Book review

Thursday

Elif Shafak

A diamond set in sapphires

I was a young, aspiring writer when I decided to leave everything behind and move to Istanbul more than two decades ago. I rented a tiny, dingy flat at the bottom of the Street of Cauldron Makers not far from Taksim Square, the heart of the modern city. That first night, I sat by the window under the anaemic light from a streetlamp, and wondered what this urban sprawl held for me. At midnight, I heard a loud voice from outside, full of anger and emotion. A transvestite was walking down the street, her miniskirt glittering in stark contrast to her raven hair. She was limping furiously, holding in one

Jeff Noon

Recent crime fiction | 9 February 2017

There isn’t a clear line separating crime and literary fiction, but a border zone where ideas are passed from one genre to another. Flynn Berry’s debut Under the Harrow (Weidenfeld, £12.99) is set well to the literary side of this border, but doesn’t shirk on the thrills of a psychological mystery. Nora Lawrence expects to spend a few peaceful days in the countryside, staying at her sister Rachel’s house. Instead she finds Rachel dead, the victim of a brutal murder. A previous, unsolved attack on her sister has left Nora with very little faith in the police, and she is forced to undertake her own investigation. But is she driven

Ian Sansom

Flights of fancy | 9 February 2017

Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s been a long time since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a book entirely true to its title, so amazing and adventurous, indeed, so full of pizzazz, that it seems to have taken the poor chap the best part of two decades to recover from it. Moonglow is a return to form. Nonetheless, some readers will doubtless find it easy to resist the book’s obvious charms. Chabon has described it in interviews as a ‘faux-memoir novel’. In his acknowledgements he calls it a ‘pack of lies’. And in

Thursday

Joanne Harris

The great Norse soap opera

Norse myths are having a moment. Or should I say another moment; one of a long chain of moments, in fact, beginning in the primordial soup of the oral tradition of storytelling in Iceland and Scandinavia. This mythology is old; old and very tenacious. First chronicled by scholars and historians some centuries after the Christianisation of Scandinavia, it tells of the creation of the world from the flesh of a slaughtered giant; of the rise of Asgard, the stronghold of the gods, and of their struggle against the forces of evil; and it predicts the eventual death of the gods in a final battle, Ragnarók, in which all of creation

Matt Thorne

And then there was one

After a long struggle to receive mainstream publication, Paul Auster’s first few novels were a genuinely significant contribution to American letters, his patented mix of postmodernism, deadpan comedy and metatextual homage to Kafka, Hamsun, Melville and Hawthorne so singular it invited parody. Among these books, The New York Trilogy and The Music of Chance seem likely to last many years from now. But the second half of his career has proved more problematic. Seemingly tiring of his own shtick, he spent a long time dismantling what made him great, sometimes to powerful effect (Oracle Night), but more usually in a way that seemed designed deliberately to test his biggest fans.

Kapil Komireddi

Still giving peace a chance

Tibetans were once fabled warriors. Their empire, at the summit of its power in the eighth century, extended to northern India, western China and central Asia. The Arabs, making inroads into central Asia, were in awe of them. And China, according to an inscription commissioned to memorialise Tibet’s conquest of the Tang Chinese capital of Changan in 763, ‘shivered with fear’ at their mention. But the Tibet annexed by Mao Zedong in the 20th century bore no trace of its imperial past. When the People’s Liberation Army struck in 1950, Tibet, having metamorphosed over a millennium into a reclusive hagiarchy, possessed neither the vocabulary to parley with the communists nor

Suzi Feay

Riding the storm

Clover Stroud opens her memoir with the crippling bout of post-natal depression that hit after the birth of her fourth child. ‘I felt like a fist. Dash was always naked, plastered bare to my breast, sucking from me as my body dripped milk and tears.’ She even contemplates harming the baby then killing herself, guilelessly telling the health visitor: ‘But isn’t that normal?’ We spiral back in time to the cataclysmic events that spurred Stroud’s distress. Stroud’s life was idyllic up to the age of 16. Home was a rambling country house in the village of Minety, Wiltshire, filled with adorable siblings and presided over by her father Rick, a

John Hare

The lure of the desert

The great deserts of the world hold a compelling attraction for a rare breed of men who are ‘unwise and curiously planned’. Once under the spell of that seemingly infinite arena of sand and stone, many are helplessly hooked. It is an arena where the sun burns down relentlessly during the day, to be replaced at night by a hauntingly beautiful backdrop of brilliant stars. Where the moon shines with a light which softens the austere outline of rocks and hills and casts a diffused greyness over the desert sands. This well-organised and beautifully produced book lists many of the men and women who have been hopelessly seduced by the

Martin Gayford

Whited sepulchre

‘How often’, wrote Sigmund Freud in 1914, ‘have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the heroic glance.’ The gaze that the founder of psychoanalysis struggled to withstand belonged to Michelangelo’s Moses, centrepiece of the tomb of Julius II in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli. Michelangelo’s Moses has indeed a look of formidable authority. The prophet possesses, in addition, the physique of a body-builder, a beard that cascades like Niagara Falls and a pair of knees for which the best adjective is also ‘heroic’. Yet, despite its power,

Michael Beloff

Another challenge for Trump

James D. Zirin is an experienced litigator as well as the host of a popular television talkshow. In this provocative polemic he uses skills developed both from behind the bar and in front of the camera to mount the charge that the US Supreme Court is a political court. How far does his evidence support his claim? In 1803 Chief Justice Marshall invented the doctrine of judicial review, by which the Supreme Court had the right to strike down Acts of Congress and executive action as inconsistent with the constitution. Inevitably, it then became involved in issues that were heavily political. In 1857 the court upheld the property rights of

