Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Daniel Hahn

The cold grip of fear

A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the views stunning, the isolation splendid. He rented the home through Airbnb — surprisingly cheaply, as it happens. He has come to this place for a family holiday with his wife Susanna and their four-year-old, Esther, but also to get some peace and quiet in which to concentrate on his current job. His last movie, Besties, was a smash hit, and now the producer wants a screenplay for Besties 2, and the sooner the better. And as we read through his notebook, in which he’s hoping the screenplay will take shape,

Henry Keswick

By Patten or design?

My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to the TV set. I’m more assiduous: I have actually read this book under review. And Chris Patten’s latest memoir is a very enjoyable read — the account of a life of considerable privilege. Born into a middle-class family in suburban London, Patten won an exhibition to Balliol before — after a brief dalliance with US politics — he became a Conservative apparatchik and, in due course, an MP. Once he’d reached the cabinet, he was a made man — and from his middle years onward garnered a succession of agreeable

Alan Judd

The infamous four

Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy to forget that we also spawned a few who worked for the Germans in the second world war. This book concerns four of them: John Amery, wastrel son of a Conservative cabinet minister; William Joyce, the Irish-American Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Haw-Haw; Harold Cole, soldier and petty criminal who sent 150 or more Resistance members to their deaths; and Eric Pleasants, a circus strong-man who disavowed national loyalties while donning German uniform. Their motives were mixed but, treachery apart, they had one thing in common: an insistence on

James Walton

Playing Stalin for laughs

Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read. The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953 — and that a road accident when he was six damaged his brain, leaving him with a curious set of symptoms that couldn’t be worse suited to life under Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask awkward questions and a face so angelically trustworthy that everybody tells him their deepest secrets. Given

Graham Robb

Something in the water

‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’ From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the

Ian Thomson

The new age of the refugee

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic

Mick Brown

A strange vibration

Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of the so called ‘summer of love’ in 1967 the British historian Arnold Toynbee, on a visit to San Francisco, made his way to the Haight-Ashbury district — hippy central — to catch a concert by one of the Bay Area’s most popular bands, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Just what Toynbee, who was 78 at the time, made of the group’s epic exercise in free form, psychedelic improvisation, ‘The Fool’, Goldberg does not mention. But he does tell us that elsewhere in the Haight, at around the same time, Dame Margot Fonteyn

Tuesday

David Butterfield

Would Jane Austen be amused or bemused by her £10 note quotation?

So, the new tenner has been unveiled today. Two centuries after her death, Jane Austen replaces Charles Darwin, who has enjoyed a 25-year sojourn with his hummingbirds. And yet it feels like this new note has been in the air for a while, though obscured by the hazy fug of controversy. First there was the (largely vegan) stew about animal tallow remaining part of the production process. All protests about what we’re doing with the natural world are worth hearing, so long as they are proportional. Quite what percentage of society occupies the intersection of the Venn diagram where strict boycotters of plastic bags, soap and cosmetics overlap with those

Thursday

Jeff Noon

Latest crime fiction

Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city and a small unruly town surrounding an oasis. One man is on the run through the desert regions: he has no name, no memory and no clue as to why he’s being pursued by at least three different parties, all intent on doing him harm. Other characters inter-mingle with this tale of woe: ineffectual detectives, a glamorous sales agent, a commune of hippies, and a paranoid spy whose sense of purpose evaporates in the midday heat. The sun bakes the streets, the sand, people’s faces. And their minds. The amnesiac

Mark Cocker

On matters maritime

The Greenland shark has to be one of the most fascinating creatures of which you’ve probably never heard. Growing sometimes to 25ft, it is the largest flesh-eating shark, longer even than a great white. It dwells in the deepest northern oceans. It eats seabirds, huge fish and seals, most of which it probably surprises and devours on the seabed. The youngest Greenland shark of reproductive age is 100 and the oldest may have been alive when the Mayflower set sail. It is, thus, the longest-lived vertebrate life form on the planet. Whalers and the native people of the Arctic have hunted it for centuries, primarily for the immense oil-rich liver.

