Book review

Thursday

Kate Womersley

The death of the author

The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable. Patient waiting follows, described in monthly essays written for a respected publication. Jenny Diski (non-small cell adenocarcinoma, London Review of Books) calls this personally singular but culturally familiar experience the race from ‘the Big C to the Big D’. Surely the hope is not to reach the end in the fastest time. But if you take too long, your audience’s sympathy might tinge with suspicion, as Clive James (B-cell lymphocytic leukemia, the Guardian) recently described, now a survivor of several years. Claiming a title for your cancer memoir has also

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

‘Mother says I look like a sick ostrich’

Most modern biographers feed off celebrity like vampires let loose in a blood bank. That is why their books sell: they give readers the illusion of intimacy with people they will never know. Alexander Masters is different. He specialises in what one might call ‘marginal biography’, devoting hundreds of pages to individuals who live on the frayed edges of society, and often seem to be on the edge in other ways besides. In Stuart: A Life Backwards, he wrote about a sharp-witted down-and-out whose life had been damaged beyond repair; with Simon: The Genius in My Basement, his focus switched to a dropout mathematician who spent his days eating tinned

Henry Jeffreys

The horse from hell

There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other times, it felt as if the author was convinced that she was writing one. The Sport of Kings is the story of the Forge family of Kentucky. They’re a brutal lot. In the opening scene, John Henry Forge ties his son Henry to a post and whips him. A black employee, Filip, caught with John Henry’s wife, is lynched. As well as violence, John Henry instils a fierce sense of destiny in his son. Against his father’s wishes, Henry turns the family farm over to raising racehorses. Through some severe

William Cook

Inside of a dog

Before I read this book, I thought I knew what a dog was. It barks, it wags its tail, it fetches sticks, it craps on the carpet. However, now that I’ve finished this learned tome, I realise there’s a bit more to it than I thought. As well as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), the genus Canis also includes wolves, jackals, dingoes and coyotes. They all seem very different, yet domestic dogs can breed with all of them. According to Darwin, this makes them all members of the same species. Now can you see why I’m confused? Raymond and Lorna Coppinger don’t want you to make a snap decision about

Mark Mason

Reading the waves

Water accounts for 70 per cent of your planet, and 60 per cent of your body. Yet when do you ever stop to consider it? The quirks and habits and secrets of good old H2O were crying out to have a book written about them. That said, it had to be written by the right person. A subject like this could have attracted a complete dullard, the sort of person you dread getting between you and the door at a party. Fortunately, the job went to Tristan Gooley. His previous books include The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs and The Natural Navigator. There’s more of the same here,

Cressida Connolly

The mother of all crimes

During the heatwave in the summer of 1895, the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lords Cricket Ground on 8 July attracted more than 12,000 spectators. Among the crowd that sunny day were two little boys from the East End of London, brothers Robert and Nattie Coombes, aged 13 and 12. That morning they had got themselves up and prepared their own breakfast. Their mother was in the house, but she wasn’t able to see to her boys, because during the night Robert had killed her. He had stabbed her with a knife bought expressly for this purpose and then, just to be sure she’d perished, put a pillow over her

Philip Hensher

The spaces in between

The unfinished is, of course, something which tells us about the history of a work of art’s creation. A work of art may have been interrupted by the artist’s death, as with the paintings that Klimt left behind in his studio. Or it may simply have been abandoned when a patron failed to fulfil his obligations, or the painter had grown bored with the subject and moved on to something else. These spaces and gaps give us a glimpse of an artist at work and invite us to speculate about what Mondrian, for instance, was doing abandoning the 1934 ‘Composition with Double Lines’ or Cézanne the 1898 ‘Bouquet of Peonies’.

Thursday

Tiffany Jenkins

Symbols of eternity

On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards the sky. Carved from a single slab of red granite, it is 69 feet tall, weighs a substantial 224 tonnes, is decorated with hieroglyphs, and was made for the Pharaoh Thotmes III in 1460 BC. In 1877, six sailors lost their lives transporting the obelisk from Alexandria. Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, gave it to the Prince Regent in thanks for the British victories over the French at the Battle of the Nile and Battle of Alexandria. The Cleopatra, a specially designed iron cylinder container, was used to carry it,

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Thetans under threat

At last! It has taken over two years, but a British publisher has summoned up the nerve to bring out Going Clear, an astonishing exposé of the Church of Scientology by Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker. Wright — who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower, his investigation of 9/11 — is the journalistic equivalent of a virtuoso musician: he can race us through the most complicated narrative because he has done unimaginable amounts of homework. Wright conducted hundreds of interviews for Going Clear, then had a team of fact-checkers crawl over the text. Even so, none of our big publishing houses would touch it. This UK edition

Anthony Cummins

More blood and tears

Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel Train-spotting flicked a hearty V-sign in the face of alarm-clock Britain. ‘Ah choose no tae choose life,’ crows its giro-cheating antihero Mark Renton, proudly enslaved to heroin instead of mortgage repayments. But when Welsh revisited his native Leith for a 2012 prequel, Skagboys, he threw over this bourgeois-taunting amorality for blunter politics: Renton, it transpired, first turned to heroin for pain relief after police beat him up on a picket line during the 1984 miners’ strike. In Welsh’s latest novel, it’s the turn of Renton’s psychopathically violent frenemy, Francis Begbie, to get an origin story involving the abuse of state power. As a boy (we

