Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Tom Williams

Wordsworth may have been partially eclipsed by his fellow Romantics, but his life was far from dull

Between 1798 and 1807 William Wordsworth revolutionised English poetry, giving voice to the marginalised in poems such as ‘The Idiot Boy’ and anticipating modern psychology in his exploration of childhood. Today, his ability to articulate the connection between man and nature can still bring us up short, as in these lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’: … And I have felt,A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man… After 1807 Wordsworth experienced what Jonathan Bate, in one of

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

There’s nothing romantic about Cornish fishermen, whatever tales they may spin

Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of the Newlyn School on the quayside. Today, journalists are found at the Star Inn, which featured in Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, buying pints for Ben Gunn, a ‘celebrity’ fisherman, for a tale. Ash is a woman who can lose herself ‘along the simplest of paths’. She immerses herself in the real Newlyn,

Graham Robb

Has Notre-Dame ever been a symbol of unity for the French?

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’. Live-streaming of that apocalyptic conflagration

Keith Miller

At last, a novel about the art world that rings true: Annalena Mcfee’s Nightshade reviewed

On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from the stuccoed comforts of what was until recently home towards a studio in the East End, where a much younger lover lies waiting. Observations, generally of a caustic nature, about the comédie humaine encountered along the way and the state of the wider world jostle in the artist’s febrile mind with an apologia for the previous nine months’ events. The artist is a woman, Eve Laing, but the tropes past which Nightshade flits like an Underground train are strikingly, almost mundanely, male — the ageing, status-anxious creative, the mid-life crisis,

Sarah Ditum

Annie Ernaux looks back at her teenage self – and sees a stranger

How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this dress worn at that party, the taste of that alcohol on this boy’s mouth — but restore the world in which these things took place, and the self who acted and was acted upon. Is it possible to be your own Orpheus and yank the Eurydice of your former self from the underworld of forgetting? This is the problem that Annie Ernaux sets herself in this slim, transfixing memoir of young adulthood and first sexual experience. It’s 2014 and Ernaux is looking at a picture. The picture was taken in

Matthew Adams

His son’s death may have inspired some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but he never recovered from the loss

Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality. Her latest novel returns to this pre-occupation with the undiscovered country. In it she sets out to tell the imagined story of the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who perished at the age of 11, four years before his father wrote the play that would share his dead son’s name — in Elizabethan

Allan Mallinson

The Far East Campaign of 1941-5 is the new focus of Daniel Todman’s comprehensive history

To begin not at the beginning but at the end of the beginning. Or rather, to begin at another beginning, where Daniel Todman’s book ends. In January 1948, Clement Attlee’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, told the Commons that ‘the free nations of western Europe must now draw more closely together’, for western Europe was not just a geographic entity but a global presence: If we are to preserve peace and our own safety at the same time we can only do so by the mobilisation of such moral and material force as will create confidence and energy in the West and inspire respect elsewhere, and this means that Britain cannot

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Violence and infidelity on sun-drenched Hydra: A Theatre for Dreamers, by Polly Samson, reviewed

The beautiful Greek island of Hydra became home to a bohemian community of expats in the 1960s, including the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian lover and muse Marianne Ihlen. The legacy of their relationship is the songs ‘So Long Marianne’, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ and ‘Bird on the Wire’. Their story is so intoxicating that it seems surprising it has not featured in a novel before, but perhaps others have been discouraged by the prospect of portraying someone as dauntingly well known as Cohen. Polly Samson rises beautifully to the challenge in her supremely accomplished A Theatre for Dreamers. She wisely does not introduce Cohen

Claire Kohda

The devastating effects of bigamy: Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

Conservative estimates place the number of those in America with more than one spouse as up to 100,000, but the figure is much higher. Bigamy, which is outlawed in 50 states, takes place in secret, with only a handful of people knowing about it. ‘It’s a shame that there isn’t a true name for a woman like my mother Gwendolyn,’ says Dana Lynn Yarboro, the ‘other’ daughter of her father’s ‘other’ wife, in Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow, a novel that examines the multitudinous effects of bigamy — how it can extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives. ‘There are other terms I know,’ Dana continues.‘When she is tipsy,

Andrew Scull

When six of her 12 children went mad, Mimi Galvin did her best to make to light of it

Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts. Just before Don was about to be shipped out to join the fighting in the South Pacific, Mimi called from New York to say she was pregnant. A rushed wedding across the Mexican border in Tijuana followed: a not uncommon wartime story. But Mimi’s pregnancy turned out to be the first of a dozen, each accompanied by severe morning sickness. Between 1945 and 1965, a procession of children arrived, ten boys and then, at last, even after Mimi’s gynaecologist had warned that further pregnancies might prove life-threatening, came two girls.

