Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Dea Birkett

Big cats and acrobats

We’re celebrating 250 years of circus this year. In 1768, the retired cavalryman and entrepreneur Philip Astley, together with his trick-rider wife Patty Jones (whose act was to gallop around the ring smothered in a swarm of bees) took a piece of rope, laid it in a circle on a piece of marshy land at London’s South Bank, and filled it with astonishing acts — tumblers, acrobats, jugglers, clowns. This was the very first circus. Every circus, anywhere in the world, began at that moment. The extraordinary new art form — a collection of street acts and horse tricks, infused with spectacle and risk and set in a circle —

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What a demented dog teaches us about life

I met the late Darcy ten years ago, and wrote about him. I was 59 and he was 12. I was a Times columnist, and he was an Australian sheepdog. ‘Kelpies’ they call them: black and tan, in build and temper not unlike our border collies, energetic, intelligent, irrepressible but trainable, and occasionally neurotic. Darcy was not neurotic except in one pitiable respect, and I shall come to that. I studied him and wrote about him, but in the decade since have come to understand more deeply what his condition teaches about my own, and human, nature. I wrote about this dog as an oddity. I now see that Darcy

Katrina Gulliver

Stitches in time | 11 October 2018

I recently read a book in which the author, describing rural life in the early 19th century, casually mentioned clothing as being ‘all made in the home’. I laughed. Anyone who has ever tried to sew anything (let alone make an entire family’s wardrobe by hand) would not be so cavalier about the amount of labour involved. But it is typical of how a female trade tends to be dismissed as something anyone (well, women) can do in their spare time, as a picturesque hobby. Nobody similarly suggests that farmers in the 1800s made all their own furniture or saddles. But just like those items, clothing was made by people

Philip Womack

Passionate pursuits

André Aciman’s 2007 debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, was a sensuous, captivating account of the passionate love a cosmopolitan teenage boy bore for an older American man, which has since been made into an elegant and successful film, directed by Luca Guadagnino. For readers of all sexual persuasions, there was universality in young Elio’s desperation, the false starts and misreadings in his interactions with his desired; the consummation and the final disappointment. Love, unrequited or not, is something of an Aciman speciality, and he returns to it here in his fourth book, Enigma Variations. More of a collection of vignettes than a straightforward novel, it examines the emotional

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The scourge of the Raj

‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, wrote in 1933. Gandhi would have been 150 years old in 2019, had he taken better care of himself. He remains the most irritating and admired politician of the 20th century: a perfect subverter of power and political logic, but a nuisance to everyone, allies included. Only Hitler, the other anti-capitalist spiritual politician who broke the British Empire, fascinates to the same degree. The first volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography, Gandhi Before India (2013), carried the young Gandhi across the British Empire from Kathiawar to London to Cape Town. In

Lee Langley

The man who disappeared | 11 October 2018

A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The Infatuations was ostensibly a murder mystery; Thus Bad Begins chronicled a loss of innocence. But the stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history. Marías’s closeness to Cervantes, Proust and, above all, Sterne is no secret. Shandyesque digressions are among the incidental pleasures faithful readers have come to expect. Berta Isla is set largely

Philip Hensher

A mind going to waste

The revival of interest in mid-20th century novelists is one of the most positive and valuable developments of our time. This has particularly brought about a reconsideration of the work of women. Beginning, perhaps, with the creation of the Virago classics, female authors have been brought back into print and given the sort of serious treatment they rarely received in their lifetimes. The Virago list of classics is not what it was, but the excellent Persephone Press has carried on the task of rediscovering out-of-print authors. Occasionally, other mainstream presses have wondered whether a new readership might be found for names from the past, and Hodder is now trying its

Thursday

Gordon Corera

Betraying bandits

Spy stories, whether the stuff of fictional thrillers or, as in the case of Sergei Skripal, the real deal — often leave a question nagging. For all the tales of tradecraft and tension, double agents and drama, what difference did one person’s decision to spy really make? That is not the case with Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky’s story is remarkable because it has all the drama of a fictional tale and yet also conveys why a single person’s choices can make a difference. Gordievsky was a rising star in the KGB, but one who became disillusioned with the regime he was serving — particularly as he watched the crushing of the

Kapil Komireddi

India on the brink

Most religions bind their adherents into a community of believers. Hinduism segregates them into castes. And people excluded from the hierarchical caste system — the ‘untouchables’ — are permanently doomed to a life of scripturally sanctioned calvary. This hideousness doesn’t, however, hinder Shashi Tharoor from breathlessly exalting Hinduism as ‘a religion for the 21st century’. Having catalogued the Raj’s depredations in his previous book, Inglorious Empire, and demanded an apology from the current generation of British politicians for the crimes of their forbears, Tharoor, a prominent Indian parliamentarian from the opposition Congress party, declares in the introduction to Why I Am a Hindu that he will ‘make no apology’ for the

Greg Garrett

Which came first?

Those who study culture — or think about public policy in relation to it — often wrestle with the classic post hoc dilemma: did a work or movement in popular culture influence events in real life, or did it simply reflect the zeitgeist? Were, say, ‘video nasties’ responsible for an uptick in violence and sadism in a generation of British youth? The Daily Mail seemed to think so, although today their hysterical headlines appear faintly ridiculous. Were the two broken boys who committed the Columbine shootings in Colorado shaped by The Matrix? Or did they simply recognise in that film a stylish myth in which to dress their murder/suicide pact?

