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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Sofka Zinovieff

From teenage passion…

The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary Merton Grange and, having flunked his exams, Charlie Lewis attends the leaving disco — all dry ice, vomit and snogging, laced with Cointreau and disinfectant. An infinity looms of bloated summer days, with only a part-time, underpaid garage job as distraction. Home is a small southern English Everytown, neither city, suburb nor rural village, with Dog Shit Park and Murder Wood ‘where porn yellowed beneath the brambles’. Worse, Charlie’s parents have separated, and he is stranded with his depressed, boozy, bankrupt father, eating cold curry from takeaway foil containers. An

Chris Mullin

The great ministerial merry-go-round

‘Annual reshuffles are crazy,’ remarked one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers in July 1999 as I hovered outside the cabinet room, waiting to be anointed as the lowest form of ministerial life in John Prescott’s vast department — environment, transport and the regions. He went on: There is massive in-built insecurity. Ministers, who may not be there in a year, are on top of a civil service which is permanent and who have nothing more to worry about than who gets what gong. The chances of moving anything more than 0.1 per cent are slim. Crazy as reshuffles may be, most prime ministers are addicted to them. On

Caroline Moorehead

The ‘rumours’ we chose to ignore

On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to decide whether or not to go public with what they then knew about Auschwitz and the Nazis’ extermination plans. When they emerged two hours later they had voted, almost unanimously, to remain silent. As did the US state department, the British government and the Vatican — all in possession of the same evidence of mass murder across German-occupied Europe. The reasons given ranged from the danger of reprisals against Allied PoWs to the need to focus on military targets, and thus shorten the war. And, most importantly, because of a

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: Caroline Crampton’s forgotten histories of the Thames

My guest on this week’s podcast is Caroline Crampton — whose fine and lyrical new book The Way To The Sea twines travelogue and memoir to pay tribute to the neglected mystery and beauty of the downriver portions of the Thames. Evoking Joseph Conrad and Dickens, ranging from prehistory to the sunken wrecks (and still live explosives!) of wartime ships that foundered on its shoals, from the 18th-century maritime madness to the modern day rejuvenation or social cleansing of the London docklands, Caroline tells a remarkable and fascinating story.

Thursday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Staring into the abyss

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has achieved that rare feat, in her second novel Starling Days, of writing a convincing novel about depression which manages, miraculously, not to be in itself depressing. Her success is partly due to the fact that her protagonist, Mina, is not flattened by her despair and remains alive enough to become fascinated by another woman, Phoebe, her husband’s best friend’s sister. When Phoebe asks her to say something about herself, Mina considers what she might voice: I want to run my tongue along the dent in your collarbone that your top has made visible. Nope. Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a

André Van Loon

Love at first sight | 4 July 2019

France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home. So thinks an English boy, Cromwell, as he lies on a beach at Biarritz, contrasting the green fields of Scotland and Eton with the state he is now in, perpetually waiting and haunted by the ‘constant premonition of love’. Looking out over the rose-tinged waves of the rushing ocean, he thinks of Tristan and Isolde, and then sees the piercingly beautiful Isolde herself walking towards him. The fact that she’s a teenage Russian girl, Liza, staying with her mother and brother Nikolai near by, doesn’t bother Cromwell a bit. He is immediately

Sam Mills

Women on the edge

In Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her female protagonists grapple with abusive relationships, degree courses, difficult bosses, unemployment programmes and a lascivious professor. The stories are tragicomic and deliciously odd. The author writes sentences that make you laugh, and then immediately want to reread to savour a striking image: a woman’s boss ‘had a way of looking me up and down like I was a CV full of errors and misspellings’. They somersault from the everyday to the absurd, in a way that reflects the disorientation of the characters, leaving one feeling both sympathetic and alienated. Flattery captures the pressures on women to be ingratiating, and

Margie Orford

King of a wild frontier

Red Dog is an ambitious hybrid of a book. It was published in South Africa to wide acclaim in 2014 and has been expertly translated by Michiel Heyns, who has retained the cadence and some of the vocabulary of the original Afrikaans — the mongrel tongue that evolved in the Dutch East India Company’s Cape colony. Willem Anker brings South Africa’s bloody birth to life through the story of Coenraad de Buys. The priapic founding father of a nation of bastards, he is a pillager and survivor, a rapist and husband, a colonist and outlaw, a rebel and hero. With his numerous wives and children, he is the gargantuan progenitor

Sarah Churchwell

Murder at the funeral

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most beloved American novels of all time. Famously, Lee never completed another book, once declaring she’d ‘said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again’. But a journalist who went to Lee’s home in Monroeville, Alabama in 2015 learned of another book that Lee had worked on, perhaps for decades — again the story of an Alabama courtroom trial with a black defendant and white lawyer, but this one was true. Lee does not appear to have finished that book, but the journalist who discovered the story, Casey Cep, has: the result is Furious Hours: Murder,

