Book Reviews Archives

Thursday

26 May 2016

An Oxford treasure trove

‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it… [whereas] every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him… Oxford men will say that this shows what a much more inspiring place Oxford is, and Cambridge men will say that it shows how much less quickly Oxford men grow up. The hefty and brilliant tome that has escaped from inside Professor Brockliss is very grown up indeed and, as a history of the university, greater than all those that have come before. (The previous, eight-volume account that inspired this one has many fine

Christopher Howse

On Moses’s mountain

A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim staffs shone like candles but, wisely chanting ‘Kyrie Eleison’, they were relieved that after an hour or so the fire abated and not an eyelash of theirs was harmed. The top of Mount Sinai is no place to be stuck in an electrical storm, even less exposed to the fire of God’s presence. A steep mass of weathered granite 7,616 ft high overlooking the Red Sea, it could be climbed on foot (but not on mule-back) with the help of 3,700 steps built into the rock. The slog was worth

Jonathan Bate

Shakespeare’s crowning glory

In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts of the plays preserved by his fellow actors in the posthumously published First Folio of his Comedies, Histories & Tragedies and those that had been published in the playwright’s lifetime in the cheap pocket editions, analogous to modern paperbacks, known in the trade as Quartos. In the case of King Lear, the subject of Sir Brian Vickers’s new book, the Quarto of 1608 is strikingly different from the Folio of 1623. The Quarto has nearly 300 lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has over 100 lines that

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

One club, no hearts

Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms: the dining-rooms and living-rooms, mainly, of five elderly, thin, Jewish bridge-playing ladies, Bette, Bea, Jackie, Rhoda and Roz, in a desirable suburb of New Haven, Connecticut. Their napkin rings are made of silver, porcelain, tortoiseshell, bamboo and Bakelite, and they put on their best necklaces and get out the best coffee cups when it’s their turn to host. They have met together to play bridge every Monday afternoon for over half a century. ‘Five ladies, luncheon of silvery fish, two decks of cards and a scoring pad nearby.’ (It’s five

Anna Aslanyan

Lost in a time capsule

On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants are treated well, parents encourage self-expression in children, poor students are given support, and intellectual discourse flourishes. Gerty comes to Moscow as the governess to a rich aristocratic family and stays through the war, the revolutions and the Red Terror. A free spirit, she embarks on her adventure with an enthusiasm which only grows in the face of the dramatic events she comes to witness. Gerty falls for the futurist of the title, Nikita Slavkin, an aspiring physicist, and both become ardent supporters of the revolutionary cause. Though their romance

Patrick Skene-Catling

The great monkey puzzle

King Kong, the story of a violently amorous gorilla, Me Cheeta, the autobiography of a slanderous Hollywood chimpanzee, and now this, a benign biological, psychological and cultural survey, comes in further recognition of the versatility of our primate cousins. Both collateral branches of our family seem doomed (too many humans, too few apes), unless. . . Chris Herzfeld, a philosopher of science, an artist and a founder of the Great Apes Enrichment Project, has written a movingly tragic study in praise of Wattana, a Bornean orangutan. Even the restrained academic publisher calls it ‘poignant’. Commercial depredations are spoiling Wattana’s ancestral forest habitat at such a rate that the orangutans of

Andrew Taylor

There’s no escape

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a

Juliet Nicolson

Great halls, last balls

Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at the end of the Great War. And in his deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book, Adrian Tinniswood, social historian and country house authority, also upturns the story that huge numbers of Britain’s loveliest houses disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s, either through lack of heirs, despair, neglect or the stranglehold of taxation. He describes how instead, with ‘new aesthetics and new social structures’, the clubby, elitist, joyful prewar way of life adapted and became even more vibrant after the Armistice. In part, the yearning for a sense of rootedness had

Stuart Kelly

The elegiac and the exuberant

Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a quibble over a consonant. Carver or Carter? On the surface, it would be easy to present Philip Hensher as the Raymond Carver-like elegiac naturalist, giving glimpses of disappointed lives and misunderstood epiphanies, and Helen Oyeyemi as the Angela Carter-ish exuberant fabulist, all giddy metamorphoses and yarns within tales within stories. It would be a disservice to both collections to read them in such a manner. All the stories in Tales of Persuasion have an exquisitely tweezer-y feel to them. The psychologies of the principal characters — an arts administrator realising

Stuart Ritchie

Principles of heredity

Darwin came tantalisingly close to understanding them, 20th-century eugenicists obsessed over them, and with modern science, we are poised to control them as never before. Genes are a constant source of fascination, yet ignorance and misunderstanding plague almost every public discussion of their effects on our health and behaviour. How useful it would be, then, if there was a clear, accurate, and up-to-date pop science book on genetics, a book that recounted the history of genetic science and reflected on its implications for the future of medicine and society. This is the goal of the new book by oncologist-biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is a lofty goal, and Mukherjee attempts it

Friday

20 May 2016

A.J. Goldmann

The wunderkind disappoints – but Cassel may take Best Actor: Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World reviewed

‘This day fucking sucks,’ remark several characters over the course of Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World. It’s hard to argue with them. Recriminations, ugly behaviour and shitty attitudes are par for the course in this dysfunctional family drama. A young, gay playwright named Louis returns home after 12 years to his family to announce that he is dying, probably of AIDS, although that word is never mentioned. His emotional roller coaster of a homecoming lasts a grand total of five hours, as he tries to reconnect with his nervous, oblivious mother, the younger sister whose adolescence he missed and takes heaps of abuse from his brutish older brother.

