Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Ali A.

The sick man of Europe finally succumbs

In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai, China’s premier on the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ was Zhou’s answer. Zhou was not simply being enigmatic. His answer had a great deal to do with the enormous consequences that flow from cataclysmic events such as revolutions and wars, which influence the course of peoples and nations in ways that cannot be easily foreordained or traced. The Great War led to the dissolution of three European empires — Russian, Austrian and German — from which emerged unimaginable consequences for the future of

Craig Raine

The raw material of fiction

Saul Bellow died in 2005. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The first installment of Zachary Leader’s exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling biography runs to over 800 pages and takes us only as far as 1964. The length is important. It allows Leader to adjudicate calmly, weigh the evidence — sometimes remaining undecided — and quote Bellow freely, so that the biographical narrative is enlivened by Bellow’s prodigally gifted prose, little injections of bliss. In his introduction, Leader quotes the appearance of the turtle from Herzog — ‘it trailed a fuzz of parasitic green’ — and makes it clear that Bellow’s fluent, unstoppable descriptive kleptomania, as

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Revolt on the Right: Award-winning Ukip authors bicker about party’s election chances

At the Political Book Awards earlier this year, Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford took home the £10,000 top prize for their book on the rise of Ukip, Revolt on the Right. However, word reaches Steerpike that despite their success the literary duo have rather diverging views when it comes to their subject. In fact, the pair’s bickering on social media caused one user to liken it to ‘the Twitter version of seeing parents having a row’. Ford, who lectures at the University of Manchester, took to Twitter to assert that he is the co-author of the book after Goodwin failed to name check him in a tweet: .@GoodwinMJ @DPJHodges I co-authored that and I think this

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: a paean to Red Rum (plus: famous writers’ job applications)

Thanks to David Pearn, who suggested that I invite competitors to write a paean to a famous racehorse and drew my attention to Right Royal, John Masefield’s 1920 fine narrative poem about a steeplechaser. It was strong field of champions past — Shergar, Desert Orchid, Frankel, Dawn Run — and present — this year’s victor at Aintree, Many Clouds. Peter Goulding made me smile with his tribute to the 100/1 long shot Foinavon. P.C. Parrish, Roger Theobald and Jane Dards were also unlucky to miss out on a place in the winners’ enclosure. I could almost hear the thunder of hooves as I read Chris O’Carroll’s bonus fiver-winning entry. His

Thursday

Steven Poole

Indulge your inner reptile

What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question no one in their right mind would ask, but this book represents a kind of answer anyway. Offering a rambling pseudoscientific argument that some countries are better than others at enabling their citizens to flourish, it affects to have uncovered archetypes of the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ that are characteristic of each nation. Meanwhile, cultures get a gold star if they indulge, rather than repress, the ‘reptilian’ part of our brains, which is mainly interested in food and sex, as opposed to the ‘limbic’ brain (emotions) and the cortex (higher reasoning).

Duncan Fallowell

Toujours la politesse

Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then transported to terraces of cypress and statuary, sunshine and high art, Edith Wharton and Paul of Yugoslavia cooing over a balustrade. Clark was 22 and had just finished at Oxford; he was ‘doing’ Italy with Charles Bell, Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean. Lunch at I Tatti, Berenson’s citadel of aesthetic endeavour near Florence, was arranged. By the end of it, Clark had been taken on as Berenson’s assistant for the revision of the master’s classic The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. Cumming tweaks the myth: Clark’s youthful self-assurance

Tim Bouverie

Passionate pioneers

If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even greater reason could be said of her daughter Mary Shelley. Not only was she the child of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was also the daughter of William Godwin, the radical political philosopher. Given this auspicious pedigree, it is perhaps not surprising that Shelley would lead a life every bit as daring as her mother, and in Frankenstein produce a masterpiece of equal fame. A joint biography of this most famous mother/daughter combination is, therefore, a good idea. Despite the fact that Wollstonecraft died

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…

Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have been occasions during the past three years, since I was given the heave-ho from my last regular newspaper column, when I’ve felt that I didn’t exist any more, despite having a happy marriage and more than enough money. Then I recently returned from a carefree holiday, realised that I had four deadlines over the next four days (including this one) and momentarily wished for those wilderness times. But on balance I know I would rather work than not. That is, of course, if one can call reading a book about

Andrew Taylor

Gore blimey

Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had brought him into critical disfavour, he turned to writing sprightly detective fiction under the name of Edgar Box. It’s much less well-known that he also took a dip in the far murkier waters of the pulp thriller. Thieves Fall Out, originally published in 1953 and then deservedly forgotten, centres on Pete Wells, ex-wildcatter and former war hero, who turns up in King Farouk’s Egypt for no very good reason. Mugged in a Cairo brothel, he’s forced to look for work. Naturally he goes to Shepheard’s hotel (‘where the biggest operators

Lee Langley

A peephole into Peru

Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came the soufflé of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter with its mischievous nod to TV soaps, followed by The Feast of the Goat, a searing portrait of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. Sixteen novels on, The Discreet Hero is Llosa-lite. Nobel laureate, academic and politician (he ran for president in 1990), Peru’s most celebrated writer has acknowledged Flaubert as his spiritual mentor. In The Perpetual Orgy, a critical study, he put forward his theory of Flaubert’s style: the manipulation of narrative and time, obsession with pairs, humanising of objects. All are

