Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This Year’s Booker Rumpus: Just As Ridiculous As Every Other Year’s Booker Rumpus

The annual tiff about the Man Booker Prize is a reassuringly perennial feature of the British autumn. It is also almost always ridiculous. This year, apparently, the prize has been “dumbed down” as the judges (including the Spectator’s Susan Hill) neglected a number of fashionable names in favour of a shortlist that, Julian Barnes excepted, features relatively little-known authors. Worst of all, it seems, the judges are said to have treated “readability” as an important factor when considering their favourites. Crivvens! This, it is further alleged, is part of longer-term trend favouring “accessible” novels above those of so-called genuine literary merit. Some familiar – even trendy – authors now say

Anna Baddeley

Libraries: Stop patronising, start patronising

Be honest, how many times have you used your local library in the past year? If you live in Kensal Rise, the answer is “not enough”. Before it was locked up last week, after the High Court overturned a last-ditch appeal by campaigners, its pretty Victorian library had been getting only 850 visits a week.   With each of these visits costing £4, Brent Council decided this wasn’t sustainable. Kensal, along with five other “under-performing” libraries, would be closed, with some of the £1 million saved going towards the borough’s six remaining libraries. There are also plans underfoot to build a new “super library” near Wembley stadium.   Naturally, the

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Prizes for all

Andrew Motion has joined the chorus of disapproval against this year’s Booker shortlist, saying that it has created a “false divide” between highbrow literature and accessible books. He went on to describe the split as a “pernicious and dangerous thing”, adding that it was “extraordinary” that authors like Graham Swift, Alan Hollingshurst, Edward St. Aubyn and Philip Hensher had not been shortlisted.    Stern stuff from the former Poet Laureate, who was chief Booker judge last year. His words will further inspire those who think that a new prize should be created, one that recognises an “uncompromising standard of excellence”. Those are the words of Andrew Kidd, the literary agent who is the spokesman

Daisy Dunn

Guildford Diary: Famous friends

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Masques of beauty and blackness

Sam Leith on the paradoxical nature of Britain’s first literary celebrity What a piece of work was Ben Jonson! If you lived in Elizabethan England and had just narrowly escaped the gallows after stabbing a man to death in an illegal duel, wouldn’t you want to keep your head down for a bit? Not Jonson. He converted to Catholicism. A few months after the bishops of Canterbury and London, in 1599, declared the writing of satire illegal, what did Jonson produce? Every Man out of his Humour, a self-declared ‘comical satire’. The writing of history was also proscribed — Tacitean history being a particular sore point. So in 1603 Jonson

Bevis Hillier

Stranger than fiction

Asked to review this book, which I was told was about encounters between unlikely pairs of people, I assumed it would be on the lines of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Craig Brown is our premier parodist, the best since the incomparable Max. Might his chatting twosomes include Cleopatra and Janet Street-Porter? The Marquis de Sade and Mary Whitehouse? No one could do that better, I thought; and by the end of it I’d be writhing on the Axminster, to borrow a phrase from the late Alan Coren. I couldn’t wait to split my sides. I was quite wrong. To my surprise, the book describes real encounters. Truth being stranger

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The best and bravest

‘The candle is burning out and I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can ­— that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this — with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50-to-1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George. ‘ Thus wrote the magnificent (and in many ways muddle-headed) mountaineer George Mallory on 27 May 1924. It was his last ever letter to his wife Ruth before he disappeared into the blizzard that swirled around the summit of Mt Everest, never to return. Did he

Vernon Bogdanor

Not lions, but ostriches

Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the colonisers. But that, surely, is a fallacy. For the British empire was, for most of its history, an elite project. There is little evidence that it ever enthused the British people, except perhaps in the decade following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Beatrice Webb found ‘all classes’ to be ‘drunk with the sightseeing

Tony Gould

Fixing malaria

A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics. Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief of Time magazine and has ten years’ experience of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  He knows what happens on the ground, how small a fraction of charitable donations ever reaches the people it is intended to help; and he is not a fan of aid agencies, characterised

Cressida Connolly

Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack

What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to see it. Lycett Green has written about front gardens and cottages, books full of interesting facts about history and buildings, conveyed in a pleasantly informal, even chatty, style. She also writes a column on unspoiled market towns and villages, which has already spawned one book, Unwrecked England. The present volume is along the same lines.

