Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Crane

The forgotten faithful

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so often a book comes along that makes you think that something similar could be said of the English language. It would seem from Farthest Field’s dust jacket that this is Raghu Karnad’s first book, but if this assured and moving memoir of wartime India is an apprentice piece, then you can only wonder what is coming next. From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out. There is a very English control of irony that can suggest Forster — the Forster of A Passage

Hilary Spurling

Only the lonely

This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase, let alone unpack it. It closes at the opposite end of the social scale with a small girl squatting on a plank over a village cesspit, watching the maggots seething and squirming far below as they struggle to climb the sides of the pit towards the light. The cesspit was the only place where a child of five could find refuge from back-breaking labour in the fields. ‘Granny said girls who don’t work get no food,’ she tells Xinran, who meets her two decades later as a student working for

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Some animals are more equal than others

Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb. One looks at the history of the world through the story of the chicken; the other does the same through the story of the pig. Which would you prefer? I found the chicken one harder going — like ploughing through one of those brilliant but exhausting New Yorker articles that never seem to end, for which the journalist with too generous a budget has spent years interviewing hyper-specialist scientists in labs and ‘facilities’ across the USA — but I found the pig one sadder. There’s an illustration I had to

Edmund Gordon

Confessions of a Fedhead

Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous that we’ve had so much of it about Roger Federer. The gold standard was set in 2006 with David Foster Wallace’s remarkable essay ‘Federer as Religious Experience’, in which the great novelist provided a dazzling analysis of the great player’s game. Then came Jon Wertheim’s Strokes of Genius (2010), an elegant account of the 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. In a letter published in Here and Now (2013), the correspondence between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, the latter contributed an uncharacteristically lyrical bit of praise for the

Caroline Jackson

Sub-Aga saga

Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored by the import-export business’. Enter long lost, lonely Bert, who ‘left soldiering, a distinguished colonel, and went to work for an oil company in New York’, plus Isabel’s unlikely friend and marriage-predator, thirtysomething Carlotta, who boasts a red dress, Mercedes coupé, unspecified high-powered job and ‘amazing (yes, amazing, I know) breasts’. Carlotta finds everyone ‘absolutely dementing’, but neither Dan nor Bert can resist — while suspecting ‘she just might have been one of those women who think it quite in order to go to any lengths to get what you

Simon Heffer

Robin Hood v. the toffs

The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’ traditions, reluctant to surrender the old ways of sourcing food from nature’. Imagine a book about two men who were being celebrated for ‘continuing their ancestors’ tradition of beating their wives, raping them when necessary, treating them as their private property and forcing them into a life of drudgery and subjection’. Morally, this one is just as bad, and as a work of literature it is a joke. Bob Tovey and his son Brian have shared their way of life with a writer called John F. McDonald, who in a

John Niven

A watershed moment in music history

In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group — both long gone, swallowed up by Warner Bros. That summer some Americans came into our office to pitch us a project. Rather than unfurling some band or singer, they wanted to talk about technology, specifically the internet and what it would mean to our business in the future. They were looking for an investment of around 50 grand. They talked about how, in the future, kids would buy music on their computers and that they would be able to do it anywhere — on the train, in the street. ‘But

Emily Rhodes

The traffic in human misery

When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she travels to Delhi to uncover the circumstances of his death. On the surface, Invisible Threads is a novel about an English woman on a personal journey to India, and comes with many of the trappings we’d expect. Lucy Beresford describes the country’s assault on her protagonist’s senses and observes the seeming contradictions of poverty, such as when Sara sees a barefooted beggar — her ‘hair is matted, her turquoise sari filthy, but she is carrying a mobile phone’. Sara also finds India to be palpably erotic, imagining how a sari

Paul Levy

From ambrosia to zabaglione

Should sugar be taxed? Some of the contributors to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets seem to think so. Sugar certainly appears less appealing than it used to. Its negative effect on our teeth is undeniable, and it now takes the rap for many of the ills we formerly blamed on fats, such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. But sugar is also now bound up with politics, because of its historical connection with slavery. Our awareness of this we owe to the groundbreaking, imaginative scholarship of Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is easily the most frequently referenced work

Philip Marsden

Bogs and fogs

In his poem ‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley conjures up a dreamy memory of a childhood picnic ‘somewhere beyond Eden Rock’. He reported later: ‘Somebody asked me the other day where Eden Rock is —I mean I have no idea, I made it up! “Dartmoor,” I said — that’s always a safe answer.’ As southern England’s largest expanse of unenclosed land, Dartmoor has always been a good place to lose things: dangerous prisoners, children on their Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, military manoeuvres. It has also swallowed up voluminous amounts of parliamentary time, ministerial reports, public enquiries and arcane legislation — all of which centres on one simple question: what’s it for?

