Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

James Bloodworth

Return of the infamous five

It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of Freudian neurosis. Where class resentment exists it is said to emanate less from angry young proletarians than from well-spoken youths intent on garrotting their dividend-drawing fathers. Most contemporary accounts of the Cambridge spy ring, which passed top secret information to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, draw heavily on this cliché. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are typically portrayed not only as highly privileged men who rebelled against their upbringings, but as an upper-class clique who got away with what they did because

John Burnside

Short and bitter-sweet

The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies, social misfits and minor criminals from an insider’s perspective — which is not surprising, considering his own history of drug and alcohol abuse. Certainly his most celebrated work, the hilarious yet profoundly moving story collection, Jesus’ Son, reinforced that image, offering us characters like the narrator of ‘Steady Hands at Seattle General’, who can, in all seriousness, ask a man with a recent gunshot wound: ‘When you were shot right through your face like that, did the bullet go on to do anything interesting?’ (The other replies, ‘How would I

Jason Burke

Blind into battle

Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul assembled on a makeshift parade ground. After the daily briefing, an officer announced the number of days since 9/11, read a short obituary of a victim of the attack and reminded the troops of their mission: to capture or kill those responsible for the worst terrorist strike ever in the US. Only a year previously, Bagram had been captured by the Taliban, who then exercised nominal control over 80 per cent of Afghanistan. Reduced to bombed-out buildings and a potholed, unusable airstrip, it was of limited strategic importance. Within weeks

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Mohsin Hamid

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the award-festooned writer Mohsin Hamid about his latest novel Exit West — touching on the effects of technology, the migrant crisis, political writing and why his eight-year-old daughter is shaping up to be an emo kid. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this, every week.

Annie Nightingale

Reeling and spinning

It was approximately 4.50 a.m. in Ibiza: peak time on the dance floor. I was on the decks in one of the many sumptuous rooms of the superclub Pacha, spinning breakbeat on vinyl (early Noughties) and warming up for a live broadcast back to the UK. Without warning, a Pacha henchman burst into the DJ booth, grabbed the record I was playing and pulled it off the deck. Then he yanked the headphones off my head. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ was my astonished response. ‘We are going live on radio in ten minutes!’ This did not cut any ice. Pandemonium ensued. There was a fight on the dance floor

Nicholas Lezard

Coffee and Kalashnikovs

‘This guy’s crazy,’ says a taxi driver, listening to a BBC interview with a man who has decided to become the first exporter of coffee from Mokha, Yemen, in 80 years. The man being interviewed, we have learned, has risked his life quite a few times over, in the most hair-raising ways imaginable it would seem, to achieve his dream of putting Yemeni coffee back on the map. We meet this taxi driver towards the end of the book, and although he does not know that the man being interviewed is actually sitting in the back of his cab, by this stage we have come to think that, yes, the

Robert Mccrum

The way to dusty death | 1 February 2018

In the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer: ‘We’re all doomed.’ Life remains a dangerous business whose outcome is always fatal. Despite all kinds of medical progress, the death rate is stubbornly fixed at 100 per cent, while the ways in which we die remain unchanged. At the same time, in a magnificent demonstration of cognitive dissonance, abetted by medical science, the human animal continues to cherish the fantasies of immortality that enable us, in Churchill’s stoic formula, to ‘keep buggering on’. This thrilling tension between the forces of life and death has always inspired two basic attitudes to mortality. First, a realistic, even forensic, fascination with the sensations and

Mark Cocker

No stone left unturned | 1 February 2018

Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have or not’. The Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies 1848–1887 is in the peculiarly unfortunate position of having produced a whole library that falls pretty much into this category. His novels such as Bevis (1882) or the apocalyptic After London (1885) have cult status for some who, almost 70 years ago, had cohered into an active Richard Jefferies’ Society. New anthologies of his work appear almost every decade and many of the original titles are in print — both Wild Life in a Southern County and Nature Near London were only

Alexandra Coghlan

Half-heard truths

If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple having a blank-faced argument in Tesco or a mother remonstrating with her toddler even though you couldn’t hear the words exchanged, then you understand the importance of the human voice. Command of tone, timbre, pitch — the how, not the what, of communication — is at once the most natural and instinctive of skills, common to every infant and its parent, and the most fetishised, finessed and, of course, monetised. A whole industry, and a lucrative one at that, exists to transform the human voice from tool to product, from

Houman Barekat

Crime and puzzlement

Tony White’s latest novel begins for all the world like a police procedural, following the delightfully named sleuth Rex King as he investigates the grisly murder of man in a Covent Garden theatre. Rex, who has a penchant for fish and chips, laments the tedium of police bureaucracy and frets over a cover-up relating to a death in custody.There is collegial bonhomie, conspiratorial winking and sardonic banter aplenty. The novel then cuts away to an altogether different setting. In an obscure rural enclave in southern France in the mid-1980s, a young Englishman on his gap-year fraternises with a gang of charismatic dissidents in a bohemian commune. They debate postwar French

John R. MacArthur

Boxing not so clever

For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late to do him any good. Abandoned by his Native American mother and Irish American father, he has exiled himself from the only people who love him, an elderly couple on a sheep ranch in deepest Nevada. His one idea for becoming ‘somebody’ is to transform himself into a world-champion lightweight boxer with a wholly fabricated Mexican identity. ‘Mexican boxers are the toughest… true warriors who never quit,’ he believes. Only well into the novel does it dawn on him that his self-inflicted loneliness is ‘a sort of disease’, not a

Violet Hudson

Has the bubble burst?

