Book review

Thursday

Mick Herron

Carry on spying

That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into his study to reveal that he worked for MI5, she was terrified that he was about to explain the facts of life, many of which had already been revealed to her by a friend on Bognor beach: ‘I thought I was going to pass out with the horror of what was to come.’ But the

Leyla Sanai

Cutting up rough

Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under the Knife and Anaesthesia admit to the fallibility of medicine and the responsibilities, flaws and complex emotions of its practitioners. Arnold van de Laar does not rely on personal experience. Instead, he explores the world of surgery through 28 clinical conditions; its historical scope makes for a fascinating book. Did you know that when Louis

Roger Lewis

Biografiends

I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of Gary Oldman or Sacha Baron Cohen, had been cast instead of Geoffrey Rush, who was muffled under prosthetic make-up. But my point is, biopics seldom come off, and nor do biographies. Indeed, it is a reprehensible and misguided genre. Privacy is violated, creative achievements are explained away, and great men and women are unmasked as

Thursday

Max Décharné

Angels with dirty faces

The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish the Nationwide Festival of Light, making religious inspired protests against the so-called permissive society, she also wrote an autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is?, published by New English Library. Thus her thoughts regarding the impending moral collapse of the nation were brought to the public by the same outfit responsible for a comprehensive range of sinew-stiffening pulp fiction delights such as The Degenerates by Sandra Shulman, Bikers at War by Jan Hudson and Gang Girls by Maisie Mosco. All of these and many more are featured in this heavily

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

Nazi gamesmanship

The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and his wife showed up in Berlin for a two-week ‘holiday’ during the 1936 Olympics. ‘Van’ was impressed by German organisation. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,’ he wrote in a confidential report. The anti-appeaser had meetings with Hitler and the principal henchmen, and took a particular shine to Goebbels: ‘a limping, eloquent, slip of a Jacobin… My wife and I liked him and his wife at once.’ Van even came to think he might have misjudged the Nazis, though a lapse by

Philip Womack

Paris mismatch

There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels that are assured of their place alongside other writers, reacting to, and taking pleasure in discussing them; that are aware of the world’s events and their impact on humanity; that have delicately drawn characters; and that range with ease from intense emotions to moments of high drama; and that use careful, subtle imagery, then C. K. Stead’s The Necessary Angel is all this and more. His previous novel, Risk, touched upon banking and Iraq, but was never overwhelmed by them. In this latest, Max, a lecturer from New Zealand living

Houman Barekat

Soft dystopias

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating the present. In a new collection of short stories by the veteran sf author M. John Harrison, lurid visions of aliens and spaceships play second fiddle to melancholic snapshots of plodding suburbia. Many of the tales in You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press, £9.99) are set in leafy south-west London, amid the banality of modest affluence: from Putney to Chiswick, Twickenham and St Margarets, and along ‘the endless heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea’. In ‘Cicisbeo’, a husband ensconces himself in his loft, and will only

Thursday

Johanna Thomas-Corr

The bread of life

Sourdough has all the ingredients of a truly despicable work of fiction. Novels about food are awful, aren’t they? Especially novels about baking; they’re the absolute worst. Sourdough is not only a kooky satire inspired by that bread they sell for £6.50 down the farmers’ market – it’s set in San Francisco, the smuggest city in the world, with a cast of Tesla-driving techies and Kimchi fetishists and anthropomorphic yeast. Oh, and the book’s author, Robin Sloan, is a former Twitter employee. But just as it would be churlish to deny that, mmm, £6.50 bread is kind of tasty, so it’s hard to deny that Sloan has an inventive way

Jeff Noon

Death at close quarters

Alex Jackson is buried alive inside his own body, a body which lies in a long-term coma following a climbing accident. He can’t see, he can’t move, he can’t speak. This is the terrifying fate of the protagonist of Emily Koch’s debut novel If I Die Before I Wake (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The doctors believe that Alex has no awareness of his surroundings, but he can still think and feel, and he can hear people speaking. His family debate withdrawing life support, and his friends talk about his girlfriend Bea moving on, finding someone new. And from these fragments of speech he starts to piece together a shocking truth: that

Christopher Bray

Wonder of Wenders

What know they of movies who only movies know? Wim Wenders’s latest collection of essays arrives at a time when the best-known film critic in England is unashamed to claim that tendentious tosh The Exorcist as the best picture ever made. Even though the slightest piece in The Pixels of Paul Cézanne is its title essay, it is good to know that there is still at least one film buff around who is alive to the first six arts. As a young man in Dusseldorf, Wenders fancied himself a painter — so much so that, before the movies lured him away, he was planning to further his studies in Paris.