Horatio Clare

Not so bird-brained after all

What is it about birds? They are the wild creatures we see most often, their doings and calls a daily reassurance that humans are not isolated in our sentience. They descend from the first reptiles, while we come from the first mammals. Across a gulf of evolution we contemplate a parallel life which has evolved exhilaratingly different answers to the same questions that existence asks of us. Cross-referencing allows us to address the fundamentals. Darwin and his finches revealed how we came to be. What else might birds teach us? Addressing questions because we can conceive them is the spirit of The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s

Jeff Noon

Two gone girls

The plot of Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four begins in 1989, with the murder of Shoko, a seven-year-old girl. Fourteen years later the perpetrator has yet to be apprehended, and the case is viewed as Tokyo’s police force’s most damning failure. The commissioner of police plans to visit the home of Shoko’s father to pay his condolences, and to insist that the murderer will be brought to justice. It’s an empty promise. The job of persuading the still grief-stricken father to allow the commissioner into his home lands on the desk of Yoshinobu Mikami, the force’s head of media relations. During this task Mikami comes across an anomaly in the old

Louis Amis

When in Rome…

‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins this really very short book (assisted here, in its lumpen-ness, by the ingenious placement of two or three blank pages in between each of its 16 very short chapters). But it is not something scratched together posthumously from Roberto Bolaño’s papers, or resurrected out of early-career obscurity (as valuable as those kinds of books, appearing in English in recent years, have also been). Written near the end of his life, this was the last of his books that Bolaño saw into print — it bears, in this free-standing form, however

Stuart Kelly

Get thee to a notary

Given this year’s 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, there was always going to be a slew of new publications; few, I suspect, will have as long-lasting an effect as John Kerrigan’s. His field of inquiry is both straightforward and complicated. It is almost retrospectively obvious that Shakespeare’s plays contain a great amount of vows, oaths, swearing both covenantual and vulgar, pledges, promises and imprecations. The same might be said for a great many playwrights’ works; but the depth of subtlety which Kerrigan finds in the handling of these specific rhetorical forms is compelling. It comprises broad historical context —this was an age in which oaths of allegiance were politically demanded

Daniel Swift

A mirror to the world

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Dr Daniel Swift discuss how Shakespeare died” startat=1008] Listen [/audioplayer]Who’s there? Shakespeare’s most famous play opens with this slightly hokey line, and the question remains for his countless audiences, biographers and scholars. Who was this man? What makes his works so apparently endless? Like the plays, his life is studded with riddles. Even the basic facts are slippery and over-determined. We do not, for example, know the date of Shakespeare’s birth. His baptism was recorded at Stratford on 26 April 1564, and since it was customary to baptise newborns quickly, it has been accepted that his birthday was 23 April. This is a nice coincidence:

Thursday

Justin Cartwright

The last word

Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India. Characteristically of Barker, the narrative of her latest book is interlaced with little jokes and haikus and sly references to contemporary language and manners. (There is even an excursion to the Camargue.) At first I found the whole enterprise repetitive and wilfully quixotic, but it is well worth persevering. Barker describes her book as ‘truly little more than the sum of its many parts’.

Steven Poole

Fast and furious | 14 April 2016

Modern life is too fast. Everyone is always in a hurry; people skim-read and don’t take the time to eat properly; the art of conversation is dying; technology places too much stress on the human brain. This litany of familiar complaints comes, of course, from the late 19th century, as collected by the American writer and XKCD comic artist Randall Monroe in his arch cartoon ‘The Pace of Modern Life’. And here we are in the 21st, in another culture that both worships and deplores its ostensibly unprecedented speed. Today we have hookup apps and high-frequency trading, and ‘tl;dr’ (too long, didn’t read) is the all-purpose internet comment; but on

Christopher Howse

To be a pilgrim

In his friendly and beguiling voice, Jean-Christophe Rufin explains (in a way that reminded me of the pre-journey relish of Camilo José Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria) that, before setting off on foot for Santiago de Compostela, he went to a little shop in Paris and joined the Association of Friends of St James. I have sometimes toyed with the idea of starting an Association of Enemies of St James. I suspect that in his worse, or better, moods Rufin might join. It’s not St James who’s the problem but his friends. Look at the evidence. Rufin walks to Santiago, but chooses the northern route from San Sebastian along the

Alastair Smart

Trivial pursuits

Well, he’s back. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d never been away. Fresh from delivering the Reith lectures, exhibitions nationwide, various television shows for Channel 4, countless broadsheet interviews, building his ‘dream house’ in Essex and much else besides, Grayson Perry is back. His latest offering is a book of sketches, selected from across his career. He began drawing as a boy in notebooks his grandmother gave him, filling them with images of racing cars and comic-book characters. It was at art school in Portsmouth in the early 1980s, however, that Perry began sketching in earnest, a practice he kept up when he subsequently moved to London, a lack

Anne Chisholm

Mouldering hats and wedding veils

In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her grandparents were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and her father was Nigel Nicolson, that they all wrote copiously about themselves, that Knole and Sissinghurst are stuffed with family records, and that she is herself a publisher turned writer, it proved impossible to resist adding her voice to the already substantial record of her family’s powerful social and literary connections. For a long time she was impressed by something her grandmother’s lover, Virginia Woolf, once said to her father: ‘Nothing has really happened until it is written down.’ She rejects this