Book Reviews Archives

Thursday

13 Jul 2017

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

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

9 Jul 2017

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

6 Jul 2017

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

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

Alex Clark

Mother Medea

Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype with everything going for her. As a fratricide and murderer of her own children, among assorted other acts of blood lust, her acts of brutality are so transgressive and symbolic that they offer themselves up to psychoanalytic deconstruction; as a woman abandoned and betrayed by Jason, for whom she has arguably risked everything, she presents herself neatly as a sacrifice thrown to the god of male ambition, arrogance and insecurity. But perhaps most enticing are the gaps and mismatches in the records and cover versions — disputed details that allowed,

Laura Freeman

Something nasty in the woodshed

I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream of just the smallest bolthole in the country: a bothy, a gatehouse, a folly below the ha-ha in someone else’s stately home. A shepherd’s hut in tasteful shades of prime ministerial greige. Liberated from the city I would be a nicer, calmer, more industrious person. I would write my magnum opus and be self-sufficient in rhubarb crumble. Every morning when the drills start on the cycle super-highway that will speed the passage of Deliveroo couriers through west London, I put my head in my hands and will myself into a

Boyd Tonkin

Hot Spring

Imagine if Kathy Lette — or possibly Julie Burchill — had written a feminist, magic-realist saga that sent four women on a road-trip around the broiling hotspots of the Arab Spring. No, not easy to do — yet the intrepid Turkish journalist and writer Ece Temelkuran has, in this novel, come up with just that sort of pantomime chimera. Temelkuran, an outspoken truth-teller whose fearless reportage has jeopardised both her livelihood and security in Turkey, flings together a quartet of ill-assorted travellers — one of whom resembles the author. She whisks them around the crisis zones of the eastern Mediterranean just as revolutions flare and tyrants tumble. Our four heroines,

Leyla Sanai

Doctor of humility

Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm (2014) was that rare thing — a neurosurgeon showing his fallibility in public and admitting to the great harm that good intentions can cause. It was a stunning, even revolutionary work, displacing doctors from their traditional ivory towers and showing them to be not only human and vulnerable to misjudgments, but also capable of self-admonishment and regret. At the time, I said it should be required reading for medical students. The follow-up, Admissions, continues the theme of self-examination. Marsh is an atheist, and in many ways his writing is like a secular confessional — hence the dual meaning of ‘admissions’. So unsparing is he

Claire Kohda

A woman of some importance | 6 July 2017

It might seem unlikely that a Christian noblewoman could have had influence over a Muslim city in the 13th century, when women were considered by Muslim society as being ‘underlings without complete intelligence’ and by Christian society as ‘a fish hook of the devil… a source of evil… a treasury of filth’. However, Tamta — a woman of Armenian Christian heritage, who travelled extensively and acted as a link between people of various faiths and backgrounds — seems to have governed, influenced taxation, provided passage for pilgrimage and even, possibly, played a role in battles and military negotiations, in Akhlat, a Muslim city in what is now Turkey, in the

Allan Mallinson

Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command.

Ruth Scurr

Dark night of the soul

As bombs fall everywhere in Syria and IS fighters destroy Palmyra, a musicologist in Vienna lies awake all night thinking of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, where he stayed in 1996, following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, Agatha Christie and King Faisal. He remembers the hotel’s Ottoman ogival windows and its monumental staircase, with its old, worn-out rugs and shabby rooms where there were still useless bakelite telephones and metal clawfoot bathtubs whose pipes sounded like a heavy machine gun whenever you turned on the tap, in the midst of faded wallpaper and rust-stained bedspreads. In 1996 Franz Ritter was travelling with a fellow student, Sarah, a beautiful

Dominic Green

Taking the rough with the smooth

In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir to a factory at Woollett, Massachusetts. Strether never names the ‘small, trivial rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use’ that has enriched the Newsomes, though he does say that it is not clothes pins, baking soda or shoe polish. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster identifies this ambiguity with James’s ‘uninvolved’ style, then suggests a button hook. Possible resolutions of the ‘Woollett Question’ also include safety matches, alarm clocks, toothpicks and, in a David Lodge campus satire, a chamber pot. I suggest another item from the booming industrial

Thursday

29 Jun 2017

Frank Brinkley

A choice of first novels | 29 June 2017

Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen Moran learning that her brother —adopted, as she was — has committed suicide. Helen lives in New York, working with troubled teenagers who have dubbed her ‘Sister Reliability’. Against familial expectations she returns to Milwaukee to her adoptive parents’ home for the funeral. But Helen has not arrived simply to grieve: Perhaps to investigate his death would revitalise my own life, and if I could communicate my eventual findings to them, it would strengthen and support the lives of my adoptive parents as well. Despite her nickname and these somewhat

Keith Lowe

High flyers

It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their covers. So, it seems, do passengers on the No. 29 bus. For a middle-aged man reading Clare Mulley’s The Women Who Flew for Hitler, some of the looks I got made me so uncomfortable that I took to hiding the cover behind a newspaper. So let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: this is not a niche book for Third Reich enthusiasts, nor a seedy excuse to fantasise about women in Nazi uniforms. Do not be put off by the awful title: it is in fact a serious double

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Jonathan Meades

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m joined by the great Jonathan Meades. A man of many hats — food critic, architectural critic, memoirist, polemicist, cultural historian, novelist etc — and one distinctive pair of sunglasses, Meades is this week talking about stealing food. His The Plagiarist In The Kitchen, new in paperback, is a sort of anti-recipe book; a collection of cookable recipes (well, except the one), an erudite disquisition on the history and theory of cookery, and a slant discussion of the whole idea of plagiarism. Also, it’s packed with good jokes. Join us to hear why Paul Bocuse doesn’t know how to make gratin dauphinois, why it’s hard to source the dried spinal

Jonathan Mcaloon

Life classes

It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of her wonderful 2010 book The Possessed —a chimera of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism — she declares: I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life… and that, as an aspiring novelist, I should therefore try not to read too many novels. Selin, the Turkish-American protagonist of her first novel, is engaged in gathering writerly experience at Harvard, reading novels and falling for Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student with a girlfriend. The pair begin an online relationship at the dawn of email. But