Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

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

Jason Goodwin

Fear of little men

When this survey of British fairydom arrived I turned to the chapter on Dorset to read about the little people of my county. After a survey of place names referring to the ‘puca’, which may or not connect with Shakespeare’s Puck, I received the disheartening news that Dorset wasn’t very good for fairies, and that there was even ‘something surprising about the absence of elves’. So I did what I was supposed to have done first, and read the introduction. Magical Folk is a collection of folklore essays, topographically arranged, and its editors welcome ‘the digitisation of millions of pages of British and Irish newspapers,’ which has allowed researchers to

A. E. Stallings

A long way home

Until recently, it seemed we were living in an age of Iliads. Since 2007, the ancient Homeric epic has been translated into English at least seven times (including by Caroline Alexander, the first woman to do so). Yet the Iliad’s sequel, the Odyssey — about war’s aftermath, the home front and the difficult return to civilian life — is just as topical. And with its greater emphasis on female characters and different walks of life, it should appeal to a broader audience. Until now, it has not been translated into English by a woman. Does this make a difference? Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her sleek translation, argues that

Patrick Skene-Catling

The Mutiny and the bounty

Sullying the glorious sunshine, sand and sea, Miami in the 1940s, when I first ventured there, was already overcrowded, vulgar and exorbitant. It got a lot worse. By the early 1980s, the period to which this sensational criminal history is devoted, it had become the capital of Cubans in exile and America’s most prosperous cocaine entrepot, where the annual murder rate was more than 300. Attempts to impose law and order were handicapped by corrupt police, a corrupt judiciary and corrupt juries. Over many years of intimate investigation of Miami at its nadir, Roben Farzad has succeeded in overcoming the formality of his Ivy League education (Princeton and Harvard) so

Honor Clerk

Figures in a landscape | 25 January 2018

Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron. In its beautiful rust-coloured linen covers it looks a bit like a block of cast iron, too. Open it to the endpapers, ‘Bodies in Space’, and black splatters across a white ground. Turn a couple of thick, silky pages and a frail human figure, photographed from behind, is silhouetted on a rocky precipice facing an abyss of roiling water, cloud and spray. Keep turning and the developing story of Gormley’s life’s work reveals itself in image after remarkable image. In the 1980s Gormley was almost alone among contemporary sculptors in

Philip Hensher

The house on the hill

‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and detailed accounts of procedure and paperwork, and characteristically narrates two things: the process of investigation and discovery, and the events that set them off. But what happens if those procedures can’t be narrated? What becomes of the genre’s claims of full and complete truth? Owing to legal strictures, Thomas Harding has written a book which, I feel, falls frustratingly short of the book he wanted to write. The murder of an 87-year-old semi-derelict, Allan Chappelow, in Hampstead in 2006 was followed by the trial of a Chinese crook and liar

Thursday

Elaine Showalter

The maker and the monster

There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin and the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft (who died a few days after giving birth to her), she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at 16; wandered through Europe with him; bore their four children; married him; became the friend and companion of the other Young Romantics and their lovers; and at 18 wrote the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Scholars, writers and biographers from Muriel Spark to Miranda Seymour have been drawn to her story, and to the moment when, in the summer

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: 200 years of Frankenstein

It LIVES! This week’s books podcast honours the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein. To cut through all those high camp, bolt-through-the-neck film versions clouding our collective memory, I’m joined by the poet and critic Fiona Sampson, whose fine new book In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (reviewed in this week’s magazine by Elaine Showalter) tries to bring the monster, and his creator, and his creator’s creator, back to life as they originally were. Mary Shelley’s fascinating, brave and unconventional life — and the literary excellence of her most famous novel — are our subjects today. Do join us: And, as ever, please do take a

Kate Webb

A friend in need

The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires, leaving him at home raking leaves, mulling over memories of his wife and wondering about the body in a nearby lake — suggests that this will be a book of endings, something akin to Anita Brookner’s stories of self-absorbed people in the twilight of their lives. But Richard, now professor emeritus, proves to be a more unpredictable character. Unlike many of Brookner’s loners, there is the strong force of history in him. A precarious beginning under fascism and war, then a life shaped by the GDR and its abrupt cessation

