Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Bevis Hillier

… the bad, and the ugly

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings. In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote: David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put

Victoria Glendinning

The good …

Edna O’Brien would obviously never write a typical Irish ‘misery memoir’, though she has experienced more misery than is quite fair, even to the point of planning suicide. Country Girl is an emotional roller-coaster of a book, beginning with two disturbing dreams of her old home, setting the elegiac tone. Family life was a ‘ragbag of anecdote, hearsay, allegory and consternation’ in a large two-storey stone house among fields in Co Clare, every room and every object in which is summoned up on the page. Father had been prosperous, but was so no longer, and he drank. Mother, whose ways and sayings are recalled as if yesterday, was of poorer

Robert Stewart

Eager for the fight

Horatio Nelson is England’s most loved military hero. Marlborough is remote from our view, and the aristocratic Wellington was perhaps too stiff and unbending a Tory for popular taste. Nelson, by contrast, had an engaging personality and a colourful private life. The disabling wounds that he suffered and the affecting circumstances of his death in the midst of the country’s greatest naval victory have secured him in the national memory. The navy, at any rate, has deeper roots in national sentiment than the army; it was seapower, after all, that carried Great Britain and its empire to pre-eminence in the world. The second volume of John Sugden’s biography, covering the

Juliet Gardiner

One dank October dawn

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared. Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947. Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver. Petrzywaski was also middle-aged, a bespectacled

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 18 October 2012

Like mists and mellow fruitfulness, Val McDermid novels often arrive in autumn. The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown, £16.99) is a standalone thriller whose central character, Stephanie Harker, is a ghost writer who compiles the autographies of celebrities. Her relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a foul-mouthed reality TV star known to the nation as the Scarlett Harlot, begins on a professional level but soon lurches towards the personal. The novel opens after Scarlett’s death from cancer. Stephanie, now the guardian of Scarlett’s five-year-old son Jimmy, is held up by security at O’Hare Airport, Chicago.  A kidnapper walks off with Jimmy and vanishes into the blue. The story develops into a double narrative:

Christopher Meyer

A peacekeeping body at war with itself

It takes less than an hour to fly from Washington DC to New York City. But, if you are a diplomat, you might as well be travelling to a distant planet, such is the gulf in diplomatic culture between America’s capital and the United Nations’ headquarters. Whenever I went to see my opposite number at the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, I felt that I was entering a hermetically sealed universe, where ambassadors marched to an arcane beat governed by the mysteries of multilateral diplomacy. During my time in Washington, a new French ambassador arrived, who had been transferred directly from the UN. He confessed to me that, of all his postings,

Stig Abell

The growing pains of spirited youth

It is initially unsettling to read a new novel by an acclaimed author that is not really new at all, merely available in an English translation for the first time. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote Silent House way back in 1983. It was his second novel, and helped to cement his reputation as the rising star of Turkish fiction. It has since been translated into a variety of European languages, and has already lived its literary life as a multilingual triumph and mused-over example of Pamuk’s ‘early’ period. It is rather thrilling for us monoglot Brits to be able now to share in the experience. Silent House’s English

Ferdinand Mount

A life of sad romance

‘What porridge had John Keats?’ Browning offers this as the crass sort of question that stupid people ask. But in fact the first person to answer it would have been John Keats himself. He loved to talk about food, good and bad. He writes to his dying brother Tom from Kirkcudbright that ‘we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs and dirtiest potatoes with a slice of salmon’. As Keats and his Hampstead friend Charles Brown tramped round Loch Fyne, he complained that all they had to live off were eggs, oatcake and whisky: I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down

Richard Shone

The sage of Aix

Like Mont St-Victoire itself, looming over the country to the north of Aix-en-Provence — seen unexpectedly, then just as suddenly hidden, now clear-cut against the sky, at other times a presence in the corner of the eye— the work of Paul Cézanne has been a landmark in the art of the century and more since his death in Aix in 1906. Unlike Monet, Matisse or Picasso, his influence in his own lifetime was restricted to a small circle of admirers — mostly in the last decade of his life. It is an unusual occurrence for so crucial a figure in the history of painting to have gained a reputation that

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Ol Parker

Screenwriter for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and now promoting his latest film Now Is Good starring Dakota Fanning and Olivia Williams, filmmaker Ol Parker tells us which book is the funniest ever written, when he might find himself in bed with Martin Amis and what he does exactly when his wife, Thandie Newton, is asleep. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I tend to have about fourteen books on the go, keeping at least one under my pillow in the hope of absorbing it osmotically. But a current few are the new James Meek, Heart Broke, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, the magnificent 102 Minutes, about the extraordinary feats of

Jerry Hayes

Review – A Doomed Marriage by Daniel Hannan

When Dan Hannan’s book, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe, arrived through the post I was alarmed to see that it was shrink wrapped in the same way as top shelf pornographic material. For those of you Europhiles who rather warm to the idea of a federal Europe and look forward to the day when we join the Single Currency, this will not be a happy read. But if you are of the Amish wing of the Conservative Party (or even a Kipper), convinced that it won’t be too long before the clank of jackboots will be heard on the Mall and that her Majesty will be evicted from Buckingham

