Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Carrying on regardless | 25 June 2015

This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war. Apparently we then grew only 30 per cent of our food, horses did most of the work and a lot of the land, criss-crossed by empty roads featuring the occasional pony trap, had been abandoned to weeds and brambles. Move on a year or two and millions of acres had been brought under the plough. Tennis courts, golf courses, railway embankments, school playing fields and even the lawns of large houses had been turned into vegetable plots or corn fields. Barbed wire blocked the beaches, church bells only rang to

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Social climbing through the basement

This book has brought out my inner Miliband. A punitive mansion tax on all properties with garden squares in Notting Hill? Hell, yes! Friends, I’d go further: flight taxes on trips to Mustique; VAT at 27.5 per cent on Stella McCartney running shoes, Daylesford groceries, Yogalates classes, Vita Coco coconut water, almond milk and chia seeds. All prep schools which attract paparazzi shooting supermodels dropping off their children to be abolished, and little Fox and Memphis sent to the nearest inner-city comp not yet turned into an academy. As for iceberg basements: a direct payment of £1.5 million to the treasury for one storey, £2.5 million for two, £4.15 million

Stuart Kelly

Sex, violence and lettuces

There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and close this book: one shows what the characters think they are and how they are related, the other what they are revealed to be. How the couplings shift is less important than the chains of desire that cannot be mapped or taxonomised. The Gardener family is reeling from and sneakily plotting about the death of great-aunt Oleander, owner of Namaste House, a retreat for whack jobs and slebby failures. But her will leaves them confounded. This family of botanists are each given a seed which might flourish into death or

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Licence to kill

One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a walk in the Tiergarten. A young man crossed his path, drew a pistol and shot him in the neck. Emitting a groan ‘like a branch falling off a tree’, he fell dead. The assassin ran, but was arrested by the crowd. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘I am Armenian, he is Turkish. What is it to you?’ The victim was Talat Pasha, erstwhile interior minister of the Ottoman empire and convicted war criminal. His nemesis was Soghoman Tehlirian, engineering student and agent of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Talat topped

Jeff Noon

Recent crime fiction | 25 June 2015

The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept and pushes it to dangerous extremes in her psychological thriller Disclaimer (Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 304, Spectator Bookshop, £11.69). Catherine Ravenscroft finds a novel in her house which she doesn’t remember buying, and which seems to be telling the story of her own life. Her deepest, most terrible secrets are included. And the final page ends with her own murder. Is this a threat? How can the author have such an intimate knowledge of Catherine’s life, of events and feelings that she’s kept hidden even from her husband? This is a

Sara Wheeler

Into the blue

Jenny Balfour Paul is an indigo dye expert. She has written two books on the subject, and lectures around the world. A librarian alerted her to the mention of the colour, and the plant it comes from, in the journals of a long-forgotten sailor and indigo hand. That day a ten-year love affair began. Thomas Machell was born near York in 1824, a son of the manse. At the age of 16 he went to sea, scrubbing the decks of a merchant ship. After numerous adventures he settled in India, initially working for the Bengal Indigo Company, then transferring to plant and harvest coffee in Kerala. He was a curious,

Wynn Wheldon

‘It’s always wrong to starve’

‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking.’ So begins, with bitter Jewish humour, this involving book set largely in the Warsaw ghetto. There is a hint of unnerving pastiche in this, but it is a sentence that finds an echo in the compassionate words of Jim Shepard’s hero, Janusz Korczak, in the final sentence of the book. Korczak was a real figure, a paediatrician who ran an orphanage in Warsaw, moved with it into the ghetto and, despite being offered several chances of

Sean Mcglynn

The hardest man of all

From the unpromising and desperately unforgiving background that forged his iron will and boundless ambition, Temujin (as Genghis Khan was named at birth) rose to build an empire that was to range from Korea and China, through Afghanistan, Persia and Iraq and eventually to Hungary and Russia, constituting the largest contiguous land imperium in history. His was an extraordinary, epic story and Frank McLynn does it full justice in a vivid, page-turning biography. The author portrays well the extreme hardship of the nomadic life for Genghis as boy and man on the arid Mongolian steppe, where temperatures range between 100 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 43, and where ‘one can be

Michael Beloff

The devils’ advocate | 25 June 2015

Jeremy Hutchinson was the doyen of the criminal bar in the 1960s and 1970s. No Old Bailey hack or parvenu Rumpole, he was the son of Jack, a distinguished practitioner in the same field, and Mary, a Bloomsbury Strachey. An Oxford undergraduate who acquired a criminal record along with a PPE degree (he accidentally shot a policeman with an air pistol), married first to Peggy Ashcroft, he moved throughout his life in the upper echelons of English liberal intellectual society, and was elevated, while still in practice, to the House of Lords. The brief biographical sketch at the outset of this book, littered with names of those whose paths he

Anne Chisholm

Filling in the Bloomsbury puzzle

In March 1923 a large birthday party was held in a studio in Bloomsbury. It is often assumed that the eponymous Group was habitually glum or intense; but there were a lot of parties. The artists were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the birthday was David Garnett’s 31st. David (known as Bunny) was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of bisexual charm, beloved by Grant, among others. His second novel, Lady into Fox, inspired and illustrated by his wife, Ray, had been a literary sensation the year before. There was much energetic dancing, and a floorshow was provided by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Maynard Keynes’s wife, and by Harriet Bingham,

