Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Allan Massie

They’re all doomed

Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s first novel for 14 years. For most of us he is better known as a travel writer, perhaps the finest of our time. But between journeys there have been seven previous novels, and this new one draws on his travelling. Ostensibly confined to a house converted into single apartments, and a night when it is consumed by a fire starting in its basement, it actually, in its chapters each devoted to one of its seven characters, wanders the world, while also moving to and fro in time. The seven characters are designated by role or occupation: landlord, priest, neurosurgeon, naturalist, photographer, schoolboy, traveller. We

Mark Cocker

Trees of life and death

Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on these veterans, and in The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona Stafford makes a welcome and entertaining contribution. She draws on material from fields including folklore, natural science, literature, cultural history, European art, ancient mythology and modern medicine to illuminate such trees’ central place in western civilisation. Sometimes all of these are skilfully blended in

Harry Mount

Long lives the King

Elvis only ever appeared in one commercial in his life — for Southern Maid, his favourite jam doughnut shop. That commercial appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1955. But since his death in 1977, Elvis has appeared in adverts all over the world: ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ has been borrowed to flog bathroom fragrances; a Greek dairy company used ‘Always on My Mind’; and Coca-Cola, BMW and Nike have all been promoted with ‘A Little Less Conversation’. Ted Harrison’s central thesis — that Elvis has been much more heavily and successfully commercialised in death than in life — is convincing. This is an odd, rambling, repetitive book,

Lee Langley

The horrors of French colonialism

We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’ been a contender!’ in On the Waterfront still resonates — but I have a problem with heroic thickos: Othello, so easily duped; purblind Lear… So I’m ambivalent about the leading character in the new novel by the French-Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra — his wife’s name, adopted by Mohammed Moulessehoul to evade the military censors when he was an officer in the Algerian army. The award-winning author of more than 20 novels, most notably The Swallows of Kabul, he now lives in France but retains the pseudonym. The Angels Die is

Peter Bradshaw

Desperate liaison

Six years ago, the Canadian author Clancy Martin made a splash with his autobiographical novel How to Sell, based on the hard-drinking years he spent as a jewellery salesman before going to college and beginning the brilliant academic career he currently enjoys as a philosopher. Now he has come up with a weird, densely focused novella about an adulterous affair being pursued by an alcoholic female writer, who is the one doing the narrating. It’s beside the point to wonder if this too is autobiographical. In his acknowledgements, Martin thanks the people who ‘together convinced me to rewrite what began as a memoir into fiction’. As ever, there is incidental

Patrick Skene-Catling

The axeman cometh | 11 August 2016

All organic beings descended from a single primordial blob, according to Darwin. Some of them developed sufficiently to leave the commodious depths and widths of the sea to scramble ashore. Was that wise? In this intricately detailed history, David Miles, a distinguished Oxford archaeologist, takes up the story of human evolution since our species and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor about seven million years ago. Between the origin of our life on Earth and the exponential population growth that causes long queues and traffic jams and threatens imminent apocalypse, there was a period when change amounted to beneficial progress. Miles is well qualified by his experience as director of

Alastair Smart

Preaching in pictures

To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy of Art and Design has written a revisionist biography of Hieronymus Bosch: one which tells us that the Early Netherlandish painter wasn’t, as many over the centuries have suggested, the devil incarnate or Satan’s crazed representative on earth. Instead, his graphically disturbing visions of hell — infernal soups populated by hybrid monsters — were actually the product of a devoutly Catholic, medieval mind. Bosch came from a family of painters in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch near Antwerp and, following an orthodox education and advantageous marriage, became an important member of

Philip Hensher

A meeting of two minds

This lovely, modest and precise book tells the story of the most productive friendship among the modernists, and the most surprising. Stanley Price calls James Joyce and Italo Svevo two of the four great modernists, along with Kafka and Proust. That may overstate the case for Svevo, but no reader will reach the delightful, happy ending of their friendship and begrudge a biographer’s warm enthusiasm. Few encounters between a paint manufacturer and a teacher of English as a foreign language have ever ended in a mood so like a fairy tale. In 1904, Joyce arrived in Trieste with a woman he had met only four months earlier called Nora Barnacle.

Marek Kukula

Is there anybody out there?

Fifty years ago this summer, a new show appeared on American TV screens. These, the opening titles explained, were the voyages of the starship Enterprise; its mission — to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations. Half a century later the Star Trek franchise still rumbles irrepressibly on, but now the first part of the Enterprise’s mission has moved firmly from the realms of science fiction into those of fact. The change is profound: in 2016 we can look up at a night sky full of stars and know that almost every one of them has its own family of planets orbiting around it, just

Emily Rhodes

The power of music and storytelling

Madeleine Thien’s third novel, recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, begins in Vancouver with Marie, who, like the author, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to Canada. Marie tells us that her father committed suicide in 1989 and that, soon after, the 19-year-old Ai-ming — whose father knew Marie’s father — came to stay, having escaped China in the aftermath of Tiananmen. Ai-ming is drawn to a notebook that has been found among Marie’s father’s surviving paperwork: a handwritten copy of part of a mysterious Book of Records. Marie persuades Ai-ming to tell her the story. Her tale transpires to be not the content of that book, but the

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

From cosy to crazy

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall, the only summer festival I’d pay to attend. Indeed, I ended up paying through the nose. Not only did I rent a teepee so that we wouldn’t have to lug our bell tent from the car park to the campsite and back, but I bought Caroline and our four children special wristbands so they could use the ‘posh loos’. I thought she’d get a particular kick out of swanning off with them to do their ablutions in the morning in the lap of luxury while I had to queue up to use one of the Portaloos. For those who’ve never had

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The Bible is too important to be left to believers

May I write a review of a review? I have to get this out of my system, having been unable to sleep last night, for anger at Christopher Howse’s beastly, scoffing and unjust treatment of a new book: Simon Loveday’s The Bible for Grown-Ups, reviewed in our 30 July issue. Somebody needs to call a halt to the tedious practice of using review to show off at somebody else’s expense. It happens that I feel a special protectiveness towards this book, having seen the manuscript last year and encouraged its author to seek a publisher. Icon books have now published him, and done his study proud. The book deserves it.

