Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

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

Alan Rusbridger

Enjoy the ride

It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism, but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite a detective story — though there are, towards the end, elements of a hunter on the track of his prey. It is probably best to begin the book with no expectations of where it will lead. It starts in the Palma workshop of one Juan Bauza in the 1830s as he fashioned an upright piano

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Beautifully out of sync

‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist, his childhood nickname (after Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot) remains. It is the first sign that this is a novel about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings. Abandoned by his mother as a child, Myshkin has received a letter ‘pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has’. It involves his mother but he cannot bear to open it. Instead he narrates her life, and his own, one of tending trees with commendable diligence, and waiting for her return. As with Roy’s previous work,

Nicholas Shakespeare

Outward bound

Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half dozen, having also lived there, Lisbon ranks high. ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold,’ gasped Byron’s Childe Harold. Two centuries on, Portugal’s capital remains Queen of the Sea. Yet beyond a sombrely sentimental gift to entrance, the character of Lisbon is elusive. It outreached the grip even of its greatest modern muse, Fernando Pessoa, whose posthumous 100-page guidebook, Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See, finally published in 1992, included the helpful information that Lisbon ‘rises like a fair vision in a dream, clear-cut against a bright blue sky which the

Thursday

Michael Duggan

Coach, politician and agony aunt

When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it: heroic sporting underdogs, a new coach with nothing in common with his players, and the forging of an indestructible bond of comradeship, all topped off by success on the world stage. But I felt trepidation too. Books about sporting greatness often descend into a gruelling slog through humdrum match reportage, reheated banter and details of contract negotiations, game plans, diet plans and training. I needn’t have worried. In this account of three years in charge of the Fiji sevens rugby squad, Ben Ryan and his writing collaborator Tom Fordyce get

Jane Ridley

The British Dreyfus

One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat. Miss Gilchrist, who lived alone with her maid, was an obsessive collector and hoarder of jewels, which she hid among her clothes. There was no sign of a forced entry, but a valuable diamond brooch was missing. The month before the murder she had changed her will, cutting out her relatives, whom she hated, and leaving everything to her maid. The Glasgow police decided to arrest a foreigner named Oscar Slater. He happened to have pawned a brooch around the time of the murder. The brooch turned out to belong

Brian Martin

Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield

Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar with Australian vernacular to appreciate the first-person narration by the young protagonist who says he is 17 but is thought to be ‘more like 15’ by an old renegade Irish priest he meets in the wastelands of Western Australia. Jackson Clackton is on the run in the scrub and salt-lands away from the coast. His voice is full of Oz-isms — roo bars, johnnycakes, mulga and gimlets. Jaxie flees small-town Monkton. His mother is dead, and his father kills himself in an accident for which Jaxie thinks he will be

Helen R Brown

Telling tall tales

‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,’ says Glen David Gold. I emerged from his weighty memoir feeling more like I’d been through a marriage: sadder, wiser, still sifting the decades of detail for the moments when a little self-awareness could have spared hearts. My crush on Gold’s writing dates back to his sensational 2001 debut novel: Carter Beats the Devil. Set in the author’s native California in the 1920s, the tale of rival magicians combined seductively complex characters, wisecracking dialogue and vintage Americana in a plot as ingeniously designed and expertly sprung as an escapologist’s

Owen Matthews

The road to Ekaterinburg

The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar naivety was shown by his would-be rescuers. Helen Rappaport’s frank and brilliant study of the various efforts to save the Romanovs begins, intelligently, with the race to save them from themselves. Their downfall began in 1916 as the course of the first world war began to run against Russia. Nicholas reacted by attempting to take

Caroline Moore

Making the foreign familiar

Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign fiction prize, first won by Orhan Pamuk and his translator Victoria Holbrook. Translators are routinely undervalued. As with stage-lighting technicians, one is apt consciously to notice only glaring blunders; so it is good to know that the Independent’s prize is shared between author and translator. I nevertheless approached this book with some scepticism. I couldn’t quite see the point of it. If one has read a novel already, what would one gain from a three-page essay? If not, surely a discussion that describes the book and reveals the plot would

Minoo Dinshaw

New York times

Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War. This historically faithful and scrupulously detailed Napoleonic saga was thought in some quarters to have met its period’s gold standard: Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels. It also received the accolade, now obligatory for success in the genre, of being worthy of Hilary Mantel. For her second novel, Tillyard has adopted a fresher, braver setting — Cromwellian East Anglia, framed with 1660s New Amsterdam, the Dutch American capital about to succumb to the restored Charles II’s greed. In 2016 Francis Spufford produced Golden Hill, a hit of Mantelian proportions, set in

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Setting the bar too high

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly, this has been written off by literature undergraduates and fridge magnet makers as a joke at the expense of one of the oldest professions; but there’s another interpretation. Dick, although a comic character, was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who believed that by disrupting law and order he could overthrow the king and stand in his place. What this line actually means is that lawyers independent of the state are the final bastion of civilised society. Without lawyers, society falls apart. This premise is examined in two new

David Crane

Change and decay | 5 July 2018

It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s title requires explanation. On the face of it ‘the rise and fall of the British nation’ seems a comforting enough notion, but when Edgerton deploys the term British nation he is not talking about any long perspective, but a very specific, post-imperial, nationalist project of internal reconstruction that rose and flourished between 1945 and the 1970s, only to sink back into the global system from which it had emerged. ‘Making the national explicit’ in this way, he writes, allows us to notice the non-national features of earlier and later periods.

Thursday

Rodric Braithwaite

Knowing your enemy

Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track and outmanoeuvre their foreign and domestic enemies. So they place spies, suborn traitors, eavesdrop, decipher other people’s messages, subvert their governments, assassinate their servants and sabotage their property. The technology has changed massively over the centuries; the aims and the basic methods have not. During the 20th century, thanks partly to the works of talented

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Judith Kerr and Matthew Kneale, writing in the family and the real Mog

This week’s books podcast is a family affair: I’m talking to the children’s writer and illustrator Judith Kerr (Mog The Forgetful Cat; When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit; and The Tiger Who Came To Tea), and her son the novelist and historian Matthew Kneale, author of English Passengers and Sweet Thames, and most recently, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings. We talk about fiction and nonfiction, hereditary writers, whether what we’re seeing now answers the definition of fascism — and the bit that Judith’s publisher wanted taken out of The Tiger Who Came To Tea on the grounds of it “not being realistic”.