Ian Thomson

Satirising the artful Hoxha

Blood, they say, is quick on the knife in Albania, where Balkan-style revenge killings, known as giakmarrje (‘blood-takings’), settle ancient scores and land disputes. The great engine of vengeance — the old idea of purification by blood — was explored by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare in his first novel, General of the Dead Army. Published in communist Albania in 1963, the novel told of an Italian army officer who returns to the Balkan outpost after the second world war in order to bury his fallen compatriots. It remains a magnificent allegory of life and death under totalitarian dictatorship. Kadare, 80, wrote his best books under the communist regime of

Molly Guinness

Agonised questions

It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who

Lee Langley

Big skies and frozen wastes

We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window onto a wilder America — the far reaches of Montana, Alabama, Texas, Missouri… But to say his stories are about rural life would be like saying Moby-Dick is about whaling. Lauded by American critics and freighted with prizes, Bass is scarcely known in Britain. Praise to Pushkin Press for introducing us to an astonishing literary voice. Life in Bass’s world is often challenging: his people live close to the land; they fish, shoot birds, hunt elk, moose and deer to stock the larder. But while forests, prairies, rivers and lakes

Andrew Taylor

In hot water

It’s good to be back in Spook Street, home of the nation’s secret service. From a handful of locations across London, its dedicated employees struggle ceaselessly against the nation’s enemies, when not otherwise engaged in scratching each other’s backs or scratching each other’s eyes out. Spook Street is Mick Herron’s fourth novel in the series, and like its predecessors its focus is the activities of the ‘slow horses’, the Service’s rejects. Their records irredeemably blotted by past transgressions, these men and women have been despatched to Slough House, a small but hideous office block near the Barbican, where they are condemned to spend the rest of their careers engaged on

Allan Mallinson

Day of infamy

On 7 December 1941, without declaration of war, 350 Japanese carrier-borne aircraft struck at the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii — in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ringing words, ‘a date that will live in infamy’. For the 75th anniversary, Craig Nelson, a New York Times journalist, has, says his publisher, produced ‘a definitive account’. I disagree. Indeed, if this book were a motor car (or ‘automobile’, for it is a re-print of the US edition, with American usage and spelling), it would have to be recalled for extensive safety modifications and replacement parts. The errors, mis-understandings and omissions are markedly misleading, sowing doubt about the accuracy

Philip Hensher

Sins of the flesh

Bill Schutt has an excellent subject, and he explores it from a promising angle. Cannibalism has long interested zoologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, literary theorists and students of theology and blasphemy — the absurd claim that Roman Catholics were commending it in their account of transubstantiation was a favourite with 18th-century English blasphemers. Few people have tried to bring all these together, and perhaps by the end we have to conclude that there is not much connecting the very different elements at the remote ends of the scale. Still, it was worth a try. Schutt is an animal scientist, and he begins with the simpler organisms. At the bottom of the

Thursday

Bharat Tandon

Reading between the lines | 26 January 2017

Writing to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, Jane Austen declared, in a parody of Walter Scott: ‘I do not write for such dull Elves/As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.’ That identification of the good Austen reader as one continually on the qui vive, ready to piece out the novels’ nudges, winks and silences, also underpins Helena Kelly’s ambitiously revisionist new study of Austen — a study that is by turns illuminating, provocative and infuriating. ‘We’re missing something,’ she argues with reference to Northanger Abbey. That sentence, both in its content and in the position it adopts with relation to its readers, could

Edward Paice

A scandalous scramble

Empires in the Sun might conjure up romantic visions for some, but this book’s essence is distilled in its subtitle, ‘The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa’. Lawrence James’s panoramic survey of imperial and then neo-colonial subjugation of the African continent between 1830 and 1990 is a timely reminder, if any were needed, of the devastating consequences of chauvinistic nationalism and expansionism. Violence, inflicted on a continent wracked by the slave trade, internal wars and epidemics, is the dominant theme: empire-building is always brutal. France’s conquest and settlement of Algeria, the first European colony in Africa in modern times, sets the scene. Between 1830 and 1875, an estimated 875,000 Algerians

Boyd Tonkin

Dangerous liaisons | 26 January 2017

In a Kashmiri apple orchard, a young fugitive from the Indian army’s cruel oppressions spots a snake that has ‘mistaken its tail for a separate creature’ and started to devour itself. Imran, a.k.a. ‘Moscow’, will later break away from the equally barbaric Islamist insurgents who prey on his rage and grief, flee to Pakistan, and there meet the other protagonists of this fifth novel by Nadeem Aslam. Although The Golden Legend has plenty of passages of exposition and argument, Aslam shines above all as the fabricator of radiant images that tell a story in themselves. That self-consuming serpent — an ouroboros in Greek myth — here embodies not only the

Christopher Bray

Boy wonder

Back in 1978, a young and already successful Steven Spielberg told a bunch of would-be moviemakers at the American Film Institute not to ‘worry if critics like… Molly Haskell don’t like your movies’. Four decades on, and just in time to mark his 70th birthday, Haskell has written a biography of Spielberg for Yale’s series of Jewish Lives. Since the series is essentially celebratory, and since Haskell is one of the hanging judges of feminist film criticism, this is an interesting commission. But is it a wise one? Whatever you think of Spielberg’s work, its emphasis on motherhood and apple pie hardly makes it feminist fodder. Little wonder Haskell hesitated