Book review

Thursday

David Patrikarakos

A parable of good and evil

It is difficult to write well about slavery. As with the Holocaust, the subject’s horrific nature lends itself too easily to mawkishness. This tendency is one that Colson White-head consummately avoids in this impressive novel. The Underground Railroad, set before the American civil war, tells the story of Cora, a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and her escape with a fellow slave, Caesar, via the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and activists that enabled slaves to reach the free states of America’s north. It tells it beautifully. The book mixes genres to sublime effect: a straight parable of good versus evil that sees Ridgeway the

David Crane

England’s unloved king

Aethelred the Unready (c.968—1016) has not, as Levi Roach acknowledges, enjoyed a good press. In recent times there may have been some attempt in academic circles to take a more measured view of his calamitous reign, but the fact remains that if most us would have trouble saying quite what he did or did not do, or even what ‘unraed’ actually means, we all know how it ended. ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld;’ wrote Kipling, But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane. On the face of it the revisionists have an uphill

William Leith

His and her healthcare

When I started this book, I have to admit, I did not think it would be as absolutely fascinating as it turned out to be. It’s by a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, and it’s about the medical differences between men and women. There are lots of medical differences between men and women — something doctors in general should bear in mind during treatment. But they don’t, says Dr Glezerman — or, at least, not enough. This is all in the realm of the fairly interesting. Men and women are hormonally different from each other, they store fat differently, their brains are not quite the same, they respond to heat

James Walton

Too good to be true

The McNulty family in the novels of Sebastian Barry have a definite claim to be one of the unluckiest in all fiction. After serving with the Brits in the first world war, the main character in The Where-abouts of Eneas McNulty is branded a traitor to Ireland, and spends the rest of his days in bleak and terrified exile. In The Secret Scripture, his sister-in-law Roseanne is locked up for life in a Sligo mental asylum for having an illegitimate baby (that’s taken from her). In The Temporary Gentleman, Eneas’s brother Jack is an ageing alcoholic reflecting on the failure of virtually everything he’s ever done. On the plus side, mind

Nicky Haslam

He blew his mind out in a car

There was a touch of Raymond Radiguet, the young literary sensation of 1920s Paris, about Tara Browne. In life poetically beautiful, poetry-imbued, tender and trusting, deliciously precocious and eerily presumptive, androgenous in looks but not desires, Tara died —‘without knowing it’, as Cocteau said of Radiguet — tragically, but given his penchant for very fast cars, unsurprisingly young. And, like Radiguet, having touched the lives of those who knew him with a kind of iridescence that remained with them more than half a century later. This lengthy biography, which, given its subject’s foreshortened life is necessarily somewhat repetitive, has gathered their still-vivid recollections, and if it reads more as a

Alastair Smart

Paintbrushes at the ready

When the old curmudgeon Edgar Degas died in 1917, a stunning trove of works by Edouard Manet — eight paintings, 14 drawings and 60 prints — was discovered in his studio. There, too, was a portrait of Manet and his wife Suzanne, painted by Degas 50 years earlier. But its right-hand third was missing — which included half of Suzanne’s body and all of the piano she was playing. For some reason, Manet had put a knife through the canvas and sent Degas packing with what remained. The duo’s relationship is one of four ‘friendly rivalries’ considered by the Boston Globe art critic, Sebastian Smee, in his new book (Matisse

Juliet Nicolson

The world in limbo

In 1919 the economist and sometime prophet John Maynard Keynes left the glittering ballroom of Versailles feeling profoundly despondent. The treaty that determined the political geography of a postwar world inspired in him a fearful sense of inevitability. The punitive conditions imposed on Germany would be too harsh for the country to tolerate for long. One junior delegate in Paris observed: ‘There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed with the terms.’ This was a world not only united by the devastating results of the Spanish ’flu epidemic, responsible for the deaths of five times as many as had lost their

Lee Langley

And the answer is…

Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes — and that’s just the format, before you get to the content, which might include fractured grammar, reversed chronology, parallel plots, contradictory footnotes, dead or unborn narrators and labyrinthine text. Never though, until now, have I encountered a work of fiction set out as an examination paper. From first page to last here are 90 questions, a sly parody of the Chilean Aptitude Test for university applicants, right down to the numbered multiple choice boxes to tick. If this sounds off-putting, tricksy, a little

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Behind the fringe

‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ Philip Larkin famously announced in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ But the key line is a far more private confession, caught in parentheses like a gloomy thought bubble: ‘(which was rather late for me)’. Few of Larkin’s contemporaries would have been more sympathetic than Alan Bennett. In 1963 he was appearing on Broadway in Beyond the Fringe, the hit satirical revue that also featured Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller; and while this led to him rubbing shoulders with the stars (the first- night audience included Rita Hayworth and Stravinsky,

Thursday

Stuart Evers

Smoke and mirrors | 6 October 2016

Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds with Jonathan Franzen, which led to Franzen’s subsequently championing her work, and ended with not one but two novels — Mislaid and The Wallcreeper — published together in a lavish, design-savvy edition. But it was Zink’s style and ideas that drew fervid, hyperbolic praise. Fresh and undeniably original, this is fiction at odds with much of American literary convention, Zink’s prose refusing to conform to received ideas of how novels are constructed; time shifts, perspective changes and characterisation, for example, are all treated casually, almost with disdain. The word ‘genius’

