Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Stephen Robinson

Writing behind bars

So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela that it is useful, finally, to be able to read about him and the privations of his prison years in his own contemporaneous, understated prose. At more than 600 pages including annotations, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela might be regarded as a volume strictly for the liberation struggle obsessive. But this collection tells us more about the man — in his fearlessness, grace and occasional pomposity — than almost all of the good and bad books that have been written about him. The key point about Mandela, often overlooked,

Peter Hoskin

Leaping dragon

Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the film which Lee made just before his death in 1973 at the age of 32, and that would in turn seal his worldwide stardom. There, on one side, stands Lee himself. There, on the other, is the villainous Han, who has a set of metal talons where one of his hands ought to be. The two men leap across each other, leaving Lee with an unpleasant gash on his shirtless torso. He pauses, dabs a finger in the blood, raises it to his mouth — and licks. It is weird,

Alex Clark

Dreams of oblivion

The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts, after all, to spin a yarn out of a rich Upper East Side orphan who decides to put herself to sleep for a year in an attempt at rebirth. Beyond the evident — the death of her parents, an obnoxious man in her life — precisely why our narrator wishes to shed her skin remains

Steven Poole

Every man in his humour

Since the 17th century, a ‘humourist’ has been a witty person, and especially someone skilled in literary comedy. In 1871, the Athenaeum said that Swift had been ‘an inimitable humourist’. But in modern usage the term seems to describe a specifically American job title: someone who specialises in writing short prose pieces whose only purpose is to be funny. The current king of humourists is David Sedaris, and his books are essentially scripts for his sell-out reading tours. But is he funny? On a line-by-line basis, he sure can be. He helps push someone’s broken-down car, ‘and remembered after the first few yards what a complete pain in the ass

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

No country for old women

Lissa Evans has had a good idea for her new novel. It’s ‘suffragettes: the sequel’. She sets her story not in 1918 but in 1928. Two washed-up spinster suffragettes in their sixties, Florrie (known as ‘the Flea’) and Mattie, live together platonically in a house in Hampstead known as the Mousehole, because it used to be a convalescent home for hunger-striking suffragettes during the Cat and Mouse Act. It’s freezing, and they cut up old Christmas cards for splints, conversing like two dotty old dons. ‘What utter spinach!’ ‘Small sherry? Or a toddy? Buck you up a bit.’ Their WSPU glory days are behind them. Florrie is now a sanitary

Ian Sansom

Get lost

When Boris Johnson resigned recently he automatically gave up his right to use Chevening House in Kent, bequeathed by the Earl Stanhope for the use of a person nominated by the prime minister, traditionally the foreign secretary. I think I’m right in saying that when she first came to office, Theresa May attempted to get Boris to share the place with David Davis and Liam Fox, but to no avail, which was surely a sign of things to come. Among its many attractions and allurements — 115 rooms, a boating lake, all the other usual country-house trimmings — Chevening has a magnificent maze, planted by the 4th Earl Stanhope, to

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rewriting Kipling for the modern age

It is often said that we should worry about the world we are leaving to the younger generation. I am a bit more worried about the poor world, given the state of the younger generation who will soon have custody of it. Last week, for example, the students of Manchester University have decided that Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” is not suitable for their college because he was raaaaacisst. Of course. They have replaced his poem with some vapid drivel from the serially overrated Maya Angelou. It might have been better if they’d simply rewritten Kipling’s verse, adapted it for modern times. I tried to help out in the Sunday Times

Thursday

Christopher Harding

In search of Japan

‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour. But Alex Kerr is not your typical tour guide, briskly selling a place to a time-pressed group via a few must-snap essentials — the glint of the sun off Kyoto’s Golden Temple and its still waters; the demure shuffle of geisha; winter rays radiating through a bamboo grove. Kerr is more the lone local you’re not entirely sure you should trust, sidling up and engaging you in conversation. Why do temples have gates without doors? Are they entrances — or exits? Ever thought about that? No? Come on, I’ll show

Hugh Thomson

Travel literature

Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the genre still viewed the world from under the tilt of a Panama hat. (‘I looked at the tops of the columns. Were they Doric or Ionic?’) It was considered as ill-bred for a writer to reveal anything about themselves as to have illustrations — ‘the best travel books never do’. Raban tore a lot of this up, and with glee. He had worked closely with confessional poets from America like Robert Lowell and John Berryman, producing what is still one of the best essays on Lowell’s late poems about his

