Book review

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Rewriting holy writ

Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada years. For one thing, they set much store by Romish ‘persuasion’ (sophistical reasoning) and were often superb linguists. Among the languages codified by Jesuits were Guaraní in Paraguay and Sri Lankan Tamil. Jesuit attempts to translate the Bible into local vernaculars were often less successful, however. Japanese converts to Jesuitism apparently still believe that Noah survived the flood in a canoe; scribal error had corrupted the Ark into an unlikely means of salvation. Inevitably, translation is a frayed and ragged version of the original (Traduttore traditore, the Italians say: ‘The

Kate Webb

One day, two lonely people

Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious Sweet, a work full of anger at what has happened to London since the Thatcher revolution and concern for the city’s isolated, impotent inhabitants. Kennedy’s representative Londoners are Jon, a divorced and fusty civil servant, a ‘passed over man’ plagued by failure, and Meg, a bankrupt accountant and recovering alcoholic who jokes at her own expense that she is ‘Fine: Fucked-up Insecure Neurotic and Emotional’. The novel takes in many contemporary bugbears — the loss of civility, state snooping on private lives, misogyny and child abuse — but like the

Honor Clerk

The grit in the oyster

Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George and Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread and Susan Hiller. He loves writing about contemporary art. And he worked as art critic of the Daily Telegraph for 25 years. Like the grit in the oyster he irritated the establishment, producing pearl after pearl that occasionally had even his own paper distancing itself from his opinions. ‘I looked edgy and transgressive,’ he says, ‘when in reality my taste in art was fairly cautious.’ Born in America, Dorment studied art history at Princeton and was assistant curator in European painting at the Philadelphia Museum

Andrew Lycett

The dog it was that died

Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the bizarre circumstances behind the murder plot which cost the Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe his job and his debonair reputation in the 1970s. First yelps from the kennel came from the Honourable Brecht Van de Vater’s five springer spaniels. Ostensibly they added a veneer of respectability to their owner’s comfortable Cotswolds existence. But like many of the characters involved, appearances were illusory. His real name was Norman Vater, the son of a Welsh miner and an undisclosed bankrupt. In 1960 he received a postcard from Thorpe (the background to their

Patrick Marnham

Throned on her hundred isles

Approximately 500 new books on Venice are published every year and this is not the first literary anthology devoted to the city. But Marie-Jose Gransard lectures in Venice about Venice to Venetians, and conducts her students on guided tours of the city. Her selection draws on sources going back over 800 years and across six languages. So the text, based on very wide reading, is crowded with unfamiliar observations and includes the impressions of artists, musicians and diplomats as well as writers. This is not a guide book for the first-time visitor, but for anyone who knows Venice, and cannot keep away, it provides a delightful change. We are given

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The gooseberry fool

On 10 April 1772, the biographer James Boswell recorded in his diary that he had hugged himself with pleasure on discovering he would be dining with Oliver Goldsmith. This was not because he hoped to elicit from the Irish-born writer some fruity details for the life of Dr Johnson, the dictionary-maker, that he was planning to write (although Goldsmith did know Johnson intimately). On the contrary, Boswell, the literary groupie, was fascinated by Goldsmith himself. He devotes several pages of his Life of Johnson to him in an attempt ‘to make my readers in some degree acquainted with his singular character’. But, frustratingly, Goldsmith remains an enigmatic figure. Boswell reports

Matilda Bathurst

A selection of short stories

How many debut collections does it take to stand up to one of the most accomplished short-story writers of the past half-century? In this case, it’s three against one. Under the Rose is Julia O’Faolain’s first short-story collection in over 20 years, bringing together stories published between 1968 and 2006. Danielle McLaughlin follows in her wake, picking up the pieces of post-crash Ireland in her debut Dinosaurs on Other Planets. Greg Jackson is the latest virtuoso on the US literary scene, writing stylistically self-conscious stories with titles like ‘Wagner in the Desert’ and ‘Metanarrative Breakdown’. As a practising psychiatrist in New York City, Arlene Heyman has no shortage of material.

Henry Hitchings

Who’s who and what’s what

Asked to name a reference book, you may well choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. But perhaps you’d pick something less elephantine — the Guinness Book of World Records, with its tributes to figures such as Smudge, holder of the record for most keys removed from a keyring by a parrot, or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which informs us that the Russian equivalent of ‘to carry coals to Newcastle’ is ‘to go to Tula with one’s own samovar’. The American literature professor Jack Lynch has spent a large part of his life exploring the world of reference books, and in its darker corners has

Michael Beloff

Running the triple crown

The story of the Czechoslovak runner Emil Zátopek is a tale from athletics’ age of innocence. Without the aid of qualified coaches, state-of-the-art equipment or ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs, Emil Zátopek set no fewer than 18 world records over distances between 5,000 and 30,000 metres with a style memorably described as that of ‘a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt’: all eccentricity above the waist, all efficiency below it. Brought up in poverty, he ate when he could and what he could, and treated beer as a prototype isotonic drink. His sporting career was set in the brief period of dominance of his specialist events enjoyed by runners from

Lindsay Johns

Escape from the hood

The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a much-lauded African-American journalist on the Atlantic, best know for his trenchant 2014 essay making the case for reparations for black Americans. A bona fide heir to the mantle of ‘hip-hop intellectual’ (last claimed with any credibility by Michael Eric Dyson), Coates is a rara avis, able to move with ease between Rakim, Q-Tip, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. The Beautiful Struggle, written in 2008 but only now published in the UK, is a memoir of the writer’s perilous journey from boyhood to manhood in inner-city

