Fiction

Double trouble: August Blue, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

The narrator-protagonist of Deborah Levy’s August Blue, an elite-level concert pianist called Elsa, is going through a difficult time. She recently walked off stage after messing up a Rachmaninoff recital in Vienna. More worryingly, she has just dyed her hair blue. At a market stall in Athens, she becomes entranced by a pair of novelty mechanical horses, but they’re snapped up by another customer with whom she becomes fixated. Elsa keeps noticing ‘the horse woman’ out and about, and starts to think of her as ‘a sort of psychic double’. She is deeply impressed when she sees her smoking a large cigar: ‘It was a poke at life. A provocation.

Unholy row: The Choice, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti’s 13th novel The Choice is full of tough moral conundrums. The central dilemma facing Clarissa Phipps, the rector of St Peter’s Church in Tapley, Cheshire, is particularly knotty. Should she remove the church’s panels depicting a troublingly sensuous Eden, painted by the degenerate artist Seward Wemlock in the 1980s, or leave them to stand? Can, in short, an artist’s life ever be disassociated from their work? This is a hot potato, one with which Arditti grapples using endless reserves of theological nuance. By juxtaposing Clarissa’s choice with others she has to make in her life (and the original choices made by Adam and Eve in eating the forbidden

What the Royal Society of Chemistry gets wrong about free speech

Why has the Royal Society of Chemistry published a 37 page opinion piece entitled ‘Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?’ in their new journal Digital Discovery? Digital Discovery publishes ‘theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, materials science and biotechnology’ focusing on ‘the development and application of machine learning’. So it is a little surprising for them to publish a piece that ‘argues that those who wish to have an honest debate about the limits around freedom of speech need to engage that conversation in a manner that avoids resonance with the language of White (heterosexual, cisgender male) supremacy, lest their arguments provide intellectual cover to those who

Literary charades: The Writing School, by Miranda France, reviewed

A recent YouGov survey found that 60 per cent of Britons dream of being writers, compared with 31 per cent who dream of being film stars. Although the chances of success, or even subsistence, are equally remote in both professions, aspirant authors flock to the country’s ever-proliferating creative writing courses. Miranda France’s splendid third book, blending fact and fiction, is set on one such course: a week-long residency in a rural retreat house, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Arvon Foundation at which France has taught. The unnamed narrator, a Spanish translator and travel writer with two novels to her name, leads an eclectic group of 12

Was this footballer killed for scoring against the Nazis?

Vienna, April 1938. To mark the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich, the German football team plays a match against the Austrian team, which will cease to exist when the match is over. The Austrians are much better, but can’t seem to score – aha, the match has been fixed by the Nazis. And then, in the 70th minute, Austria’s best player, Matthias Sindelar, can’t take the pretence any more and puts the ball in the German net. At the end of the match, to underline his feelings, he performs a victory dance in front of the Nazi dignitaries. This might sound like fiction but it really

Life’s survivors: The Angel of Rome and Other Stories, by Jess Walter, reviewed

Anyone who has read Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins will want to turn straight to ‘The Angel of Rome’, the title story in this second collection by the versatile American author. Like the novel that elevated Walter from an underrated writer of police procedurals and thrillers to one capable of bestsellers, ‘The Angel of Rome’ is set in Italy and features a filmset and glamorous actors. Both are also partly based on real life. In Beautiful Ruins, Walter plays with what happened during the filming of the 1963 epic Cleopatra. Here he bases the story on an episode in the life of Edoardo Ballerini, an actor who read Beautiful Ruins. Walter,

The view from on high: The Sleep Watcher, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, reviewed

The Sleep Watcher, the third thoughtful novel by the gifted Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, features a narrator who floats free from her body at night and circles around invisibly, observing her family and friends. This departure into the supernatural from the author’s previous work does not leaven the sadness of her writing, and the book is even more melancholic than her Starling Days (2019), which opened with the protagonist contemplating suicide.   Sixteen-year-old Katherine, or Kit as she is known, does not always like what she sees as she wanders about unobserved – though it does allow for some moments of comedy. She lives with her parents, F and M, and

Caught in a web of lies: The Guest, by Emma Cline, reviewed

This deeply unpleasant novel kept me reading all night. Alex, 22, preys on rich men as an upmarket prostitute, formerly in New York and now in resorts such as the Hamptons. She is a thief and addict, sneaking her boyfriend’s sleeping pills, his valuable watch, a former room-mate’s medication, random jewellery and any available alcohol, while lying to herself and others. Moving among the rich, she pretends to be one of them. Writing about them in their holiday homes, Emma Cline is skilful and observant: The women had a funny, girlish air: their tiny steps, their uncertain smiles, satin bows in their ponytails, though most of them were probably over

The horrors of lynching: The Trees, by Percival Everett, reviewed

Percival Everett’s 22nd novel The Trees was that rare thing on this year’s Booker shortlist: a genre novel. Only which genre? Crime is its first claimant – the bickering Bryants of Money, Mississippi having stumbled straight off an Elmore Leonard page. Then it’s horror – the obscenity of the first Bryant death rivalling the grisliest of Stephen King. Then, with the flummoxing custody-elusion of the black suspect, it’s a locked room mystery. Then, with the arrival of two wisecracking black cops from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Blaxploitation takes over. But the book is more than just an exercise in genre-hopping. Money, Mississippi was where 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

These letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby cover 15 years of a remarkable friendship that began at Somerville College, Oxford in 1919 and ended only with Holtby’s premature death from kidney failure in 1935. Brittain went up to Oxford in 1914, but left to serve as a nurse in the first world war. She returned freighted with tragic experience, having lost both her lover and her brother and tended the wounds of horribly injured soldiers close to the front. She disconcerted younger undergraduates with her fiercely competitive and forthright views combined with fragile looks and a general air of suppressed trauma. Holtby, five years her junior, had also interrupted

Horribly described sex: The Last Chairlift, by John Irving, reviewed

Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in the town hall with local dignitaries. I was asked if I liked asparagus. I do, I said, thinking of delicious green spears. Good, said the woman in charge, as it was the asparagus season. I was then presented with an enormous plate of leek-sized white asparagus with a tiny dab of hollandaise on the side, and then expected to eat my way through essentially a fibrous albino python as the dignitaries looked on expectantly. It was a long evening. I mention this because that’s basically what the experience of reading

Mitfordian mischief: Darling, by India Knight, reviewed

It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Purists greeted last year’s television adaptation much as cat-owners might welcome a partially eviscerated mouse. I avoided watching, because the Wes Andersonification of my greatest literary succour seemed likely to burst every vein in my eyeballs. Can India Knight pull it off? The bones remain intact. Beautiful, guileless aristocrat Linda Radlett falls disastrously in love with a rich banker and then a broke radical before finding happiness with an urbane Frenchman. But plot was never really the point. The delight is in the details. Knight’s are bang on, and there’s

Reworking Dickens: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed

Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably leads the way, with Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey, Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma, Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility, and no fewer than four recent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. Dickens, too, has been updated, with Michael Rosen’s Bah Humbug and Lorie Langdon’s Olivia Twist. Now Barbara Kingsolver pitches in with a contemporary version of David Copperfield. Her Demon Copperhead is a russet-haired, mixed-race boy from the backwoods of South Virginia. His father died before he was born and his mother, like many of the novel’s characters, is addicted to opioids, leaving

An avian allegory: Dinosaurs, by Lydia Millet, reviewed

Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim, quietly powerful 12th novel, but the threat of extinction, implicit in the title, hovers in the air. Bird-obsessed – our feathered friends are ‘the last of the dinosaurs’ – the novel tracks two years in the life of a ‘stricken’ character who feels ‘less than whole’. Gil was damaged in early childhood by the sudden death of both parents, and then by a second abandonment, by a long-term girlfriend who absconded, leaving a three-word note: ‘I met someone.’ Gil is rich, having inherited his grandfather’s fortune. He has few friends

The deathly malaise that’s crippling Russia

Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him to bring alive to us what it means to live in Putin’s Russia – how the system finds ways to crush all but a very few. Even more, we need him to remind us of the kaleidoscope of qualities that a country like Russia inevitably contains – the humanity and generosity as well as the stupidity and cruelty. An author of great subtlety, Osipov would no doubt wince at such grandiose claims for his writing. Yet when the world is deciding how to deal with the aftermath of Putin’s (eventual,

Isolating with the ex: Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed

Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. That book tracked Lucy’s growing friendship with her first husband, William, after the death of her second. In Lucy by the Sea, she accompanies William to Maine to ride out the pandemic. Closing the door of her New York apartment, she does not know that she will never see it again; that she will lose a friend and a family member to Covid; and that her relationship with William and her two grown daughters will change. Lucy is at sea at first: she hates the cold, the locals’ distrust of

Explorer, author, soldier, lover: The Romantic, by William Boyd, reviewed

William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the extent of providing the accustomed framing device: the chance discovery of a cache of papers and mementoes. The items listed by ‘WB’ in his ‘Author’s Note’ – a musket ball, a fragment of a Greek amphora, a crinkly lock of hair – all find their place in the tale of this 19th-century adventurer, lover, traveller and author. Cashel Greville Ross (his name turns out to be as mutable as his identity and nationality) is born in Ireland in irregular circumstances – so irregular that a swift flight to England as

The great deception: The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as ‘Call me Ishmael’. But there’s a reason for this. Agnès Moreau, the narrator of Yiyun Li’s disconcerting, mesmerising fifth novel The Book of Goose, only became a storyteller by accident. Writing from Pennsylvania, where the ‘French bride’ Agnès raises geese, she remembers post-war rural France and her childhood in Saint Rémy. She and her friend Fabienne, avoiding other girls their age, spent their days lying among gravestones and minding cows – until Fabienne decides that they should write a book together. Fabienne’s stories are dark – dead babies, dead children,

A complicated bond: The Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie, reviewed

When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising until it spills over the lip and onto the stove. In Best of Friends, the author’s seventh novel, the tension is still there, but the bubbles are contained. It’s more of a simmer, gentle but insistent – not unlike the ‘shared subtexts’ that pass between the protagonists. We first meet Maryam and Zahra as 14-year-olds. It’s the summer of 1988 in Karachi and the two girls are preoccupied with standard teenage stuff (budding bodies, boys) and the kind of concerns that sadly become standard when living under a ‘repellent dictator’

An empire crumbles: Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk, reviewed

Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this ‘calm and charming island’ south of Rhodes from a comfortable steamer after sailing from Smyrna, Piraeus or Alexandria. A crew of Greek or Muslim boatmen will row you to the picturesque harbour of Arkaz, flanked by the radiant White Mountain and the gloomy turrets of the medieval castle. The fragrances of honeysuckle, linden trees and the famous Mingherian roses waft over azure seas. Admire the ancient churches and newer mosques, the neo-classical State Hall, the grand buildings funded by the sultan’s government in faraway Istanbul. Savour figs, oil, nuts and