Alan Judd

The call of the Wren

This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy from the Middle Ages to the present. What it lacks in anecdotes and personal accounts it makes up for in its comprehensive documentation of official attitudes and measures. Women have served in — or, more accurately, with — the Royal Navy for longer than we might think. There are medieval references to women accompanying their husbands on voyages, including the Crusades, and to women serving as launderers, cooks, nurses and prostitutes (possibly all four). Ladies of the Cinque Ports — Hastings, Dover, Sandwich, Romney and Hythe — were the most

Jonathan Steinberg

Massacre of the innocents

I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties in the trenches; the second world war and the German conquest of Europe; day and night bombing; Stalingrad and the Holocaust. But I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about the tragedy in Galicia in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Nazi genocide, much of the killing took place between neighbour and neighbour: Jews, Poles and Ukrainians destroyed each other with increasing ferocity and brutality between 1914 and the 1940s. The beautiful city of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia, with its Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish shrines, ended as a gigantic

Horatio Clare

Poison in Paradise

Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare its alumni perfectly for flying snakes, scorpions so large you can put leads on them and leeches in waving battalions; titanic drinking and dancing ceremonies (our explorer, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, suffers repeated blistering on the dance floor); the friendship of head-hunters; and for the exacting business of leading world-protecting, people-nurturing expeditions into the planet’s wild and vulnerable regions. In the school’s natural history museum, pupils can now see a parang, presented to Hanbury-Tenison by his tribal friends, its handle shaped like a hornbill, its razor-sharp edge responsible for hacking off more

Rose Prince

Fast or feast

‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.’ The best known adage in food literature, penned by the French politician and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, divides all of us generally: the gourmands from the picky, the greedy from the careful, one nation from another, one culture from the next. Laura Shapiro’s book about six famous women and their ‘food stories’ made me want to re-read a few biographies for those food moments. Shapiro claims that food in life stories is undervalued as a subject, considering how much time people spend eating. Their tastes, loves, hates, phobias, habits and cravings can tell us as much about

Thursday

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The eternal visionary

On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous — the blarney, stoned — but Ginsberg stole the aesthetic victory by reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a homage to William Blake. ‘White fog lifting and falling on mountain brow,’ Ginsberg intones, ‘…teeming ferns/ exquisitely swayed/ along a green crag/ glimpsed through mullioned glass in valley rain.’ ‘Nice,’ Buckley nods. He lets Ginsberg read the whole poem. Ginsberg opposes the artificial imagery of power and money (‘London’s symmetrical thorned tower / & network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self’) to the vision of the unmediated, natural Self: ‘Each flower Buddha-eye.’ After six

Justin Marozzi

Reconsider Phlebas

So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really what Josephine Quinn is saying, or is it just a cunning ruse to stir up a fuss and infuriate the dwindling band of Herodoteans out there? Because Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, declares that her mission is not so much to rescue the Phoenicians from their ‘undeserved obscurity’ so much as to argue that there were no such people. ‘It is modern nationalism that has created the Phoenicians,’ she writes, citing 19th-century French, English and German historians who spoke of the Phoenician ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in

Patrick Flanery

A brutal race

More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, which circles the globe before concluding with a long interlude in the Australian outback. While the film was in the mode of speculative science fiction and Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, this new book nonetheless shares both that earlier work’s fascination with outsiders whose lives spin off in unpredictable directions, and as a profound reverence for Australia’s interior and its people. Outside Melbourne, in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, Willie Bachhuber — a

Keith Miller

Dangerous living

Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short stories, journalism, theatre, television or a combination of the above. The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable and transplants it into real life — in this case bourgeois southern British suburban life — where the neat conclusions we might draw from it if we encountered it in a more distilled form are muffled and made strange. The exemplar of Kafka is obvious (both Metamorphosis and The Trial); but I found myself thinking also of John Cheever, Richard Yates and other American writers who

Kate Womersley

The germ of a revolutionary idea

Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms. A soothing routine accompanied by the sound of water hitting a steel trough sink. Washing is an act of safety but also humility. It acknowledges a doctor’s capacity to cause disease as well as cure it. More than once I have thought of Joseph Lister — the father of antisepsis (killing germs) and forefather of asepsis (excluding germs completely) — as I perform this hygienic set-piece. Not that he would have liked the idea of me, his sister’s great-great-great granddaughter, studying medicine. Lister ‘could not bear the indecency of discussing