I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few years ago. Then it was confirmed. Cynicism seemed to ooze out of every millimetre of his vast, shiny sculpture. It was vividly apparent that this artwork wasn’t about beauty or transcendence or emotion. It was about money. Don Thompson’s The Orange Balloon Dog (the title is taken from the name of a Koons piece) is ostensibly about the contemporary art market. He details recent auctions, using the autumn 2014 sales — where buyers spent $1.7 billion in two days at Sotheby’s and Christie’s — as his starting point. But, as

Thursday

Lara Feigel

Love becomes a duty

The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century Metroland, joins the local tennis club, where he dismisses all the girls his age as wholesome ‘Carolines’ but falls for Mrs Susan Macleod, a spirited, sarcastic woman in her forties. Paul shocks the village by taking her for drives (both are soon barred from the tennis club) and then starts taking her to bed in her marital home. Here he manages to become a familiar presence. Though Susan’s husband mocks Paul as her ‘fancy boy’, he also teaches him to do the crossword and only occasionally lashes out at him

Alex Colville

The true hero of Singapore

Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a flag, a faith and a funny hat, arriving in exotic lands untouched by civilisation. Overcoming great odds, they would kick-start the regions’ histories, show the locals the proper way to live and extend the imperial pink on the map a few inches before sailing off into the history books. Cook in Australia, Rhodes in Africa, Clive in India: in the popular imagination, the Empire was built by remarkable men, all by themselves. Singapore was no exception — and the myth endures to this day. Stamford Rafflescontinues to dominate its pedestals,

Andrew Crumey

The ‘Pope’ must answer to God

Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the greatest figures of 20th-century physics, with a reputation for infallibility. In Rome, pioneering atomic science under Mussolini, he was nicknamed ‘the Pope’. Escaping to America where he created the world’s first nuclear reactor, he was dubbed ‘the last man who knew everything’. Yet he was no Renaissance man: he knew everything about physics, and didn’t care much about anything else. It is testimony to David N. Schwartz’s excellence as a biographer that he can reveal the workaholic Fermi to have been such a fascinatingly complex figure. He was, we are

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: The life and work of Muriel Spark

This week’s books podcast celebrates the centenary of Muriel Spark. I’m joined by Alan Taylor (author of a new memoir of his friendship with Spark, Appointment in Arezzo) and the critic Philip Hensher to talk about Spark’s life, legacy, special strengths as a novelist — and the mystique that continues to surround the Scottish-born, Tuscan-dwelling author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. You can listen to our conversation below: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like that every week.

Nicholas Shakespeare

A huff to the music of time

You’re in the index, but not in the book. This ghostly sensation has been my experience since 1990 after commissioning Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts. Waugh’s verdict appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 20 May that year. Next morning, Powell resigned in a celebrated huff from the sister paper, of which I happened to be literary editor. When, seven years later, Powell published his Journals, I wanted to know how he dealt with this incident which had caused acute distress. The index directed me to page 40, yet my name wasn’t there. Nor any entry for 20 May 1990; nor one for Auberon Waugh, as promised, on

James Mcnamara

Hopes and dreams

Twenty-odd pages into Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, I pounded the table and bellowed an Australian-accented ‘fuck yeah!’ This startled my wife, who startled the cat, which startled my gin and tonic into my lap. But it was worth it, and remains my unvarnished critical opinion. To varnish it a bit: The Life to Come is de Kretser’s sixth book, her first full-length novel since her 2013 Miles Franklin Award, and for my money one of the best to have been published in Australia in the past decade. De Kretser follows a group of characters all dreaming of the titular life to come: Pippa is a middling Sydney

Emily Rhodes

Running for her life

Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in Paris. Her passion for French literature led her to open the first French bookshop in Berlin in 1921, a resounding success in spite of the predominantly Francophobe sentiment in Germany following the first world war. She happily reminisces over its ‘curiously mixed clientele’: ‘Famous artists, celebrities and well-heeled women pore over the fashion magazines, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the philosopher buried in his Pascal.’ It soon became a place of readings, lectures, plays and parties and an essential stop for any French writer passing through

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Fairy tales for feisty girls

This being the centenary of women’s suffrage, there’s an unmissable feminist aspect to children’s books right now. Stories about strong girls, fictional and historical, are everywhere. (The worst example of the genre, I may say, was Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.) Well, if it’s feisty girl stories you’re after, you could do much worse than Hilary McKay’s Fairy Tales, which are written with terrific brio and have umpteen resolute heroines. If you like your fairy stories as you remember them, this may not be for you, but these retellings of the classics are done in an affectionate spirit. ‘If I ever wrote a book with love, it’s this one,’ says the