Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Apostle of gloom

Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of the grim and darkly fascinating Wallander series of Swedish crime novels, though he also produced a formidable body of other novels, as well as plays, screenplays and children’s books, before his death in 2015. After the Fire is his last book, now published in an admirably smooth English translation. It reprises the main setting and many of the characters of an earlier book, Italian Shoes, including the narrator. Fredrik is a former surgeon whose medical career was destroyed after he botched an operation. Now nudging 70, he lives alone on

Philip Hensher

Of his time

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In

Thursday

Harry Ritchie

Learning to talk

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been blessed by such great popularisers — your Attenboroughs, your Sagans, your Dawkinses. Alas, there is one inglorious exception to this marvellous rule — linguistics. A discipline that has produced enormous and enormously important advances over the last century — but not one linguist who has managed to tell the rest of the world about them. Steven Pinker did have a bestseller with The Language Instinct, but he was moonlighting from his day job in neuropsychology. Linguistics does have one world-class intellectual celebrity, but Noam Chomsky is celebrated mainly for his

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Demonised by history

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’ In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’. Remind you of anyone? But perhaps it isn’t surprising that Churchill should have

Richard Davenporthines

Muddled in minutiae

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his quarterly review of literature, the Criterion, which had its first issue in October 1922. Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding editor of the New York Times books website, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fashions, publicity drives and the politicking of literary factions. And so he makes a painfully reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark: ‘The importance of Proust was publitical above all.’ 1922 was the publication year of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert

Neel Mukherjee

Deep learning

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate career in non-fiction. He trained as an academic (English literature, mathematics, linguistics and computer analysis of stylistics), taught for several years in the US and in South Africa, and continues to translate, write essays and reviews — most notably for the New York Review of Books — and introductions to books. This third volume of non-fiction pieces, Late Essays 2006-2017, gathers a selection mostly from the NYRB and from his introductions to a series of novels translated into Spanish and published by the Spanish-language press El Hilo de Ariadna. The

Ian Thomson

The cult of Holy Bob

The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy Cliff as the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw amid the ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamaican capital of Kingston. The film’s director Perry Henzell, a ganja-smoking white Jamaican who had been sent to board at Sherborne school, was influenced by the gritty ‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed for a documentary immediacy off the street. The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in under a week, effectively introduced reggae to white British audiences. Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to

Owen Matthews

The hunger

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black Packard automobile would draw up to the door of the handsome pre-revolutionary mansion her family shared with other senior Party cadres to take her father to his job as Party boss at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. When he returned in the evening her father would be carrying bulging packets of sausages and meat from the factory canteen. Lenina did not remember wanting for anything. Yet in reality Kharkov, like all Ukraine’s cities in that terrible year, was an island of plenty in a sea of starvation. All over Ukraine millions

Patrick Skene-Catling

Harsh, but entertaining

When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal. Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption. Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old Canadian mogul who founded and developed the world’s second-most influential media conglomerate. His older daughters, Abigail and Megan, want the wealth and power; his youngest daughter, Florence, wants only his love. The rivalry is

Jane Ridley

Britain über alles

  David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had known. In the 1960s the town planners demolished much of Victorian Birmingham. The bulldozing of 19th-century cities coincided with — and helped to cause — a boom in Victorian history, led by Asa Briggs. As a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Cannadine wrote a thesis on Birmingham’s 19th-century aristocratic landowners. Since then, there has been a torrent of academic research on 19th-century history, and this has had a ‘deadening and dampening effect’. The Victorians have gone out of fashion. Historians have migrated to the rich pastures of the 18th century or

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 September 2017

The army patrols at Nice airport go around three abreast, steely-eyed, fingers on the trigger. They walk slowly and scrutinise the passengers carefully, assessing each individual for minute clues to their psychology. They take the incredibly boring job incredibly seriously, or appear to do so, which must be great comfort to those with honourable intentions but a nervous disposition. Contrast, then, these highly disciplined men with the armed pair I saw recently patrolling the floor of the departures lounge at Bristol airport. One had a comic, fall-guy, laughter-prone face, as characterful and funny to look at as George Formby’s. His boon companion looked like a great fellow to sink a

