Book review

Thursday

Laura Freeman

A fresh start

Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. So we’re told. Frits van Egters apparently leads a life more desperate than most. He lies in bed too long. He eats green pickled herrings and brown onions. He turns the radio on. He turns it off. Half the day gone already. He squeezes his spots. He tells bad jokes. He takes cod-liver oil. He makes custard from packet powder. He obsesses about going bald. He is annoyed by his parents: his mother darning socks, the warts on the back of his father’s neck. He has nightmares. He wakes the next morning and starts again. In Gerard Reve’s The Evenings: A Winter’s

Ian Birrell

A truly monstrous regiment

When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had terrorised people for decades across a big chunk of Africa turned out to be emaciated teenagers with dirty clothes who could hardly hold the big guns they carried. Some were unarmed children, barely ten years old. He felt sorry for them. ‘They could not have known anything else but living in the forest like wild animals.’ Soon he had joined their pack, a reluctant member of one of the world’s most notorious rebel groups. A bright boy who dreamed of becoming a teacher, George ended up a bodyguard to one

Daniel Hannan

Put out more flags

Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags? (The wheel in the middle of India’s flag is blue, for example, and the Vatican flag has a red cord hanging from the keys.) Did you know that four of those 190 — Andorra, Chad, Moldova and Romania — have pretty much the same blue-yellow-red tricolour? Or that the stripes of the French flag are not of even width, but are proportioned 30-34-37? It’s an optical illusion: if the red, white and blue are of equal breadth, the flag looks curiously unbalanced. These are among the facts that you won’t

Hermione Eyre

Homage to Mad Madge

There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s foremost female authors, philosophers and eccentrics. But there have been several near misses. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando tips its cap to her: Orlando, just like Cavendish, is a feverishly imaginative, androgynous aristocrat afflicted by the ‘honourable disease’ of writing, filling folios with the speed of an addict. Writers from Pepys to Lamb have tended her flame, as have two recent biographies. Siri Hustvedt paid extensive homage to Cavendish in her 2014 novel set in New York’s art scene, The Blazing World — a title, devotees of the Duchess will notice, appropriated

Jonathan Mirsky

Whisper who dares

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism. When people

Thursday

Deborah Bull

A marvel and a mystery

In 2013, Pavel Dmitrichenko, disgruntled principal dancer of the Bolshoi, exacted a now infamous revenge on the company’s artistic director, Sergey Filin, for overlooking his girlfriend in casting the starring role in that most Russian of ballet classics, Swan Lake. The circumstances surrounding the acid attack, which seemed to combine ballet’s glamour with a murky underworld of intrigue, conspiracy, villains and victims, quickly became a contemporary metaphor for the Bolshoi itself. It’s irresistible as a lens through which to consider this intriguing institution at the heart of Russian politics, culture and life. The 2015 film Bolshoi Babylon started from this point, and went on to capture the ensuing year, its

Piers Torday

The lonely passion of Beatrix Potter

The story of the extraordinary boom in children’s literature over the last 100 years could be bookended with a ‘Tale of Two Potters’ — Beatrix and Harry. The adventures of the latter have sold millions, but the foundations of his success were laid by the former, whose series of ‘little tales’ Matthew Denison estimates in his equally condensed new biography, ‘are purchased somewhere in the world every 15 seconds’. That is not bad for an author whose first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, came out in 1902 — 40 million copies sold so far, and counting — with neither the benefit of the internet or a movie franchise to

Paul Levy

Rhinoceros pie, anyone?

Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto: Semper in ventrem aliquid novi). Dedicated to the memory and gastronomic exploits of Francis Trevelyan (Frank) Buckland (1826–1880), the Oxford-born surgeon, natural historian and popular writer who aspired to eat a member of every living animal species, the Club’s repasts are unfailingly interesting, if seldom so ambitious. Frank’s penchant for zoöphagy came from his father, William (1784–1856), a Canon and Dean of Christ Church, where he served up delicacies such as mice on toast, pickled horse tongue, puppies, hedgehog, crocodile and bear. The travel writer Augustus Hare is the source

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Poor bewildered beasts

If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to enjoy a heartwarming tale of 18th-century babies being rescued from destitution and brought to live in a lovely safe place, you will have found instead that the tale was mostly about babies dying after they arrived. So it is with this fascinating book about the early days of London Zoo. Expecting to read about lions, tigers and monkeys in all their boisterous aliveness, you wade instead into disturbing descriptions of the illnesses they suffered and their pitiful early deaths. Disembarked from long voyages in the late 1820s, the poor bewildered

Jonathan Mirsky

A girl in a million

All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed me as this one, just as events alarmed and frightened its central character. She is Okatsu, a young woman from the samurai Satsuma Clan in mid-19th-century Japan. The country has been ruled by the shogunate, a military caste, since the early 17th century; the emperors were remote figures until their restoration to power in 1868. China is already under attack and exploitation by Britain and the US, and many Japanese fear they may be next. Some urge driving the foreigners off, while others — realists — insist that treaties must

