Book review

Thursday

Sam Leith

Smashing stuff

‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself. The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent and perfectly pared-down novella is Joe, a former FBI agent and marine who has reduced what remains of his life to a sliver of deadly purpose. After a gruesome incident in his past, ‘his limit for trauma, a very high limit, had been reached’ and he went completely off his onion. The only method he

Jasper Rees

Paean to the Starman

On 11 January 2016 Paul Morley was awoken by an urgent voicemail from the Today Programme. Could he talk about the life and — news just in — the death of David Bowie? (The researcher apologised if this was how he’d heard.) Resistant to gnashing his teeth for a few minutes of radio rent-a-commentary, Morley uncharacteristically ignored this and sundry other requests. Instead he wrote these 500 pages in ten weeks. The same time, he says, that Bowie needed to cut albums at his cocaine-powered peak. The Age of Bowie is not strictly a biography, with such things as dates and sources and supporting quotations. Want to know about the

Helen R Brown

‘I wish you were never born’

All parents worry about the extent to which their children will expose their private weirdness to the world. They tell their teachers that Daddy takes his tea into the toilet and Mummy ‘actually pulled the car over’ for a closer look at the dead badger they passed on the school run. But the traumatic new memoir by the journalist Ariel Leve lifts the lid on a whole new league of maternal craziness. Although Leve disguises her mother as ‘Suzanne’ in this book, a quick google reveals her to be the poet and feminist film-maker Sandra Hochman. When People magazine’s Patricia Burnstein visited Hochman’s ‘elegantly appointed’ Manhattan penthouse in 1976, it

Mark Mason

Maryland’s mean streets

Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and sobs. Only the guilty snooze there. It’s known as the ‘felony nap’. Del Quentin Wilber learned a lot as he tailed the PG homicide squad during February 2013. His account of the experience is a non-fiction version of faction, the genre in which novelists incorporate real people into their stories. Coming at it from the

Stuart Kelly

Rich in legend and song

There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with literary connections: as Walter Scott wrote in Marmion, ‘Nor hill, nor brook we paced along/ But had its legend or its song.’ Many years ago when the Scottish Borders was marketing itself as the ‘Land of Creativity’ I assembled a database of references which stretched to well over 1,000 entries — for example, the village of Yetholm crops up in a strange extended simile in Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous October Ferry to Gabriola. Then there is Scotland’s propensity for memorialising its own writers. The Scott Monument is only the most obvious example. Within a few miles

David Horspool

A five-ring fiasco

The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst. To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, these two books by

Thursday

Matt Thorne

Riding high

How’s this for a heartwarming set-up­­? Forty-something recovering alcoholic and aspiring artist Ginger copes with the disappointment of being unable to have children of her own by signing up to an organisation that sends underprivileged inner-city kids to the homes of middle-class couples in the countryside. When she is introduced to 11-year-old Dominican girl Velvet, the two bond over horses, with Ginger offering the girl a freedom denied to her by her domineering mother. It sounds perfect for book clubs, soon to be a life-affirming movie, and of little literary interest. But The Mare has much more merit than the synopsis suggests. It’s the first novel in ten years from

Boyd Tonkin

Something new out of Africa

In a Johannesburg mall, a listless and lonely IT worker chats with his dad about the bitter fruits of upward mobility in South Africa. ‘Do you remember when you scored 139 for that IQ test?’ Pa asks, in Masande Ntshanga’s story ‘Space II’. ‘I thought it meant my life would be different, I tell him, but I don’t really like computers.’ As the dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ fades, all the Ubers, espressos and craft beers in the city can’t dispel the mood of yuppie melancholia. Modern Africa, as several pieces in the latest edition of this annual anthology attest, may cast away old burdens only to take on the

John Hare

In the steppes of the Golden Horde

When I first visited the complex of Buddhist cave grottoes, dating from the fifth to the 14th century, at Bezekilk in Xinjiang province, China, I was struck by the destruction wreaked on them by Muslims whose religion proscribes figurative images of human beings. Eyes had been gouged out and figures lacerated with knives. When and by whom had the vandalism of these exquisite and colourful portraits been done? I later learnt that the Buddhist Uyghurs of the Kingdom of Qocho and Turfan, in which Bezekilk was situated, were converted to Islam by conquest during a holy war at the hands of the Muslim Chagatai Khizr Khwaja. Not easy information to

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Death in Greenwich

With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on the bedside book over the last few weeks. When, in this true Victorian murder mystery, I came to the sentence, ‘Ebeneezer Pook, however, had no intention of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure’, all I could see in my head was Jeremy Corbyn emerging from his house, ducking under the prickly rosebush and refusing to stand down. And when I came to this complicated passage: Mrs Thomas’s story buttressed the account that William Sparshott had given and would dovetail with the account Olivia Cavell was about to give. Nevertheless, Coleridge could

Kate Womersley

Stiffen the sinews

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in the course manual for directions about how to cut — through? around? underneath? But there was no mention of these pleasure-giving, milk-yielding, cancer-visited organs. One justification for the vast expense of cadaveric dissection is to develop a clinical understanding of the body in its supposed entirety. Omitting the breasts reflects a way of thinking —

