Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Jonathan Rugman

Murderous mullah games

Montesquieu observed that popular governments are always more vindictive than monarchies. So it proved in Iran in 1979, where the demise of a 2,000-year-old monarchical tradition made most ‘Arab spring’ revolutions seem like child’s play. More than 30 years on, the descent of Ayatollah Khomeini from a jumbo jet, wearing an American bullet-proof vest, also remains arguably more significant. James Buchan concludes that Osama bin Laden was the extreme Sunni response to Khomeini’s clerical dictatorship; and without Khomeini, the Shias’ battle for survival would not have played out across the Middle East as violently as it has, including in Syria today. By the end of 1982, more than 5,000 young

David Crane

Carve their names with pride

On a ridge high above the River Ancre, four miles to the north of the town of Albert, stands the greatest of all Britain’s memorials to its dead. For some curious reason the Thiepval Arch has never touched the imagination in the same way as Blomfield’s Menin Gate, but as an evocation of the pity and horror of war, Lutyens’s astonishing pyramid of arches, rising high above the old battlefields of the Somme on the site of one of its bloodiest sectors, has no equal. It is the Marabar Cave of war memorials, the negation of every concept of honour or glory or fame that ever sent a soldier to

Anne Somerset

The strange potency of things

Building on the success of his acclaimed Radio 4 series and bestselling book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor has now successfully narrowed down the format. Selecting 20 objects that he suggests formed part of ‘the mental scenery’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he exploits what he calls ‘the strange potency of things’ to illuminate the world they lived in. Some of the items chosen initially appear almost perversely mundane. The cloth cap that was the prescribed headgear for all non-gentrified Elizabethan males is scarcely intrinsically beautiful, but under MacGregor’s scrutiny this humble garment proves satisfyingly informative. Elizabethans would have known at a glance that the

Cecily Gayford

Too much time in the library

Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to trace a legacy left by the 17th-century composer Agostino Steffani, a slippery customer who mixed libretti with realpolitik in the courts of Europe. The bequest turns out to consist mainly of nasty secrets, which seem strangely important to the attractive yet shady lawyer who has hired Caterina. But despite having all the ingredients of a zippy historical mystery in an intriguing new genre, Jewels doesn’t quite deliver the goods. Caterina spends too much time in libraries, furtively eating energy bars, for the climax to have much more tension than an

Allan Massie

About to cop it?

Rebus is back, in a novel long, meaty and persuasive enough to make up for the years of absence. Actually, he is only part-way back — on a civilian attachment to the Edinburgh & Lothian Police, and working on cold cases. However, the retiring age has been raised, and he has applied for re-instatement. He may not succeed; the head of this small department is unlikely to recommend him, and Inspector Fox, the officer in charge of the complaints department, who has been the lead character in Rankin’s last two novels, regards him with suspicion, dislike and contempt. To his mind, Rebus is a type of policeman who should be

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tragically flawed

This is a story of impossible gifts. The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, stands to inherit a 17th-century baronetcy and a large fortune accumulated by his enterprising father. He was also blessed with intelligence, charm, ambition, eloquence and the mysterious ability to seek out power and use it for his own ends. His biographer, Janan Ganesh, has written a pacy, well-researched book whose only fault is its unquestioning fealty to its subject. Osborne excelled at St Paul’s and Oxford and then strolled into Conservative Central Office as a special adviser. No career but politics interested him. At 25, he was holding one-to-one briefings with the prime minister, John Major. In

Simon Jenkins

Nostalgic nationalist piety

Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities. The English still want their local spokesmen to be vicars not mayors. Roger Scruton should have been a bishop. He would have gone to the top, and spared Anglicans their present agony over whom to send to Canterbury. Archbishop Scruton would have gathered up the church’s shattered canticles, creeds and conflicts and marched them to

Wednesday

Lynn Shepherd

Puffing Pamela: Book hype, 18th-century style

There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of the super-heavyweight contenders will always be Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel-in-letters, Pamela. When it first appeared Pamela was as much of a sensation as the X Factor and Fifty Shades rolled into one, a genuine ‘multi-media event’ more than two hundred years before that phrase was even coined. Part of that impact

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Iain (M) Banks

Scottish novelist Iain (M) Banks is this week’s Shelf Life provocateur. He tells us how he likes to test his potential lovers and what extreme punishments he exacts on books he doesn’t like. 1) What are you reading at the moment? The Hell of it All by Charlie Brooker and Anatomy of the Orchestra by Norman del Mar are by the bedside, but the book I’ve just started is The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer (at only a year old, this is ferociously up-to-date by my standards). 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Beano 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if

Tuesday

Emma Gray

Writing the Tory Wars

On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those days. The standard question was: why the hell aren’t we in government and whose fault is it? The Duncan Smith leadership was evidently doomed from the moment of its conception, but the ‘quiet man’ stumbled on to his inevitable demise. If the party wasn’t going to find a broadly appealing leader, I’d better write one

Nigel Jones

The Fuhrer was not amused

‘The German sense of humour,’ Mark Twain famously observed, ‘Is no laughing matter.’ Although many Greeks, stretched on the Euro’s rack at Berlin’s behest, may be inclined to agree, Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing study of humour in and against Hitler’s Germany, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany, proves conclusively that the Teutonic funny bone, while it may be difficult to locate, definitely exists. Herzog, the son of the great German film director Werner Herzog, has written a book that is at once an anthology of German jokes current under the Third Reich, an analysis of their evolution as a weapon of resistance against Nazi rule, an insight into how Europe’s