Claudia FitzHerbert

The magic of bookshops

It is not uncommon for writers to be obsessed by bookshops. Some even find their writing feet through loving a particular bookshop and developing a habit, which helps to form the writers they become. And often they end up in a rage with the common run of bookshops. Why would they not? It is, or used to be, a numbers game, and most bookshops fail to stock most writers. But in recent years online outlets such as Amazon have changed the stocking (and the hating) game. Since proper bookshops became an endangered species, a use-them-or-lose-them energy pervades the bookish classes. It is a form of virtue signalling to go to

Andre Van Loon

Bolsheviks on board

Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia. As so often, Churchill has the best lines. Here he is about one of the most famous episodes in European history: the safe passage given to Lenin by a Germany desperate for victory in the first world war. As long as German high command could dream up ways to eliminate the threat from either the West or East, there

Juliet Nicolson

More sinned against than sinning

The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock with fever but also with fear. Would the jury, assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpredecentally sensational two-week trial, find him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or, instead, stark raving mad? Elizabeth Foyster, a historian and senior lecturer at Clare College, Cambridge, was alerted to this enthralling, almost unbelievable true story with the caveat that the vastness of the material in Lambeth Palace archives concerning a scarcely remembered trial of a hugely wealthy, relatively obscure aristocrat had deterred anyone else from attempting to

John Jolliffe

Derring-do in the desert

The SAS was the first unit to be granted regimental status for generations. Its chief aim was to damage the enemy from behind their lines in the North African desert. It was an entirely independent unit, not answerable to any superior command and therefore anathema to the regular army mind. Its creator, David Stirling, had a record of complete allergy to discipline or serious work either at school at Ampleforth or later, briefly, at Cambridge, where the Master of his college sent him down after showing him a list of 28 transgressions and asking him to choose the three which ‘would be the least offensive to his mother’. In 1940

A.S.H. Smyth

The spell of the pharaohs

Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen’s (updated and reissued) Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs ‘aims to answer some basic questions about life in Ancient Egypt and whet your appetite to find out more’, and achieves both in appropriate abundance. It looks great, reads well, even smells nice — and is positively jam-packed with wonderful things. Citing the fundamental continuity of 3,000-plus years of pharaonic culture, the Hagens tuck away a (very) concise chronology at the back of the book, and then get on with the business of showing us what Ancient Egypt looked

Philip Marsden

Over hill and dale

When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle bland abstractions. Many of his parliamentary colleagues inhabit a blah-blah land where terms such as ‘peace process’ and ‘international community’ have meaning. An upbringing in the Far East, where his father was a diplomat, as well as years spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, have given Stewart direct experience not only of nations but of town quarters, villages and individuals. Walking was his preferred method in Afghanistan, where he tramped across the country with a dog and a Punjabi fighting stick. The dog couldn’t keep up and died, but here for

Andy Miller

Jolly good fellows

‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the blurb on this reissue of the author’s first and penultimate novel, originally published in the US in 1978. Admired and influential Michaels may have been, but that was largely in his homeland and then as an essayist and author of short stories, rather than as a novelist. The Men’s Club was not published in the UK until 1981 (by Jonathan Cape) and is only now, 35 years later, being made available in paperback by Daunt Books in the category of ‘lost classics’. If the phrase ‘crisis of masculinity’ did not

Steven Poole

A puzzling phenomenon

Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky; you have to rotate and shunt them around so they fit perfectly together at the bottom, and then that horizontal line of blocks vanishes. This is Tetris, and it was created in 1984 by a Soviet mathematician called Alexei Pajitnov. But how it came to the West is a remarkably complicated cloak-and-dagger story, here given its first book-length treatment. The narrative opens with all the bad bravado of a Dan Brown novel, as one of the several businessmen chasing the rights to the game flies into Moscow for a meeting

Duncan Fallowell

Nazis and narcotics

Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were shrinking violets in the drugs department. We smoked cannabis, ate opium and sometimes took strong LSD; lines of uncertain content went up nostrils; and we swallowed countless uppers (speed) and downers (tranquillisers, sleepers for looning on). Speed was amphetamine sulphate. Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine were the three original brands, in rising strength. Soon there were many other names, including slang: Desoxyn, Durophet, Durophet-M (speed with Mandrax), French Blues, Purple Hearts, Black Bombers. Many were prescribed by doctors who didn’t regard them as outrageously dangerous. I

Patrick Skene-Catling

Lessons in sex

Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is revealed in this intimate biography in 50 shades of pink. ‘Let it be understood at the outset,’ writes Gerri Hirshey, an American freelance journalist for many upmarket periodicals: Sex has imbued the soft core, hard times and glory days of this story — sex surrendered, sex wielded, lavished and revelled in, sex merely endured and sometimes coolly transactional, sex reimagined, promised and packaged on glossy magazine covers for global dissemination… Hirshey tells all about Helen’s life, every nook and cranny, from her childhood poverty in hillbilly Arkansas, steeply ascendant to