William Cook

Bitten by the bug

‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at night, which may be why, like the author of this book, I never thought bedbugs were real. ‘Bedbugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing,’ Brooke Borel told her father (a pathologist who specialises in skin conditions). But as Mr Borel told his disbelieving daughter, bedbugs are real all right. They even have a fancy Latin name: Cimex lectularius. So, having been bitten to buggery (moral: never share a flat with someone who bought a used futon off the internet) Brooke Borel did what virtually every journalist ends

Mark Mason

Dirty dealing across the board

I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known antidote to the will to the live. There is a 12 per cent chance that any given game of Monopoly will go on for ever (the other 88 per cent just feel like that). In fact I’m still not convinced that the name isn’t a spelling mistake. The story of Monopoly, on the other hand — now there’s a thing. Specifically, the story of how it was invented. For decades the accepted version had down-on-his-luck Charles Darrow creating the game in the 1930s, as entertainment for his impoverished family and

Christopher Bray

What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him

Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break is the fact that Ed Miliband is a snooker fan. Which doesn’t mean he was a Steve Davis fan. Davis was ‘boring’, Miliband told the Guardian recently. The sentiment was widely shared during Davis’s 1980s heyday. Indeed, the writers of Spitting Image found him so dull they nicknamed him ‘Interesting’. Hence the hostage-to-fortune title of what is by my count Davis’s third volume of autobiography. Will the leader of the opposition find anything in the book’s turgidly ghostwritten pages to modify his opinion? One fears not. Yet if Interesting isn’t

Christopher Howse

St George: patron saint of England, patronised by all

What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention of the dragon is made before the Norman Conquest. Nor is the pairing ‘England and St George’, invoked by Shakespeare’s Henry V, much noted outside Britain. Foreigners do not know that the English think St George is theirs alone. Many other nations are keen on him — Ethiopia, with a 13th-century church carved out of rock for him, Egypt where the Copts rejoice in him, or of course Georgia — and they all tell local versions of his legend. One quite untrue tale is Edward Gibbon’s identification of him, which

Wednesday

The Spectator

Watch live: Spectator wealth debate with Owen Jones, Jack Monroe, Toby Young and Fraser Nelson

The Spectator will host a debate at 7.00pm this evening on whether ‘Politicians should leave the wealthy alone, because they already contribute more than their fair share’. Fraser Nelson, Toby Young and William Cash will go head-to-head with Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato, with Andrew Neil chairing the debate. The debate has now sold out, but if you were unable to get tickets, we are offering Coffee House readers an exclusive chance to watch the debate live from 7.00pm. You can sign up here prior to the debate, then when the debate begins, you will be able to view the event live, as well as comment and vote on the motion. It’s going to

Thursday

Philip Gwyn Jones

The civil war for books: where is the money going?

This is a transcript of a speech given at this year’s London Book Fair: Over the course of the last few years, it has come to feel that we bookish types are stuck in our very own world war one re-enactment, in trench warfare over where the money lines are drawn. The skirmishes in the global book industry are internecine and unrelenting: the independent authors bombard the traditional publishers; the traditional authors bombard the literary festival directors; the traditional publishers bombard the retailers; academics denounce those who would defend copyright as traitors to the public good; and the retailers take the publishers to courts martial. Who will taste defeat first? The publishers?

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The power of collective grievance

When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the 20th century’, he knew he was entering a minefield. On 24 April Armenians will commemorate the 100th anniversary of their genocide. There can be no single date for a genocide but that was the day the entire leadership of the Armenian people was arrested by the Ottoman government in Constantinople, now Istanbul, whose successors are the modern Turkish state. The Ottomans had never trusted Armenians, who were Christians, and had long suspected them of being a fifth column within the empire. There had already been pogroms. But now began a

Daniel Hannan

The same old song

T.S. Eliot liked to recall the time he was recognised by his London taxi driver. Surprised, he told the cabbie that poets weren’t often recognised. ‘I’ve an eye for celebrities,’ the driver replied. ‘I ’ad that Lord Russell in the back o’ the cab the other day. I said to ’im, “All right, then, Bertrand, so wossit all about?” And, you know what, ’e couldn’t tell me.’ I’ve always felt the story reflects well on the cabbie. While it may have been asking too much of Bertrand Russell to condense his philosophy into the length of a taxi journey, he surely ought to have been able to say something useful.

Alex Clark

Sink or swim

The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman — once a slave in the West Indies, for a time a weaver and now an itinerant single mother dubbed ‘Crazy Woman’ by those who might toss a coin in her direction — finally gives up the unequal struggle. What becomes of her son, in whom still beats ‘a strong and tenacious heart’ despite his abandonment, is for the moment unclear; his connection to the novel Wuthering Heights occupies a later portion of this sometimes frustratingly patchwork novel. For now, though, we are transported to 1950s Oxford and a woman with

Andy Miller

Pure word music

Since his debut with the Booker-nominated The Restraint of Beasts in 1999, Magnus Mills has delighted and occasionally confounded his loyal readers with a series of novels and short stories about projects, schemes and expeditions that never quite seem to pan out. In these situations, his characters tend to dither politely between cautious enthusiasm and mild exasperation. It’s the deadpan comedy of thwarted logistics. Similarly, a person could drive him or herself slightly mad trying to puzzle out exactly what Mills’s books are about. Do they have a hidden meaning? Are they parables, allegories, fables? One often has the sense that the author knows but enjoys not telling. What matters