Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Nicky Haslam

Madly Modern Mary overcomes childhood hardships to become the Queen of Shops

In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her countrywide progress as monarch and oracle of retail, but conjures a nostalgic cornucopia of the mid- 20th-century brands and frankly cheesy TV personalities (she often dressed up as Jimmy Savile) that dazzled her youthful Hertfordshire eyes. These were rapturously set on future journeys, of which we get only one — her great leap forward from North Watford to Knightsbridge, where her undoubted brilliance as a window-dresser eventually blossomed at Harvey Nichols. While credited with making that store a destination experience — though possibly its acquisition by the Hong Kong magnate

Wynn Wheldon

All change: everything metamorphoses in Aquarium, including its author, who takes on the persona of a 12-year-old girl

Books ought to be able to stand on their own, but perhaps it is important to know this about David Vann: a year after his stepmother’s mother had shot her husband and herself, his father also shot himself. Vann was 13 years old. The reason it’s important to know this is that what might seem implausible in the author’s new novel, Aquarium, probably does not at all seem like that to him. Vann has mined these events for his writing. The second tragedy he treated in his first, much acclaimed, book, Legend of a Suicide (2008), a hybrid work containing bits of all sorts of genre, but concerned chiefly with

Thursday

Christopher Bray

Jean-Paul Sartre was perhaps the 20th century’s most famous thinker – if you can get beyond the verbiage

Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if not an intellectual — so much so that one struggles to think of him as anything but an intellectual. Albert Camus, Sartre’s great rival for the title of the 20th century’s most famous thinker, was a strong swimmer and a stronger soccer player. A little adolescent boxing aside, Sartre did little but sit at zinc tables necking coffee and Corydrane (the amphetamine-based painkiller he was addicted to). When, in his magnum opus Being and Nothingness, he called a waiter out for inauthenticity — for refusing his existential duty to define

Tibor Fischer

John Gray’s great tour-guide of ideas: from the Garden of Eden to secret rendition

You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft of content, so painfully thin that they’re transparent, and you wonder why anyone would publish them. I can imagine Gray’s editor begging him to jettison some profundity. The reader is bombarded with boulders of philosophy and politics. Religions are gobbled up. Whole civilisations whizz past. It’s the ontological kitchen sink coming atcha, or to paraphrase

Leyla Sanai

When two young Britons go camping in Yosemite their lives are changed for ever

The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two British men who befriend each other in their early twenties in 1993 when in the US. Among the sights they see on a tour of Yosemite is a pair of old trees with a conjoined trunk known as ‘The Faithful Couple’. Neil lost his mother as a child, and his father owns and runs a stationery store. He is the only one in his family to have been to university. Adam comes from a more entitled background and is full of confidence. When he speaks of his career ambitions in

Viv Groskop

The Dear Leader’s passion for films — and the real-life horror movie it led to

Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un, North Korea interpreted the film as ‘an act of war’. Sony Pictures were hacked by a group linked to North Korea and hundreds of humiliating titbits about spats between celebrities and Sony execs made public, most memorably the description of Angelina Jolie as ‘a minimally talented spoilt brat’. The film was first cancelled and then given a limited release. Kim Jong-un had the last laugh when the reviews came out, however. ‘About as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted,’ said Variety. What got lost in the

Louis Amis

A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?

When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged into a reservoir.Why wouldn’t that be an accident? But Garner seems to have had a premonition. This House of Grief is her account of the murder trial, and ultimate conviction, of the car’s driver, Robert Farquharson, who had escaped and swum ashore while his three young sons drowned. One surprising absence from the book is

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

If ‘incorrect’ English is what’s widely understood, how can it be wrong?

In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys). At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them company. A leader-writer for the Times and its resident authority on style, Kamm is the most small ‘c’ conservative man I know. If he has ever left home without cleaning his shoes — and I doubt that he has — he would have realised his mistake before reaching the end of his road, and rushed

Tim Butcher

Both Belgium and the United States should be called to account for the death of Patrice Lumumba

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even still alive and being held hostage in the Ituri rain-forest. So radiotrottoir assured me variously in January 2001 when I made my first visit to Kinshasa around the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s disappearance. The reason for my trip felt darkly familiar: one of Lumumba’s successors as national leader, Laurent Kabila, had himself just been assassinated

Mark Cocker

John Lister-Kaye tracks Highland wildlife through a pair of binoculars as he lies in his bath

Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a single 12-month cycle in the life of the Scottish Highlands near his home at the Aigas Field Centre, just to the west of Inverness. The author has lived in the region since the 1960s, when he was lured north out of a business career to take up work with the famous naturalist Gavin Maxwell. In the intervening half-century he has acquired a deep knowledge of wildlife, and many of his observations are skilfully woven into the fabric of his 12-month narrative, so that we end up with a lifetime’s rich

Mark Mason

2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)

My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per year and the average British dog walker 676. Eric Chaline’s history of the institution has offered up some competition on the fact front — but my cynicism remains undimmed. Chaline, a personal trainer and weightlifting instructor, certainly shows that ‘gym-bunny’ doesn’t have to equal ‘numbskull’. The book is learned and well-researched, and although this sometimes gives us sentences such as ‘The body plays a central role in the transformation of abstract social discourses into lived actions and identities’, it also furnishes some pretty interesting history. We start with the Ancient

