Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rest in peace, Judith Kerr

I am so, so sad to hear about the death of Judith Kerr. I last saw her only a month or two ago, at an Oldie Literary Lunch, where she was in fine form and did not stint herself on a glass or two of wine. She seems to have been constitutionally a merry person, and a modest one. Among the greatest privileges of doing our books podcast was meeting Judith at her house in Barnes, where we recorded our interview with her and her son Matthew Kneale. What made it really special was that – thanks to one of my routine childcare emergencies – I had my then four-year-old

Emily Rhodes

Brutish Brits

Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This story began with a picture of a boy in a newspaper. That boy was Raymond Buys and he’d been killed in a camp not unlike New Dawn. He was just 15. This book is dedicated to him. So the novel opens with a prologue in which a boy, Willem, is left at the New Dawn camp, south of Johannesburg, in 2010. Then Part One takes us back to 1901, to the diary entries of Mrs Sarah van der Watt, about to be taken from her farm — which she watches

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 23 May 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON   ‘Small Latin and less Greek’ was Ben Jonson’s verdict on Shakespeare the linguist. But as Henry V (the latest play in the Globe’s Merian-sponsored summer season) shows, he knew a bit of French, too. As well as all that blood-and-thunder stuff on the battlefield, the play contains — in Act Three, Scene Four — the only scene wholly in French anywhere in the plays; as well as his dirtiest joke. Princess Katharine, offered in marriage to King Harry to appease him after the Dauphin’s consignment of tennis balls failed to amuse, is learning English with her lady’s

Nick Lezard

Grave meditations

In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition. Between 2012 and his death, aged 84, in 2016, Hill wrote another 271 poems, and here they are — although, given his productivity since the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty more. But the poems in The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin look as though they are part of a deliberate and ordered sequence, all of them using the same form, of irregular lines, occasional internal rhymes and Hill’s characteristic style, hopping over centuries with semi-cryptic allusions, barks of rage and mordant humour. I say

Claire Kohda

Time takes its toll

In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after the animals of the Chinese zodiac; the cow had its own hour, as did the mouse, the chicken, the horse, etc. In winter, daytime hours were shorter than in summer, and night hours were long. The bells told people when to rise, eat and sleep. In 1872, however, Japan switched to Western time, the use of the bells was forbidden and ‘time was torn away from nature’. Anna Sherman looks for evidence of the time bells of Edo in modern Tokyo. She describes a map that shows the sound-ranges of

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Books Podcast: what makes Shakespeare special?

In this week’s books podcast my guest is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, who’s talking about her new book This Is Shakespeare. What is it that makes Shakespeare special — and is it defensible that, as even in university curricula, we talk about Shakespeare apart from and above the whole of the rest of literature? How did he think about genre? Why is Act Four always a bit boring? Is the Tempest an autumnal masterpiece or the thin work of a writer of dwindling powers? And how filthy is A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Thursday

Stephen Phillips

Writing that burns the eyes

Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s a reliable chance John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ will figure among them, and not just because it will have been assigned at an impressionable age in school. For the first time in its history, the New Yorker cleared an entire issue in August 1946 to run the 30,000-word piece in full. In Mr Straight Arrow, his chronicle of Hersey’s career, the former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown relates an account of its reception among the international press corps in Rome — every one rapt, occupying their own cone

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

Sport and mind games

Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books, he argued, are written with honest effort. Writers often devote years of their lives, whereas reviewers put in hours. Even a mediocre book that hardly anyone will ever read generally contains something worth passing on in a review. Savage reviews are usually just attempts to show off. Ed Hawkins, a respected investigative sports journalist, worked hard on The Men on Magic Carpets. But I struggle to find anything good to say about it. He starts from an interesting premise: during the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United

Jeff Noon

Mad, bad and dangerous

Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with his grown-up son, Adrian. He believes Adrian is dangerous, a threat to other people. But the real evil might be living inside Mr Todd’s head. This is the squalid battleground set out by Iain Maitland in Mr Todd’s Reckoning (Contraband, £8.99). Skirmishes take place in a rundown bungalow, giving father and son few places to hide. There is no relief from intimate noises and petty arguments. When Adrian brings home a girlfriend and her young child, Mr Todd’s world crumbles at the seams. The consequences are horrible. Maitland conjures madness

Stephen Bayley

The slasher with the knife

A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable traffic was on a mainline between Paris and New York, with modest sidings in London, Barcelona and Zurich? Was the adventure of modern art an exclusively masculine journey across the North Atlantic? Suddenly, it has been discovered that there were modernists at work in Latin America and Africa too. An exhibition of Carmen Herrera, a Cuban abstractionist, in New York’s Whitney Museum two years ago was a sensation. The more so, of course, because Herrera (now 103) is a woman. The Tate has recently shown that Dorothea Tanning was at