Katrina Gulliver

Harlequin ladybird, fly away home

I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They first arrived in the 1820s, in barrels of water from a visiting ship. Of course, the climate was perfect for them, and they settled in very happily. But we could have had tropical islands free of them  — and the risk of diseases they can carry. The story of invasive species is often one of accidental introduction. Or of misguided humans who think they are somehow setting a creature ‘free’ — like the group of Buddhists who released hundreds of foreign lobsters from

Steven Poole

Distress signals

It’s an increasingly common lament that computers have ruined everything, and a longing for the days before Google and Twitter, when everything was somehow more organic and authentic, is on the rise. As someone who can remember writing early reviews on an electric typewriter and then going to the library to fax them to a literary journal, I’m partial to this kind of unplugged nostalgia myself. But it can get out of hand. So it does in this book — ambitiously titled to evoke John Berger’s classic of art criticism, Ways of Seeing — which explains that computers have wrecked music along with everything else. Early on, Damon Krukowski rails against

Peter Parker

Feasts and flowers

Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises, he has always been highly regarded in horticultural circles, his reputation as a painter has been subject to regular fluctuations. Last year, two excellent and complementary London exhibitions — Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden  Wall at Philip Mould & Company — did a great deal to revive interest in his paintings; and so a joint biography of Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines is welcome. They met in 1918 at an Armistice party hosted by Lett (as he was always known)

Jude Cook

A sea of troubles | 4 July 2019

Andrew Ridker’s The Altruists (Viking, £20) is a Jewish family saga of academic parents and grown-up offspring. From this rather careworn material he manages to wring a spry comedy of parental failure and romantic misadventure. Arthur Alter is a terrible father, an ‘emotional cheapskate’ who attempts to bring his estranged children Ethan and Maggie together for a weekend in St Louis, with the ulterior motive of getting his hands on their inheritance. Unsurprisingly, he was excluded from his wife’s will, as he was sleeping with a much younger German medievalist throughout her final illness. The novel takes us on grimly entertaining excursions into the parents’ back-stories; but the main focus

David Crane

King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s ‘King of the World’, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top. Louis XIV came to the throne in 1638 at the age of four with the monarchy ‘on a knife edge’ and

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Binding love

In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced to cancel a string of gigs. Keith Richards, the ne plus ultra of rock’s wild men, had damaged a rib in a tumble from a ladder while trying to retrieve a book from one of the higher shelves in his Connecticut library. Hide that smirk: it could just be true. Keef, it turns out, has not one but two extensive libraries — on either side of the Atlantic — and even went as far as applying the Dewey Decimal System to bring his sprawling collections into some kind of order.

Anthony Horowitz

Writer’s Notebook | 27 June 2019

Someone should write a guide to the best literary festivals. Sydney and Auckland would certainly be there, along with Sri Lanka, Jaipur and Dubai. Later this year I’m off to Mumbai and I’ve been invited to Mandalay. I swear there are writers who never actually have time to write any more, they spend so much of the year shuffling around all these exotic places. I’ve just come back from the festival of writing at Borris, which I loved. It’s a beautiful house in County Carlow, two hours from Dublin, and the whole weekend was one long party in the company of Michael Morpurgo, Simon Schama, Carl Bernstein and others. Writing

Philip Marsden

Ideas are history

Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool

Anne Chisholm

Born to be wild

It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception, they have been seen in glimpses, playing marginal parts on the Bloomsbury stage after about 1910. The exception was the youngest, Noel, who all her life and since has been stuck with her invidious role as the girl who turned down a national hero, Rupert Brooke. Even Sarah Watling cannot help beginning and ending her solid, thoughtful book with that piece of the jigsaw. But admirably, if a trifle laboriously, she goes on to consider each of them as an individual, and succeeds in placing them firmly in the vanguard

Patrick Skene-Catling

Mastering rocket science

Now that we are stupidly rendering Earth almost entirely uninhabitable by many species including our own (through overcrowding, failing political systems, chemical pollution and climate disorder), a few humans of means are looking forward to migrating soon to other planets, even though, as yet, there are no good hotels and restaurants there. Scientists, stimulated by international rivalry and their own ambitions during the past century, have put together the machines and propellants for interplanetary travel. Here are two excellent, microscopically detailed books about the most important individuals and organisations that achieved personkind’s first progress into space. In Escape from Earth, Fraser MacDonald, who teaches historical geography at Edinburgh University, has

Peter Parker

On a wing and a prayer | 27 June 2019

In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue became extinct. There is widespread concern about the more recent decline in butterfly populations, but the American ecologist Nick Haddad writes that the collective weight of the known populations of the five rarest butterflies he discusses in his sobering book is just ‘three pounds five ounces — as much as one panda’s paw’. The special importance of butterflies, he argues, is that they provide lessons about the decline and management of other threatened species. The fate of the British Large Blue shows how difficult it can be to conserve a