Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Peter Conradi

‘The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum’ – review of The Dostoevsky Archive by Peter Sekirin

After you decapitate someone, might their severed head continue thinking? Prince Myshkin holds his audience spellbound with this macabre inquiry in The Idiot, a great novel whose author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was once called the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. Each of his great novels concerns a murder (one a parricide); most also touch upon the sickening theme of the rape of a child. The writer Lafcadio Hearn warned that reading him might actually drive you mad: it can certainly invoke pity and terror, embarrassment and laughter. Dostoevsky’s life was even weirder than his fiction. He was born in 1821, the son of a surgeon whom he believed to have been

Joanna Wootten

Song Without Words, by Gerald Shea – review

At the age of six, Gerald Shea had scarlet fever. The sounds of birds passed into memory to be replaced by the sound of locusts. Not only had Shea developed tinnitus, he had lost the ability to hear high frequencies.   Broadly speaking, he could only hear vowels, not consonants. If you can hear vowels, you can grasp the intonation and the feel of what is said, but not get much meaning. He calls this his ‘language of lyricals’. Neither Shea nor his family realised that he was now partially deaf, and thus slightly out of sync with the world. My own experience of deafness is different: I was born deaf,

Roger Lewis

What Fresh Lunacy is This?, by Robert Sellers – review

Midway through this startling book, Robert Sellers asks himself a question with such apparent seriousness I barked with laughter: ‘Was Oliver Reed an alcoholic?’ A more pertinent enquiry would be: ‘Was the man ever capable of drawing a sober breath?’ What Fresh Lunacy is This? is the monotonous chronicle of a nasty drunk whose ‘explosions of pissed aggression’ filled every waking hour, culminating in a deranged session, while filming Castaway in 1986, when he attacked an aeroplane. Reed would gulp 20 pints of lager as a way of limbering up. He’d then switch to spirits and the cycle of fighting and carousing would begin. It’s a miracle he survived to

Jane Rye

Paul Nash, by Andrew Causey – review

Andrew Causey opens his book on a slightly defensive note: Paul Nash, he says is often identified as Britain’s outstanding 20th-century landscape painter, as if painting the natural scene was the only thing he did, or landscape art as a genre is entirely separable from others, such as portraiture or history painting. It is unexpected to find that at least among art historians the idea of landscape painting as a lesser genre still lingers. To the general public Paul Nash is as likely to be familiar as an official war artist of both world wars, author of one of the most indelible images of the Great War, ‘We are Making

Jonathan Mirsky

China’s War with Japan, by Rana Mitter – review

The Sino-Japanese struggle that began in 1937, two years before the rest of the world plunged into war, is not as unknown as Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford, contends in this comprehensive new book. His copious notes, after all, display how well that conflict has been studied by many scholars. But in the sense that few Westerners under the age of 80 can string more than two sentences together about those terrible eight years, he is right. It is a big story, and for the most part Mitter tells it well. The scene — China — is vast. Two competing leaders, Chiang Kai-shek and

Emily Rhodes

Things I Don’t Want to Know, by Deborah Levy – review

In her powerful rejoinder to Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, Deborah Levy responds to his proposed motives for writing — ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ — with illuminating moments of autobiography. Levy begins one spring when she was crying on escalators, ‘at war with my lot’. She flies to Majorca, where, stuck on a mountain the night she arrives, she takes comfort in ‘being literally lost when I was lost in every other way’. Reading her notebooks later, she alights on a Polish director’s advice to a young actress: ‘to speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a

Duncan Fallowell

Backing Into the Light, by Colin Spencer – review

Colin Spencer first came to my notice in the Swinging Sixties when a fellow undergraduate alerted me to his larky romp Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, the first novel since Woolf’s Orlando to treat of transexuality. It was published in 1966, two years before Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, and I associated Spencer with the ‘sexual allsorts’ group around the publisher Anthony Blond at that time. But he didn’t build on it and seemed to fade away. Now I know why: he never quite knew what he wanted to be — gay or straight, a family man or a rover, a writer, musician, painter or horticulturalist. The next time I

Mark Mason

The Outsider, by Jimmy Connors – review

As a teenager in the 1980s I liked Jimmy Connors. This meant parking my not inconsiderable jealousy that he’d once had Chris Evert as his girlfriend. Magnanimously, I agreed to do so. Not only did the star respond to a shout of ‘come on Connors’ with ‘I’m trying for Chrissakes!’, he was also, you sensed, the real thing: a genuine rebel. John McEnroe played at it, but — like Ian Botham in cricket — always had a faint air of the knob about him. Connors’s anger, he reveals in his autobiography The Outsider (Transworld, £18.99), stems from the day he was eight and saw his mother beaten up on a

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The 10 “best” historical novels, sort of…

The BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, which began last Sunday, has led numerous books editors to pick their 10 best historical novels. I played this silly dinner party game last year (although I forget the inspiration). And, while admitting that it was nigh on impossible to pick 10, I came up with: J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander Robert Graves’s I Claudius JM Coetzee’s Disgrace Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Pat Barker’s Regeneration Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard There were some

Tuesday

Stephen Mcewen

Ben Fountain interview: Lies are an affront to writers because lying is the corruption of language

Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It would appear that it was well worth the wait, as it immediately met with praise, awarded both the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting Award. This success continued when his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was published five years later. In the last six months alone, it has won two awards in America, including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award, and nominated for a further two here in the UK. His short story collection explores America’s

Monday

David Blackburn

Fathers, sons and the beauty of a “borrowed” book

I spent the weekend in Dublin; consequently, I am suffering from what Apthorpe would have called ‘Bechuana tummy’. For the uninitiated, Apthorpe is the premier fool in Men at Arms, the first book in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. I was reading it in bed last night and was wryly amused by this joke, which hangs over two chapters: ‘The two lame men climbed into the car and returned to Kut-al-Amara in alcoholic gloom.  Chapter 7 Next day Apthorpe had a touch of Bechuana tummy, but he rose none the less.’ I return to Men at Arms often, but never without reason. I did so this time because Father’s Day fell

Austen Saunders

To their coy mistresses: two poems about the arts of seduction

Andrew Marvell, from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found: Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song. Then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. This is the middle stanza of Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which I imagine many will know well. The first stanza begins ‘Had we but world enough and

Friday

The Spectator

The week in books

This week’s magazine is full to the brim with cracking book reviews. Here is a selection of quotes to whet your appetite. Sam Leith on Modernity Britain, David Kynaston’s rampaging account of the birth of the consumer age during Harold Macmillan’s premiership: ‘The jacket quotes a passage from late in the book that is an extreme but far from unique instance of the clattering cavalcade style. I wasn’t even alive then but I still feel nostalgic: Galaxy, Picnic, Caramac (‘Smooth as chocolate … tasty as toffee … yet it’s new all through!’), Knorr Instant Cubes, Bettaloaf, Nimble, New Zealand Cheddar (‘Now I’m sure they’ll grow up firm and strong’), Jacob’s

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

The Special power of the printed word

A few weeks ago, three colossal boxes of new books from Penguin arrived in the bookshop. I made myself a strong cup of tea and then began the lengthy task of unpacking them, taking out the books and piling them up in neat stacks, ready to tick them off the invoice before zapping them on to our computer system and putting them out on the shop floor. Rather unusually, one stack of books was visibly shrinking, even as I added to it. Strictly Bipolar is a smartly designed, pocket-sized paperback, in which psychoanalyst Darian Leader challenges the rise of ‘bipolarity’ as a solution to complex problems. There were ten copies

Maggi Hambling

A Time by the Sea, by Ronald Blythe – review

I first encountered Ronald Blythe at Benton End, a glowing oxblood farmhouse above the river Brett, poised on the edge of Hadleigh in Suffolk. This was the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, run by Lett Haines and Cedric Morris, and known locally as the ‘Artists’ House’ and for ‘every vice under the sun’. Ronnie describes the set-up brilliantly. I was a raw 15-year-old at the time, and the point of studying most subjects on the school curriculum had escaped me: painting alone had become my raison d’être. Indeed, art began for both of us in Suffolk. Its particular air, sea, sky and mud run through our blood —

Rupert Christiansen

Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis – review

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well. Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces? Most probably not: his enterprise as critic, teacher and editor of Scrutiny is now strictly a matter for the historians (Christopher

Julie Kavanagh

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate

Nicky Haslam

Flappers, by Judith Mackrell – review

I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both? Reference books don’t help much. The OED says the word means a fly-killer, and you really don’t want to know the Dictionary of Slang’s definitions. So what was, in the accepted vo-deyo-do-ing, headache-band-browed, fancy-dress costume and Baz Luhrmanesque image, a ‘flapper’? One might assume that in this substantial, erudite and detailed, but oddly humour-free book,

Timothy Mo

Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard – review

Nothing in Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park betrays the fact that it is his first period novel: not its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit, or its choice of a narrator and material quite outside the author’s own experience. The 19th century is closing and the 20th is opening in a London seething with foreign sedition and the antics of its own wayward men of genius. The enchanted suburb of Bedford Park, a baroque gem created in 1875 as part of an architectural counter-revolution and renewal, houses W.B. Yeats and the novel’s narrator, Calhoun Kidd.  Kidd has fled Chicago and his domineering father. However, he enters London

Joanna Kavenna

A Place in the Country, by W.G. Sebald – review

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and that ‘literary greatness is still possible’ (Susan Sontag). Literary greatness it seemed, at times, was Sebald, and for a while after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, it was hard to find a work of fictive non-fiction that wasn’t riddled with grainy photographs of dubious quality integrated into the text. Despite Sebald’s sudden death