Richard Ingrams

The great sulker

Ted ‘Grocer’ Heath, as he will always be for me, was chosen by his fellow MPs to be their leader in 1965 as the Tory answer to Harold Wilson. After two Old Etonian patricians, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, the Grocer was a grammar-school boy, a meritocrat who would spearhead a new-look, classless Conservative party. He was a clever, hard-working man, totally devoted to his political career. Unfortunately, with his wooden stance and curious ‘neow-neow’ voice, he lacked charisma, a failing he would never have admitted, as Michael Gove did recently. I remember Heath presenting the awards at the annual What the Papers Say lunch in 1968 and you could see journalists

Owen Matthews

Russia’s dumping ground

Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the Russian state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil. Katorga — from the Greek word for galley — was the judicial term for a penal sentence where inmates performed hard labour in the service of the state. The sentence was commonly imposed in place of death from the reign of Peter the Great onwards. And in many ways Siberia truly was a House of the Dead — as Daniel Beer,

Thursday

Jeff Noon

A choice of crime novels | 30 June 2016

Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into reason’, and finds it in the form of Étienne, a man who helps her when her car breaks down. She invites him into her lonely home, and her life. When her neighbour’s son is killed in a road accident, it becomes obvious that her new lover is linked to this tragedy in some way, and

Philip Mansel

The road to catastrophe

France’s problems today should lessen the condescension of posterity towards Louis XVI. Presidents of the Republic have proved just as incapable as the King of reforming privileged corporations — stemming the flight of skills and capital — and winning popular confidence. Louis XVI’s failure to manage France after 1789 is easier to understand after reading John Hardman’s complex , well-researched, gripping 500-page biography . Louis XVI’s greatest problem was the French national debt. It had reached four billion livres — accumulated over many wars — and there was an annual deficit of 100 million livres. As a result, Hardman points out, in the 1780s, whereas the British government could borrow

Alexandra Coghlan

The food of love | 30 June 2016

‘You are the most adorable man and artist, intelligent, gifted, simple, loving and noble… I am really very, very lucky to be alive with you around….’ The relationship between the tenor Peter Pears and the composer Benjamin Britten is part of our cultural and national furniture. A partnership spanning nearly 40 years drove each artist to the peak of his creative and expressive powers, producing works like Peter Grimes, Winter Words and the War Requiem, as well as their definitive recordings. But music is only half of the Britten-Pears story. Before his death in 1976, Britten asked his friend and publisher Donald Mitchell to ‘tell the truth about Peter and

Allan Mallinson

Ce n’est pas la guerre

On 1 July 1916, along a frontage of 18 miles, 100,000 British infantrymen — considerably more than the entire strength of the British army today — climbed out of the trenches to begin the great offensive that would become known as the Battle of the Somme. By nightfall there were 60,000 casualties, 20,000 dead or dying. No appreciable gains had been made, and there was no prospect of the breakthrough for which the commander-in-chief, General Sir Douglas Haig, had assembled three cavalry divisions, some 30,000 horses. No one very senior would be sacked; the scapegoats were regimental officers not judged to have pressed their attacks with sufficient determination in the

Alastair Smart

Life’s rich collage

Such is the veneration in this country for the St Ives school of painters, it’s easy to forget that other art colonies existed, let alone thrived, in the mid-20th century: that in Great Bardfield, Essex, perhaps chief among them. The village near Saffron Walden was home to the likes of John Aldridge, Kenneth Rowntree, Michael Rothenstein, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (1903–89). Maybe it’s going a bit far to say there has been a resurgence of interest in this loosely affiliated group of figurative artists. But it’s certainly a welcome coincidence that, following the success of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s superb Ravilious exhibition last year, comes the publication of Bawden’s scrapbooks

Dorian Lynskey

Escape into pop

‘How can you come into this room and ask me “What is the purpose of life?”,’ wails Massive Attack’s laconic DJ Mushroom after a typically searching interrogation by the veteran music journalist Sylvia Patterson. In this powerful, enjoyable memoir she fares better with Spike Milligan (‘I wake up every morning and think, “Thank God, another day” ’) and gleans further nuggets of wisdom from the likes of Bono, Diana Ross and David Attenborough. Patterson, primarily an interviewer rather than a critic, isn’t interested in the mechanics of music-making or the record industry but in the fundamental question of why people do what they do. In her hands, music journalism becomes

William Cook

Of microbes and men

Which disease are you most scared of catching: Ebola or influenza? Before I read this medical memoir, I would have said Ebola. Now, I’d say flu. As Dr Ali S. Khan points out, Ebola is fairly hard to catch; flu is fairly easy. And unlike wimpy man flu, proper flu can be a killer. You’ve heard of the Spanish flu, which killed 675,000 Americans a century ago. But did you know that influenza still kills up to 50,000 Americans every year? Most pandemics are more like flu than Ebola: they don’t sound that spooky until they get out of hand. Yet instead, we worry about killer bugs which we stand