Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Juliet Nicolson

Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945. The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and Averell Harriman who accompanied their world-leading fathers to the freezing bleakness of the Crimea to thrash out terms for ending the second world war all played their crucial role. As Churchill and his second daughter Sarah crossed the Crimean steppe to the sulphurous muddy peninsula in the Black Sea they drove through countryside where ‘nearly

Andrew Taylor

Older and grumpier: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin, reviewed

By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the many pleasures of the series is that Rebus ages in real time. COPD now makes climbing stairs an increasing problem, so he and his dog Brillo are in the throes of moving to a downstairs flat. DCI Siobhan Clarke, his former colleague, has turned up to lend a hand. She’s distracted by the murder of a wealthy Saudi student, who soon turns out not to be wealthy at all. Nevertheless, he had recently promised to invest £10 million in a real-estate development 250 miles from Edinburgh near the north coast

John Maier

A passion for pastiche: China’s Potemkin villages

Closely inspect No. 23 Leinster Terrace, Bayswater and you might notice the house has no letter box. Push at the door and you might find it stuck; force your way in and you might find you plummet 40 feet through open space down an obsolete ventilation shaft on to the tracks of the District Line. The house is a fake; a five-storey façade; an architectural trompe l’oeil disguising a disused steam outlet on the London Underground. (Or, as the estate agent might yell down to you, the property combines an airy open-plan design with excellent transport links right on the doorstep.) Flaws notwithstanding, the white stucco frontage — owned and

Lee Langley

Lacrimae rerum: That Old Country Music, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners, and three captivating novels. First, the baroque mayhem of City of Bohane, characters exploding on the page flashing knives and fancy footwear, its vernacular veering from Clockwork Orange argot to Joycean dazzle. A world away from the beguiling charm of Beatlebone, which imagined a stressed-out John Lennon driving across Ireland to check out the uninhabited island he’d bought years earlier as a future bolthole. Barry’s triumphant third novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long-listed for the Booker, opened with two old crims waiting at the ferry terminal of a Spanish port

Emma Beddington

Victoria Wood: stiletto in an oven glove

Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it for a high-fibre biscuit), it was impossible not to feel Victoria Wood got you, somehow. Her death in 2016 triggered an outpouring of grief commensurate to her talent, but it also revealed how intimately, how individually, she was loved. Lazily viewed as the cosiest of national treasures, Wood was finer and fiercer than that: she distilled something essential about British character (national, regional, sexual), and her forensic skewering of middle-class aspiration, high and low culture and any and every class of stupidity managed to remain warm: a spectacular balancing act.

Frances Wilson

Euthanasia sitcom: What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read in five hours flat and will leave you staring into endless night. ‘Make the audience suffer as much as possible,’ advised Alfred Hitchcock, and Sigrid Nunez, whose subject is emotional extremity, follows suit. The suffering begins at the start when the narrator, a woman of a certain age whose name we never learn, goes to a talk by a writer, whose name we also never learn. His lecture, given in a polished, emotionless voice, is about the death of the planet: It was over, he said. It was too late,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rowland White and Tim Gedge: Harrier 809

49 min listen

In this week’s edition of the Book Club podcast I’m joined by two guests. One is Rowland White, whose new book, Harrier 809: Britain’s Legendary Jump Jet and the Untold Story of the Falklands War, tells the story of the air war in the Falklands from the frantic logistical scrambling when ‘the balloon went up’, via spy shenanigans in South America, to the decisive action in theatre. The other is Tim Gedge, the commanding officer of 809 Squadron who flew in that war.

Thursday

Tom Lathan

Helen Macdonald could charm the birds out of the trees

When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes, she would imagine and count through the layers of the earth that lay beneath her, and then the layers of atmosphere above her. ‘It had something of the power of incantation,’ she writes in Vesper Flights, an essay originally published in the New York Times Magazine and now the title piece in this new collection of essays. Much like her previous book H Is for Hawk, this volume sees Macdonald weave together personal reflections, natural and human histories and fragments of autobiography to create nature writing that is at once

Patrick Skene-Catling

Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed

After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly and persuasively briefed him on the latest secret weapon, a powerful ballistic missile, with a film to demonstrate its capabilities. Hitler was enchanted. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I thank you. If we had had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. No one would have dared oppose us.’ Hitler made the aristocratic von Braun an honorary professor — and ordered the manufacture of 10,000 of the new rockets. The V2 was inaudible and invisible before its cataclysmic explosion, and after blast-off there was no defence Germany had

James Miller

Breakdown in Berlin: Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed

‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from New York of modest reputation who secures a three-month residency at the prestigious Deuter Centre in Berlin. While there, he hopes to write something about ‘the construction of the self in lyric poetry’ and escape the pressures of fatherhood. However, he soon finds the ethos of the centre — on transparency, surveillance and measurable outputs — counterproductive to his notions of artistic creation. Instead, Kunzru’s protagonist is pulled away by new distractions. He discovers that the romantic writer Henrich von Kleist killed himself and a young woman in a suicide

Jay Elwes

Shock and awe — what should we make of our Viking ancestors?

