Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

The weird world of the hapax legomenon

Today is National Indexing Day (#indexday) – at least according to the UK’s Society of Indexers. ‘Celebrating book indexes, indexers, and the profession of indexing.’ As I write, they’re wrapping up their annual jamboree, at London’s Foundling Museum. A few months back, I was out walking the dog and listening to Dracula on my phone when I could’ve sworn I heard a character described as ‘indexy’. Now, audio recordings are not always perfect, and glitches – digital or human – do creep in (I recently heard one narrator trip over a word, say ‘sorry’, then repeat the word and carry on – all of which remaining in the finished version).

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Waiting for the Last Bus

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to Richard Holloway about his new book Waiting For The Last Bus. Richard is famous for having, as some would think rather inconveniently, “lost his faith” while serving as Bishop of Edinburgh. He talks to me about how it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and about how being half in and half out of Christianity has given him a special perspective on old age, death and dying. Does he look to an afterlife? Not since a particularly momentous walk in the Pentlands. And how is it that he maintains Philip Larkin — who wrote of religion as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade”

Preachers, princes and psychopaths

On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in protest at the anti-Protestantism of Bohemia’s King Ferdinand, soon to be elected Emperor Ferdinand II. The defenestration was only injurious to dignity, and had farcical aspects, a rebel shouting: ‘We shall see if your Mary can help you!’, only to exclaim, ‘By God, his Mary has helped!’ when the men landed in a midden. This sparked what C. V. Wedgwood termed ‘the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict’ — the bloodiest campaign ever waged on German soil. It was long thought that 70 per cent of Germans died

Look back in anguish

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink drama. What was less clear at the time was the extent to which it was autobiographical, based on Osborne’s failed first marriage to the actress Pamela Lane. In the play, Jimmy, the working-class anti-hero, harangues his wife, the cool, emotionally distant and upper-middle-class Alison, attacking her parents and her background. When Lane saw the play she immediately recognised this portrayal. When asked, many years later, about her reaction, she said: ‘I felt as though I had been raped.’ The play was a theatrical version of revenge porn.

Fire and brimstone

Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we know what to expect. The ugly buildings. The dull work of the shop floor. The worker reduced to a mere fleshy extension of a machine, his existence condensed into a series of jerks, twists and spasms. A life at best eroded by monotony — an eternal inhabitant of Dickens’s Coketown, ‘to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart to the last and the next’ — or at worst snatched up and tossed onto the sacrificial flames of Fritz Lang’s modern ‘Moloch’ of

Love’s myriad forms

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve. In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much

Nick Hilton

The strangest Icelandic saga

Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten months and several miles apart. Gudmunder Einarsson was a teenage labourer who loved to arm-wrestle; Geirfinnur Einarsson a construction worker and family man. Other than shared national hysteria in a country where people rarely go missing, there was nothing to link these mysteries — until, one by one, a ragtag group of petty criminals started to confess to their murders. The investigation was the biggest in Iceland’s history. It spanned decades, and saw ten people arrested in relation to the crimes, some of whom spent several years in prison. But

The hell-raiser from Baghdad

You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, long may they live.’ Abu Nuwas was all three, and a complete hoot. Why he is so little known in Britain should be a mystery. But outward-looking as we are as a nation, we remain peculiarly parochial in our literary tastes outside the Western canon. Born in the late 750s in Ahvaz, Abu Nuwas came to Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid in what was Islam’s golden age. In and out of favour as much as he was in and out of prison,

Not all bunk

This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David Andress thinks everyone has. I can’t say I disagree, being a subscriber to the Hourly Outrage, also known as Twitter. Andress refers to Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics as things that should have been ‘punchlines’, comparing those who voted for them to dementia sufferers. And that’s just in the first couple of pages. So I’m guessing that as a Leave voter, I’m not the intended audience — nor do I, as someone with a PhD in history, fit into Andress’s analysis of uninformed

Into the heart of Bow

Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet the sugary wartime sentiment finds a moving and resonant echo in Melanie McGrath’s new work of social excavation. The past casts an unusually deep shadow over Bow. And, cleverly, she has found a fresh means of exploring these striated layers of heritage: through the enduring local appetite for minced beef pie, mashed potatoes, and side orders of stewed eels. G. Kelly’s Pie and Mash is the 100-year- old restaurant in question, on the Roman Road in Bow (there are branches elsewhere). Pie and mash served with ‘liquor’ (parsley sauce) and

