Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Alone in the world

Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. They are obviously useful to storytellers, and particularly to the writers of children’s books, who naturally want their heroes to undertake adventures without the controlling eye of ordinarily caring parents. The parents of Roald Dahl’s James have to be killed by a rhinoceros for his satisfyingly swashbuckling adventure in a flying giant peach to take place. L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, living with an aunt and uncle, is, we know, an orphan, but no trouble at all is taken over her loss — we just like to know that there’s no one

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

War and monsters: my new favourite author

If you’re looking for a good beach read this summer, look no further. A few weeks ago I was reading the blog of an American anthropologist called Gregory Cochran when I came across a reference to an author I’d never heard of: Taylor Anderson. According to Cochran, he’d written science-fiction books about an American destroyer that heads into a storm to escape a Japanese battleship during the second world war and ends up in an alternative universe. It looks a lot like our world, except there was no massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago, which means no mass extinction event. As a result, dinosaurs still roam the Earth and

Stephanie Merritt

Too close to the sun

If you go to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February every year, you’ll find yourself surrounded by an eclectic crowd of atheists, free-thinkers, Catholic reformers, anarchists, mystics, students, scientists and poets all jostling to lay tributes before the statue of the hooded Dominican friar whose shadowed face stares inscrutably towards the Vatican. His name is Giordano Bruno and his statue, erected by public subscription in the 19th century, commemorates the site where he was burned for heresy in 1600 at the hands of the Roman Inquisition. In the four centuries since, the idea of martyrdom has attached to Bruno’s death, with various causes (including, recently, a member

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Jesse Norman and how to properly appreciate Adam Smith

Adam Smith is the most quoted and misquoted economist of all time. But was he the prophet of devil-take-the-hindmost neoliberalism, or the heroic enemy of cartels, monopolies and stitch-ups? To try to get him in the round, I’m talking in this week’s podcast to Jesse Norman, author of the new Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters (reviewed in last week’s Spectator by Simon Heffer). Norman argues that we can only understand Smith in the round by reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as the Wealth of Nations; and by putting him in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the thinkers such as Hume who

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Why have we forgotten the greatest of all crusaders?

For your perfect summer read I’d recommend Zoé Oldenbourg’s 1949 classic medieval adventure The World Is Not Enough. It’ll comfortably occupy you for a good fortnight and while it’s thrilling, romantic and heartbreaking enough to keep you turning the pages, it’s also so beautifully written and historically illuminating that you won’t feel the emptiness and self-disgust you do when you’ve finally got to the end of a bog-standard airport thriller. It begins in 12th-century France but then moves to the wonderfully exotic-sounding Outremer, the contemporary name for the crusader states on the far side of the Med, such as the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom

Mika Ross-Southall

Consumed by guilt

At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned yellowy-white, ‘like the mane of an old wooden rocking-horse’, not out of shock, she reassures us, but because ‘one couldn’t get one’s hair dyed’. She thinks she deserved to be there: ‘What I did was terrible. Terrible. The shame of it will never leave me until my dying day.’ For a long time in Cressida Connolly’s chilling new novel, though, it’s not clear what she has done. The year is 1979, and middle-class Phyllis, who is bitter and alone (her family don’t talk to her any more), recounts her story

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