Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

What’s to become of Pedro Friedeberg’s letters?

The year 2015 has been designated one of Anglo-Mexican amity, with celebrations planned in both countries by both governments. But it looks as though one name will be missing from the list: Pedro Friedeberg’s. ‘Who?’ you may ask. Well, in 1982 I was in Mexico City to interview Gabriel García Márquez after he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At a party given by a Mexican art-collector, I noticed several zany pictures on the wall. ‘They’re all by Pedro Friedeberg, my favourite Mexican artist,’ said the collector. I stared at one large framed square after another, at pictures in which the Old World and the New seemed conjoined in a

Allan Massie

Just sign here…

This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two new biographies of King John; not surprising either that one should be billed as ‘The Making of a Tyrant’, the other as a story of ‘Treachery’ and ‘Tyranny’. King John has long been regarded as the worst English king: cruel, deceitful, avaricious, untrustworthy, incapable and cowardly. For some of us he remains indelibly the despicable younger brother of Richard the Lionheart, as so memorably portrayed by Claude Rains in the irresistible swashbuckling Errol Flynn movie The Adventures of Robin Hood. It doesn’t matter that John had no connection with the

Anthony Cummins

The mask of death

Remember Ebola? It killed more than 8,000 people last year — before we were all Charlie — with a quarter as many again dying since January. Almost all the deaths have occurred in the war-weakened west African states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone; no licensed drug or vaccine yet exists for a virus that claimed its first victim almost 40 years ago in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The spread of that maiden epidemic northwards over the border with Sudan is the basis for Amir Tag Elsir’s punchy short novel, Ebola ’76, originally published three years ago and now translated with fluency and keen timing by two

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Putting away the fear of childishness

Go to any bookshop — always supposing you’re fortunate enough to have any left in your neck of the woods — and chances are that lots of window space will be given over to two genres — children’s books and cookbooks. Step inside, and the children’s books are under your nose. Last year, children’s books were the fastest growing section of the books market. Yet the amount of space given over to children’s fiction and literature in the forums — newspapers and arts programmes — where we talk about books is remarkably small. We brood endlessly over Bookerish novels; when it comes to children’s, however, the genre is generally lumped

Charlotte Hobson

Attack of the night witches

The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already have impressed you. As Antony Beevor generously acknowledges in his introduction to this book, her work as his researcher in various archives played an important role in the creation of his triumphant Russian histories; she has also assisted Simon Sebag Montefiore and Max Hastings, among others. Here she brings to light the fascinating story of the world’s first and only all-female aviation regiments. As German troops advanced towards Moscow in 1941, the celebrated aviatrix Marina Raskova determined to form three ‘women’s regiments’: fighters, night bombers and long-distance bombers. The glamorous

William Leith

Even worms and vampire bats do it

I used to think we had five senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. And I used to think I knew how they worked. Using specialised instruments, such as eyes, ears and fingertips, they gave us information about the outside world. I imagined that the eye saw things, and then told the brain what those things looked like. I imagined that the fingertips touched things, and then told the brain what those things felt like. But now, every time I look at a book on neuroscience, I see that this nice cosy picture is absolutely wrong. Before I continue with this line of thought, let me say that this

Sara Wheeler

The lure of fool’s gold

In 2008, the price of gold lofted above $1,000 an ounce for the first time in history, inspiring a rush of small-scale panners to head for the diggings with hope in their hearts. As the price of the metal fell and rose again — it nearly touched $2,000 an ounce in 2011 — journalist Steve Boggan contracted a touch of gold fever himself. He set off for California to find out who these chancers were. And to find some gold. I’ve taken Route 49 through inland California — Coloma to Sonora. The largely empty highway, which slices through heartbreaking landscape, is named of course after the fabled ‘Forty-niners’, and you

James Walton

Scabrous lyricism

Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees the return of ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson from the novel Glue and the short story ‘I Am Miami’ — now an Edinburgh taxi-driver in his mid-forties but still, in the face of some competition, possibly the most priapic character Welsh has ever created. With a penis he understandably nicknames ‘Auld Faithful’ and an unshakeable faith in the power of porridge (‘Complex carbs: set ye up fir a day’s shaggin’), Terry begins his latest adventures by pulling a grieving relative at a funeral — and, on the way home afterwards, two young

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Daring to be a Daniel

As I swink in the field of Thatcher studies, this book brings refreshment. It is a welcome and rare. Far too many writers attitudinise about Margaret Thatcher (for and against) rather than studying her. I doubt the author likes Thatcher much, but all the more credit to her that she makes a fair-minded effort to understand what she believed about God, and how she succeeded and failed in applying her beliefs. Not all who knew Mrs Thatcher agree that she was religious. In a way, they are right. She was not churchy or denominational, which is good. She was not sacramental (she once told me that her twins were baptised

A.N. Wilson

Early Christian alms race

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since his great life of St Augustine in 1967. His latest book, relatively short in volume but very wide in scope, explores Christian attitudes to the afterlife, from the time of Cyprian of Carthage (martyred in 258) to that of Julian, Bishop of Toledo in the late seventh century. Julian put together an anthology called the Prognosticon Futuri Saeculi. He viewed his book as a compilation of the shared wisdom of Christianity. What in fact he demonstrated, in this ‘futurology of the Christian soul’ as Brown calls it, was the extreme

