Book review

Wednesday

Aleks Sierz

Look back in anguish

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink drama. What was less clear at the time was the extent to which it was autobiographical, based on Osborne’s failed first marriage to the actress Pamela Lane. In the play, Jimmy, the working-class anti-hero, harangues his wife, the cool, emotionally distant and upper-middle-class Alison, attacking her parents and her background. When Lane saw the play she immediately recognised this portrayal. When asked, many years later, about her reaction, she said: ‘I felt as though I had been raped.’ The play was a theatrical version of revenge porn.

Alex Colville

Fire and brimstone

Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we know what to expect. The ugly buildings. The dull work of the shop floor. The worker reduced to a mere fleshy extension of a machine, his existence condensed into a series of jerks, twists and spasms. A life at best eroded by monotony — an eternal inhabitant of Dickens’s Coketown, ‘to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart to the last and the next’ — or at worst snatched up and tossed onto the sacrificial flames of Fritz Lang’s modern ‘Moloch’ of

Emily Rhodes

Love’s myriad forms

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve. In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Everything we know is wrong

Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, this is Peter Weir’s 1998 fable in which Jim Carrey discovers he is unwittingly the star of the most successful reality-TV show on the planet. His world is a film set and everything that happens to him has been plotted by a brilliant if somewhat pretentious director named Christof. Truman has this thunderbolt moment. It’s part Aristotelian anagnorisis, which is to say the realisation of something horrific, and part Camusian absurdity. But at the same time, it’s incredibly liberating. He sees that

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The strangest Icelandic saga

Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten months and several miles apart. Gudmunder Einarsson was a teenage labourer who loved to arm-wrestle; Geirfinnur Einarsson a construction worker and family man. Other than shared national hysteria in a country where people rarely go missing, there was nothing to link these mysteries — until, one by one, a ragtag group of petty criminals started to confess to their murders. The investigation was the biggest in Iceland’s history. It spanned decades, and saw ten people arrested in relation to the crimes, some of whom spent several years in prison. But

Justin Marozzi

The hell-raiser from Baghdad

You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, long may they live.’ Abu Nuwas was all three, and a complete hoot. Why he is so little known in Britain should be a mystery. But outward-looking as we are as a nation, we remain peculiarly parochial in our literary tastes outside the Western canon. Born in the late 750s in Ahvaz, Abu Nuwas came to Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid in what was Islam’s golden age. In and out of favour as much as he was in and out of prison,

Katrina Gulliver

Not all bunk

This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David Andress thinks everyone has. I can’t say I disagree, being a subscriber to the Hourly Outrage, also known as Twitter. Andress refers to Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics as things that should have been ‘punchlines’, comparing those who voted for them to dementia sufferers. And that’s just in the first couple of pages. So I’m guessing that as a Leave voter, I’m not the intended audience — nor do I, as someone with a PhD in history, fit into Andress’s analysis of uninformed

Sinclair McKay

Into the heart of Bow

Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet the sugary wartime sentiment finds a moving and resonant echo in Melanie McGrath’s new work of social excavation. The past casts an unusually deep shadow over Bow. And, cleverly, she has found a fresh means of exploring these striated layers of heritage: through the enduring local appetite for minced beef pie, mashed potatoes, and side orders of stewed eels. G. Kelly’s Pie and Mash is the 100-year- old restaurant in question, on the Roman Road in Bow (there are branches elsewhere). Pie and mash served with ‘liquor’ (parsley sauce) and

Tom Holland

Children and slaves first

In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that as an explanation. The purposes of heaven were to be traced in the patterns of earthly history. ‘It was not merely as a consequence of human agency that the greater part of the world’s peoples came to be joined under the sole rule of Rome — nor that this should have coincided with the lifetime

Thursday

Peter Carty

A sea of troubles

Donal Ryan is one of the most notable Irish writers to emerge this decade. So far he has produced five volumes of fiction set in post-millennial Ireland. What sets him apart is a striking facility for narrative voice as well as a startling diversity of protagonists. His first novel, The Spinning Heart — about a town’s slump when the Celtic Tiger died — had no fewer than 21 narrators, mostly speaking in effervescent vernacular. His latest work revisits tragedy and loss with just four narrative perspectives. With the first, however, he puts aside Irish provincial life to tackle global tragedy. Farouk is a Syrian doctor who is working in a

Suzi Feay

Getting away with murder | 22 March 2018

This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker it concerns, a sneaking California rapist who graduated to multiple murder, was never caught. The other is that its author died aged 46 before the book could be completed. That it is nevertheless so gripping and satisfying is thanks to its sensitive editors and compilers, but mainly due to the remarkable skills of Michelle McNamara herself. The subtitle is ‘One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’. McNamara coined the catchy nickname for the shadowy figure that slaughtered five couples and two women between 1978 and 1986. The investigators

