Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

High stakes and chips

According to the subtitle, this is a collection of ‘short stories of long nights at the poker table’. Were that the case, this would be a more enjoyable book, but there are too many stories here that stray from the baize. As a game, poker is relatively simple. The deal gives you your ‘hole’ cards, the ones you and no one else can see. They determine whether you play the hand or not. The betting follows as cards are further distributed. One by one players drop out, hopes dashed. Finally someone wins, not necessarily with the best hand. Beginning, middle, end. Poker has a richer literature than any other card

Andrew Lambirth

Sculpture of the imagination

At the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) was buying fast cars and flying to architects’ meetings by helicopter. Within a decade the commissions for public sculptures had dwindled, and the rest of his career was something of an anticlimax. Yet he remained largely undaunted and was exceptionally prolific, making some 900 sculptures and more than 200 etchings, as well as 3,500 monotypes. He first came to public attention in 1952, as one of the artists representing Britain at the Venice Biennale. He was a ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptor, along with Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, and his work at this point was like

Richard Davenporthines

Found and lost | 30 November 2017

Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the subtitle’s threat of earnest Welsh soul-searching, Charley’s Woods is tart, arch and crisp. It recalls a strange, lonely childhood with brisk frivolity and a ruthless perception of other people’s oddities, vices and humours. Duff was born in Battersea in 1949. His mother, Irene Gray, was a Dublin social worker who pioneered role-play therapy in Ireland, and became pregnant by an Irish don of French-Jewish descent. After her son’s surreptitious birth, she hastened back to Dublin. In a hugger-mugger fashion, without legal formalities, two collateral royalties, the Marchioness of Carisbrooke and

Owen Matthews

Turkish delights | 30 November 2017

Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the crumbling grandeur of Count Ignatiev’s Russian embassy summer villa on the upper shores of the Bosphorus to the remote and fog-bound manor houses of the Black Sea. But the Palace Lady’s Summerhouse is much more than a beautifully illustrated book: it’s about the people who lived — and live — in these buildings, and a portrait of the vanishing worlds they represent. We meet the gentlemanly descendants of a dynasty of grand viziers who quizzically watch the maritime traffic of the modern world passing by their ancestral waterside palace. There

Suzi Feay

Just a few tweaks…

As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I tried to imagine what a hapless editor might have had to say about the manuscript. ‘I like the way you, I mean Jay the narrator, makes the point that your, sorry his, mother is just like a scheming medieval queen, but I think you can assume readers willing to tackle 500-page literary novels will remember, so you don’t need to keep saying it, especially since the idea’s implied in the title,’ such a person might begin. ‘Likewise, the idea that the siblings interact like members of cannibal tribes that Jay

Katrina Gulliver

On with the new

I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told about rationing and petrol coupons, as yet another chapter in the long book of ‘how good you have it now’ — along with chilblains, measles, castor oil and walking ten miles to school neck deep in snow, uphill both ways. The Swedish author Elizabeth Åsbrink presents the year as the fulcrum of modern history, when ‘everything seemed possible, as it had already happened’. Month by month, she shows us the year through the eyes of a disparate cast of characters. Some of them are well known (George Orwell, Simone de

Claire Kohda

The colour of fate

Before the narrator of The White Book is born, her mother has another child; two months premature, the baby dies ‘less than two hours into life’. The narrator is born in the dead baby’s place. ‘This life,’ she writes, in a passage directly addressed to her sister, ‘needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.’ In small, breath-like fragments, The White Book, written while Han Kang was on a writers’ residency in Warsaw, feels its way through and tries to find meaning in both lives, the narrator’s and her sister’s — or, rather, the single

Harry Mount

… while Rome freezes

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? It’s a question that’s been puzzling writers ever since Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. One classicist — a German, inevitably — bothered to count up all the various hypotheses for the fall, and came up with 210. The conventional explanation is that, in 410 AD, King Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome. Across the Empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to Africa, legionaries folded their tents and deserted their posts. Several centuries of self-indulgent, over-reaching and in-fighting emperors had done for the whole shooting match, leaving the Eastern Roman Empire to stumble

Lee Langley

Naples floods…

There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s novel has its own compelling voice, filled with the sound of water rushing, gushing, flowing, hammering on rooftops, falling in threads from the sky. Naples is drowning, disintegrating, battered by relentless rain. Buildings collapse; huge sinkholes swallow cars and people. Ghostly and unsettling events are reported all over the city: mysterious visions, hidden dolls howling in anguish, coins that emit music audible only to small children. Signs and portents. Naples is an urban nightmare, the saturated ground itself a treacherous element. With a sense of mounting dread the inhabitants are

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cat among the pigeons

Back in 1990, Roald Dahl wrote a book called The Minpins, which was illustrated by Patrick Benson, a very good artist. By now we regard Dahl (when writing for children) to be inescapably linked with Quentin Blake, to the point where any other combination seems fundamentally unsatisfactory, like trying to decouple Goscinny and Uderzo in the Asterix books, or Kenneth Grahame and Ernest Shepard for The Wind in the Willows. The whole is somehow bigger than both halves. So it’s a matter of pure delight that Blake has now illustrated the book (Puffin, £10.99). At a stroke, the atmosphere of the story has changed from menacing to spirited and intrepid.