In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The attack that followed was shockingly brutal. The English cleric Alcuin wrote: ‘Never before has such terror appeared in Britain… Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments.’ It was the first recorded Viking raid on Britain. Many others were to follow, and the image of the axe-wielding raiding party remains the stereotypical view of the Viking horde. The question that this dark, brilliantly written and absorbing book asks is: who were these people and where did all that

Allan Mallinson

Break-out and betrayal in Occupied Europe

Für dich, Tommy, ist der Krieg vorbei. However, many British servicemen, officers especially, didn’t want their war to be over. Or, at least, didn’t want to spend it in a PoW camp. One of the enduring myths of the second world war is that officers had a statutory obligation to escape, but nothing in King’s Regulations required it. Most just saw it as their duty to rejoin their units. The German military courts that tried escaping officers generally viewed it that way too. Besides escapers, there were those evading capture, particularly downed airmen. In December 1939 a special meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee discussed how to help them. Present

Brian Martin

Appearances are deceptive: Trio, by William Boyd, reviewed

Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives are the issue. Wing’s long-suffering agent tells her if you want to know what’s going on in people’s heads, ‘behind those masks we all wear — then read a novel’. The main setting of Trio is Brighton in revolutionary 1968. The actress says: ‘I’m meant to be a famous film star who’s making a film in Brighton.’ That’s the core of the novel. William Boyd is one of our best contemporary storytellers; remember An Ice-cream War and Restless. He tells this morality tale with sustained humour; remember the Nat Tate

Philip Hensher

De Profundis: the agony of filming Oscar Wilde’s last years

Somewhere or other Martin Amis remarks that the reason we have very little idea of what it feels like to go into space is that no astronaut so far can write. If we know very well what it felt like to go through a tropical typhoon, that’s because there was a Joseph Conrad able to tell us about it. Something similar might be said about the experience of real stardom. Although many great actors have published autobiographies, with or without the help of ghost writers, there are vanishingly few that combine honesty with an ability to write. Since David Niven’s unreliable but brilliantly authentic autobiographies, such as The Moon’s a

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Hugh Aldersey-Williams: The Making of Science in Europe

34 min listen

If you know the name of Christiaan Huygens at all, it’ll probably be as the man who gave his name to a space probe. But Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of Dutch Light: Christaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe, joins this week’s Book Club podcast to argues that this half-forgotten figure was the most important scientist between Galileo and Newton. He tells a remarkable story of advances in optics, geometry, probability, mathematics, astronomy – as well as the invention of the pendulum clock and the discovery of the rings of Saturn – against the backdrop of a turbulent post-Reformation Europe and the beginnings of an international scientific community. Plus,

Thursday

Philip Marsden

Surrounded by sea and sky: the irresistible draw of islands

Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the earth’s topographic features, islands are the most elastic, the most adept at accommodating the wilder projections of our imagination. Why it should be so is a question that has exercised writers from D.H. Lawrence to Oscar Wilde, Annie Dillard to Adam Nicolson. The cultural geographer John Gillis identifies it as a curiously western trait, an extension of the metaphysical thirst for definition, the need to cut everything up into discrete entities in order to understand it. Island Dreams is Gavin Francis’s own contribution to the debate, based on his decades-long

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history

Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando, The Cat That Walked By Himself, Gobbolino or Behemoth in The Master and Margarita, he really existed. Protagonist of the most anthologised section of the mad poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the eccentrically spelled ginger tom now takes a fresh lease of fictionalised life in this jeu d’esprit. Oliver Soden’s ‘biography’ of Jeoffry takes its most obvious bearings from another novelised animal biography, Virginia Woolf’s life of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush. It is, if you’ll forgive me, a pretty feline performance. It’s at once a sly introduction to Christopher

Susan Hill Susan Hill

We all love a poltergeist story

There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists seem to have gone quiet, or at least unreported; but before then they were everywhere. In 1938, poltergeists kicked off in Thornton Heath, Surrey, and a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and psychic investigator, Nandor Fodor, was alerted to strange happenings in the home of a 34-year-old housewife there. The list of happenings is familiar in all poltergeist stories. Furniture moves, light fittings shatter, crockery, money, knick knacks, even small pictures are thrown through the air, sometimes seemingly aimed directly at individuals. Alma Fielding and her husband Les were ill at the time

Bart van Es

The ‘unremarkable’ life of SS officer Robert Griesinger

In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It concerned an armchair that her mother had recently taken for re-upholstering. The chair was something of a family treasure. As a child growing up in Amsterdam, the woman herself had always sat on it as she did her homework and it featured in countless family photographs. When her mother returned to pick up the chair, however, the upholsterer had addressed her in outrage. He did not work for Nazis, he said. The loved chair, it turned out, contained a hidden cache of SS documents, all stamped with swastikas. The woman

Rabeea Saleem

A melting pot of mercenaries: Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map.’ That part of the world is East Africa, particularly what is now Tanzania, whose early-20th-century history is the backdrop to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives. The novel spans the years preceding and during the first world war, when East Africa was colonised by the Germans and British. The turbulent history of the region is relayed through the unanchored lives of three adolescents — Hamza, Ilyas and his sister Afiya. For various reasons, they find themselves uprooted and isolated from their families. Their life paths cross via Khalifa, a