Fisun Güner

Dumbed-down ‘accessible’ writing is just as bad as obscurantist art-speak

When the art critic Robert Hughes died in 2012, someone from the Times turned up on Channel 4 News to sing his praises. The journalist burbled on for a few flailing, hapless minutes and you were left wondering whether she’d actually ever read him. The great critic’s strength was apparently his, wait for it, ‘accessibility’. Eschewing obscurantist art-speak – the desiccated argot of the art establishment – it seemed Hughes’ critical gifts lay in not being difficult to read. But who familiar with Hughes’ robust and sinuous prose would ever call it ‘accessible’? It wasn’t. His facility with language was underpinned by a ferocious intellect, and it showed. Acuity and insight made

Thursday

19 May 2016

James Yorke

The feast before the famine

If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was certainly more prosperous and peaceful than it would be after the 1848 famine. This idyllic world is captured in Patricia McCarthy’s scholarly and highly entertaining work, which stretches from the start of the building of Castletown House, Co. Kildare, in 1722, to the 1848 famine. The chapters are arranged as though one were visiting an Irish country house: you approach the house in its landscaped setting; you are led through the hall; you are ushered into the dining room; you are shown the other public rooms, such as the saloon,

Leyla Sanai

The Feelgood factor

When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who deserve derision — those whose egos and clothes’ bills dwarfed their talent — and those who commanded respect. Wilko Johnson, one-time guitarist of Dr Feelgood, was of the latter. Whether pacing moodily on stage, hammering out choppy refrains on Feelgood classics such as ‘Roxette’, or touring and recording with subsequent bandmates, he was a dedicated grafter with attitude and ability in spades. More recently, Johnson has been in the news for very different reasons. In 2012, he was diagnosed as having inoperable terminal pancreatic cancer. His fortitude in the face

Andre Van Loon

Fleeing Mother Russia

‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with a large hose while another sailor scrubbed away with a stiff, long-handled brush with bristles cut at an angle. I had thought at the time that nothing in the world could be jollier.’ This is Russian writer Teffi accepting her enforced labour on board a refugee ship fleeing Bolshevik Russia. Moments before, a dispossessed landowner has proclaimed his right to idleness — ‘Hire someone! Do whatever is necessary! If you prefer all this socialist nonsense, then what are you doing on this ship?’ A few notches below his social class

James Walton

… and sense and sensibility

Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books themselves’. It’s a theory, I’m afraid, that doesn’t apply to this review — but it certainly does to this book: an impeccably wide-ranging collection of Ferdinand Mount’s own non-fiction reviews, including for The Spectator, over three decades. Find yourself unaccountably vague on the premiership of Lord Rosebery? A little rusty on the life of George Gissing? Embarrassingly patchy on the history of Methodism? Thanks to Mount, there’s no need to plough through 500 pages on any of them — nor the more than 50 other subjects he covers. Now you

Peter Bradshaw

Pride, prejudice, celebrity…

Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short chapters is as unwholesomely addictive as a Pringle coated in crack cocaine. It’s clearly influenced by writers like Tina Fey, Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers. But that isn’t the point. Because with a certain punky insouciance, Sittenfeld has closely modelled her entertainment on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The Bennet sisters are now a quintet of unmarried women aged between 20 to 40, hailing from Cincinnati: Liz Bennet is a journalist working for Mascara magazine in New York; her elder sister Jane is a yoga instructor, her younger sister Mary

Kate Maltby

Elizabeth alone

If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young prophetess, a charismatic war leader, slips alone into her private chambers and removes an enchanted necklace. Beneath it, she’s just one more withered crone. We, the viewers, having happily feasted on her naked body, now congratulate ourselves on seeing it for what it is: another whore’s trick. This moralistic antipathy towards the over-preserved female body haunts popular studies of the last years of Queen Eliza-beth I. Nearly a century ago, Lytton Strachey kick-started the grotesquerie genre with Elizabeth and Essex: ‘As her charms grew less, her insistence on their presence

Allan Mallinson

Wars on drugs

‘Of all civilisation’s occupational categories, that of soldier may be the most conducive to regular drug use.’ The problem with this statement — the first words of this book — is the problem with the book as a whole: it may be correct, and there again it may not be. Even the captionless cover photograph is ambiguous: of an American soldier, in Vietnam perhaps, with a corncob pipe which may or may not contain a banned substance, though we are obviously meant to infer that it does. Then there is the inconclusiveness: ‘One may say that to a lesser or greater degree drugs shaped warfare.’ Yes, one may; but to

Tim Martin

The cryonics game

Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and capital. Language and death. Just as it used to be possible to play Ballard Bingo with the work of the late 20th century’s other great literary monomaniac, so Don DeLillo’s themes have remained astonishingly consistent in the 45 years since Americana, his first novel, appeared. The unswerving focus has a lot to do with why, like Ballard, he has so often been charged with prophecy: in cryptic gallows comedies such as White Noise and The Names, with their sinister wonder-drugs and murderous language cults, or the spacey and frigid Mao