Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Susie Mesure

The roots of conflict: The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, reviewed

The Island of Missing Trees feels like a strange title until you realise how hard Elif Shafak makes trees work in her latest novel, an epic tale about love, grief and memory set in Cyprus and London between 1974 and the ‘late 2010s’. One tree, a fig or ficus carica, narrates half the story, tipping Shafak’s 12th novel into myth territory. The others — the missing trees — are stand-ins for those killed in the 1974 Cypriot civil war, metaphors labouring as hard as plants for the British-Turkish author who fled Turkey after being prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ in her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul. The action opens in

Andy Miller

David Keenan, literary disruptor in chief

Near to the heart of this wild and labyrinthine novel — on page 516 of 808 — a character in a letter addressed to his future self within the reminiscence of a disfigured and imprisoned second world war sailor who will subsequently be transformed via sorcery, surgery and sex into a medium and prophet, eventually finding his way to Scotland where he will marry his own wife again, though possibly not in that order, states the following: My studies in magic and experimental psychology and of course alchemy suggested that the goal of magical practice, which had become the goal of art practice, was a reuniting of fractured selves across

Stephen Bayley

How we did the locomotion: A Brief History of Motion, by Tom Standage, reviewed

Audi will make no more fuel engines after 2035. So that’s the end of the Age of Combustion, signalled by a puff of immaculately catalysed smoke from polished chrome exhausts designed by fanatics in Ingolstadt. But some say the age of motion itself will have shuddered to a halt before then. A trope of the New Yorker is a cartoon showing cavemen inventing the wheel, a companion to the other trope of desert island castaways. The adventure promised by the wheel and the limitations of boring stationary solitude are ineffably linked. Since Homo erectus left Africa 1.75 million years ago, without wheels, moving our bodies through space has been a

Roger Lewis

Keeping yourself angry, the Hare way: We Travelled, by David Hare, reviewed

A character in David Hare’s Skylight claims she has at last found contentment by no longer opening newspapers or watching television. ‘Well,’ says her astounded interlocutor, ‘you’re missing what’s happening. You’re missing reality.’ Hare himself can never be accused of missing (or missing out on) the reality of what is happening. He has already even mounted his response to ‘what it was like to experience Covid-19’ in Beat the Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes. His instinct has always been to tackle current affairs, sometimes with surreal consequences. When I saw Pravda, which was about Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, the stalls were filled with Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen — art

Marcus Nevitt

Oliver Cromwell: ruthless in battle – but nice to his men

One of the first retrospective accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s early career, Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650), maintained that its subject was difficult to capture. Perhaps the finest political poem in the English language, it was written shortly after Cromwell’s return from a brutally successful military campaign overseas, which witnessed infamous atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford. It celebrates Cromwell as a victorious military commander, a supernatural epic hero who burns through the air, destroying all who block his path to establishing England as the greatest nation on Earth. But for all its praise and hyperbole, the abiding impression of the poem is that there is

Stuart Kelly

The poet with many lives

This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the wonderful and lamented Penguin International Poets series, and what intrigued me was that he was more than one person. There was his poetry, but also sections attributed to his heteronyms, or imaginary alter egos. Stylistically they were very different. There was the rustic naïf, Caeiro; the neo-classicist, Reis (later to be a subject for one of Portugal’s other major literary figures, José Saramago); and the loud-mouthed modernist, Alvaro de Campos, a naval engineer who apparently studied in Glasgow. Later, I bought a copy of The Book of Disquiet, a posthumous

Andrew Roberts

Churchill as villain – but is this a character assassination too far?

The veteran journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft claims in his prologue to Churchill’s Shadow that: ‘This is not a hostile account, or not by intention, nor consciously “revisionist”, or contrarian,’ before launching into a long book that is virtually uninterrupted in its hostility to Winston Churchill, his memory and especially anyone who has had the temerity to admire Churchill or learn lessons from his life and career. Churchill revisionism is hardly new. The very first book I reviewed was Clive Ponting’s revisionist biography of 1994, since when there have been scholarly books by John Charmley, a predictably vicious one by David Irving (whose hero’s career was somewhat curtailed by Churchill) and a

Henry Jeffreys

More than one bad apple: the sorry demise of English cider

Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely from grapes to something that was essentially grape-flavoured alcoholic sugar water? It’s inconceivable. In fact, they did just the opposite. To stamp out the growth of ersatz wines, the appellation contrôlée system was created, which, for all its faults, provides a guarantee that a particular wine will be made from grapes from a certain area. But there was no such regulation in England. After the second world war, large-scale cider-makers in the West Country began lowering the amount of fruit in their products, specifically characterful bittersweet cider apples, and making

Tessa Dunlop

It all started with Dracula

The title of the journalist Paul Kenyon’s second book on crazy leadership, Children of the Night, leaves the reader in no doubt of its approach. This is a narrative that feeds off the macabre legacy of Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, the country’s most infamous anti-hero, while examining Romania’s recent collection of demented dictators and cult heroes. Imagine the history of Britain cast exclusively through the flamboyant prism of Henry VIII, Princess Diana, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and you’re nearly there, only in the case of 20th-century Romania the pickings are far richer. The story opens with Vlad, and his dramatic appearance as a medieval Wallachian prince (Romania didn’t exist

Anna Aslanyan

Borges: the man and the brand

‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and it should be understood as fiction.’ The author, Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and literary executor, has also told the press that she ‘will have to act in some way or other’ should the book come out in Argentina. Borges memoirs have long exceeded the master’s oeuvre by what must amount to the library of Babel in volume. The author of one classic of the genre, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Borges’s translator and collaborator, told me a decade ago: ‘I’m not going to lie to you now and say, you know,