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winner: saucy short stories

The American writer Richard Brautigan fulfilled his ambition to end a short story with the word ‘mayonnaise’ in his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Actually, strictly speaking, he didn’t. As an eagle-eyed friend pointed out to me, the word appears, in most editions at least, as ‘mayonaise’, a deliberate misspelling on Brautigan’s part. But it was still a good excuse to invite you to write a short story ending on a condiment of your choosing. In an entry rich in invention, the pun-merchants had a field day and there were a number of Cluedo- and Wodehouse-inspired entries. Honourable mentions go to unlucky losers Peter Sain ley Berry, S.A. Leavesley,

Friday

Charlotte Hobson

We had so many books we had to hire a structural engineer to prevent us being buried

My father Anthony Hobson, whose books are to be sold at Christie’s in two sales next week, claimed that the book collector’s greatest joy was the sight of an empty shelf: a vacuum begging to be filled. Such a thing was a rare occurrence in our home, so freighted with literary matter, mainly upstairs, that the advice of a structural engineer had to be sought: were we all about to be buried beneath an avalanche of bibliographical rarities? On the landing stood the vast tomes on Renaissance book binding, my father’s lifelong study – serried dark objects stamped with words that sounded to my young self like spells: Sigismondo Boldoni,

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Are the cultural Marxists in retreat, or lying low?

In his Memoirs, Kingsley Amis includes a story about meeting Roald Dahl at a party in the 1970s. Dahl advises him to write a children’s book — ‘That’s where the money is’ — and brushes aside his objection that he doesn’t think it would be any good. ‘Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it,’ he says. Then, a few minutes later, Dahl raises himself to his full height and, with the air of a man asserting his integrity in the face of an outrageous slur, says: ‘If you do decide to have a crack, let me give you one word of warning. Unless you put everything you’ve got into it,

Mathew Lyons

Why Twitter was right to mock Craig Raine’s poem

Yesterday was a strange day on Twitter. For most of it, a living poet was trending. Unfortunately for Craig Raine, the poet in question, he was trending because a poem of his entitled ‘Gatwick’ had appeared in the LRB and Twitter didn’t like it. Most comments ranged from amused contempt to, well, just plain old contempt. But it wasn’t only angry feminists, as Lara Prendergast suggested yesterday, who leapt into action. Indeed, I saw much more ridicule than anger. Many of us were merely enjoying mocking what is by no means a good poem. Which is the point, really. Certainly there is no shortage of bad poetry in the world.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Women’s Prize for Fiction deserves a better drink than Baileys

Well, as a mere PR exercise, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, awarded last night, has done really well, what with the American woman from Diageo (owner of Baileys) causing Ian Hislop to fall asleep while standing up during her speech. I haven’t a clue whether Ali Smith’s book, How To Be Both, about sexuality-shifting, is any use, though I am still recovering from reading last year’s winner, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which is sort of James Joyce, only with really gross stuff about sexual abuse. It’s nice and short though. Two questions to ask about the prize. One, why was Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty,

Alexandra Coghlan

Celebrations of song and humanity

‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.’ Ask any musician for a one-sentence summary of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and they will probably tell you that he is Hungary’s national composer — a musical modernist who passionately championed his nation’s folk music tradition. David Cooper’s new biography seeks both to enrich and complicate that statement, questioning the definition of musical ‘nationalism’ in a country of such pronounced ethnic heterogeneity, at a time when borders were being drawn and redrawn, peoples created and destroyed, across Europe. The portrait that emerges is of no mindless patriot, celebrating his nation

Allan Mallinson

The bravest of the brave

‘It is the task of a Patton or a Napoleon to persuade soldiers that bits of ribbon are intrinsically valuable. The historian’s job, in part, is to spot contradictions and unravel obfuscations, and the history of the VC is steeped in both.’ To this job of de-obfuscating, Gary Mead, former journalist and military historian, might well add ‘though the heavens fall’. For although he concedes that, remarkably, the Victoria Cross remains ‘one of the few British institutions that is untarnished by accusations of corruption, scandal, political intrigue or manipulation’, the procedure for awarding the highest British decoration for courage in the presence of the enemy is ‘peppered with anomalies, contradictions,

Mark Cocker

To Hell in a handcart — again

Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world’s ecosystems. The case he lays bare with moving clarity in the opening chapters is compelling stuff. Essentially he argues that the world of wild creatures, plants, trees and whole habitats — you name it — is going to Hell in a handcart as a consequence of what he calls ‘the human project’. The cultural

Ian Thomson

Beautiful, bedevilled island

The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Arab rule was generally tolerant, its dolce far niente evocative of sultans, minarets, concubines and other jasmine-scented delights. Walking round Palermo today, however, one is assailed by less lovely smells. Parts of the city remain unreconstructed since the Allies bombed it in 1943: fire-blackened palazzi and rubble-strewn slumlands speak of the Mafia’s systematic ransacking of the public coffers. A still darker side of Palermo finds expression in the 19th-century catacombs of the Capuchin friary, situated near the Arab-Fatamid pleasure palace of La Zisa (‘the magnificent’). Some 8,000 embalmed corpses moulder

Keith Miller

Nasty piece of work

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled detective fiction’. The new book is not so much hard-boiled as slowly poached, Heston Blumenthal style, in a sous-vide water oven, then finished on a violently hot grill. King has the popular novelist’s gifts in spades — a flawless sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, an eye for the telling detail, a no-mess-no-fuss approach to characterisation. He also has special insights into the uncanny: his frequent forays into the supernatural are wrenchingly plausible, while his rendering of ‘ordinary’ things — a face, a doorway, the hollowed-out roots of a