Book review

Saturday

Andrew Barrow

Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway

Basil Peyton-Crumbe is a multi-millionaire landowner. An embattled man known to all, even his dogs, as ‘Banger’, he claims to have despatched at least 41,000 pheasants with the cheap old 12-bore he’s had since childhood. Shooting pheasants, he believes, is ‘an exquisite accomplishment’, as complex as writing a sonata or designing a cathedral. On the first page of this bloodthirsty novel, Banger’s trusty old gun explodes in his hands and blows half his head off. No one seems particularly upset. Not his half-brother William, who succeeds to the estate, and certainly not his Springer Spaniel, Jam. Dismissing his dying employer as ‘a selfish oaf’, ‘fat arse’ and ‘grouchy old bastard’, 

Andrew Taylor

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, which she included as an appendix to her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest. Both types of fiction operate within enclosed and carefully structured worlds; both depend for their plots on a threat to the established order; and both conclude with tidy resolutions that contain an implicit promise that a happy, orderly existence now lies ahead. Death Comes to Pemberley combines these two traditions in a whodunnit set mainly at Mr Darcy’s stately home in Derbyshire,

Charlotte Moore

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull, a stout, plain, clever Victorian, founder-member of the feminist Langham Place group, manager of the ground-breaking Victoria Press which extends employment possibilities for women, has her story lightly fictionalised in The Sealed Letter. The action starts with the return from a posting to Malta of Fido’s erstwhile best friend, Helen Codrington, a naval wife with a yellow-whiskered colonel in tow. Helen needs an alibi and a trysting-place; the apparently guileless Fido and her drawing-room sofa will do nicely. Before Malta, Fido had lived with Helen and her older, straitlaced husband Harry. Fido’s asthma had been the pretext for Helen to leave the marital chamber and curl up

Andrew Gimson

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

If David Cameron and his friends wish to know why they and their policies are so despised by some Conservatives of high intellect and principle, they should read Robin Harris. His book is a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship, with penetrating things to say about Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan and the rest. But much of its savour derives from Harris’s disgust — the word is not too strong — with the various forms of bogusness, including intellectual cowardice veiled by complacent politeness, which recur so often in the history of the Conservative party. Harris recognises the ‘note of genius’ in Disraeli, but scorns the pious, posthumous ascription

Philip Ziegler

The Diamond Queen by Andrew Marr

‘Of making many books there is no end’, particularly when the subject is Queen Elizabeth II. It is less than ten years since Ben Pimlott and Sarah Bradford independently produced authoritative and excellent biography-centred books on the Queen. Since then a fair number of minor studies have appeared. Can enough have happened in the meantime, can enough new information have been revealed, to justify two new books? The answer, rather surprisingly, is a cautious ‘yes’. Both Andrew Marr and Robert Hardman are serious students of their subject. Both write well and thoughtfully. Neither offers sensational revelations — just as well, since it seems unlikely that there is anything sensational to

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Blue Night by Joan Didion

This is a raw, untidy, ragged book. Well, grief is all of those things. On the other hand, Didion wrote about the death of her husband in an iconic memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, which apart from being raw was none of them. So she knows how it can be done.  That book was about the horribly sudden death of her husband, about shock and pain and then the confusion of bereavement and loss. But it was also a vivid portrait of the man himself. ‘One never knows when the blow may fall’, yet people have been surprisingly surprised that it fell again so quickly on Didion, when her

Fay Maschler

A History of English Food by Clarissa Dickson Wright

It is where cookery is involved that tele-vision gives perhaps the greatest succour to the book trade. After Jennifer Paterson’s death in 1999, the remaining ‘Fat Lady’ barrelled into view with Clarissa and the Countryman, Clarissa and the King’s Cookbook, as a gamekeeper in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous and as presenter for a documentary on her soul-mate Hannah Glasse. Such exposure, combined with an unapologetic mien and candour that have attracted the somewhat patronising description ‘national treasure’, could only have helped her autobiography Spilling the Beans scale the heights of the bestseller lists and allowed the next manuscript, a year-long diary and rant called Rifling through My Drawers, to

Anthony Daniels

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

With all the advances of science, we may be no nearer to understanding ourselves than before, says Anthony Daniels — but we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility outright Some years ago I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, unskilled workers like himself, had developed an electronic thought-scanner whose antennae they could, and did, direct at him in order to know his thoughts as and when he had them. He heard them laughing and jeering at the banalities with which, inevitably, his mind was filled most of the time. Needless to say, he found this intrusive and oppressive, and it made him murderously angry. As life follows art, science follows

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bookends: Spirit of place

A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly published collections of articles, which makes At the Yeoman’s House (Enitharmon £15) especially welcome. It’s an autobiographical meditation on an ancient dwelling-house set in flint-strewn fields: Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, where Blythe lives. He inherited it from the artist John Nash, and now investigates its history in an enjoyably oblique and fragmentary fashion. In Cobbett’s definition a yeoman was above a farmer but lower than a gentleman, and Bottengoms has never been grand. It began when ‘a man roofed in a spring and dwelt beside it’, and in

