Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Celebrity lives

I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish charms, from bullied boyhood : One time I was due to race for England abroad. The school announced the exciting news in assembly one morning… that afternoon I was attacked viciously with a cricket bat in the playground. I thought the other children would be proud of me. How wrong can you be? — to

The Spectator

Books of the Year: the best and most overrated of 2015

Anna Aslanyan   My top title of the year is Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape, £16.99), convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists, and that James Joyce, were he alive today, would be working for Google. I also enjoyed Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta, £14.99), a self-deconstructing novel whose metafictional plot speaks of the nature of time and of things being endlessly interconnected. My non-fiction pick is Iain Sinclair’s London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), the psychogeographer’s passionate take on 21st-century London, a place of perpetual change and chronological resonances. For the most overrated books of the year, see the

Thursday

Richard Francis

A chronic case of mass hysteria

There have been many books devoted to the terrible events that took place in the small rural community of Salem Village and its larger sister, Salem Town, between February 1692 and May 1693. As Stacy Schiff points out, most of them are shaped by particular theses — she lists 13 in all. This approach doesn’t just offer readers the consolation of an overriding explanation, but gives authors built-in filters, enabling them to concentrate on what proves their particular case. Such a strategy is tempting because of the unruly complexity of the Salem phenomenon, with its hundreds of accusers, accused, magistrates, ministers and fearful bystanders. Schiff’s own selective cast of characters

William Leith

Warning: this book only contains strong language

Dan Marshall, the author of this memoir, loves to swear. ‘It’s very difficult for me to write a sentence without using a bad word,’ he tells us. ‘That last sentence, for instance, was fucking impossible for me to write.’ Dan is young, rich and American. One day, in his twenties, he and his girlfriend, Abby, were on holiday, lying poolside at the Marriott resort in Desert Springs, California. He is in a world of material and sexual abundance. ‘My siblings and I were lucky, living with the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses,’ he tells us. He has lots of sex. So does his gay brother Greg. His

Jeff Noon

When escape to the sun — or even to Devon — goes horribly wrong

A character in Sophie Hannah’s A Game for All the Family (Hodder, £14.99, pp. 432) presents a theory: ‘Mysteries are the best kind of stories because you only get the truth at the very end, when you’re absolutely desperate.’ This makes us realise just how scarce truth is. In books, as in life. It’s an idea to keep in mind as we follow former television producer Justine on her quest to start a new, quieter life in Devon. This dream proves elusive, as her teenage daughter makes a new friend at school, a friend who the teachers insist doesn’t actually exist. Is the friend real, or just a product of

Christopher Bray

Frank’s world

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.’ Who was Bob Dylan talking about earlier this year? Woody Guthrie? Elvis Presley? Or maybe, halfway through the sixth decade of his own career, himself? But no. The man in question was Frank Sinatra — the inspiration behind Dylan’s latest album, Shadows in the Night. That record is a collection of covers —from the great American songbook — ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘The Night We Called it a Day’, ‘What’ll I Do’. We call such songs standards, as if they have been set, if not in stone, then at

Stephen Bayley

Designing the swimming car, the Doodlebug and the Panzer tank was all in a day’s work for Ferdinand Porsche

The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers. The joke goes: ‘When you get into a Porsche, you feel you want to invade Poland.’ In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, Karl Ludvigsen investigates the genetic spiral that gave Porsche cars the character of weaponry. All German manufacturers were forced to supply the Third Reich. The BMW-sponsored London Olympics 2012 were held on a site devastated by Luftwaffe planes powered by its engines. But the relationship between Professor Dr Ferdinand Porsche and Hitler, a motor-racing enthusiast, was altogether wider and deeper: the engineer put his design expertise exclusively

Wynn Wheldon

To the ends of the earth

What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing novel: Naomi, a good Hebrew name; Williams, a stout Welsh name; born in Japan; lives in California. The earth is spanned. Landfalls charts the voyage of two French frigates exploring the world at the end of the 18th century, after Cook but before the Revolution. Based on true events, the story unfolds in discrete episodes, short stories indeed, told from a variety of points of view, in changing cases and in differing person. The dramatis personae remain more or less constant; they cross-inform each others’ stories. In its work as

Anna Aslanyan

Umberto Eco really tries our patience

Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan. Domani (‘Tomorrow’) will never be published: a tycoon who finances it plans to use it as a blackmail tool in his shady dealings. The proposed title of the memoir, Domani: Yesterday, sets the tone for this pacy book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Carmen Callil

Where would America be without Gloria Steinem?, asks Carmen Callil

This is a book written by a most admirable woman, which is nevertheless — with some rare and excellent exceptions — most tiresome to read. Gloria Steinem has done heroic work as a founding force of American feminism and as an organiser, in America, for a myriad of causes. She is an icon of 1960s feminism, when persons such as she explained to women — mostly western women, but you have to start somewhere —that some sort of equality could be fought for and, if won, could change the world for all men and women. She spent some early years after university in India and a Gandhian philosophy permeates her

Mark Mason

Discover your inner nerd

There’s a curious thing about the bowling green in my Suffolk village. The footpath running alongside it is on a slope, meaning that as you descend, the wall gradually rises and hides the players from view. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I find myself slowing down to see what happens to the wood that’s just been delivered. Not knowing whether it reached the jack, or managed to nudge the opponent’s wood to one side, simply isn’t an option. It would be like going to see a whodunit and not staying to the end. This book gave me the same feeling. Crown green bowls is one

