Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Sins of the flesh

Bill Schutt has an excellent subject, and he explores it from a promising angle. Cannibalism has long interested zoologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, literary theorists and students of theology and blasphemy — the absurd claim that Roman Catholics were commending it in their account of transubstantiation was a favourite with 18th-century English blasphemers. Few people have tried to bring all these together, and perhaps by the end we have to conclude that there is not much connecting the very different elements at the remote ends of the scale. Still, it was worth a try. Schutt is an animal scientist, and he begins with the simpler organisms. At the bottom of the

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the truth behind the nation’s favourite maritime poem

Your latest challenge was to recast John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ in light of the news that the poet suffered from acute sea sickness. In his book Sea Fever, Sam Jefferson relates how as an apprentice seaman aboard the Gilcruix, the unfortunate Masefield was struck down by a brutal bout of mal de mer. A diary entry recorded the full horror: ‘I was faint, clammy, helpless, weakly wishing for death or dry land.’ This was a hugely popular comp and there were lots of skilful, witty and well-made entries (though with a fair, if not unsurprising, degree of repetition). Those that nearly made the cut include Jerome Betts, Albert Black, A.H.

Thursday

Bharat Tandon

Reading between the lines | 26 January 2017

Writing to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, Jane Austen declared, in a parody of Walter Scott: ‘I do not write for such dull Elves/As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.’ That identification of the good Austen reader as one continually on the qui vive, ready to piece out the novels’ nudges, winks and silences, also underpins Helena Kelly’s ambitiously revisionist new study of Austen — a study that is by turns illuminating, provocative and infuriating. ‘We’re missing something,’ she argues with reference to Northanger Abbey. That sentence, both in its content and in the position it adopts with relation to its readers, could

Edward Paice

A scandalous scramble

Empires in the Sun might conjure up romantic visions for some, but this book’s essence is distilled in its subtitle, ‘The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa’. Lawrence James’s panoramic survey of imperial and then neo-colonial subjugation of the African continent between 1830 and 1990 is a timely reminder, if any were needed, of the devastating consequences of chauvinistic nationalism and expansionism. Violence, inflicted on a continent wracked by the slave trade, internal wars and epidemics, is the dominant theme: empire-building is always brutal. France’s conquest and settlement of Algeria, the first European colony in Africa in modern times, sets the scene. Between 1830 and 1875, an estimated 875,000 Algerians

Boyd Tonkin

Dangerous liaisons | 26 January 2017

In a Kashmiri apple orchard, a young fugitive from the Indian army’s cruel oppressions spots a snake that has ‘mistaken its tail for a separate creature’ and started to devour itself. Imran, a.k.a. ‘Moscow’, will later break away from the equally barbaric Islamist insurgents who prey on his rage and grief, flee to Pakistan, and there meet the other protagonists of this fifth novel by Nadeem Aslam. Although The Golden Legend has plenty of passages of exposition and argument, Aslam shines above all as the fabricator of radiant images that tell a story in themselves. That self-consuming serpent — an ouroboros in Greek myth — here embodies not only the

Christopher Bray

Boy wonder

Back in 1978, a young and already successful Steven Spielberg told a bunch of would-be moviemakers at the American Film Institute not to ‘worry if critics like… Molly Haskell don’t like your movies’. Four decades on, and just in time to mark his 70th birthday, Haskell has written a biography of Spielberg for Yale’s series of Jewish Lives. Since the series is essentially celebratory, and since Haskell is one of the hanging judges of feminist film criticism, this is an interesting commission. But is it a wise one? Whatever you think of Spielberg’s work, its emphasis on motherhood and apple pie hardly makes it feminist fodder. Little wonder Haskell hesitated

Sam Kitchener

Telling on mother

Like many debut novels, The Nix, by the American author Nathan Hill, is about somebody writing their first book. Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an erstwhile literary wünderkind, working as an English professor at an undistinguished college outside Chicago, was paid a huge advance a decade ago, on the strength of a single short story. It is now 2011, the promised book has failed to materialise, and Samuel’s publishers have, reasonably enough, decided to sue him. His editor, Guy Periwinkle, is an author’s nightmare of a publishing bigshot, for whom ‘a book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it’. You suspect Periwinkle would be happy with

Louis Amis

Do you know who I am?

Anyone looking for a groundbreaking ethnography of the global political elite —the elusive social grouping that western electorates are currently lining up to slap in the face — is likely to be disappointed by this book. In the course of these ‘Misadventures’ it is often stated that, for example, ‘At the UN, the bullshit meter is off the charts,’ or ‘the State Department is… full of self-importance and hot air… with very little tangible output. ‘The reader may have suspected as much; but rather than elucidating that world, Daniel Levin depicts ‘the powerful’ almost exclusively in the form of not very amusing or original caricatures, which troop by to dramatise,

Daniel Swift

A losing streak

In backgammon, a blot is a single checker, sitting alone and unprotected. This is a sly title for this sly novel (which was published in the US as the more literal A Gambler’s Anatomy). The hero, Alexander Bruno, is a single, exposed man, and a professional backgammon player. He also suffers from an eye condition: there is a floating blank space in his line of vision, which means that he cannot see that which he looks directly at. Lastly, as a term drawn from the specific vocabulary of the game, the title suggests Lethem’s deep interest in the conventions and insider language of obsessions and professions. As the novel opens,