Lee Langley

Crossing continents | 5 May 2016

Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child, an abandoned wife, a missing mother… The Bones of Grace has a narrative as fragmented as a scattered jigsaw, initially puzzling, with seemingly disparate stories slowly coming together one by one, until the moment a last piece clicks sweetly into place to give us the revelation of a perfect, satisfying whole. The book is conceived as a love letter from Zubaida, a young Bangladeshi palaeontologist at Harvard, to Elijah, a stranger who comforts her when she weeps at a Shostakovich concert. Love at first sight, but bad timing: she’s leaving

Mark Cocker

Gods and monsters

Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little impact upon the prevailing western impression of this country. For many the mountain state remains steadfastly exotic and remote. This is not just a consequence of those sublimely unattainable Himalayan peaks. For generations Nepal was a source of western fantasy that bordered on the obsessive and carried an undercurrent of late-imperial eroticism. What had so stirred European appetites was the long-standing Nepalese policy of playing hard to get. A short, bitter conflict in 1814–1816 with the East India Company inspired its militant Gurkha elite to pursue the rigorous exclusion of

Simon Ings

Chance would be a fine thing

If I prang your car, we can swap insurance details. In the past, it would have been necessary for you to kill me. That’s the great thing about money: it makes liabilities payable and blood feud unnecessary. Spare a thought, then, for the economist Robin Hanson, whose idea it was, in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, to create a market where traders could speculate on political atrocities. You could invest in the likelihood of a biochemical attack, for example, or a coup d’etat, or the assassination of an Arab leader. The more knowledgeable you were, the more profit you would earn — but you would

David Wootton

A clash of two cultures

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and there has even been a competition devoted to its refutation. Steve Jones, though, thinks it too coarse to be quoted in what he himself describes as a popular science book. This is just one of many indications of the way in which this book is haunted by C.P. Snow’s two cultures. I was a bit shocked to see Jones describe his book as popular science because I had been under the impression that he thought it was, in part at least, a history book. As a popular science book, it’s

Charlotte Hobson

All is not lost | 5 May 2016

Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as its epigraph: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people.’ In the vertical community within one of Lubetkin’s postwar blocks of flats in East London we meet hapless Bertie, resting actor caught on the hop by the spare-bedroom tax; disabled Len, thinking positive about his benefit reassessment; Violet, dreaming of her childhood in Kenya at her desk in a City insurance firm; and many more — some powering ahead in our new age of golden job opportunities and zero-hour contracts, others not so much. In fact, after his mother’s death, Bertie

Suzi Feay

The American dream goes bust

One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of unusually rounded elderly characters she presents. Her pitiless eye notes every mark of age and vanity in the older generation of the Mandible family, but they remain in robust health, sharp without being merely spry, and full of personality. They have too much life as far as the younger family members are concerned, waiting impatiently for the wealth to trickle downwards. Jayne and Carter, already in their sixties, will be disappointed, for Shriver’s doomsday scenario concerns a catastrophic devaluation of the dollar which wipes out the family fortune overnight. The

Alex Von Tunzelmann

Black mischief among the Medicis

In a recent interview, the African American actor Wendell Pierce revealed he had once been told by the head of casting at a Hollywood studio: ‘I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have black people then.’ The story was repeated on social media with a mixture of horror and hilarity, many responding — as Pierce himself did — ‘You ever heard of Othello?’ Yet the head of casting’s comments represent a common misconception and a significant gap in historical memory. Black Africans have been a visible presence in European life for centuries — and not only as slaves. In the 16th century, there were black musicians,

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

Mao devours his foes

Frank Dikötter, professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and winner of the Samuel Johnson prize in 2011, is the author of many studies on China, most notably two on Mao’s dark rule. This new book completes the trilogy. The first volume, The Tragedy of Liberation, made plain, more exhaustively than previous accounts, that from the beginning of his time as Chairman, Mao was paranoid and murderous, and that Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping egged him on. The second volume, the prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine, examined, in characteristic detail, the Chairman’s responsibility for the 1959–1961 famine, which killed 30 to 50 million Chinese. Now we are shown that

Peter Parker

Broken and mad

In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers who had no physical injury were displaying a wide range of alarming symptoms. Some appeared to be completely dazed or were shaking uncontrollably, others had lost their sense of taste or smell, or were suffering from blindness, mutism and various kinds of paralysis. It was not until February 1915 that the term ‘shell shock’ first appeared in print, in the Lancet. It was originally intended to describe a physical condition in which the brain had been damaged by the percussive effects of high explosives, but was subsequently adopted to describe

Christopher Bray

Reclaiming Nietzsche

Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running jump at a horse and thud down front first on the pommel with a yelp. This was Friedrich Nietzsche, midway through his 23rd year and, thanks to a sickly childhood, no stranger to hospitals. Nietzsche lost part of his sternum, leaving him not so much pigeon-chested as angle-grinded. Once recovered, he celebrated by having his picture taken in full uniform, sabre at the ready, glaring at the ‘miserable photographer’ like a warrior set for battle. Daniel Blue regards the photo as ‘unflattering’ — though it’s nowhere near as unflattering as the picture