Book review

Thursday

Clare Mulley

Carve their names with pride

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing as much suspicion as able-bodied men. But lonely courage was an essential virtue for the female agents, who had to face long weeks of keeping a low profile, with very little support, in between hours of terrifying activity. Most of them only met each other during training or, in several cases, in detention after capture.

Cressida Connolly

Comfort the suffering

If a single book could help you to be kinder and more compassionate, could expand and deepen your understanding of other people (and possibly yourself) and make you less afraid of dying in the process, you would surely be eager to acquire it at once. Well look no further, for Grief Works is that book. The King Lears among us — whose every third thought is the grave — will need no persuading that a collection of essays about surviving bereavement is an enthralling read. For those of a more timid or sunny disposition, ask yourself this: when someone you love dies, how will you manage? The odds of avoiding

Steven Poole

Nothing matters very much

Nothing will come of nothing, said Lear, because he wasn’t familiar with quantum physics. According to our current best theories, a region of space that contains nothing at all is still seething with pairs of virtual particles popping in and out of existence for no good reason. Meanwhile, it is possible to be mathematically sure that an entire universe contains nothing whatsoever, but then if you go looking for stuff in a particular part of this same universe you could find a wheelbarrow. But what did I mean by ‘a region of space’? It turns out that all sorts of assumptions are baked into such a phrase depending on what

Frances Wilson

Back with a vengeance

One hour in No. 5 Cheyne Row, Virginia Woolf observed, will tell you more about the Carlyles than all the biographies. The house lived in by Thomas and Jane Carlyle from 1834 until their respective deaths, and now owned by the National Trust, was one of the great battlegrounds of domestic history. Here Jane warred against bedbugs and coal dust and her husband’s obsession with the vast and unstoppable Lady Harriet Ashburton (there were three people in her marriage), and Carlyle warred against the intrusions of the outside world. While next door’s rooster kept him awake at night, by day, as Jane wrote in one of her peerless letters, he

Thursday

Stuart Evers

Worming out the truth

In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a movie.’ In a way, this moment distils the challenge of all oneiric narratives — it’s a fiction within a fiction, one in which anything can happen, but without real-world consequences. In this dark, brilliantly controlled debut, the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin uses the fabric of a dream to weave a novel in which everything is at

Allan Mallinson

Who will guard the guards?

The history of an army is essentially the history of its deeds. The history of an army within an army is more intriguing. The Praetorian Guard, a modern term, was founded, or rather formalised, around 27 BC by Augustus for the protection of the emperor and his family. Hitherto, cohors praetoria had been a generic description of the body of troops detailed, ad hoc, for the protection of a general on campaign. This derived from praetorium, the general’s tent next to which they were quartered in camp, which itself derived from praetor, ‘the man who goes before others’. As Gaius Octavius (Octavian) metamorphosed into the first emperor, Augustus, so his

Stuart Ritchie

It’s in the memes

The greatest of Bach’s 224 cantatas is BWV 109, ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben’. Its subject — the title translates as Mark 9:24, ‘I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief’ — is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennett’s new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is aimed at those who suffer from this intermittent unbelief, though not about God — Dennett is, after all, one of modern philosophy’s most prominent atheists — but about his specialist subject: evolution by natural selection. Of course, most educated people nowadays accept Darwin’s great insight. But, Dennett argues in his

Tom Fleming

Short – but far from sweet

Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathisers, the stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are set largely among the Vietnamese diaspora on the west coast of America, where Nguyen himself lives, having fled to the US from Vietnam with his family in 1975. They mostly feature characters juggling the lives they’ve made in their adopted culture with their memories of — and loyalties to — the old land. In one story, set in the Reagan era, a penny-pinching woman who runs her family’s New Saigon grocery store is reluctantly moved to donate money to the futile guerrilla war against communism back in Vietnam. In another, a young refugee,

Peter Parker

Undone by love

On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint after the accident, but also began writing the autobiographical fiction for which he is now best known, publishing his first novel, Maiden Voyage, in 1943. By this time he was living in a chauffeur’s flat over a garage in rural Kent. When well, he was able to walk and bicycle around the countryside, exploring buildings

Philip Hensher

All in the mind’s eye

Everyone knows what the Rorschach tests are. Like Freudian slips, boycotts, quislings and platonic friendships, however, it was long ago forgotten that they had been named after an individual human being. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss doctor and psychiatrist with curiosity about the visual arts, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He created the tests in a book published in 1921, and a structure for evaluating patient responses to them before dying of appendicitis the following year. Rorschach’s life has its interests, and certainly casts some unexpected light on the Europe of his time. His father wrote an artistic treatise which sounds extraordinarily like the Bauhaus writings of Paul Klee,