Viv Groskop

Beyond the pale

You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of this book’s two sections: ‘Invisible’ and ‘Angry’. A graphic artist from Serpukhov, just south of Moscow, Lomasko spent eight years documenting people from all walks of life across Russia, producing drawing and commentary about the ‘Russia that is hardly ever seen’. Many of her fellow citizens feel invisible. Almost all of them are angry. The effect of seeing this in cartoon form is disturbing, impressive and fascinating. The subject matter she is dealing with is almost unbearable: juvenile prison wards, sex workers, protesters affected by Russia’s homophobic laws. Lomasko calls

Dominic Cummings

China syndrome | 13 July 2017

Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s Charles River could take years while in China bigger bridges are replaced in days. His book tells the extraordinary story of China’s transformation since Deng abandoned Mao’s catastrophic Stalinism, and considers whether the story will end in war between China and America. China erects skyscrapers in weeks while Parliament delays Heathrow expansion for over a decade. The EU discusses dumb rules made 60 years ago while China produces a Greece-sized economy every 16 weeks. China’s economy doubles roughly every seven years; it is already the size of America’s and will

Tim Martin

Self’s obsessions

This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a tank commander in Iraq, an autistic computer genius, the autistic computer genius’s mother and a closeted MI6 spy who thinks his cock is talking to him — which, for this stage in Will Self’s writing career, is pretty much situation normal. Readers of Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014) will know the score already, as this is the third instalment in a loose trilogy following Self’s recurring psychotherapist Zack Busner as well as several generations of a family called Death (De’Ath for the posh ones). They will also know that these

Andreas Campomar

Voices of exile

During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of being as a vocation. Some were given early warning of what might befall them if they stayed. The polemicist Eduardo Galeano remembered receiving an evening telephone call from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance: ‘We’re going to kill you, you bastards.’ ‘The schedule for calling in threats, sir, is from six to eight,’ I answer. I hang up and congratulate myself… But I want to stand up and I can’t: my legs are limp rags. Other writers were not so lucky. Antonio di Benedetto was rounded up in the first wave of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The first celebrity

It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be the biggest hot-air balloon the world has ever seen. Adoring crowds gather to watch the launch. He rises rapidly and sails off towards the clouds — but in due course the whole thing goes arse-up and he comes clattering to earth, narrowly escaping with his and his crew’s life. Never mind: the catastrophe is reported around the world and has made him even more famous than he was before. It was a ‘semi-unsuccess’. And within weeks he’s back planning another ascent in another giant balloon. As if to bear out

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The Book of Nicola Sturgeon

Inspiration for the latest competition came from Anthony Lane’s terrific ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’, an account of the general election that ran recently in the New Yorker and was shared widely on social media: ‘And there came from the same country a prophet, whose name was Jeremy. His beard was as the pelt of beasts, and his raiments were not of the finest. And he cried aloud in the wilderness and said, Behold, I bring you hope.’ You were asked to flesh out the story with a version of either ‘The Book of Boris’, ‘The Book of Theresa’, ‘The Book of Tim’ or ‘The Book of Nicola’. Cod-biblical can

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 6 July 2017

Banking up the wrong tree The Magic Money Tree is such a neat concept it is a wonder it has not featured more widely in literature. But there is a book of that title by Anna Rashid, self- published in April 2009 — just after quantitative easing began in Britain. In the story, a little girl finds a tree brimming with banknotes, which are given to poor ladies and children at a party. The tree grows back every Christmas but only the girl can see it. The self-published book has not yet lived up to its name — last week it was number 7,413,589 on Amazon UK’s bestseller list. Healthy

Simon Kuper Simon Kuper

Always the Superbrat

John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to the great man himself. John Sr, who is tennis-mad, has a request: can he come with his son to a veterans’ tournament in Belgium? McEnroe is horrified. Having dad around is a major drag. ‘I was about to say absolutely not,’ he writes — when his old rival Björn Borg, who happens to be dining with him, interjects: ‘Let me speak to him.’ Borg, who had lost his own father three years earlier, tells McEnroe Sr: ‘Don’t worry, JP, if John doesn’t bring you to Knokke-Heist, I will.’ The story

Katrina Gulliver

Crossing the pond

What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to answer that question by exploring both the push and pull factors involved. His descriptions are vivid, so the reader can imagine the life choices that would lead to one finding oneself heaving up over the side of a small ship somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, or watching the burial at sea of a fellow passenger, and hoping to God one had made the right choice. God, of course, was a big part of the choice for many of them. The Mayflower pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, are the

Philip Hensher

In defiance of Il Duce

The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite well-meaning people have a tendency to treat him as, in part, a joke. Just how horrible the period was needs to be explained with reference to individual lives. Caroline Moorehead’s book about the Rosselli family, who were central to the principled resistance, has a valuable and sobering subject. They were intellectual and idealistic Jews. The matriarch, Amelia, from an eminent Venetian family, had married a clever and dissolute man. They had three sons together before Amelia had enough of his philandering, and left him with the children. She settled in