Alex Clark

The priest’s tale

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far wider audience than she has hitherto gained — so much so that just before Gaby Wood’s appointment as literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, the critic wrote a lengthy exploration of Harvey’s prodigious qualities, describing her as ‘this generation’s Virginia Woolf’. The reasons for her relative neglect are not complex: her work is deeply serious, her novels rarely mining the same seam; she has featured on numerous long- and shortlists but failed to scoop any major awards; and we don’t see her on the telly or at the head

John McEwen

Bird of ill omen

With bird books the more personal the better. Joe Shute was once a crime correspondent and is today a Telegraph senior staff feature writer. It is his investigative journalism, a series of meetings with people who deal with ravens first-hand, which provides novelty. Historical, mythological and other diversions add ballast. In the prologue he writes: ‘I was born in 1984, making me the flag-bearer of a strange generation.’ Raised comfortably and lovingly in London, his future seemed serene. Then ‘came the financial crash of 2007; and with it the collapse of all the misplaced entitlement of my youth… Rather than better, it was going to get far worse’. At this

Andrew Taylor

Corpses, clues and Kiwis

Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even death cannot part them from their fortunate publishers. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Bertie Wooster and James Bond are among those who have survived their creators’ deaths, thanks to the assistance of living authors. Now Roderick Alleyn, the ineffably posh Scotland Yard detective created by Dame Ngaio Marsh, returns for a posthumous outing with the help of Stella Duffy, herself a distinguished crime writer. It’s an inspired pairing — Duffy, like Marsh, is a New Zealander with a professional interest in the theatre. Marsh’s direct contribution to the book was small

Piers Paul-Read

The road to Damascus

Saint Paul is unique among those who have changed the course of history — responsible not just for one but two critical historical developments 15 centuries apart. First, he persuaded the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth that gentiles as well as Jews could belong to their nascent church. This enabled its spread throughout the Roman empire, until Christianity become the state religion under the Emperor Constantine, and remained the official creed of all European nations until the French revolution. Second, there was his teaching on justification by faith alone —a ticking time bomb detonated by Martin Luther in the 16th century. ‘If we were to do justice to Paul

Thursday

Andrew Crumey

The cosmic made comic

We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers to prime-counting insects. Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird argues that we’ve got quantum mechanics all wrong: it’s not so weird actually, but quite sensible. All three books do a fine job for their respective audiences. Just make sure you know which target group you’re in. The Dialogues is a sequence of illustrated conversations, often between pairs

James Ball

Pandora’s Box

On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos every day, with creators uploading 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute. Given this almost incomprehensible scale, it’s fitting that the word Videocracy — the title of YouTube Head of Trends Kevin Allocca’s history of the site — evokes the idea of an authoritarian dystopia. Like any approved account from such a regime, its

Mark Bostridge

Princesses of Parallelograms

It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and self-proclaimed ‘bride of science’. Not the least of Lovelace’s fascination is the way in which her reputation and the claims for her significance have fluctuated so wildly during that time. She’s been hailed for her understanding of the potential of Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine and for her far-reaching vision of the role of the technology of the future. This has unfortunately led to her being credited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley. Alan Turing, no less, called one of his basic principles

Jeff Noon

Unusual motives for murder

Donald E. Westlake wrote crime books that were funny, light and intricate. Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (Hard Case Crime, £7.99) was first published in 1974. The protagonist is Harold Künt. (That umlaut, as you can imagine, is very, very important.) In reaction against his name, he’s become a serial prankster. After one of his jokes goes badly wrong, he ends up in prison. Here he falls in with the Tunnel Gang, a group of inmates who use a secret tunnel to escape into the nearby town. But they only go there for a few hours at a time before returning to prison to serve out their sentences. Künt

Lisa Hilton

On a wing and a prayer | 15 March 2018

Operation Columba was one of the most secretive arms of British Intelligence during the second world war. Between April 1941 and September 1944, its agents made 16,554 drops over an area stretching from Copenhagen to Bordeaux. Amongst Columba’s successes was the mapping of Belgium’s entire coastal defence system, 67 kilometres worth of priceless, minutely detailed information. Columba was the province of a specially created Secret Service division, M114 (d), which received its first message from occupied Europe on 10 April 1941. The correspondent ended his message stoutly: ‘I am, and will always remain, a Frenchman.’ That spirit of defiance, expressed by an ordinary, anonymous citizen who risked his life to