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

From the Big Smoke to the Big Choke

‘A foggy day in London town,’ croons Fred Astaire in the 1937 musical comedy A Damsel in Distress, puffing nonchalantly on a cigar as he wanders through a wood that has already been half obliterated by belching Hollywood smoke machines. Today Gershwin’s lyrics conjure up a nostalgic vision of life in the city, involving pale fingers of fog wrapping themselves around lamp posts and the muffled clop of hooves on cobbles. Actually, for many years the reality of a London fog was far less appealing. It clogged your lungs and made your eyes smart; it turned the air into a murky kaleidoscope of colours (yellow, grey, blue) that appeared to

Sinclair McKay

Through the eyes of spies

Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig’s face. Its adepts interrogate the surface of reality — people, landscapes, texts — knowing that they will discover extraordinary hermetic meanings. They study fragments of documents, whispers of messages, and from these, they summon entire worlds. Possibly one of the reasons Max Hastings cannot pretend to be hugely impressed by the boasts of wartime spies is the philosophical nebulousness of what constitutes ‘results’ in secret-agent speak. Soldiers fight, shoulder to shoulder; battles are clearly lost and won. But those who work in the shadows — and in The Secret War, Hastings turns

Ian Sansom

The best British short stories — from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith

Philip Hensher, the thinking man’s Stephen Fry — novelist, critic, boisterously clever — begins his introduction to his two-volume anthology of the British short story with typical gusto. ‘The British short story is probably the richest, most varied and most historically extensive national tradition anywhere in the world.’ Take that, ye upstart Americans, with your dirty realism and your New Yorker swank! Read it and weep, ye Johnny-come-latelys! Look to your laurels, Chekhov and Carver. Jorge Luis Who? Maupassant? Bof! And there’s more — much much more. In a short introduction of just 35 pages Hensher sets out his stall, settles some old scores and convincingly establishes himself as a

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: clerihews about fictional characters (plus: bad sex award)

The clerihew is a comic four-line (AABB) biographical poem characterised by metrical irregularity and awkward rhyme. The first line is often the subject’s name. Or, to put it another way: E.C. Bentley Quite accidently Invented this form of wit, And this is it. (Anon) Here is another clerihew inspired by the form’s inventor, this one written by Michael Curl: E.C. Bentley Mused while he ought to have studied intently; It was this muse That inspired clerihews. The call for clerihews about fictional characters attracted a sizeable postbag and there was much to applaud in an entry full of wit and whimsy. The winners below fought off stiff opposition to bag

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

A hint of anarchy everywhere

For a genre that is frequently dismissed as dead, travel writing is proving a remarkably stubborn survivor. If anything, this year’s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, won by Horatio Clare with Down to the Sea in Ships, a very British tale of the container-shipping trade, demonstrated how the genre remains in remarkably good health, shrugging off its perennial obituaries with great élan. Bristling with literary talent, the shortlist took in Jens Mühling on Russia, Elizabeth Pisani on Indonesia, a homage to Paddy Leigh Fermor by Nick Hunt, Helena Attlee on Italy and Philip Marsden on Cornwall. With John Gimlette, a previous winner of the same award for

Andrew Barrow

A tale of cloaks and daggers

You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio Scarpia, portrayed on stage as a ‘sadistic agent of reaction’, a cut-throat murderer who enjoys drinking his victims’ blood from their skulls and, as one of my opera-loving Kensington pals puts it, ‘not a nice bloke at all!’ In fact you may not even recognise him in these pages. Here Scarpia appears as an all-round human being, kind-hearted, handsome, likeable, occasionally lonely, even destitute, who also just happens to be a brilliant swordsman and man of action. Brought up in Sicily, his first act of daring is to rescue a

Richard Ingrams

Super man of legend

On 13 March 2014 a congregation of 2,000 people, including many of the great and the good, gathered in Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for David Frost, who had died suddenly six months previously while travelling on the Queen Mary to America. During the service a select band, led by the Dean of Westminster, John Hall, retired to Poets’ Corner, sacred to the memory of Keats, Shelley and others of the immortals, where the Prince of Wales laid flowers on a tablet in the floor bearing the illustrious name of Frost. Given that in only a few years’ time Frost’s name, along with many of today’s celebrities, was likely

Andrew Lycett

Through the Looking Glass

‘Have you got over your father yet?’ the 26-year-old David Cornwell was asked by MI5’s head of personnel when he joined the agency in the spring of 1958. And the answer, more than half a century later, has to be ‘no’. We knew of his conman father Ronnie’s cartoonish presence in Cornwell’s life, but never the extent to which he has dominated his very being. After leaving Lincoln College, Oxford, Cornwell taught for a couple of years at Eton, where he disliked the ‘Herrenvolk doctrine’ expounded in what he called the ‘spiritual home of the English upper classes’. So he sought a return to the secret world that he had

David Horspool

Who was then the gentleman?

Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 hasn’t proved particularly attractive to writers of historical fiction. Pierce Egan, better known for his essays on boxing, wrote an interminable novel called Wat Tyler in 1841, and Robert Southey produced a dramatic poem of the same title which he later disavowed. William Morris took another hero of the revolt, the itinerant preacher John Ball, as his inspiration for a time-travelling socialist fantasy; and that’s about it. Historians and political thinkers in the centuries after the revolt have often tried to redress the balance of the unrelentingly