Alan Judd

Disputes over Putin

These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti focuses on Vladimir Putin himself, his background, aims, tactics and strategy (if any).  Andrew Monaghan takes a wider approach, analysing Russia’s strengths and weaknesses, its self-image, its perceptions and misperceptions of us, ditto ours of it. Both argue that relations between Russia and the West suffer because we are sometimes prisoners of our own preconceptions. Monaghan describes what he calls the two-part security dilemma, a problem firstly of interpretation and secondly of response.  The interpretive problem is partly the automatic assumption that Russia is an expansionist threat, as evidenced by

Honor Clerk

Seas of ink-and-wash

Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla on her return to Britain after D-Day. There was something very moving in seeing the bare navigational details noted in my uncle’s familiar hand. But then can anything be so immediate a point of contact with the past as a ship’s log as, watch by watch, the location, the wind and the weather are recorded with relentless discipline? Is there a more eloquent message than the odd water stain during a ‘fresh gale’? And if this is telling, what of the journals and diaries, sketchbooks and maps that give a

Lee Langley

Fire and fury

Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and misogyny, examining what the author calls ‘the violence in the male gaze’. Its blithe disregard for social norms and finer feelings is exhilarating; it’s pitiless and scathingly funny. The women invariably make wincingly bad decisions. Feminism for the Fleabag generation? Nothing is simple here, in a world as disorientating as a hall of mirrors. The novel has three parts, each with a narrator and the story is told backwards as it teasingly reveals its leading character — not a person, but a manuscript that will change all three narrators’ lives.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Pass the sick bag | 16 May 2019

It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for readers of Cari Mora is that Hannibal is here in spirit if not in person. This is a very peculiar book, lavishly ridiculous in almost every respect and fully committed to the gothic extremes of human cruelty: just camp enough to skirt charges of outright porno-sadism. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it is. But, as I say, it’s also mad as a badger. The way I found myself describing it to a friend is

Sarah Perry

Worlds within worlds

The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia; a memoir; a handbook on how not to write a novel; and two irreverently erudite guides to the canon. The variety of these accomplishments indicates Newman’s roving and playful intelligence, together with a kind of wilful unpredictability and a deep engagement with literary forms and traditions. These qualities have attained a sublime height in The Heavens, a work of remarkable skill and invention, linguistic brio and righteous political intent, and one which gleefully defies categorisation. ‘Ben met Kate at a rich girl’s party,’ the novel begins. New York: August, the

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

From fame to shame

Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a kind of embalming fluid, it has long been suspected that they enjoy wielding their pens more like a cosh or a scalpel. Victorian writers were especially nervous about the prospect of a biographer prodding and slashing away at their reputations. Tennyson worried that he would be ‘ripped up like a pig’ after his death, and many of his contemporaries did all they could to present their best face to posterity: hand-picking an authorised biographer; making a bonfire out of any embarrassing letters; discreetly muzzling friends who might be tempted into

Thursday

Jonathan Powell

The agony of the ‘almost man’

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the uncensored memories of his wives and mistresses, as well as

Philip Womack

Daughters of Troy

In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a few: Barry Unsworth’s elegant The Songs of the Kings enhanced the narrative with psychological flair; Alice Oswald’s beautifully distilled Memorial brought a disquieting focus on to the deaths of lesser heroes, as well as the electric beauty of the Homeric similes drawn from the natural world; and last year’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which successfully imagined the Iliad with Agamemnon’s slave-girl as the narrator. Natalie Haynes, with A Thousand Ships, a retelling of the war and the stories around it, has entered a crowded field. Haynes’s

Brian Martin

Cat and the King

The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless and refugee camps established on the outskirts. Andrew Taylor introduces his readers to life as it survived there and involves them in the politics of Charles II’s court. Cobblestones are ‘slick with rain’, rushlights smell vile because of the rancid fats they were dipped in; in Covent Garden, thieves, peddlers and beggars ply their trades ‘like lice in a head of hair’  — and if you want to travel on a Sunday you must acquire a magistrate’s warrant. The King’s Evil is the third in Taylor’s trilogy about the Great

Andrew Lycett

Amusing Queen Victoria

The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and then as an example of an attraction at the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1864. But he is the star of John Woolf’s breezy personality-driven history of the ‘freak’ show, an intriguing sub-set of that wider field of leisure activity. Tom is first introduced there 20 years earlier when, aged six and standing just 25 inches tall in red velvet coat and breeches, he performs before an enchanted young Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace, together with his manager, P.T. Barnum. Born Charles Stratton in Connecticut, Tom was snapped up