Peter J. Conradi

Another enemy within: Thatcher (and Wilson) vs the BBC

In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of ‘pinkoes and traitors’. That drollery points to the corporation’s paradoxical place in British life: an essential part of the establishment (‘Auntie’) yet sometimes its most daring critic, willing to put impartiality above patriotism. Jean Seaton makes one wonder at this impressive balancing act in a book that continues Asa Briggs’s magisterial history of the BBC up to 1987. After the war many from newly liberated Europe thanked the BBC Overseas Service for keeping hope alive during the Occupation; this was reprised after the Berlin wall fell. Yet one British government

Philip Hensher

A strain of mysticism is discernible in the floating colour fields of Mark Rothko’s glowing canvases

One of the curiosities of western art is that, until the 20th century, few visual artists were of Jewish ancestry. With odd exceptions such as the Pissarros and Simeon Solomon, the culture tended to produce verbal rather than visual imaginations. With the 20th century that changed. The important group of abstract expressionists that came out of New York after the second world war centred on at least two Jewish artists — Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Both possessed a specifically Jewish imagination, and both narrowed down their pictorial language to forms that expressed mystical aspects of their ancestral culture and faith. In Newman’s case it was the ‘zip’, a thin

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeffrey Archer: Bollywood plagiarised my books

Jeffrey Archer is none too impressed with the Bollywood film industry. In an interview with India’s DNA Newspaper, he said that several Bollywood films have ripped off his books without his permission. The comments came after the convicted perjurer was asked whether his novels have the potential to translate into Hollywood films: ‘Well, forget Hollywood, just look at your Bollywood! These bunch of thieves have stolen several of my books without so much as a “by your leave”.’ According to Lord Archer, his books Not A Penny More, Not A  Penny Less and Kane and Abel have both inspired successful Bollywood films. In the interview Archer goes on to say that he has found Indian film producers difficult

Thursday

Will Self

Don’t buy The Glass Cage at the airport if you want a restful flight, warns Will Self

Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner. In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows. The title does indeed say it all: Carr’s view was that our increasing use of these technologies is having an impact on our cognitive and other physical faculties, and that by and large it’s a negative

Harry Mount

The first Lord Dufferin: the eclipse of a most eminent Victorian

The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the Victorian age. In the second half of the 19th century, Dufferin zoomed around the empire, hoovering up the sweetest plums in the diplomatic service: Governor-General of Canada, ambassador to the courts of Russia, Turkey and Italy, ambassador to France, Viceroy of India. Why did Queen Victoria’s proconsul slip into oblivion? Andrew Gailey, the Vice-Provost of Eton — until now best known as housemaster to Princes William and Harry — answers the question, telling not just Dufferin’s sad, dazzling story but the story of the empire at its high point, before

Lucy Beresford

Michael Arditti is the Graham Greene of our time

Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s utter contempt, Duncan is also the eloquent yet mild-mannered editor of the Francombe Mercury, a local newspaper on its last legs. Francombe too has seen better days, not least since its pier burnt down in 2013 (an event covered fulsomely in the Mercury). While Duncan negotiates a good take-over deal for Mercury staff and their pensions, he’s also trying to prevent the ruined pier from being developed into a sex theme park by his schoolboy nemesis Geoffrey Weedon. The fact that Duncan’s ex-wife Linda is married to Geoffrey’s brother doesn’t

Daniel Hahn

Reading one book from every country in the world sounds like fun – until you come to North Korea

One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial. No worse than most English-language readers’, perhaps, but still with dramatic, unnecessary bias towards the Anglophone, with only Freud and a single battered Madame Bovary representing the other 90-odd per cent of the global population. Morgan prescribed herself a corrective, embarking on a 12-month course of reading one book from each country of the world. (Which is how many, exactly? We’ll come to that…) The experience was recorded on her blog, ayearofreading-theworld.com, and is now synthesised into this brilliant, unlikely book. Reading the World isn’t a narrative account of Morgan’s

James Walton

Ogres, pixies, dragons, goblins… Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years is a strange beast indeed

If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon called Querig, I suspect you might have taken a while to guess that the answer was Kazuo Ishiguro. Admittedly, since his career-establishing 1980s triumphs with An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro has been at some pains to distance himself from poignant, perfectly-wrought narratives by uptight self-deceivers who find themselves on the wrong side of history. There was, for example, the long, dream-like and famously punishing The Unconsoled. More rewardingly, Never Let Me Go — published ten years ago — took place in an

Tracey Thorn

Sonic Youth turns sour: a tarnished marriage band

For 30 years Kim Gordon was one half of a cool couple in a cool band. With her husband Thurston Moore she formed Sonic Youth, who sprang partly from the New York art world and partly from the post-punk No Wave music scene. Idealised and romanticised by their fans, they seemed to represent a radical version of domestic bliss, more Rebel Marrieds than Smug Marrieds. When both marriage and band ended in 2012, fans were distraught, and many will surely come to this memoir hoping to find out exactly what happened to their dream. They won’t be disappointed. Detailing her Californian childhood, subsequent move to New York and ensuing musical