Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

David Honigmann

Who’s still flying the flag for Britpop?

There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the

Scott Bradfield

The subversive message of Paradise Lost

For those of us who have long loved (or hated) Paradise Lost, this is one of those rare and refreshing books that invites us to compare our feelings with other committed readers over the centuries. The poemmay well be the only major work in the western canon that nobody can avoid for long – even if it comes down to making a decision not to read it at all, or just to give up trying. Orlando Reade argues that it may also be the most ‘revolutionary’ text commonly available in modern classrooms – written by a man who, in his time, took extreme positions on everything from divorce (he was

Thomas P. Lambert

A father’s love: Childish Literature, by Alejandro Zambra, reviewed

Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance. In doing so, he aims to correct the failings of prior male generations, who may have ‘tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men’, but never quite ‘taught us to be fathers’. Before he became one of Latin America’s most inventive prose writers, Zambra was an acclaimed poet and, like many poet-novelists, he treats narrative

Will Tosh

Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale

The path to National Treasureland is no paved highway. Simon Russell Beale, the finest classical actor of his generation, was nearly lost to academia (he swerved a PhD in Victorian literature), and faced down pigeon-holing from an agent who wanted to change his name to Simon Beagle, the better to capitalise on a knack for dopily jolly comedy roles. Now – and not before time – he’s written an elegant study of Shakespeare that does double duty as a juicy actor’s autobiography. The pleasure here is in the mix of green room gossip and literary insight. There’s plenty of the former: dining next to Lauren Bacall at the chat show

Nick Spencer

The report of Christianity’s death has been an exaggeration

George Orwell began his beautiful, nostalgic pre-war novel Coming up for Air with an epigraph from a popular song. ‘He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.’ It’s tempting to borrow the line when writing about Christianity in the West today. The chronicle of its death has been long foretold, its obituary repeatedly rewritten. Numbers, particularly in older denominations, have been heading south for decades, and churches (in Britain at least) have been shutting ever since over-enthusiastic Victorians opened far too many of them. Yet at the same time immigration is revivifying congregations everywhere. Many people show signs of spiritual openness, few speaking well of the kind of bare-knuckle rationalism that

Daniel Marc Janes

The curse of distraction: Lesser Ruins, by Mark Haber, reviewed

Earlier this year, I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. This cherished museum appears at first to be a collection of bizarre arcana: botanical specimens, miniature dioramas, tributes to forgotten polymaths. Closer inspection reveals it to be something altogether stranger, at the junction of fact and fiction. Witty and highly individual, it invites us to sit with the wonder, to contemplate what we have seen. Phones are strictly banned. Lesser Ruins, the consummate third novel by the Minneapolis-based Mark Haber, feels like a literary analogue – taking us as it does down rabbit holes, a twisting tour of an overloaded mind. Its unnamed narrator is a former

Olivia Cole

Seeking forgiveness for gluttony, sloth and other deadly sins

Professor Guy Leschziner writes that he was raised in a secular household that was ‘entirely irreligious’ yet with ‘a strong sense of morality, of right and wrong’. As an eminent neurologist and a rational atheist, it’s striking that his study of the extremes of human behaviour should reach for such Biblical terms. Is there an element of ghoulishness here? Seven Deadly Sins has a structure of which David Fincher, director of the gruesome film Seven, might approve.  To zero in on the sins is undoubtedly a darkly entertaining approach, if not for the squeamish. Having been a consultant at Guy’s hospital for more than 25 years, Leschziner has seen ‘the

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Not for the faint-hearted: She’s Always Hungry, by Eliza Clark, reviewed

Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, centred on a self-destructive woman taking explicit photographs of men. Her second, Penance, was about a journalist constructing a ‘definitive account’ of a seaside murder. Last year she was named one of Granta’s best young novelists; but she has now produced a sadly uneven short story collection. These 11 tales do not hang together thematically, aside from a broad emphasis on the corporeal. The good ones are full of brio: ‘The Shadow Over Little Chitaly’ is composed entirely of hilarious reviews of a takeway that offers Chinese food alongside pizza. The feedback is bizarre from the start: the first mentions that the restaurant is

Caspar Henderson

The North American fruit tree that provides a model for economics

Life on Earth is not a zero-sum affair. Most plants only exist thanks to partnerships with fungal filaments in the soil which mobilise essential nutrients for them and receive sugars made from sunlight in exchange. Without those partnerships, humans and most other land animals which depend on plants either directly or at one or two removes would not exist. Cooperation gives rise to a living world that is vastly more complex, productive and beautiful than the sum of its parts. An understanding of this reality is one of the key insights of an ecological worldview; and, argues Robin Wall Kimmerer in this short and charming book, it is of vital

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Lion’s Mane, the Firework and terrible jellyfish jokes: the year’s best children’s books

Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise that the world’s great cities have detached themselves from their terrestrial foundations and are floating across the sky like so many urban space ships, swallowing up smaller fry, you’d probably think this is asking a bit much of the reader, but somehow you take it all on board. In this futuristic scenario the characters and their modes of thinking are in fact rather quaint – like Miss Torpenhow, a governess whose floating town of Thorbury has been captured by a diabolical former protégé. The assurance

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Joanna Bell, Peter Frankopan, Mary Wakefield and Flora Watkins

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas (17:31); Mary Wakefield reviews Rod Dreher’s new book Living in wonder: finding mystery and meaning in a secular age (28:47); and, Flora Watkins looks at the Christmas comeback of Babycham (34:10).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Book Club: Josh Cohen

38 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen. With anger seemingly the default condition of our time, Josh’s new book All The Rage: Why Anger Drives the World seeks to unpick where anger comes from, what it does to us, and how it might function in the human psyche as a dark twin of the impulses we think of as love. Photo credit: Charlotte Speechley

Tuesday

Marcus Berkmann

A shortage of Nigels and other calamities: humorous stocking-fillers

This is the part of the run-up to Christmas I always look forward to most – the ‘silly’ books, loo books, even non-books produced by serious publishers who may resent the huge piles of money they make every year while delicate, thoughtful literary novels remain unbought and unread. As it happens, I have just finished a wholly unsatisfactory book of short stories – no names, no packdrill – so a few weeks of loo books have proved surprisingly refreshing, like a palate cleanser after a hideously over-thought restaurant meal. They are all recommended for grumpy old relatives, or even yourself. Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Scream (Abacus, £14.99) comes in the familiar

Tom Payne

A post-Brexit entertainment: The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

This is a novel that spans the Truss administration, from its heady dawn to its decline and fall 49 days later. The Proof of My Innocence starts as a satire, not so much of Truss and her world but the ideologists who thought that the prime minister’s brief, shining moment was their long-cherished future. They meet in a collapsing Cotswolds castle to hear from delegates such as Josephine Winshaw, who intones that everything now is woke: ‘Paying your TV licence was woke. Getting vaccinated was woke… buying avocados was woke, and reading novels was woke.’ Another speaker praises a reactionary novelist to a much smaller audience. Into this milieu steps

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

We need to learn to pray again

In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as ‘endarkenment’ (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our backs on God, we have become easy pickings for demonic forces. ‘Oh Lord’, said Angus, turning wearily away, ‘I’m so sick of demons.’ This delighted me then and still delights me, both because it’s so surreal and also because it rings so true. If you’d told me ten years ago that young political types in

Paul Deaton

Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand. Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of

John Jolliffe

The chilly charm of Clarissa Eden

Clarissa Churchill – as she was known until her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden – was brought up in a now vanished privileged world of intellectual, social and political London. In the introduction to his biography, Hugo Vickers provides a valuable roll-call of names. Those still living who knew Clarissa have proved invaluable sources of information, though a note of unconscious humour sometimes slips in – as when Antonia Fraser comments: ‘I was not quite glamorous enough for her’ (‘quite’ being the operative word). Born in 1920, Clarissa began life with the ostensible advantage of being a Churchill, the niece of Winston. In fact this was not the case: her

Alexander Larman

A century of Hollywood’s spectacular flops

Gore Vidal once sighed that ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’, and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash. The most recent high-profile failure of this kind was Todd Phillips’s bewilderingly poor Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, which insulted its audience and thus precipitated its commercial failure. If the Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey’s excellent study

Leyla Sanai

The boundless curiosity of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, first came to public attention with his descriptions of fascinating neurological conditions in accessible articles and books. He was one of the first doctors to attempt to break down the barriers between the medical profession and the layman by eschewing esoteric jargon and explaining complex brain pathology simply while never losing sight of the patient as a human being. He exuded compassion and honesty. He brought attention to little-known illnesses such as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, of which there was an epidemic after the first world war. In his book Awakenings (1973), he wrote about how these patients were locked into a syndrome

Rupert Shortt

Is it time for Jordan Peterson to declare his spiritual allegiance?

Alan Isler’s novel Clerical Errors (2001) features a troubled priest who mocks the faith he has largely abandoned. ‘How can any rational creature not see in the story of Christ the pattern of countless pagan myths, the universal romance of the sacrificial god, his apotheosis and his rebirth?’ Jordan Peterson’s new book stands this argument on its head. That core Old Testament and gospel narratives are echoed in other cultures, past or present, is hailed as a mark of biblical universality. What applies to the resurrection also covers themes including sibling rivalry (Cain and Abel), pride and overreach (Noah’s Flood), deliverance from slavery (the Exodus) and the Fall itself. These