Alex Clark

Even Anne Tyler can’t make a solitary Baltimore janitor sound interesting

Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his rare moments of whimsy — slipping into a foreign accent on Mondays when the week turns to floor-cleaning and ‘zee dreaded moppink’ — come to seem like unfathomable caprice. Indulging a sudden hankering for a takeaway barbecue is as wild to him as one of Hunter S. Thompson’s most lurid binges. The reasons for his cautious mundanity are unclear: he emerged from a chaotic family, but so did his convivial, cheerful sisters; he’s no stranger to romantic disappointment, but then who is? Now in his forties and scraping a living

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A history of poetry with Professor John Carey

35 min listen

This week’s Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey – emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses. (He’s also lead book reviewer for a publication we shall call only the S****y T***s, but we pass over that.) In his new book, A Little History of Poetry, he sweeps us with his usual elan from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the backyard of Les Murray. I asked him (among other things) what constitutes poetry, why ‘Goosey Goosey Gander’ has it all,

Saturday

Alan Johnson

From Liverpool’s Cavern to the world stage: how the Beatles became a global phenomenon

When the Beatles’ first authorised biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be … part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’ But here in the recently released statistics for the Top Ten global recording artists of 2019, among the Taylor Swifts and the Ed Sheerans, 50 years after they broke up — let me introduce you to the band you’ve known for all these

Lara Feigel

Where would any writer be without a room of their own?

If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana, that there’s a pen on the desk, mid-novel, and it feels as though he’s about to return from a day’s fishing. You might encounter, as Hermione Lee did visiting the novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s beloved ancestral home in Ireland, only a pile of grass and stones, because the building has been razed to the ground. Or you might discover, as Kate Kennedy did seeking out the Gloucester mental asylum where the poet and composer Ivor Gurney was incarcerated, that it has been turned to a new use. The chapel of Barnwood

Robert Skidelsky

What makes Thomas Piketty so sure he can save the world?

The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a ‘fundamental force of divergence’ in the capitalist system, which he represented by the equation r>g — the tendency for returns to capital to grow faster than national income, and therefore for wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. This tendency was reversed between 1914 and 1980 by the impact of two world wars, the Great Depression, social democracy and the trade unions, but it has since reasserted itself, restoring levels of inequality last seen 100 years ago. In his new blockbuster,

Hermione Eyre

Greg Jenner’s survey of celebrities through the ages has a distinctly Horrible Histories feel

Good writing about celebrity is scant. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate Roland Barthes, Peter Conrad, Kenneth Tynan, Clive James, Marina Hyde, Lynn Barber and the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins). It all runs the risk of becoming instantly dated. As a magazine interviewer myself, I’ve learnt to expect anyone blabbing about their marital bliss and vegan awakening to be divorced and setting up a burger chain by the time the piece comes out. After celebrities die they are stratified; the very good or very bad get biographers. But the mere celebs get Greg Jenner. Despite his previous achievements in making history palatable

Peter Stanford

To hell with hell: Bart Ehrman debunks the Christian belief in perpetual torment

Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend money are doomed to spend eternity in a pit with filth up to their knees. This is not the verdict of some radical, online, anti-capitalist echo chamber but of the second-century Apocalypse of Saint Peter, an early Christian text in the form of a graphic tour of heaven and hell, ascribed to the leader of Jesus’s apostles, though not actually written by him. It offers scant comfort too for those who have sex before marriage: their bodies will be torn to shreds in the afterlife. And for women who have

Joanna Pocock

A love letter to San Francisco’s mean streets

Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after the American writer, and on the same continent, and much of what she describes in Recollections feels very familiar: the flamboyant gay scene of the 1980s, swiftly followed by the devastation of the Aids epidemic, the navigation through second-wave feminism, the men who constantly told us ‘what to do and be’ while they scrutinised our bodies. When Solnit was young, ‘nearly everyone who held power and made news was male’. I was fist-pumping by the time I got to: ‘We were trained to please men, and that made it hard

Caspar Henderson

Nature fights back with tooth and claw as we persist in destroying it

Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite the ravages inflicted on it by humans, continues to offer solace and hope to many. Such, at least, is a possibility linking these fine but quite different books. Lucy Jones’s starting point in Losing Eden is her own struggle with depression and addiction a few years back. She writes that three of the things that helped her recover — psychiatry, psychotherapy and the support of others — were straight-forward, but the fourth was more mysterious: a greater connection with the natural world. Surprised and interested, she embarked on investigating the

Andy Miller

Even in the Swinging Sixties, Ray Davies was feeling nostalgic

At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop song; after all, this is the topic which inspired, at least in part, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, two of the greatest and longest novels of the 20th century. What can one say in three minutes that hasn’t already been said in six volumes? On the one hand, we have such warnings from history as ‘Those Were the Days’ by Mary Hopkin or Terry Jacks’s implacably awful ‘Seasons in the Sun’, a rendition of Jacques Brel’s ‘Le Moribond’ which loses not just something but everything in translation.