Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

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

Ian Thomson

Redcoats and runaways

Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during President Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Maroons were hailed as forerunners of Black Power. Rastafari militants and back-to-Africa ideologues saw a nobility in Maroon descent. The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had claimed Maroon ancestry for himself; as has, more recently, the British Jamaican hip-hop singer Ms Dynamite (whose debut album, A Little Deeper, remains a UK drum and bass masterwork). In Jamaica, at any rate, Maroons fought exclusively for their own liberty, not for the overall liberty of the island’s enslaved Africans. As a condition of their freedom (and in

Houman Barekat

Folk-tale redux

Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter, eking out an autarkic existence as squatters on land belonging to the unscrupulous Mr Price; on a typical day they are engaged in woodwork, plucking mallards or tickling trout. Price’s personal fiefdom operates outside the law of the land, with violent henchmen enforcing his will. The children’s father had once worked as a fixer for him before turning renegade, rallying Price’s exploited workers and tenants into collective action to improve their lot. Price’s vendetta against him is pursued with icy determination across the pages of Fiona Mozley’s debut novel: ‘He

Hilary Spurling

True grit | 14 September 2017

As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered their offices with mildly erotic female images, Claire Tomalin stuck up pictures of sexy men: ‘Some found it hard to believe I could do anything so shocking.’ Double standards, casual sexism and blanket prejudice were normal at the time, even on a relatively civilised national paper. I know because I had the same job a few years earlier at The Spectator. Men ran the world and women answered the phone. Claire had come down from Cambridge with a first in 1955, but the BBC refused her a job on the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The journey of Adam and Eve

Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we observe it has never been the easiest of things. But heaven knows, people did try. Well enough known, I suppose, is the work of the 17th-century Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who totted up all those begats to establish that the creation of the earth took place at six in the afternoon on 23 October 4005 bc. (‘He added,’ reports Stephen Greenblatt, ‘that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday, November 10.’) In like manner, in the 18th century, a French mathematician called Denis Henrion calculated, from a

Wednesday

Houman Barekat

Man Booker Prize 2017: Fiona Mozley’s debut novel is an old-fashioned portrayal of gender privilege

Elmet by Fiona Mozley John Murray, £10.99, pp. 311 Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter, eking out an autarkic existence as squatters on land belonging to the unscrupulous Mr Price; on a typical day they are engaged in woodwork, plucking mallards or tickling trout. Price’s personal fiefdom operates outside the law of the land, with violent henchmen enforcing his will. The children’s father had once worked as a fixer for him before turning renegade, rallying Price’s exploited workers and tenants into collective action to improve their lot. Price’s vendetta against him is pursued with icy determination

Sam Leith Sam Leith

What our critics thought of the books on the Man Booker shortlist

The Man Booker shortlist is out. My colleague Philip Hensher isn’t convinced. He today tweeted ‘Booker shortlist – McGregor, Z Smith, Whitehead, Roy, Barry, Shamsie. Oh wait – those were the ones they left off. Baffling.’ But you can make your own mind up. Or, be guided by our critics. Here (with the exception, alas, of Emily Fridlund, which we missed) are our reviews of the shortlisted novels: 4321 by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber) History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Books) Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House) Elmet by Fiona Mozley (JM Originals, John Murray) Lincoln in the Bardo by George

Friday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Schama, Uglow and Applebaum among the longlisted authors for the Baillie Gifford

The Baillie Gifford longlist – consisting of contenders for the country’s most prestigious nonfiction prize – is out today. A very good list it is, too. For readers’ ease, I’m affixing some links here to the Spectator’s reviews of the longlisted titles. We missed Souad Mekhennet (sorry); and a couple of them – Applebaum, Schama and Uglow – are forthcoming so will be reviewed in the next few weeks. Expect a review of Allan Jenkins’s allotment memoir when we consider gardening books at Christmas. · Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum (Allen Lane) · The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, Christopher de Bellaigue (The

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books podcast: A N Wilson

A N Wilson’s new biography of Darwin was acclaimed in these pages by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for having a ‘scientist’s forensic skill and a novelist’s imaginative touch’; but, he warned, it was likely to ‘put the felis catus among the columbidae’ with its portrait of the great man as a publicity-hungry plagiarist who got the science wrong. It certainly has done that.    In this week’s podcast I talk to Andrew Wilson about Darwin’s feet of clay — and the way in which, as Wilson sees it, the theory of evolution was used to license everything from the cruellest excesses of Victorian capitalism to the eugenics programmes of the mid-20th century.  And if you enjoyed that,

Peter Pomerantsev

Punks vs. Putin

What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America during the Cold War), dissidents and dissenters could target rulers’ political ideas, whether communist or capitalist. But in regimes where ideology is used more to distract than indoctrinate (such as Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America), directly opposing the leaders’ ‘narrative’ (one which can change, depending on political expedience) risks playing right into their game. As Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon revealed in an interview with American Prospect, Trump’s race-baiting has provoked Democrats into focusing on identity issues, which is just the argument Bannon wants them to obsess over: he believes

Simon Ings

The magic of maths

It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop five stones on the ground, and most of us will see five stones without counting. Six stones are a challenge. Presented with seven stones, we will have to start grouping, tallying and making patterns. This is arithmetic, ‘a kind of “symbol knitting”’ according to the maths researcher and sometime teacher Paul Lockhart, whose Arithmetic explains how counting systems evolved to facilitate communication and trade, and ended up watering (by no very obvious route) the metaphysical gardens of mathematics. Lockhart shamelessly (and successfully) supplements the archeological record with invented number systems

Paul Levy

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing about theatre and opera. This coffee-table whopper, weighing in at just under a kilo, dazzles: Michael Coveney’s text is even better than Peter Dazeley’s remarkable photographs. And in a luminous foreword, Mark Rylance sets out the not-so-obvious difference between theatre and cinema: ‘In a theatre you need to hear the truth. In a cinema you need to see it.’ Most of the theatre audience can’t see the actor’s eyes, and have to rely on hearing emotion in the voice and, to a lesser extent, detecting emotion in body language. Hence

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Descent into hell | 7 September 2017

It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in the imagination. It’s that of Eva Rausing’s decomposed body, wrapped in a tarpaulin on the marital double bed in Belgravia, buried under a mattress, several flat-screen televisions and a heap of blankets and duvets. When it was discovered by police forcing open the duct-taped bedroom door in July 2012 — more than two months after her husband Hans had left it there, unable to face up to his wife’s death from cocaine-induced heart failure — the only way Eva could be identified was by a fingerprint and the number on