Alexander Chancellor

After America: Get Ready For Armageddon by Mark Steyn

There are people sent to depress us, and prominent among them is Mark Steyn, whose speciality is apocalyptic predictions. Following his bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which was about the collapse of all of the Western world with the exception of the United States, he is now predicting the collapse of the US as well, leaving the entire ‘free world’, as it used to be called, at the mercy of those great enemies of freedom, China and Islam. He writes: There will be no ‘new world order’, only a world without order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest

Anthony Cummins

The ripple effect

Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her hip. Her daughter, Rose, personal assistant to the once-eminent historian Lord Peters, is meant to be in Manchester to help her employer give a talk on Walpole. When Rose bails out, Peters turns to his own daughter, Marion, an interior designer in hock to the bank. At the pre-talk lunch, she has the good fortune, so it seems, to meet a venture capitalist, who offers her a gig doing up luxury flats. Less fortunate is her married lover, Jeremy, whose

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses by Paul Koudounaris

In one Capuchin monastery in Sicily, the so-called Palermo Catacombs, locals used to buy a niche where their mummified corpse would one day stand erect, clothed and on display to visitors, the way we might now buy a burial plot. Would-be purchasers would pay a visit to select their niche and stand in it to make sure it fitted. Indeed, by way of voluntary penance, some would remain there for hours, contemplating their end. At the same time, in the early 17th century, a related order of nuns in Rome, the Sepolta Vive or Buried Alive sisters, would sleep in coffins and hail each other with the observation: ‘Remember sister,

Ian Sansom

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jonathan Franzen. David Foster Wallace. Jeffrey Eugenides. Giant, slow-moving, serious writers, notching up about a novel per decade, all with their sights set on The Big One, The Beast, The Great American Novel. Wallace pulled it off, undoubtedly, with Infinite Jest in 1996, before ending it all by suicide in 2008 — a tragic loss. Franzen laid claim to fame — and earned himself the cover of Time magazine — with The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). And now Eugenides, after The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), makes another attempt at literary immortality with The Marriage Plot. And fair play to him, he throws absolutely everything at it. In

Richard Davenporthines

AfterWord edited by Dale Salwak

‘Conjuring the Literary Dead’ is the sub-title of this outlandish, sometimes beguiling book. Its editor, Dale Salwak, coaxed 19 writers — of the status of Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Jay Parini and Alan Sillitoe — to write essays in which they imagine speaking to dead authors who intrigue them. The resulting chapters are often inquisitive, macabre and teasing, but occasionally flat or laborious. ‘Perhaps all writing is motivated, deep down,’ Margaret Attwood suggests in an introductory survey, ‘by a fear of and fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.’ Francis King more

Ian Thomson

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, had appreciated their transformation. The author’s own mother, Nicola Fuller, was disquieted to find herself as a character in that ‘awful book’ (as she refers to it today). Was she really that flaky and drunk? Or was that how others perceived her? Most writers make life more interesting than it is; I suspect that Alexandra Fuller is among them. In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness she returns to the Africa

Cressida Connolly

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett. At her finest, (in which category I’d put The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Lighthousekeeping) there is no one to match her. The title of this memoir comes from the mouth of Mrs Winterson of Accrington, Lancs, the author’s adoptive

Jane Brown

William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Patricia Reed

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’. It is pertinent to follow with a quote from Merlin James’s introductory essay on Nicholson’s ‘Painting and Experience’,

Andrew Rosenheim

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

America has always idolised its entrepreneurs, even when it has proved a thankless task — if you can glamorise Bill Gates, you can glamorise anyone. Especially Steve Jobs, whose death from pancreatic cancer has been greeted as the loss of Mammon’s Messiah. Is any of this justified? Well, yes and no. Jobs did as much as anyone, with the possible exception of Gates, to bring digital change into the mainstream, and this makes his biography as much a history of a digital revolution as a personal story. It’s this fittingly binary quality that makes Walter Isaacson’s biography so worthwhile, since Jobs himself emerges from it as an unattractive, even repellent

Eric Christiansen

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others edited by Tim Heald

Richard Cobb had many good friends, among them Hugh Trevor-Roper, who kept letters, and so made this selection possible. There must be many more letters, since the author was an inveterate correspondent at least from the 1930s. The wartime ones would be of greater historical interest than these, which are nearly all post-1967, many of them concerned with the essentially piddling subjects of university politics, pupils and personalities. Of course, these are foie gras and the sound of trumpets to persons connected with such things at Oxford and Cambridge, but the admirable publisher must be aiming at a larger audience than that, ignoring Cobb’s own repeated assertion that ‘nothing ever

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know. Only by consulting Richard Bradford’s bibliography would you know that in 1982 Martin Amis published a book — subtitled ‘An Addict’s Guide’ — on how to win at Space Invaders, and that he (presumably) hasn’t let it come back into print. An entire book! That seems to me worthy at least of a paragraph in the body of a 400-odd-page writer’s biography. It tells you something, doesn’t it? I mean, apart from the fact that Martin Amis once liked Space Invaders, which is amusing if not crucial. Anything a writer disowns is of interest: particularly if it’s a