepted as currency across the region. Cowries are not native to West Africa and had to be shipped from the Indian Ocean. But they worked

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: what modern Bibles get wrong

In this week’s books podcast, my guest is Robert Alter – who has just published the fruits of decades of labour in the form of his complete new translation of the Hebrew Bible into English. Acclaimed for his Bible translations by Seamus Heaney, John Updike and Peter Ackroyd, Prof Alter tells me how Biblical Hebrew really works, what can and cannot be preserved in translation – and why, as he sees it, nearly every modern translation of the Bible gets it catastrophically wrong.

Thursday

Alex Colville

An eye in the storm

Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply confusing and controversial figure who loathed democracy and glorified German militarism, yet despised the Nazis, he not only bore witness to the industrial flesh-mangles of two world wars, but almost the entirety of the 20th century. His writings and insights have long earned him sage status in Germany. This, the first publication in English of his diaries from 1941–45, heightens his complexity but also makes him a more rounded figure. This will come as a surprise to those who know him as the ruthless young warrior of the infamous Great

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 17 January 2019

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON One of the things about Shakespeare that always makes you marvel is how insistently he speaks to the present moment — any present moment you choose. Academic literary critics wince when you start bandying around phrases like ‘eternal truths’, so let’s just say Shakespeare has a way of chiming with current events. The Globe’s Richard II opens next month, the first in that chain of history plays that continues with Henry IV parts one and two and culminates with Henry V, all of which are part of the summer season. Here is a four-part conversation about

Jeff Noon

The journalist as sleuth

Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller, Moscow, Midnight (John Murray, £20). Life and art intermingle, in both subject matter and character. The hero is named Jon Swift, a veteran journalist bristling under new media regimes. When government minister Patrick Macready is found dead — presumably from a solo sex game gone wrong — Swift takes it upon himself to clear up a few loose ends. Soon he’s under investigation himself, ostracised, and journeying to Moscow to work a connection to a number of Russians who have met similar ‘accidental’ fates. Swift is cynical, unreconstructed in his

Michael Beloff

Behind the top 20

This is a story of resurrection. A mere three decades ago, club football in England was a professional game largely and listlessly run by amateurs. Fans shuffled in decreasing numbers to obsolete stadia redolent of pie and pee. Lives were lost in the tragedies of Bradford, Hillsborough and Heysel. The sport was scarcely entertainment; it was certainly not a business. Yet today the Premier League is the world’s richest sporting brand. How this happened is a tale told with much verve and some wit by two experienced sports journalists. The key modernisers, David Dein of Arsenal, Irving Scholar of Spurs and Martin Edwards of Manchester United, entrepreneurs who presciently purchased

Andrew Taylor

The mask of death | 17 January 2019

Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory whose precise boundaries are unique for each reader. Its author, Jeff Noon, is probably best known for his intellectually adventurous science fiction (his first novel, Vurt, won the Arthur C. Clarke award) and also, to readers of The Spectator, as a crime fiction reviewer. The labels are unfairly reductive, however, since his work has never slotted neatly into genre categories. On the face of it, Slow Motion Ghosts looks as if it might buck the trend and be Noon’s first straight crime novel (if such a thing exists). Set in

Tim Martin

Water, sky, wind and cold

Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already, and the latest entrant to the glum-futures category is John Lanchester’s The Wall, about which much can be divined from a glossary of the capitalised nouns that throng it from the title onwards. The Wall encircles the perimeter of a fortified Britain. The Change has caused the sea level to rise, transforming the world forever. The Defenders, a national service now demanded of all young people, protect the Wall. The Guards patrol the coastal waters in boats, the Flight in planes. The Others want to get over the wall from

Paul Levy

The human chimera – part lion, part goat

Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems to be the history of an amalgam of moral and political virtues and vices, its thesis is actually the large claim that these have evolved; and he has no compunction about writing that the foundation stone of good behaviour is the possibility of capital punishment (against it though he is in today’s world). It’s not just that the logic of his argument requires this hypothesis; he has found examples of premeditated (‘proactive’), co-operative (‘coalitionary’) killing in the Pleistocene record, providing an empirical basis for his claims about our evolution. Chimpanzees

Anna Aslanyan

A serious tease

Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the masters of the genre who, rather than inventing jokes (a skill many possess), notice life’s winks and chuckles and tease them out of their surrounding matter, even if the latter happens to be of grave concern. Teffi was one of those writers. Born in 1872 in St Petersburg, by her early twenties Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya was a housewife with three children stranded in a provincial town; by her early thirties she was back in the capital, a literary celebrity writing for various publications under a snappy pseudonym, her witticisms quoted ‘in