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Short on wit

Nominative determinism is the term for that pleasing accord you occasionally find between name and profession: the immigration minister named Brokenshire, the sprinter named Bolt, and so on. Apparently, there was once a Republican candidate for the California state assembly called Rich White. And how wonderful for there to be a comic novelist called Patrick deWitt. Booker-shortlisted for his western pastiche, The Sisters Brothers, and praised as a latter-day P.G. Wodehouse, the Canadian author certainly seems sure of his calling. My copy of French Exit opens with a letter explaining that each character in his fourth novel ‘deliver[ed] on his or her promise, or beyond his or her promise’. Is

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The piano tuner

William Boyd’s 15th novel begins well enough. In 1894 Edinburgh, a 24-year-old piano tuner is promoted to the Paris branch of the firm he works for. Boyd is good on the inner workings of the piano: ‘the hammers, the rockers, the jacks, the whippens, the dampers — its innards were exposed like a clock with its back off or a railway engine dismantled in a repair shed.’ Brodie Moncur, the tuner in question, is possessed of perfect pitch and a fine sensibility which places him at odds with the brutal household of his tyrannical father and nine siblings (his mother has died in childbirth). The early domestic scenes possess real

Ian Thomson

A very big life

In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to Italy with the deplorable Lord Alfred Douglas. Sodomy, whether with man or beast, carried a sentence of servitude for life in Victorian Britain: prigs protested that Wilde had got off lightly. In Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, the Dublin-born outcast went to ground with Bosie in the Villa Guidice (now the Villa Bracale) at 37 Via Posillipo. Inevitably there was press intrusion. The English-language Naples Echo was quick to announce the arrival of Sebastian Melmouth: ‘Readers may know that this is the pseudonym of Oscar Wilde.’ Where to

Henry Jeffreys

Is it possible to talk about wine without sounding like a prat?

There are only two British television wine presenters taxi drivers have heard of, Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke. Who can forget their double act on Food & Drink in the 1980s and ’90s? Since then innumerable cooks have become household names but there have never been any other wine celebrities who pass the cabbie test. As a child I assumed that Oz was Johnny to Jilly’s Fanny Cradock, looking on in awe as she came up with outlandish wine descriptions. He says in his new book, Red & White: ‘people used to think we were married’. But later I discovered that Oz is a wine expert of startling erudition and

Suzi Feay

Oedipus vex

Coming 12 years after his acclaimed debut, Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s second novel Distortion features a vivid argot, complicating and defamiliarising everyday terms and activities. In its pages, young people do things in exciting new ways, for example going down stairs: ‘It’s the most longed-out staircase you ever saw. Steps so far apart you gotta keep checking your stride.’ Old-dude technology requires explanation: ‘Deskphone’s got some caller-display screen but it only does its thing if they dial you direct.’ Actually, everything requires explanation, nearly always called ‘mansplaining’, the narrator Dillon/Dhilan/Dylan missing the point that it’s what men do to women they assume are stupid. Why the three names? I’ll get back

Ian Garrick-Mason

The unwinnable war

Many wars have outsized and enduring effects on the societies that fight them, but for Americans the Vietnam war has one attribute that guarantees its longevity as a suppurating wound in the national psyche: it was a loss. Analyses have been numerous and perennial, from David Halberstam’s contemporary portrait of the policymakers who led the country into war, The Best and the Brightest, to last year’s mammoth ten-part documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War. Now Brian VanDeMark, a historian at the United States Naval Academy who had working relationships with the two secretaries of defense who managed the war — he co-authored Robert McNamara’s In

Duncan Fallowell

Russian royalty

It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been merchants from 19th-century Moscow. If Russia managed to contrive a semblance of western civilisation in St Petersburg, it was by virtue of being directly under the steely Tsarist eye. Moscow on the other hand, half lost in the shadows of barbarism, was more wacky and roguish. It liked to think it was home to the true Russian spirit, which artistically meant gaudy folk art, icons, sad music and weird architecture. However the tiny rich class were desperate for the oxygen of enlightened humanist society which they found, like their St

Jane Ridley

A cracking royal read

Never judge a book by its cover. To look at, this is a coffee-table book with shiny pages which make it too heavy to take on Ryanair, but that does it a disservice. In reality it is a shrewdly observed and engagingly written account of a neglected subject — the royal household. Tinniswood takes a long view, beginning with Elizabeth I, and one of the points he makes concerns the unchanging nature of monarchy. Both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II needed to put on a display of magnificence, for example, but both were also aware that out-of-control costs spelt trouble with Parliament. The chief cause of ballooning costs for the

Philip Ziegler

Saviour of the world

Churchill must be the most written-about figure in public life since Napoleon Bonaparte (a subject, incidentally, to which Andrew Roberts has already contributed a substantial and prize-winning biography). As the publisher obligingly warns us, there have been over 1,000 previous studies of Churchill’s life, including some dross, but many works of serious importance. To add anything worthwhile to this mountain requires that the author should be determined, courageous and have something new to say. No one has ever doubted Roberts’s determination and courage; the question remains whether he has anything new to say. Rather to my surprise, the answer has to be ‘yes’. Roberts has been assiduous in his research.

Thursday

Bella Bathurst

For those in peril on the sea

The story — or rather, stories — of how the British lighthouses were built has already withstood heavy and repeated telling. There’s Henry Winstanley’s first Eddystone light (brick, hexagonal, candles on the outside, en-suite state room) and his Icarus boast to the gods that it would withstand ‘the greatest storm that ever was’, which it didn’t. There’s Henry Hill, the keeper who swallowed a mouthful of molten lead while the second Eddystone burned. There’s John Smeaton’s tree of stone, flawless, tiny, eroded from below, now landbound on Plymouth Hoe. And there are the old tales. From the early 1800s all lighthouses had three staff to ‘prevent suspicion of murder’ after