Philip Womack

Stories we tell ourselves

Sofka Zinovieff’s new novel, Putney, is an involving, beautifully written, and subtle account of an affair in the 1970s between Ralph, a composer in his thirties, and Daphne, a young girl, who is nine when she is first encountered: ‘Flitting, animal movements; narrowed, knowing eyes; dark, tangled hair; dirty bare feet.’ Enchanted by this creature, whom he idealises as a kind of embodiment of the free spirit of the age, he convinces himself, though he has never felt love for a child before, that this is a new, powerful and pure thing — ‘the beginnings of love’ — and grooms her, kissing her under a tree when she reaches the

Jamie Bartlett

Turn off and tune out

All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have an additional challenge, however, of combining all this with boring technical detail. How to explain the mechanical stuff without being either too dry or too simple? What’s the reader’s likely level of knowledge? These questions can eat an author up. I imagine science writers have the same difficulty, but this problem weighs especially on tech writers, because the composition of a piece of software, an encryption standard, or a machine-learning algorithm has a direct bearing on how it works and therefore how it affects the world. You can’t really understand

Nicholas Lezard

Master of letters

It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence of James Joyce, struggling to have their first novels published in the late 1930s. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man in the grip of profound indolence, was published in 1938; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man etc., in 1939. Murphy is great fun, but its author went on to purify and yet somehow at the same time enrich his prose style, and would win the Nobel; At Swim-Two-Birds (and its successor, The Third Policeman, written immediately afterwards,

Charlotte Hobson

‘T’ is for Trotskyite

Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as though the world is being viewed through a high-resolution lens. His subject matter, as well as his complete lack of sentimentality, means that much of what is brought into focus is horrifying or pitiful. Yet his capacity to capture and distil the experience, moment by moment, has an exhilarating effect, like that of the frozen bilberries he picked in the depths of the Siberian winter: ‘bright blue, wrinkled like empty leather purses, containing a dark, bluish-black juice… I ate the berries myself, my tongue carefully and eagerly pressing each one

Ruth Scurr

Character actors

Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown boys. After a troubled childhood in Lark City, Pennsylvania, she married at 21, stopped studying after her first pregnancy and was widowed with teenage children when her first husband was killed in a road-rage incident of his own making. Willa walked away from the crash physically unscathed: ‘She seemed to be in a kind of bubble, sealed away on her own.’ Late in life she suddenly decides the time has come to stop drifting, or going ‘at things so slantwise’. To her new husband’s bafflement, she responds to a random

Simon Heffer

The pursuit of money

Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member, conducts its business and that of the country. Those who control the destinies of that government would do well to read his book on Adam Smith, and indeed Adam Smith himself. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — which Norman correctly esteems as a fine work of philosophy with a great bearing on how we should

Thursday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

First Novels

Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99) is the haunting story of a concert pianist whose wrist is fractured in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house that he has only seen in pictures. If that sounds dull, this might be because it is hard to convey the shocking accuracy of Kilalea’s prose, which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is. This would be nothing, of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Margo Jefferson on Michael Jackson

In this week’s Books podcast, we’re moonwalking back to the glory days of Michael Jackson with the brilliant Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson and the memoir Negroland. What was it that made Jackson so captivating? Can his artistic legacy ever be disentangled from the gruesome murk of the last years? And does it really matter if you’re black or white? We consider all these questions and more.

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

The Stuart supremacy

Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III, George W. Bush, Ed Miliband: monsters all three. Sophia, Electress of Hanover — bright, lively and self-indulgent — left a no less divisive legacy. The 12th child of an exiled Mittel Europa princeling, Sophia had scarce prospects when she was born in The Hague in 1630. Yet through her mother Elizabeth, daughter of James I, Sophia was able to pass the newly unified British crown to her son George I. (She missed out on the throne herself when she predeceased her cousin Queen Anne by less than two months.) To

Sarah Ditum

Read Rhys

The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that writers do not necessarily live very interesting lives. Wrangling with editors, hatereading your rivals, making coffee and (occasionally) typing are all consuming occupations, but not the stuff of prepossessing narrative. That, at least, wasn’t an issue for Jean Rhys, whose colonial childhood and dissolute adulthood gave her ample material for fiction. But reprocessed by Caryl Phillips as the subject of this new novel, Rhys (or rather Gwendoline, since she has yet to take her pen name in the period Phillips covers) is somehow rendered boring. A fractured relationship with her

Tom Hodgkinson

Nothing doing

There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao Tzu argued that the wise man should refrain from action, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount also told us not to bother ourselves overmuch: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not.’ For Christ, idling was a spiritual and political position: he taught us to live in the moment and reject riches and status as a source of enlightenment or happiness. Now the self-help industry has taken idling and converted it into, paradoxically, a tool for productivity, i.e. getting ahead and making money, which is not what Christ had