Hugh Thomson

Raiders of the lost lands

Graham Robb, apart from being a distinguished historian, biographer and literary critic, is one of our most accomplished travel writers. His The Discovery of France remains a classic, made both engaging and accessible by his very francophile obsession with cycling. Indeed, his new book, The Debatable Land, opens with a declaration that ‘writing and cycling are inseparable pursuits’. The debatable land in question is the thin wedge of territory between England and Scotland on the west coast which, for a period in the late Middle Ages, was officially declared as lawless by the parliaments of each country. The resulting piece of English legislation contains a quite magnificent disclaimer: All Englishmen

Elisabeth Anderson

A stranger to oneself

Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58, three years ago. At the time, she was a non-clinical team leader in the NHS, managing rosters for hundreds of nurses and keeping much of the information stored in her head. She lived in York and had brought up two much-loved daughters on her own. She was clearly efficient, organised and independent. Mitchell realised something was wrong when, after a series of falls, she experienced a distinct lack of energy (she had been a keen runner and walker): a ‘fog’ in her head. The diagnosis was slow — her GP initially told this fit and able woman that ‘there

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Saki of sex

How I love short stories! Long before the internet realised that we can’t sit still long enough to commit to the three-volume novels of yore, these little beauties were hitting the sweet spot repeatedly. I especially love female short story writers — Shena Mackay, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley — as they often read quite gossipy and friendly-like, as opposed to men who have to go out and shoot something to make some depressing point, or at least try to prove they’re the strong and silent type. Strong and silent writers should be true to themselves and simply shut up. The young journalist Emily Hill is, on the strength of this

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Three concepts of freedom

There’s a tiny mistake in Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays. She describes Geoff Dyer’s unimprovably funny ‘trick while introducing an unsmiling J.M. Coetzee at a literary festival’. And it’s a suggestive mistake. The moment she refers to is Dyer, bashful, blurting that he wondered how his younger self would have reacted if he’d one day known he’d be sharing the stage with ‘a Booker prize-winning, South African, Nobel prize-winning novelist’… and then deciding that his younger self would have said: ‘That’s incredible, because Nadine Gordimer is my favourite writer.’ The joke is all the funnier because the camera pans to Coetzee, utterly stony of face as Geoff giggles. (It’s

David Edgerton

Now it can be told

Deployed in vastly exaggerated numbers, nuclear weapons were maintained in place not just by secrecy, but by banalities and lies. The atomic bomb has been, from the very beginning, both extraordinarily public and secret. Everyone knew about what was regarded as a momentous development in human history. It kept many clichés in circulation for decades — humanity as scientific giants and ethical infants; the desire for international control; the idea of moral scientists who did, or should, reject the sweet blandishments of the bomb. At the same time, insiders knew and did things which were the deepest and most troubling secrets of the deep state. For those few in the

Ian Thomson

Time to lighten up

In parts of Africa and the West Indies women are so anxious to ‘whiten up’ that they use skin-lightening creams. The British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch sees this as a regrettable consequence of the aristocracy of skin colour as instituted by British merchant-capitalists during slavery. (Skin must first be bleached before it can be considered beautiful.) Of mixed Jewish-African parentage, the 36-year-old Hirsch is proud to call herself black. In this much-hyped book she sets out to question lingering obeisance to the idea of colonial Britain and to that ghost of the British Empire, the Commonwealth. Why does it persist so? Affection for Britain remains surprisingly strong in Commonwealth

John McEwen

Wise old birds

Owls, frontally eyed and nose beaked, look the most human of birds. Accordingly, they have for millennia been prominent in mythology and literature and their image continues to be commercialised beyond compare. They offer an author rich pickings, but in a competitive market a strong personal subtext is helpful. That improbable bestseller H is for Hawk told of a bird consoling and inspiring a daughter grieving for her father.Owl Sense has a mother finding a healing source in owls for herself and her worryingly ill son Benji. His Non-Epileptic Seizure Disorder (NEAD) took a disconcerting time to diagnose and is frighteningly unpredictable. Just how frightening is illustrated by his collapse

Jane Ridley

Women on the warpath

When Westminster Council granted planning permission for a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square to mark this year’s centenary of women getting the vote, many people were puzzled. Few had heard of this feminist campaigner, and even fewer knew about the suffragist movement which she led. The suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst seemed a far more appropriate candidate for a statue. Not only was she famous, but some feminist historians claimed that her role in gaining the vote was more important. These two books stand on different sides of the debate. Diane Atkinson has written a collective biography celebrating Mrs Pankhurst and the suffragettes, while Jane Robinson makes the case for

Thursday

James Bloodworth

Return of the infamous five

It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of Freudian neurosis. Where class resentment exists it is said to emanate less from angry young proletarians than from well-spoken youths intent on garrotting their dividend-drawing fathers. Most contemporary accounts of the Cambridge spy ring, which passed top secret information to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, draw heavily on this cliché. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are typically portrayed not only as highly privileged men who rebelled against their upbringings, but as an upper-class clique who got away with what they did because

John Burnside

Short and bitter-sweet

The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies, social misfits and minor criminals from an insider’s perspective — which is not surprising, considering his own history of drug and alcohol abuse. Certainly his most celebrated work, the hilarious yet profoundly moving story collection, Jesus’ Son, reinforced that image, offering us characters like the narrator of ‘Steady Hands at Seattle General’, who can, in all seriousness, ask a man with a recent gunshot wound: ‘When you were shot right through your face like that, did the bullet go on to do anything interesting?’ (The other replies, ‘How would I