Douglas Murray

The empathy trap

Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in certain circumstances, in general it is a poor moral guide. ‘It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.’ As always this depends on definitions. And as Bloom says from the outset, ‘The act of feeling what you think others are feeling —whatever one chooses to call this — is different from being compassionate,

Mark Cocker

Lord of the Arctic

According to the author of this beautifully illustrated, hugely engaging book, if we were ever to choose a fellow mammal to serve as symbol for our time, then the polar bear would probably make any shortlist. Standing ten feet tall on their hind legs and weighing as much as a ton, the males are the world’s largest terrestrial predators and the only ones to seek human flesh actively. This extraordinary whale- and walrus-wrestling monster is proof positive that wildness persists on our planet, despite the onslaughts of the Anthropocene. For all its nightmare-haunting power, however, the aspect of the polar bear that really makes it an icon of the age

Richard Davenporthines

An infinite spirit

Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid for tawdry, over-simplified stunts? Howard Bloch is a professor at Yale whose previous books have had medieval French literature, the Bayeux tapestry and medieval misogyny as their subject matter. He has taken an entertaining diversion in his career by writing a relaxed and accessible book about Mallarmé’s poem of 1897, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘One toss of the dice will never abolish chance’) and its place in belle époque Paris. The professor’s erudition and light touch need no Barnum-style booming. There is nothing incredible in the

Philippe Sands

A singular horror

Seventy years after the Nazi Holocaust, against the background of a rich and varied literature, Laurence Rees has achieved the unexpected: a magisterial book that consolidates what has come before and manages to offer fresh perspectives. With Brexit, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen now centre stage, it also offers a timely reminder of the dangers that are unleashed when the path of demonisation and discrimination is embraced in the name of national well-being. As Primo Levi wrote in 1947, from his own experience, when the ‘unspoken dogma’ of group targeting becomes ‘the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. Like

Thursday

Hari Kunzru

The trapper and the trapped

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance, readers were introduced to nightmarish, purgatorial worlds shot through with millennarian anxiety and a hopeless mystical yearning for the divine. Then, in 2013, the massive novel — or perhaps more accurately a cloud of novellas — Seiobo There Below (published in Hungarian in 2008) revealed a writer

Clinton Heylin

The Band’s Barnacle Man

The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub- genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’ So it’s refreshing to find that Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson, the two notable rock memoirists this festive season, have both dispensed with the ghostly intermediary, dusted off their PCs, loaded a thesaurus programme and writ large. Doorstop large. In Robbie Robertson’s case, we are assured that every word of Testimony is his own, even

Dominic Green Dominic Green

A hellish paradise

‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.’ Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, is an academic picaresque. This unlikely hybrid might be the ideal vehicle for a trip around the ‘American lake’; the Caribbean’s cultures and peoples are also hybrids, legacies of unlikely crossings. The masters, slaves, indentured labourers and merchant middlemen of the Caribbean were the first truly modern societies, drawn and dragged to a hellish paradise solely to serve a global

James Mcnamara

The legacy of Vietnam

At first glance, Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River seems like an application for a National Book Award. Its protagonist, Robert, a 70-year-old history professor, lives in comfortable ennui with his semiotician wife, Darla: tenure, sabbaticals, staring through separate study windows in their sprawling Florida home. It’s a life of carefully brewed coffee and uninterrupted research. All is well, save for the growing distance in the marriage, man and wife siloed into their respective Kindle-glows at night. But a chance meeting with Bob — a homeless man Robert assumes to be a veteran — reveals the reason for the disconnect: Robert’s unacknowledged guilt about his war in Vietnam. This is compounded

Mark Bostridge

Embarrassing Victorian bodies

The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the passing of the Victorian age, we have been treated to a never-ending stream of books about the monarch herself, the houses her subjects lived in, the railways they built and travelled on, their sexual peccadillos, the sensational murders that seized the headlines, and so on ad infinitum. Now we have a study devoted to that ultimate fetishistic object: the human body. According to Kathryn Hughes, biographical writing about the Victorians has been indifferent to their vital signs of life, movement, smell, touch and taste, behaving as if our ancestors were

Christopher Howse

Piety and wit

During the second world war, while one brother was editing Punch as a national institution (‘Working with him was a little like helping to edit the Journal of Hellenic Studies,’ said a colleague), and another brother, given to asking questions like ‘Which way does a clock go round?’, was breaking codes at Bletchley (as an interlude to piecing together fragments of the Greek low-life mime writer Herodas), Ronald Knox was translating the Bible. He did this at Aldenham Park, where he lived as a weekend guest who stayed for ten years, thanks to the hospitality of Lord Acton (whose grandfather was the historian) and more particularly Daphne, Lady Acton (whose

Andrew Taylor

A cold case from the Cold War

It is a chastening thought that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities now include MI6. Alan Judd’s latest novel is particularly interesting about the relationship between our intelligence services on the one hand and our politicians (and their special advisers) on the other. Deep Blue is the fourth of his spy novels to have Charles Thoroughgood as its central character. (Charles also appears in Judd’s very first novel, A Breed of Heroes, but as a young army officer in Northern Ireland rather than as a spy.) He is now running MI6, a thankless job, particularly as the service is fighting for funds and (worst of all) cast out of central London to an