Simon Bradley

Little and large

Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier volumes on England’s best churches and houses, and like them includes fine photography by the late Paul Barker of Country Life. Too hefty to serve as a guide book, it can be consulted as a reference work, or read with pleasure for its vivid and well-informed descriptions. Jenkins’s parish churches book was a publishing hit in 1999 — partly, one suspects, because it stimulated parochial rivalries with its five-star rating system. The cathedrals are ranked too. At the top are the author’s personal favourites, the ‘three graces’ of Ely, Lincoln

Janine di Giovanni

Arms and the woman

In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by the Daily Telegraph when she landed her first serious journalistic coup. Using feminine wiles and diplomatic skills extraordinaire, she convinced a friend in the Foreign Office to lend her his chauffeured car. Stocking up with supplies in soon to be starving Poland, and charming the border guards, she crossed into Germany with nothing but her gut instinct and her smarts — the most important of a reporter’s tools (together with ‘ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’, in the words of the late Nicholas Tomalin). She didn’t

Ian Sansom

Port in any storm

Cometh the hour, cometh the book, and so Christmas brings us once again a tidal wave of titles relating to food and drink: cookbooks of seasonal dishes from around the world, never once to be consulted, and endless tomes of wine connoisseurship for all of us dedicated cheapskate consumers of Lidl and Aldi plonk. So the question is: are Thomas Tylston Greg’s Through a Glass Darkly and Henry Jeffreys’s Empire of Booze destined to last any longer than your turkey carcass and your festive case of supermarket Prosecco? Both books are undoubtedly charming. Through a Glass Darkly is one of those books in the London Library’s ‘Found on the Shelves’

Paul Keegan

Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As when soft Snows, brought down by Western Gales, Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . . Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright, And mourns her lost Variety in White. Unlike themselves the Objects glare around, And with false Rays the dazzled Sight confound. Lost variety is the nub: before it is anything else, snow is Nature’s alienation-effect, making all things look the same and ‘unlike themselves’ — even while we watch, or else behind our backs, noiselessly. But snow also carries contrary meanings: an image

Jeff Noon

Crime fiction for Christmas

Imagine receiving an anonymous suicide note addressed to you by mistake. Would you try to find that person, to help them in some way? This is the opening dilemma in Bernard Minier’s Don’t Turn Out the Lights (Mulholland Books, £14.99), and Christine Steinmeyer’s failure to locate the letter’s sender turns her life in Toulouse upside down. Her dog disappears, she’s accused of harassment at work and her fiancé walks out on her. She believes that someone — some unknown person — is to blame for her misfortunes; but are the threats real, or is Christine losing her mind? This is a super-accelerated version of a Hitchcock thriller, with thrills and

John Sutherland

Love at first bite

Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high years, a supreme London beauty. She preserved her Dresden perfection by denying her husband conjugal access. Bram consoled himself with warmer but more dangerous ladies of the night; such satisfactions came at greater cost than a few sovereigns. According to David J. Skal, a quarter of men of Stoker’s bohemian class (including all of those central to his book) were infected with syphilis. And Bram? Skal thinks so too. Florence Balcombe, when a young Dublin beauty, was courted by Oscar Wilde as well as Bram. Oscar she was not inclined

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Dark and graphic

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the message, ‘I was you.’ Doubting yourself. Knowing you don’t love your girlfriend. Waking beside someone beautiful and new, only to notice a filigree of knife-scars etched across her breasts. If, sensitive reader, these ingredients make you inclined to do a runner (your finger already hooked around the next, less distressing page), then go right ahead. Because Charles Burns’s Last Look (illustrated above) clearly isn’t your kind of book. But if you’re in two or three minds about this, then please hesitate, because I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I

Brian Martin

Double trouble | 8 December 2016

Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after reading the first quarter. It seems to be a dreary saga about three generations of the Tye family. The background is of an intellectual, comfortably off, left-wing family from a milieu in which Polly Toynbee would be happy. Grandpa was a Cambridge-educated conscientious objector during the second world war. The characters fail to interest. It all seems to have been said before. Then suddenly the plot develops and the narrative pace accelerates. Perseverance is rewarded. Mysteries unfold, complex moral issues are explored, some left hanging for the reader to decide

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The unkindest cult of all

When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah. Yisrayl (born Bill) lived with his many disciples and several wives in a compound carved out of the red dirt scrub near Abilene, Texas. His cult was called the House of Yahweh, and as a sign of their commitment, his 400 followers had all changed their names to Hawkins. Yisrayl was a narcissist, as most cult leaders are, and this made him tremendously boring. As he droned on about being chosen, and his conviction that Satan was in fact female, I watched the ferrety little Hawkins children

Tom Holland

To earth from heaven

When I was a child, the highlight of the summer holidays was when my cousin Simon came to stay. We shared a common obsession: aliens. Day after fruitless day, we would scan the skies, looking for UFOs. At night, long after we were supposed to have gone to sleep, we would get out our torches and pore over books on extraterrestrial life. These ranged from the sternly scientific — tomes on astronomy or space flight — to paperbacks with altogether more lurid copy. One in particular, filled with vivid images of flying saucers and Area 51, was a focus of our almost superstitious fascination. This was because it contained a