Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

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

Claudia FitzHerbert

A guide to the media circus

Caitlin Moran’s  bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in a council house in Wolverhampton) to the political (better pornography, larger pants, more body hair). Her latest effort, Moranthology (Ebury Press, £18.99) casts a retrospective glow of gravity over its predecessor. That was a manifesto of sorts; this is proper-job knockabout. Moran, who writes three columns a week for The Times, gives us a mish-mash of interviews, ‘celebrity watches’ and other ephemera from the past 20 years. Her skill as an interviewer lies not in the killer question but in the way she conveys being there and messing it up.

Ed Smith

The prophetic fallacy

This book isn’t just about prediction, or even the limits of knowledge. It is about the ascent of man. According to Nate Silver, the American electoral analyst, the digital age and its explosion of knowledge constitute a great turning point in human history. Never before have we had so much evidence on which to base our predictions of the future. Yes, there have been setbacks along the way, but we should feel optimistic about the direction of travel. Yet there is a paradox about the evolution of prediction. Innovations in technology and information make it possible to analyse data far more quickly and extensively.  The availability of so much raw

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Man of many parts

My father, a man not given to hero-worship, once told me that the only actor he really admired was Richard Burton. Some years later, I put the question to Peter O’Toole, who had been reading excerpts from his lushly overwritten memoirs at the Oxford Union. ‘Mr O’Toole,’ I said, ‘I was wondering if…’ A shy undergraduate, I may have stammered a little. ‘Which is to say, is there any actor … Or rather, which actor, of those you’ve acted with, or those you haven’t, among the living, or, indeed, the dead, would you say you’ve most admired, or aspired to emulate, in your acting career?’ To which the ageing thespian

James Walton

Still Waters run deep

T.C. Boyle is not one of those authors who can be accused of writing the same novel again and again. Over the past 30 years, his subject matter has ranged from 18th-century Africa to the California of the future, from Mexican immigration to the sex life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Even so, what has tended to unify his work is verbal extravagance, dark comedy and a taste for satire that sometimes borders on contempt. All of which makes San Miguel his most unexpected book yet. A historical novel of almost heroic restraint, its prose remains resolutely unflashy, and its tone is sympathetic to the point of genuine warmth. On New

Andrew McKie

Homage to the Sage of Shepperton

L’Arénas, between Côte d’Azur airport and a dual carriageway patrolled by prostitutes, is a banal stretch of concrete, steel and glass offices, malls and hotels that seems always to be deserted. A few weeks ago, I watched an 18-month-old Korean boy playing on an iPad by a hotel pool there. ‘Ballardian’ was le mot juste. As with Kafka, Borges, Pinter, Orwell and others who have earned an adjective, the mental landscape conjured up by J.G. Ballard’s work is instantly recognisable — though to have been fully Ballardian, the pool should have been drained and overtaken by vegetation, zebras, wrecked Pontiacs and rusting B-29s. In a review of Hello America in

Jasper Becker

A utopian nightmare

What must Mao have thought when in 1968 he heard that towering intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre were enthusiastically distributing newspapers on the prosperous boulevards of Paris bearing his portrait and eulogising his ideas? By then Mao, along with most Chinese, knew that just six years earlier his attempt to create a Marxist utopia in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962 had catastrophically failed. The Chinese revolution was effectively over. His People’s Communes had destroyed the lives of at least 36 million, and possibly many more. Millions of others were tortured, imprisoned or fled their homes to escape an orgy of violence and terror. The economy collapsed after the Chinese Communists

Andro Linklater

Eavesdropping on the enemy

Say ‘Colditz’, and the name immediately triggers an image of prisoners of war digging tunnels, building gliders and in general plotting outrageously to cross the barbed wire into freedom. You could shout ‘Trent Park’ from the rooftops and, until now, no one would have known what you were referring to. But this book should give the name as lively a notoriety as the brooding Saxon fortress. Trent Park in Middlesex was where Britain housed the cream of captured German officers. They were brought together, not to prevent their escape, but to encourage their conversation. Scattered throughout their cells and huts was a network of concealed microphones designed to record whatever

Philip Mansel

Love letters to foreign lands

Xenophilia is as English as Stilton. Despite a reputation for insularity, no other nation has produced so many writers who have  immersed themselves in other countries. From Borrow to Lawrence, Byron to Auden, the list is impressive. In one of the wonderful letters quoted in this perceptive, haunting and highly readable biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor called living in England ‘like living in the heart of a lettuce. I pine for hot stones and thorns and olive trees and prickly pears.’ In the opinion of his biographer Artemis Cooper he had an ‘entirely European sensibility’. In the house he built in the mountains of Mani in the Peloponnese, between olive groves

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: James Naughtie

James Naughtie explains why he’d give Scoop to a lover, confesses which books by another BBC luminary he does his best to avoid and finally reassures us, in case you were wondering, that he doesn’t fantasise about Lolita. He will be appearing at the Wimbledon Bookfest on 14th October to talk about his latest book, The New Elizabethans (published by Collins on 11th October, £25). He tweets @naughtiej   1). What are you reading at the moment? The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s fabulous biography of Lyndon Johnson; and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, about our ancient pathways, which is blissful. 2). As a child,

David Blackburn

Spreading the Word through patois

The Jamaican High Commission in London held a party last night to launch a patois translation of the Gospels. The translation, published by the Bible Society, is the culmination of 20 years work by academics at the University of the West Indies and other institutions, studying the rules of the creole created by plantation slaves and committing them fully to paper for the first time. The project has been part-funded by donations from congregations whose primary (and often only) language is patois rather than English, the language in which scripture has always been written and read in the nominally English-speaking Caribbean. This is an important cultural moment. It is an