Cressida Connolly

Dick Whittington for the 21st century

Novels of such scope and invention are all too rare; unusual, too, are those of real heart, whose characters you grow to love and truly care for. The Year of the Runaways has it all. The action spans continents, taking in a vast sweep of politics, religion and immigration; it also examines with tenderness and delicacy the ties that bind us, whether to family, friends or fellow travellers. Judges of forthcoming literary prizes need look no further. Rose Tremain’s The Road Home described the experience of an Eastern European immigrant arriving to look for work in England. The book (which is among Tremain’s finest) was a powerful corrective to the

Wednesday

William Dalrymple

In the footsteps of Marco Polo: the journey that changed William Dalrymple’s life

This is the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of William Dalrymple’s first book, In Xanadu: A Quest At the end of the windy, rainy April of 1986, towards the end of my second year at university, I was on my way back to my room one evening, when I happened to trudge past my college notice board. There my eyes fell on a bright yellow sheet of A4, headlined in capital letters THE GAILLARD LAPSLEY TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIP. It hadn’t been a good week. I was 21: broke, tired of revision for exams and already longing for the holidays. But stopping to look closer, I found that the notice was an announcement concerning

Thursday

John Jolliffe

Awfully arrayed

John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its vast scope) that remained unwritten was a history of the Austrian army. Richard Bassett has now successfully filled the gap, and few could be better qualified to do so. During many years as the Times’s correspondent in Vienna, Rome and Warsaw, he made friends with most of the leading local experts, as his acknowledgements testify. The Habsburg army had a reputation for inefficiency and bureaucratic control, which led to Talleyrand’s sneer that it had ‘an unfortunate taste for being beaten’ — a view not borne out by the fact that

Patrick Skene-Catling

The new rules of dating

An American stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari, who usually performs in Los Angeles and New York, has found time to conduct an international investigation of the mating habits of the young in the digital age. Like most other stand-up comedians, male and female, Ansari evidently bases his act on nationalistic, ethnic and sexual misanthropy, expressed with facetious cynicism. The first words of his introduction are ‘OH, SHIT!’, which seem to promise streetwise modernity but nothing romantic. Is the book only some kind of wise-guy scam? No, it’s not that simple. Born 32 years ago in Bennettsville, a small town in South Carolina, Ansari apparently felt restricted by what he calls his

Michael Moorcock

One vast, blaring cultural circus

In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I had greatly admired. Ackroyd initially knew Sinclair as a poet, author of Lud Heat, an influence on his own wonderful novel Hawksmoor. Passionately interested in London, the three of us began to meet regularly. Sinclair was an admirer of the French situationist Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) and popularised psychogeography in Britain. In his blending of myth, literature and close social observation, I felt he combined the virtues of Orwell and Pound. Before long, in company with the likes of the rock guitarist Martin Stone, the creator of

Daniel Hahn

Style over substance

We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition, but decides against visiting — not for the first time, nor the last — because of the queues. Another (D’Ardelo) is returning from the doctor’s, where he has learned that he does not have cancer — though he tells Ramon he does. Ramon’s friend Charles is a party organiser, who will soon be catering D’Ardelo’s birthday party. He does this with his friend Caliban, an actor without an acting career, who while on duty tries to make himself more interesting than he actually is by pretending to be an immigrant

Matthew Adams

Curious shades of Browne

On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what he found so appealing about the 17th-century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, the man he numbered among his ‘first favourites’ of English prose. He mentions Browne’s formal qualities, of course: he is ‘great and magnificent in his style and diction’; his Urne-Buriall ‘redolent of graves and sepulchres’ in every line. Yet most of his praise is reserved for Browne’s sensibility, for a man who is ‘fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangeness’; who ‘loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found

Richard Davenporthines

Swords of honour

Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish members of German student duelling societies. My hosts were splendidly courteous, some of them held deadly straight rapiers or lethal curved blades, there were brightly coloured and golden braided costumes that made King Rudolf of Ruritania’s coronation robes seem dowdy, and we sung a rousing anthem about Prince Eugene of Savoy smiting the fearful Turk at the battle of Zenta in 1697. It was a high-testosterone evening. A few of my young hosts had duelling scars, discreetly placed so as to be imperceptible when they were in office suits, for

Viv Groskop

Broken dreams

As Masha Gessen herself admits — and as friends and journalist colleagues repeatedly told her — it was a strange choice to write this book. But you only have to get a few pages in to realise that Gessen, the author of a bestselling analysis of Putin, is ideally placed to take on the story behind the Boston marathon bombers. And she is the perfect person to situate it in the wider context of ‘the war on terror’ in a way that illuminates and inspires. This is quite simply a remarkable piece of old-school journalism. On 15 April 2013 two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston

Ruth Scurr

Guardians of an ideal

Sudhir Hazareesingh’s bold new book is built on the assumption that ‘it is possible to make meaningful generalisations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French’. France, as General de Gaulle pointed out, has such a fetish for singularity that it produces 246 varieties of cheese. Can France be any more a nation of thinkers than England is of shopkeepers? Hazareesingh, an Oxford don, brings specific strengths to this daunting task. He was born and raised in Mauritius, a former French and British colony, in the 1970s, where his father was principal private secretary to Prime Minister Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam; he was schooled