Andrew Rosenheim

Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were almost exclusively interested in Nazis and Nordics. Certainly there seems no diminution in these twin tastes. Widowland (Quercus, £14.99) by C.J. Carey (a pseudonym for the writer Jane Thynne) is the latest Nazi-related novel in a crowded field, and its author wisely opts for a different, if not altogether original, conceit. An alternate Britain which lost the war has featured in fiction before — notably in Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Len Deighton’s SS-GB — but even with such celebrated predecessors, Carey more than holds her own. The world of her

Wednesday

Max Décharné

The musical gravy train: Leaving The Building, by Eamonn Forde, reviewed

Musicians cast a long cultural shadow. Politicians may wield considerable power in their time, but although today’s young people are still generally aware of John Lennon, they are less likely to have heard of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, despite the fact that he was running the country during the year the Beatles first came to international prominence. This is not the place to discuss the relative merits of writing ‘I Am the Walrus’ as against introducing the Resale Prices Bill (1964), but try offering T-shirts of both gentlemen on eBay today, and see which one sells. While the recordings, compositions, the images and even the signatures of certain deceased popular musicians

Thursday

Steven Poole

The AI future looks positively rosy

In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes. Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire. Today’s tech-bro coders might be surprised

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Funeral gatecrasher: The Black Dress, by Deborah Moggach, reviewed

Here is a rare dud from the usually reliable Deborah Moggach. Her protagonist, Pru, finds herself alone at 69 after Greg, her husband of decades, leaves her out of the blue. There is a further loss to come for Pru, and Moggach is good on her ‘howling loneliness’; but what she decides to do about it doesn’t quite ring true. Urged on by her sexy, bolshy friend Azra (who was Linda from Sunderland before a sudden reinvention) to meet someone new, Pru begins searching out the funeral notices of strangers, so that she can gatecrash the ceremonies and hit on the widowed husbands. Azra has told her that widowers are

Jay Elwes

Startlingly sadistic: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, reviewed

There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well he can certainly tell a good story. What we have here is Tarantino’s ninth feature film, a 1960s Hollywood yarn about a fictional actor and his stunt double, but rendered in book form. Rick Dalton is the TV and B-movie actor, while his stuntman, Cliff Booth, ruined his own career by beating up Bruce Lee during a shoot. He’s now reduced to being Rick’s driver and drinking buddy. The two of them are on the slide, but things start to look up when Rick lands a role in a new

Greg Garrett

The complex character of Tricky Dick

In this Age of Trump, as we cast about for some moment in American history that might help us make sense of the present, the name Richard M. Nixon keeps resurfacing. Nixon, who resigned the presidency in 1974 after being swept up in investigations into the crimes and cover-ups known collectively as Watergate, offers easy comparisons with Donald J. Trump: two corrupt American presidents who left office in disgrace; who considered the press their enemy; who accused the previous administration of surveilling them; who weaponised racism as a way to win elections; who employed the politics of division as a way of keeping power; who possessed and indulged an outsized

Peter Jones

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an eye-opener for classical scholars

The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and ordered to reveal what he actually did. ‘I just look things up all day,’ came the tetchy reply. That will ring a loud bell with those who learned ancient Greek or Latin at school, especially when it came to looking up the meaning of a word in LSJ, Oxford’s big Greek-English dictionary, or rather lexicon (Greek lexikos, ‘of or for words’). It was named after the initials of its two original editors (Henry) Liddell and (Robert) Scott, and a later revising editor (Henry Stuart) Jones, and was so full of

Sarah Ditum

Lucy Ellmann is angry about everything, especially men

Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which relayed the internal life of an Ohioan mother of four via a single sentence across 1,000 pages. Her publisher tells me that between the proof and final publication of Things Are Against Us, Ellman made 1,700 changes. She is, in short, an undoubted paragon of highbrow meticulousness. Then again and on the other hand, no, Ellmann is not being serious at all here. Things consists mostly of pieces written before the pandemic but is nonetheless influenced by the plague world into which it emerges, reacting

Philip Hensher

An interest in the bizarre helps keep melancholy at bay

If you crush the right testicle of a wolf and administer it in oil or rose water it will induce a loathing for sex. The Turks have a drink called coffee (for they use no wine). The Chinese have no nobility, or only those philosophers and doctors who have raised themselves by their worth. If you allowed a human being 25 square feet each, the Earth could bear 148,456,800,000,000 people. The Persian kings trained sparrows to hunt butterflies, inspired by hunting with hawks. Speaking of sparrows, the reason they are so short-lived is because of their salacity, which is very frequent. Once a nun ate a lettuce without saying grace

Rachel Redford

To appreciate Finnegans Wake you must hear its sounds and rhythms

‘How good you are in explosition!’ The first ever unabridged recording of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a monumental achievement by Naxos AudioBooks. Before its publication in 1939, Joyce had spent 17 years on this notoriously impenetrable work. Since then it has sparked dedicated study — and derision. Many serious readers have abandoned attempts to understand it — referred to within the Wake itself as a worthless ‘pinch of scribble’. But here, Barry McGovern, an experienced performer of Joyce, and Marcella Riordan (Molly Bloom in the Naxos recording of Ulysses) are so spectacularly brilliant with the sounds and rhythms of the language that words seemingly incomprehensible on the page magically