Mary Keen

Playing at shepherdesses

Oh, the longueurs of aristocratic Georgian leisure. What on earth did they do all day, with no domestic chores, no Wi-Fi, no television, no telephones for chatting and the slowest of transports to move their lives from the sticks to the bright lights of London or Bath? Kate Felus has written a fascinating book which tells us how the 18th-century landed gentry whiled away their summers out of doors. On winter she does not dwell, because, as she says, summer was the time when all the great landowners were likely to be at their country estates. Apart from Margaret Willes’s excellent Gardens of the British Working Class, the documented social

Ian Birrell

Getting away with murder

Cher Hughes loved the beauty, the white sand beaches and sun-kissed climate of the tropical islands of Bocas del Toro in Panama. So she sold her thriving sign business in Florida and spent the profits on creating a new life on the Caribbean archipelago. She and her husband built a beautiful home filled with fine furnishings on Darklands, a private island with coconut palm trees and a sheltered cove, while investing in a couple of rental units nearby. Hughes threw herself into her new life. She went into the jungle to find strange blooms for her vases and searched for armadillos in the moonlight. A blonde in her forties, she

Houman Barekat

Glimpses of beauty

Born in Michigan, raised in Lagos and educated in London and New York, Teju Cole is about as cosmopolitan as they come. In an interview with the American writer Aleksandar Hemon, republished in Known and Strange Things, he declares that ‘cities are our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance.’ Cole, whose PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel Open City (2012) was a paean to the vitality of urban sprawl, is an art historian by training; the essays and reviews in this collection — gathered from several years of writing for publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker — reveal

Stephen Bayley

The faceless man in the bowler hat

Surrealism was, at least initially, as much about writing as painting. A plaque on the Hotel des Grands Hommes in Paris’s Place du Pantheon records that the oneiric movement began in 1919 when André Breton and Philippe Soupault invented ‘l’ecriture automatique’ at numéro 17. Automatic writing, with consciousness suspended, was supposed to open a conduit to an internal dreamworld. René Magritte (1898–1967) became one of the most famous Surrealist painters, but he wrote throughout his life: detective stories, manifestoes, criticism, essays, prose-poems, lectures, surreal bric-a-brac. His Ecrits Complets was published by Flammarion in 1979 and ran to 764 pages. The avant-garde publisher John Calder intended an English edition, but it

A.S.H. Smyth

Heroes in error

In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation — or ‘big Army goatfuck’, as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton’s debut novel — three central storylines move through and around each other. Specialist Wilson, whose commanders can’t read maps but watch Black Hawk Down for ‘pointers’, and who is so frustrated he actually wants to be attacked by the Iraqis; Qasim al-Zabadi, a timid maths professor who lives with his Baghdadi uncle, enduring the attentions of unnamed government officials and of his Michael Jackson-loving cousins; and Aaron, who’s ‘just come back’ — too recently, in fact, to be breaking tofu

Anthony Cummins

You can run but you can’t hide

In The Circle, Dave Eggers’s satirical dystopia about an insatiable Google-like conglomerate, there’s a scene in which drones hound a social-media refusenik to his live-streamed doom; the character’s name, Mercer, was a nod to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1841 essay ‘Self-Reliance’ saw Twitter coming. At least that’s a hunch that looks fairly sound now that Eggers has written a novel about going off-grid in the woods. His fourth book in as many years (apparently he doesn’t have Wi-Fi), it’s another chronicle of post-Dubya America — the object of Eggers’s elegy and polemic ever since he ditched the postmodern frills of his meta-memoir debut, A Heartbreaking Work of

Naomi Alderman

Thoroughly modern Buffy

Cards on the table. Before I’d published my first novel, or written for newspapers, or won awards for my writing, before all of that, in 2004, I presented a paper at an academic conference about Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Nashville, Tennessee. I couldn’t really afford to go to that conference. I didn’t have time to be there. I wasn’t an academic; it wouldn’t help my career. It was just that when I heard there was an academic conference about Buffy the Vampire Slayer I knew I had to be there. Not in an ironic way, not as silly fun. I desperately needed to be around people who could talk

Sean Mcglynn

The Teutonic King Arthur

Hitler, ever seeking to emulate strong German hero types (especially if their Christian name was Frederick), unsurprisingly named his great invasion of Russia ‘Operation Barbarossa’. It is in this context that the name — meaning ‘Redbeard’ — is best known today. Apart from that, a rather clunky eponymous Italian film from 2011 and a presence in the underground heavy metal music scene, awareness of the medieval German emperor outside of Germany and Italy is very limited. This owes much to the fact that John Freed’s biography is the first in English for half a century. A 700-page doorstopper, this impressive, learned book certainly makes amends for this previously serious oversight.