Monday

Austen Saunders

William Rowley and the death of Prince Henry – poetry

‘To the Grave’ Unclasp thy womb, thou mortuary shrine, And take the worst part of the best we had. Thou hast no harbourage for things divine, That thou had’st any part was yet too bad. Graves, for the grave, are fit, unfit for thee Was our sweet branch of youthful royalty. Thou must restore each atom back again When that day comes that stands beyond all night. His fame (meanwhile) shall here on earth remain, Lo thus we have divided our delight: Heaven keeps his spirit stalled amongst the just, We keep his memory, and thou his dust. Prince Henry was the eldest son of James I and VI (that’s

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview: Ciaran Carson on translating Rimbaud

Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which earned him the Alice Hunt Barlett Award. Belfast Confetti (1990) won The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. In 1993 Carson won the first ever T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, for his collection, First Language; while his 2003 collection, Breaking News, won the Forward Poetry Prize. That same year, Carson was appointed Professor of Poetry, and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Queen’s University in Belfast; a position he

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Everyone loves a Penguin

Markus Dohle, Chief Executive of Random House, must have had a long hard think about what a booklover could possibly treasure more than a Kindle. The answer is, of course, a Penguin. Everyone loves Penguin. Their paperback covers have become such a design cult that people flock to buy not just their books, but also bags, mugs, postcards, and even deckchairs, trussed up in Penguin livery. If Random House wants to stand up to the mighty Amazon, then this strong brand is a boost to their arsenal. Why else would Random House want to merge with Penguin? Last year Random House reported revenues of 1.7 billion euros, with an operating

Mark Mason

Paper talk

The rainforests must be jumping for joy these days. Which is ironic, as they’ve largely got Amazon to thank for it. As the e-book continues its rise, there’ll be less and less demand from publishers for that horrible, immoral, eco-balance-wrecking stuff called ‘paper’. But before the trees get too complacent, they should remember that there’s one group of people who are still curiously insistent that our leafy friends make the ultimate sacrifice: writers. When it comes to one particular stage of the book-writing process, paper remains the only acceptable tool. It’s perfectly possible these days for a book to be conceived, written, edited, published and promoted without a single word

Sophia Waugh

A ladykiller at large

Ever since Sergeant Cuff appeared in The Moonstone in 1868, we English have loved our detectives. Moody Scandinavian fiction might come and go, but Peter Wimsey, Poirot, Marple and of course Sherlock Holmes continue to delight us. In Simon Serailler, Susan Hill has created a detective that ranks alongside all these greats. Like Cuff, he has his passion (drawing), like Wimsey he has a personal story, which is built up in each successive novel (this is the seventh in the series). A Question of Identity continues the tale of Serailler’s usually doomed love affairs, his ambivalent relationship with his father, his widowed sister’s single motherhood, and his care for her

Kate Chisholm

Exhibitions of narcissism

The summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its overstuffed galleries and motley collection of overblown portraits, twee still lifes and garish landscapes has become an event where you go to be seen rather than to see; it’s less about the art than the experience. But the first-ever public show of paintings, sculpture, architectural drawings in London, which opened on 21 April 1760, was a truly artistic sensation. For the first time, it was possible for anyone to see the best of British paintings and sculpture, for the price of a modest entrance fee. Until then, viewing great masters had been strictly limited to those who could afford to travel

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bionic bore

After wading through 646 pages of narcissistic gush and breathtaking vulgarity in the accents of Dr Kissinger and Dr Strangelove, I am consoled by the thought that the ordeal has not been entirely a waste of effort. Frequently able to put the book down, yet obliged every time but one to lift it up again, I have found the exercise has wonderfully enlarged, defined and beautified my deltoids, trapezii, latissimus dorsi and other muscles too intimate to mention. Now, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I can gaze into looking glasses with intensified Gemutlichkeit. If I obey ‘Arnold’s Rules’ — especially the advice, ‘When someone tells you “no”, you should hear “yes” ’

Joanna Kavenna

Homage to the Goddess Mother

Cometh the hour, cometh the many men (and women). The 2012 centenary of Captain Scott’s death inspired a series of heroic forays into print: glory-hungry (or just plain hungry) authors questing for something new to say about this much-described event. Next year is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, and so we might expect more of the same, with an icy blasted peak instead of an icy blasted pole. For those who approach these commemorative sorties with a heavy heart, Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1953 should come as a vertiginous relief.  The book is neither a flimsy reprise, nor a mercenary hatchet job. Instead, Conefrey crafts an exciting,

Alan Judd

An exhausting mixture of boredom and concentration

The wartime code-breaking successes of Bletchley Park are deservedly well known.  The story of how they decrypted German and Japanese codes, most famously the Enigma, has been the subject of histories, novels and films, so much so that Bletchley is glamour. Much less well known, however, and much less glamorous — rarely even thought about — is the story of how those clever cryptologists got the coded radio signals they worked on. Where did their daily and nightly fodder come from?  It certainly wasn’t from sticking an aerial in the attic and waiting to see what came out of it. The signals Bletchley decoded came from the Y Service (Y