Jenny Colgan

A game of cat-and-mouse

All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive, it took various voices from the gangs, from families left behind and the thin blue line, joining them in a rousing cacophony that made up a frightening mosaic of a hot, heady, violent time. In Safe, he returns to more recent history, choosing the 2008 financial crisis to chart a game of cat-and-mouse between Ghost, a drug-addict turned federal safe-cracker (who has stolen a large amount of money to fund the father of his dead lover’s sinking property business) and Glasses, the gang member tasked with getting the money back.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How not to be a boy

In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the comedian and writer Robert Webb — whose moving and funny new book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls “The Trick”: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to lives of inarticulacy, shagging, fighting and drinking — giving pain and fear their only outlet in anger? Sounds good to me — but Webb thinks there might be a better way… You can listen to our conversation here: And do

Craig Raine

Sappho in America

We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, Joan Acocella acknowledges this in an untroubled way. If you want to know what Baryshnikov was like in bed, she advises, look at p. 208 in a bookshop: ‘Tharp gives him better marks than [Gelsey] Kirkland’ in her 1986 autobiography Dancing on my Grave. On the other hand, we have our settled idea about Elizabeth Bishop, a famously unconfessional poet, marked out from Lowell, Sexton and Berryman by her continence, her wry tone, her meticulous descriptive accuracy and her beautiful containment. Lowell might announce in

Jonathan Mcaloon

Looking back, losing bits

As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he was born. He has a tendency almost to romanticise his loneliness, turn it into witticisms. It ‘would have been sad,’ he thinks, ‘a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he’d fancied 40 years before. Finding them.’ He is followed by a man who claims to be called Ed Fitzpatrick, and to know Victor from school. ‘Everything about him was abrupt, a bit violent.’ Victor can’t place him. And this initiates a deep dive into what Victor thinks he can

Tim Martin

Madness in Manhattan

Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel — as though, these days, anyone needed reminding. Set in New York and running between the start of the Obama administration and the rise of Trump, this book about gangsterism, art, dynastic ambition, secret identities and the tragedy of plan-making charts the descent of America into satire-killing oddity and social danger as it follows the lives of the Goldens, a family of larger-than-life Indian squillionaires who come to live in Manhattan in the wake of the 2008 Bombay terror attacks. The Goldens are Nero, a Gatsbyish businessman whose past and business

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Christianity triumphant – and destructive

In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of being overcome by lust at the sight of their own bodies. Some concealed their nakedness in outfits woven from palm fronds. One designed a leather suit that also covered his head. There were holes for his mouth and nose, but not, apparently, his eyes. There was a monk who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to remind him not to speak. Another wept so hard, his tears dug a hollow in his chest. There were those who went about on all fours. St Anthony, one of the

John Jolliffe

Swagger and squalor

This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is certainly a useful summary, with much illuminating detail to carry the story forward: describing the opulence that was so much in evidence, Simon Heffer mentions the diamond which adorned Lord Randolph Churchill’s cigarette holder. He kicks off with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee of 1877, and Disraeli’s proclamation of her as Empress of India. At home, swagger and squalor went side by side, and living conditions, both rural and urban, were often appalling. The population increased from 35 million in 1881 to over 40

David Crane

Raising Cain

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. In many ways this is understandable enough, but if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker’s generous and absorbing act — his own phrase — of ‘retrospective justice’. There was probably only one period of English history in which Lay would have found himself at home, and that period, along with all the hopes and aspirations it had

Christopher Ondaatje

Courting trouble

Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the only son of a barrister. After the Japanese entered the war in 1941, Ceylon was in the front line and it faced an onslaught. Winston Churchill appointed Lord Mountbatten as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, based at Peradeniya, just outside Kandy. De Silva’s grandfather George E. de Silva was a member of the Ceylon war council, and Mountbatten, for Desmond, was ‘Uncle Dickie’. Four decades later, he was to marry Mountbatten’s great niece, Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia. De Silva’s life, as seen through these episodic memoirs, has a Boy’s