Marek Kukula

Some watcher of the skies

We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, revealing a bizarre double-lobed mountain of ice and rock with landscapes of vertiginous crags and ashen scree slopes. In our image-saturated age it’s easy to forget that such views are only possible through the intermediary of sophisticated technology: cameras and computers and the spacecraft that carry them halfway across the solar system. And yet this is nothing new. Ever since the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei first turned his telescope to the heavens in the autumn of 1609, advances in technology and great strides in knowledge have gone hand in

Philip Hensher

That unmistakable touch of Glass

Philip Glass is by now surely up there in the Telemann class among the most prolific composers in history. There must be an explanation, preferably a non-defamatory one, for how his technique has enabled him to produce such an enormous quantity of music. A glance at my iPod shows that Varese’s collected works are over in 150 minutes: Berg, Ravel and Debussy each managed to produce between ten and 15 hours of music at most. Glass’s style, which has been called ‘minimalist’, though he doesn’t accept the label, works on a bigger scale. He has written 25 operas, some, like Einstein on the Beach, as long as Die Meistersinger. He

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Salman Rushdie sets the record straight on the classics

Salman Rushdie became embroiled in a literary row over the weekend after he rated a number of books on the website Goodreads thinking these would be private when in fact the information was viewable to the public. The Satanic Verses author’s list soon began to circulate online with many viewers aghast to read his mediocre three star rating of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird alongside the singular star given to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Other critically acclaimed books that ranked low include Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart and Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson. F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby did at least manage to make the grade with a full five star rating. Rushdie has since come forward to defend his choices, explaining

Thursday

Honor Clerk

The self-taught maritime artist who transcends ‘naïve’ cliché

In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort of mental and physical breakdown while training with the army in 1917 and for the remaining 25 or so years of his life dodged in and out of invalidism, sometimes bedridden for long periods, sometimes out fishing with his brothers, sometimes working as a fish merchant and perpetually supported and nursed by his devoted wife,

Justin Cartwright

Justin Cartwright on redheads, anti-Semitism and the betrayal of Christ

Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald. Writing Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened. Also, he may not have hanged himself. This is a fascinating story of febrile myth-making over two millennia, with very little historical fact. Stanford starts his pursuit of Judas with a visit to gloomy Hakeldama in Jerusalem, the place where Judas is traditionally said to have hanged himself — if he

Emily Rhodes

Melissa Kite comes out fighting. Again

Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing in court. She has been contrary since birth, putting her mother through six days of labour before eventually being pulled out by forceps. ‘Is she saying no?’ asks the doctor, perplexed by the distinctive ‘Naaaaaaaaah!’ sound of her new-born wail. Madison’s life begins with her voicing dissent and argument fills every moment of her adult life. Even her commute involves her quarrelling with the ticket officer about purchasing the lowest fare (she objects to an Oyster card because she doesn’t want ‘to be tagged and tracked like a sheep in

Matilda Bathurst

The secret life of the short story

The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of the novel. Denying itself the luxury of length, it is a martyr to the cause of shortness. When the short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel prize for literature, she seemed to personify the supposed modesty of her craft. With the blessing of the Swedish Academy, the short story had finally gained the status of a standalone art form: no longer, to quote Munro, ‘just something you played around with until you got a novel’. All this modesty seems at odds with the idea of an ‘epiphany’

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Brian Sewell does some donkey work: how Britain’s best-known art critic put his ass on the line

I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of this novella about a sensitive man called Mr B who rescues a donkey in Peshawar, names her Pavlova after the ballerina, and brings her overland all the way back home to Wimbledon to meet his dogs named after women painters of the 20th century, this feeling that the target reader is the childhood author himself is overwhelming. You learn more about the young, sweet, aesthetically precocious Brian Sewell while reading it than you do even about Persian carpets and the dusty towns on the old Silk Route. This is the

Patrick Skene-Catling

Back to Bedlam: Patrick Skene Catling on the book that makes madness visible

Madness is an ancient, evidently inscrutable mystery, often regarded with superstitious fear, yet can provide a refuge from reality. Sometimes, however, the refuge turns out to be a trap. The human brain, beyond even the most rigorous thinker’s continuous control, is equally able to afford exquisite privacy and atrocious chaos. Andrew Scull, born in Scotland and educated at Oxford and Princeton, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of psychiatric books highly esteemed by medical historians on both sides of the Atlantic, has now written a learned, liberally humanitarian and wryly witty account of how people in civilised societies

Frances Wilson

When Rex met Edith: a meeting of minds in interwar England

Rex Whistler — this book’s ‘bright young thing’ — was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so. They met through Stephen Tennant in 1924, when Olivier was 51 and Whistler was a 19-year-old student at what he called ‘the darling Slade’. She was snobbish and he was talented; liking one another from the start, they bonded over hair. Once Rex persuaded Edith to exchange her spinsterish bun for a ‘bingle’ — a daring combination of a shingle and a bob —