Thursday

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Dead poet’s society

Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, once claimed that he could always tell Scottish fiction from English. Novels, he said, reveal fundamental differences in the values of the Scots and the English. I wonder then what he would make of Annalena McAfee’s book, Hame — about the most Scottish work of fiction that any English novelist could possibly write. So committed is the former Guardian journalist authentically to explore every aspect of life north of the Border that she learnt to speak Braid Scots — from Lallans to Doric dialects — and crafted poetry in them. Surely that makes her more Scottish than most born-and-bred Caledonians? For what drives

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

Frontier territory

In Ali’s Café, just inside Turkey on the Bulgarian border, Iraqi and Syrian refugees spend their days drinking tea. Now and then, someone goes into the back room to give bundles of money to smugglers who have promised to get him into the European Union. Only when piano chords strike up on the radio does Kapka Kassabova realise what Ali’s reminds her of: Rick’s Bar in the movie Casablanca, a transit realm ‘where the homeless of the day come in search of passage’. The Syrian refugees literally walked into Kassabova’s book. Like many ruined peoples before them, they were heading for the border she was writing about — the crossing

Jack Wakefield

Conning the connoisseurs

Rogues’ Gallery describes itself as a history of art and its dealers, and Philip Hook, who has worked at the top of Sotheby’s for decades, is well versed in his subject. Sadly for the prurient, this is not an exposé of the excesses of the market from one of its high priests; and Hook says that where possible he has avoided writing about the living. It is hard not to feel a bit disappointed. For an alarming moment in the introduction, it seemed as if he was preparing to write an academic treatise about how dealers influence art and taste. The book does start as more of a conventional history

Mark Mason

All human life is there

This book kept reminding me of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. Just as his character spied on customers’ private lives while developing their pictures, so Chris Paling gets to know the readers at the library where he works. Unlike Williams he doesn’t follow them home at the end of the day (in fact some of the female librarians have the opposite problem), but Paling’s anonymous, functional role lets him observe without being observed. He sees the woman with two small children who takes out Is Daddy Coming Back in a Minute?, explaining sudden death to children in words they can understand. The ‘effete, shaven-headed man in a well-cut suit’

Andrew Lycett

Light in the East

Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation. As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And we’d better understand it, because it’s an interesting story, and often a positive one — the way vast crowds streamed onto the streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran in demonstrations against authoritarian

Christian Wolmar

Let me take you through the night

As a child, I used to travel with my mother from London to Cannes, a journey that took slightly under 24 hours. The strangest part of the trip was the three or four hours in Paris, where the train trundled between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon along the Petite Ceinture, giving us a view of rundown parts of Paris which tourists never normally saw. Sometimes we would cheat and take a cab, giving us a couple of hours off the train, during which we enjoyed a relaxed steak frites in the Train Bleu restaurant with its elaborate belle époque decor. I often wondered why the train

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The plight of women in Labour

We’re told not to judge books by their covers, but faced with these two it’s hard not to. Harman’s is one of those thick, expensive tomes which, understandably, politicians write when they’ve had enough earache and, unbelievably, publishers keep buying for vast sums, despite the fact that a fortnight after publication you can pick them up cheaper than an adult colouring book in a remainder bin. The old saw that ‘all political careers end in failure’ might now better be: ‘All political careers end with a book on Amazon going for less than the price of the postage.’ In the run-up to lift-off, Harman sought to sex up her selling

Marcus Berkmann

More matter with less art

When A.A. Gill died last December, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth across the nation. I must admit this came as a surprise to me, but then I hadn’t read him for many years, having developed a ferocious dislike for the Sunday Times too long ago now to remember quite why. My memories of him were of an outrageous show pony, a wordsmith of great talent but surprisingly little taste, who essentially wrote about himself and his wonderful life (in the guise of restaurant and television reviews) in a needy, look-at-me, sub-Clarkson kind of way. He seemed to me to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the paper he

Daniel Swift

Telling stories

John Burnside is the author of an impressive bookshelf of elegant novels and slim, precise volumes of poetry, and like all prolific writers he has certain repeated themes. Nicely, repetition is one of his themes. He writes of the tricks of memory, and the impossibility of perfectly recalling the past. He writes of absent fathers, often, and how they are remembered by their children. His poems sound like hymns, or the blues. ‘Before the songs I sang there were the songs/ they came from,’ begins his poem ‘Death Room Blues’, and ends: ‘I’m half convinced that childhood never happened.’ Burnside’s new novel Ashland & Vine is a story about telling

Stuart Kelly

A surreal caprice

At the start of this novella the protagonist, Thibaut, is ambushed by Wehrmacht soldiers between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. That the year in 1950 is not the strangest aspect, as he is rescued by the appearance of the Vélo, a bicycle-like contraption with a queasily organic prow. It is, in fact, a living version of Leonora Carrington’s 1941 sketch ‘I Am an Amateur of Velocipedes’. In this initially joyous, fundamentally chilling book, the art of the surrealists has been weaponised in the fight against Nazism. Surrealism billed itself as a liberation; now is it part of the Liberation. ‘New Paris’ is stalked by versions of André Breton’s ‘Exquisite Corpse’,