Nicholas Shakespeare

Love at first sight | 30 November 2017

The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless marriage to ‘a perfectly nice but remarkably boring’ barrister, Lord Swinfen, and was dining at the Ritz with a friend from MI6 — she had worked there in April 1940, decoding the positions of German regiments — when she looked up and saw, seated at another table, the Royal Marines captain whom she had met only a few hours earlier at Les Ambassadeurs. ‘He kept sending me notes through dinner saying, “You can’t stay with that old bore. Come dancing.”’ Which she did. After he had escorted her back through

Philip Hensher

A whistle-stop tour of the East

For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity. Leisure travel has given us the possibility of first-hand exposure to once very remote places. You don’t have to be particularly privileged or adventurous to go on holiday in January to south-east Asia: two weeks in a western chain hotel plus flights to Thailand may only cost £1,000. The increase in migration to western countries since the 1940s means that many lives are bound up with previously distant cultures — we have spouses, in-laws, lovers, friends and connections of all sorts whose origins lie in different countries and continents. And,

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Our Dawkins, who art in Oxford: Lord’s Prayers for the 21st century

The latest competition, to submit a Lord’s Prayer for the 21st century, drew a smallish but pleasingly varied entry. One of my favourites, among the many parodies of the Lord’s Prayer already out there, is Ian Dury’s ‘Bus Driver’s Prayer’: ‘Our father,/ who art in Hendon/ Harrow Road be Thy name./ Thy Kingston come; thy Wimbledon…’. Bill Greenwell’s ‘The Refugees’ Prayer’ started promisingly — ‘Half-hearted, we chant/ in haven, harrowed by the numb;/ deny kin can come,/ deny well, be dumb…’ — but I found bits of it puzzling. A.H. Harker, Alan Millard, Paul Carpenter, David Silverman and Meg Muldowney were also strong contenders. The winners, printed below, are awarded

Thursday

Keiron Pim

Satire and self-deprecation

If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather than be accused of making false allegations to further their own malign agenda, the chances are you could do with a laugh right now. The resurgent far right’s threat feels frightening but expected, whether from torch-waving American mobs or European ethno-nationalists directing the restive masses’ anger towards the traditional target, presently embodied by George Soros. More dismaying for many have been the myriad controversies involving putative anti-racists: for instance, the Momentum activist who claimed that Jews were the slave trade’s ‘chief financiers’ and rank their suffering above other oppressed minorities’;

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Can Anna Karenina save your life?

My guest this week is the comedienne and writer Viv Groskop, and our subject is the greats of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. In her new book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv tells us (among other things) how Dostoyevsky can calm you down, how Anna Akhmatova can cheer you up and how Alexander Solzhenitsyn can keep you going when things look grim. Can Russia’s gallery of madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — with their canon of work about madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — really be corralled into the self-help genre? If anyone can make the case, it’s Viv — who offers an enlightening, funny and quietly erudite tour

Brian Martin

Not for the fainthearted

In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for the manslaughter of Angel Melendez. Alig, leader of New York’s Club Kids during the 1980s and early 1990s, features as a minor character in Jarett Kobek’s breakneck, crazed ride through NYC’s nightlife from 1986 to 1996. Although the novel is set in the club and drug scene, filled with addicts, gays, trans, queens and freaked-out weirdos, its main themes are serious and compassionate. Repeated constantly is the mantra that history repeats itself; but most important is the theme of enduring friendship. Despite the decadence, Kobek is optimistic. The two protagonists

Andrew Taylor

Riddles wrapped in a mystery

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students can only dream of. A psychological crime novel set in 19th-century Scotland, it became a surprise bestseller — and it was also shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. It is not an easy act to follow. Perhaps wisely, Burnet has chosen to make his next novel, his third, very different in both setting and tone. The A35 in question runs through north-eastern France between Strasbourg and Basel. One evening, at some point in the 1970s, a wealthy lawyer named Bertrand Barthelme is killed when his Mercedes goes off the

Marcus Nevitt

Another Eden

In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he to end up cast away in paradise with one piece of music, a luxury and a book for company. He chose Coleman Hawkins’s version of the jazz standard ‘Yesterdays’ as his only record — seduction music, he suggested — and opted for the luxury of an unlimited Sky Sports subscription package. Amis’s preferred book, in this company, sounded similarly butch: John Milton’s Paradise Lost as edited by Alastair Fowler for the Longman Annotated English Poets series in 1968. Fowler’s edition of Milton’s epic poem remains a monumental feat of textual

Steven Poole

Wonders will never cease

Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of being alive. But one has nothing to compare it to, so why find it surprising? Another sensibility will find joy in the observation of E.M. Cioran, the sardonic Romanian philosopher who wrote: ‘It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.’ Between these two poles, this book offers a charming compendium of the astonishments that may be experienced in a human life. It is, if you like, a miscellany of the sorts of things at which a secular reader may experience some analogue

Martin Gayford

Sex and the city | 23 November 2017

‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this. Degas is after all one of the greatest names in European art, but there is much about him that remains enigmatic. Some of his works seem secretive, even surreptitious — the extraordinary monotypes he made in Parisian brothels, for example, or the many wax sculptures he created but neither cast nor exhibited. These and many other aspects of this curiously sympathetic man are explored in Degas: A Passion for Perfection by Jane Munro (Fitzwilliam Museum, £40), a fine book accompanying the current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (until 14