Book Reviews

This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp in 2007, when the critic James Wood had declared in favour of realism, and Steven Hall published his debut, The Raw Shark Texts. It was a British metafictional novel that created a big splash. Noted for its innovative design, it transformed into a flick book in which a text-block shark menaced the reader. In the years since its publication, mainstream experimentalism has paled into the cosy, metafiction-lite of Matt Haig, though there’s quality stuff on the fringes — Rob Doyle’s Threshold, for example. Hall has been undeterred by shifting fashions,

In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in bad shape, he drank inordinately, his lover had recently thrown him out of a first-floor window in the course of a drunken row, he was taking too many amphetamines and his heart was ‘in tatters’, ‘not a ventricle working’. His doctor had warned if he took one more drink, he informed them over dinner at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho, he might drop dead on the spot. Then, in ‘an ebullient mood’, the artist ordered champagne. Of course, Bacon (1909-92) didn’t expire on the spot. Instead, he lived, painted, drank and

Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from a family of cannibals. Specifically, Cannibal-Americans. The Can-Ams are the most marginalised of America’s minorities, largely because of their funerary rites: when one of them dies, the relatives drain the corpse of blood and then eat it. How much of the corpse is eaten becomes a very moot point towards the end of the novel. Seventh is so called because he’s the seventh of 13 children begotten by his mother, known to them all as Mudd.A monstrous figure, 6ft 2in tall and grotesquely obese, she has been fattening herself up

In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what he called a ‘hindered’ narrator: that is, a protagonist (often a child) whose partial understanding of their world forces us to read between the lines. Unreliable narrators set out to deceive. By contrast, hindered narrators — such as the trapped five-year-old in Emma Donoghue’s Room — genuinely believe what they tell you: it’s all they know. As in Room, a hindered narrator can supply drama and pathos, but it’s handy for farce, too, as Christopher Wilson knows well. He likes to write about science biting off more than it can

‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s a shadowy figure who hangs above her who you likely don’t know: her father, media tycoon Robert Maxwell.’ Blimey. I know that 30 years have passed since his soggy demise, and time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away, but it still comes as a shock to realise that such a preposterously outsize figure can be forgotten. His tumble down the memory hole may explain why this is a book of two halves. When John Preston contacted me in 2018 with a Maxwellian query, he said: ‘I’m not

Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim, as usual, was lying. Westminster and Cambridge, the Foreign Office and SIS: for all his attempts to pose as an outsider, Philby was a thorough-paced member of the British Establishment. George Blake — who is quoted using exactly the same phrase about himself in Simon Kuper’s wise, engaging biography The Happy Traitor — was telling the truth. Blake never belonged to a country, and communism was probably the closest thing he ever found to a spiritual home — even if he was deeply disillusioned by the reality of the workers’