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies wins the Booker Prize

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, which seems right because it is the most accomplished book on the list – challenging but fundamentally readable thanks to the execution and, it must be said, the drama of the history of that period, which Mantel handles with the insight of a historian, though thankfully not a historian’s total fidelity. If you don’t believe me, read the Spectator review written by Nicola Shulman, biography of the Henrician poet Thomas Wyatt. Mantel has joined Australian Peter Carey and South African J.M. Coetzee to hold a brace of Bookers. Speculation is already mounting about the 3rd instalment of her trilogy. It would be

Daisy Dunn

What makes a man

The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want to master the art of rhetoric. Doing all or any of these things could make you seem unmanly. You might have been born a man, but masculinity was definitely something you had to work at. I dare say little has changed there, though perhaps any decision to bolster one’s masculinity today comes less from the kind of external pressures put upon men by society in antiquity, than personal reactions to what is deemed a societal norm (to wax or not

Matthew Richardson

Your guide to the Booker Prize

Assorted literary grandees will squeeze into their tuxes this evening to compete for the Booker Prize. Of the debut novelists, one previous winner and a brace of old-timers, who stands the best chance of winning? Swimming Home by Deborah Levy This is a coiled, unsettling work. A group arrive at their French villa only to find a woman, Kitty Finch, swimming in the pool. Having nowhere to go, she is invited to stay. The book charts the way Kitty’s mental instability wriggles its way into the fabric of the group’s relations: the poet Joe, Isabel (his war-reporter wife), Nina (his teenage daughter) and tag along friends Mitchell and Laura. Written in

Monday

Austen Saunders

The shock value of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester

‘The Maidenhead’ Have you not in a chimney seen A sullen faggot wet and green, How coyly it receives the heat, And at both ends does fume and sweat? So fares it with the harmless maid When first upon her back she’s laid; But the well-experienced dame, Cracks and rejoices in the flame. Rochester is a favourite of A-level students because he writes about sex and uses rude words. That in itself would not make him an accomplished poet. Sex is not an obscure subject and there are lots of words which rhyme with ‘prick’. But there are good reasons to read Rochester. One is that he had a knack

David Blackburn

Ian McEwan’s novel questions

Brevity does not imply levity. That, at least, is the view of Ian McEwan. The national treasure was speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival over the weekend when he crowned the novella, which he defined as a book of roughly 25,000 words, as the ‘supreme literary form’. He challenged publishers and critics who believe the novella to be inherently inauthentic and frivolous, arguing that the compact form brings out the best in the greatest writers. ‘Somehow . . . the prose is better, more condensed, more rigorous. Characters have to be established with a great deal of economy. All this makes demands on a writer that brings them to a

Friday

David Blackburn

Governing the world – an interview with Mark Mazower

‘People begin to feel that… there are bonds of international duty binding all the nations of the earth together.’ This quotation, which resonates so clearly as yet more blood is shed in Syria, belongs to Guiseppe Mazzini, the 19th century Italian nationalist whose vision of a ‘Holy Alliance of peoples’ underscores much of Professor Mark Mazower’s Governing the World: The History of an Idea. Mazower’s book is an account of the ideas and institutions of international relations from the Concert of Vienna in 1814 to the present day United Nations. It is, then, the story of how Western hegemony has shaped the international sphere; this period of hegemony is soon to end

Thursday

Paul Abbott

The great shroud of the sea rolled on – reading Moby-Dick

mobydickbigread.com is a website. It adapts Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick into an online audiobook. The content is rich: what tech executives might call “trendily interactive”, in that there are Facebook groups, hipster cultural events, academic podcasts, and so on. The Guardian is heavily involved. David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow have all “jumped aboard”. There will be a “Whale-Fest” in Brighton. This kind of thing doesn’t have to be your cup of tea, to admit at least that the effort is genuine. It is a fanzine for Ahab-enthusiasts, self-described as ‘an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome’. From my desk in SW9, I feel a sort of

David Blackburn

Mo Yan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

The new Nobel laureate is Mo Yan, a Chinese writer. He is the first Chinese citizen to win the prize, and doubtless will become the first of many as China’s cultural ascent matches its economic boom and political prominence. I must confess that I’ve never read anything by him, and I suspect that I’m not alone. The big chief at the Nobel academy, permanent secretary Peter Englund, suggests that we start with Yan’s novel, The Garlic Ballads. The Guardian has helpfully linked to this New York Times review of the novel. His novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips also seems to be a popular choice on the wires, and not

Harry Mount

Rural idol

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran. ‘The old farm work was terribly hard on people — there was terrible rural poverty,’ says Blythe. ‘A lot of the people think of