Jonathan Davis

Investment special: Be very afraid

In The Fear Index, the latest thriller by Robert Harris, now heading for the Christmas bestseller lists, a brainbox hedge fund manager with little in the way of interpersonal skills discovers that his computer-driven trading system has flown out of control and threatens to send the world’s stock markets into a tailspin. Anyone familiar with Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein will recognise the genre of the oddball genius consumed by his own creation — populist fiction at its best. But is it fiction? Not so fast, reader. As Harris makes clear in a footnote near the end of his novel, the market meltdown which Dr Alex Hoffmann’s trading system appears to

Friday

David Blackburn

A thoroughly English affair

Calm reigned outside Kensal Rise Library this afternoon, following the dramas of the morning. Contractors arrived at 6am to board up the building after a court decided that Labour controlled Brent Council could close six libraries as part of its austerity drive. They discovered two people standing guard at the front door, who immediately stood-to and barred the way. The same scene was repeated at 8am, when a posse of locals descended to defy council workers. They were bolstered by a phalanx of 140 or so primary school children from the nearby Princess Frederica CofE school, dragooned into action by their parents. The burly contractors slunk off with their chip-board and

Daisy Dunn

Guildford diary: The Bell tolls

It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen.  Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls.   ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is

Fleur Macdonald

I only have ‘ize’ for you

It’s easy to blame the Americans, but sometimes — as the courts ruled in Perugia last week — they’re innocent. The case brought to mind another instance of injustice meted out to our transatlantic cousins, all in the name of that most exacting of mistresses: grammar. Of the many linguistic crimes we’ve accused them of committing, the most awful is the genocide of the suffix “ise”. We tut over spell-check, remark on the aesthetic superiority of that line of beauty — the curve of an “S” — and stand aghast at the cheek of attempting to deface their mother tongue. Replace the elegant slip of an “ise” with a clunky

Thursday

David Blackburn

A scribbling spat

The prognosis is grave for the Booker Prize, say more than a few literary commentators in response to the news that a cabal of publishers, authors and agents plan to establish a “well-funded prize” that would have a “different set of priorities” to the Booker. For different “set of priorities”, read “high-brow”; the prize may also be open to American authors. Spokesman for the nascent Literature Prize, Andrew Kidd, told the Bookseller that the prize would: ‘establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence…For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize’s administrator and this year’s judges

Anna Baddeley

Briefing Note: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California. Who is Michael Lewis? A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short. Does he have any insights? This is more a collage of colourful reportage than a book

Mark Mason

In praise of the footnote

What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is

Wednesday

David Blackburn

In response to the Guardian’s top 10 novels on farming

Over at Guardian Books, Irish playwright Belinda McKeon has picked her top 10 farming novels. Here’s her list: 1. Stoner by John Williams 2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh 3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans 5. That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern 6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff 7. Foster by Claire Keegan 8. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons 9. God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin 10. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer    It’s a provocative list and there are some notable exceptions, especially as numbers 2, 3 and

David Blackburn

Wisden’s voyage into cricket’s future

Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, cricket is India’s first faith – or so the cliché says. Wisden, the cricket Bible, announced earlier this week that is to launch an Indian edition. I’m surprised that Wisden does not already have a sub-continent edition, given that money-spinning cricket innovations such as the Indian Premier League have accompanied the region’s boisterous economic expansion. You might think that Wisden is arriving at this party somewhat more than fashionably late. Wisden and its publisher (and owner) Bloomsbury, however, exude confidence. Their press release notes, in the easy tones of a latter day Nabob, that the “local market for information on cricket in India is highly fragmented”. They plan to “unify the fragmented

Tuesday

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. Her background is journalism rather than academia. She’s married to the author Michael Frayn. What’s the deal with this biography? Tomalin’s book claims to offer a concise, rounded portrait of the man and his work. She doesn’t hold back from making judgments on his tricky personal life (in 1990 she published