Children and slaves first

In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that as an explanation. The purposes of heaven were to be traced in the patterns of earthly history. ‘It was not merely as a consequence of human agency that the greater part of the world’s peoples came to be joined under the sole rule of Rome — nor that this should have coincided with the lifetime

A sea of troubles

Donal Ryan is one of the most notable Irish writers to emerge this decade. So far he has produced five volumes of fiction set in post-millennial Ireland. What sets him apart is a striking facility for narrative voice as well as a startling diversity of protagonists. His first novel, The Spinning Heart — about a town’s slump when the Celtic Tiger died — had no fewer than 21 narrators, mostly speaking in effervescent vernacular. His latest work revisits tragedy and loss with just four narrative perspectives. With the first, however, he puts aside Irish provincial life to tackle global tragedy. Farouk is a Syrian doctor who is working in a

Getting away with murder | 22 March 2018

This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker it concerns, a sneaking California rapist who graduated to multiple murder, was never caught. The other is that its author died aged 46 before the book could be completed. That it is nevertheless so gripping and satisfying is thanks to its sensitive editors and compilers, but mainly due to the remarkable skills of Michelle McNamara herself. The subtitle is ‘One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’. McNamara coined the catchy nickname for the shadowy figure that slaughtered five couples and two women between 1978 and 1986. The investigators

The priest’s tale

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far wider audience than she has hitherto gained — so much so that just before Gaby Wood’s appointment as literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, the critic wrote a lengthy exploration of Harvey’s prodigious qualities, describing her as ‘this generation’s Virginia Woolf’. The reasons for her relative neglect are not complex: her work is deeply serious, her novels rarely mining the same seam; she has featured on numerous long- and shortlists but failed to scoop any major awards; and we don’t see her on the telly or at the head

Bird of ill omen

With bird books the more personal the better. Joe Shute was once a crime correspondent and is today a Telegraph senior staff feature writer. It is his investigative journalism, a series of meetings with people who deal with ravens first-hand, which provides novelty. Historical, mythological and other diversions add ballast. In the prologue he writes: ‘I was born in 1984, making me the flag-bearer of a strange generation.’ Raised comfortably and lovingly in London, his future seemed serene. Then ‘came the financial crash of 2007; and with it the collapse of all the misplaced entitlement of my youth… Rather than better, it was going to get far worse’. At this

The road to Damascus

Saint Paul is unique among those who have changed the course of history — responsible not just for one but two critical historical developments 15 centuries apart. First, he persuaded the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth that gentiles as well as Jews could belong to their nascent church. This enabled its spread throughout the Roman empire, until Christianity become the state religion under the Emperor Constantine, and remained the official creed of all European nations until the French revolution. Second, there was his teaching on justification by faith alone —a ticking time bomb detonated by Martin Luther in the 16th century. ‘If we were to do justice to Paul

A heavy cross to bear

‘The Victoria Cross,’ gushed a mid-19th-century contributor to the Art Journal, ‘is thoroughly English in every particular. Given alike to the highest and the lowest in rank, but given always with a cautious and discriminating hand… the Victoria Cross is an epic poem’. Like all epic poems, the VC has its tragedies. For some that tragedy lay on the field of battle; for others, as Brian Izzard details in his often depressing new book, it lay in the life that followed. The original Royal Warrant by which Victoria instituted her eponymous medal stipulated that it was to be given only for service ‘in the presence of the enemy’ for some

Ghosts of No. 10

If you associate Lord Salisbury more with a pub than with politics, here is Andrew Gimson to the rescue, with succinct portraits of every prime minister to have graced — or disgraced — No. 10 to date. You will find no trace of waspish mockery in his book. In a time when heroes are constantly being debunked, its kindly, intelligent tone appears refreshingly old-fashioned. The flamboyant Robert Walpole makes for an ideal scene-setter. In 1721 he invented the office of prime minister and held it for longer than any of his successors — a full 21 years. Plump, affable and crude, with an astute business sense, he managed to amass