Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Rose George

Suffering a sea change

The oceans cover seven-tenths of our planet, and although it may not seem like it above the surface, they are very busy. Helen Scales and Christian Sardet are marine biologists: Sardet is apparently known as Uncle Plankton, and those multitudes of drifting organisms — ‘plankton’ comes from the Greek planktos, meaning to wander or drift — are his life’s work. Scales’s focus is the shell-making creatures that are molluscs, though focus seems an inappropriate word for such a vast body of life: a 1993 survey of just one island, New Caledonia, found 2,738 distinct species, and 80 per cent of them were new to science. They are ‘some of the

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: Cormac McCarthy applies for a telesales job (plus: write a saucy short story)

Inspiration for the latest comp came from a young Hunter S. Thompson’s characteristically unorthodox pitch for a position at the Vancouver Sun. An unflattering portrait of his relationship with a previous employer — ‘The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him’ — is followed by an attack on journalists en masse, who are, he says, ‘…dullards, bums, and hacks …stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity’. The godfather of gonzo didn’t get the job. Commendations to Peter Goulding, R.M. Goddard and Josh Ekroy. The winners take £25. Alan Millard pockets the extra fiver. Alan Millard: Rudyard Kipling applies to be a zoo keeper Dear

Thursday

Caspar Henderson

Raiders of the lost Ark

Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a friend in West Hollywood and drove across town to the Los Angeles Zoo to report on a project to save the California condor from extinction. By the 1980s the number of condors had — thanks in part to the birds’ tendency to fly into live power lines — plunged to a few tens, and the species was on the brink. The remaining individuals were taken into captivity and a breeding programme begun. Newly hatched chicks were raised by hand — that is, by glove puppets made to look like adult

Helen R Brown

Punk in a funk

Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find the comments posted beneath it full of praise for the liquid melancholy in her lovely voice. The simple sound of air passing from her lungs, across her larynx and out of her lips in the 1990s is ‘sexy’, ‘soulful’, ‘classy’ and, most often, ‘perfect’. And don’t get her wrong; she’s chuffed that people like the noise she makes. But she frets about how much this ‘disembodied voice’ has to do with the rest of Tracey Thorn: the introvert with the ‘suburban’ speaking voice. The anxieties she has built up around

Conrad Black

Not-so-evil genius

It is almost inconceivable that there could be a more densely detailed book about Napoleon than this — 800 crowded pages to get him from his birth in 1769 to his acclamation as First Consul for life in 1802. When completed in three or more further volumes, this will be an extremely comprehensive study. As only French biographers can do, every conceivable motive and alternative scenario is presented at every stage in the astonishing rise of the subject from the petty and parvenu and rather impecunious nobility of Corsica to a greater position of power than anyone had exercised in Europe since Charlemagne, if not the greater Roman emperors. The

Mario Reading

A choice of first novels | 14 May 2015

As all writers know to their cost, first novels are never really first novels. They make their appearance after countless botched attempts at the perfect debut — a debut that always lurks just out of view, but seems tantalisingly easy for everyone else. My first published novel was fifth down the line. It was a line of sad, self-obsessed and achingly self-conscious junk manuscripts that now gather dust in a filing system that has long since lost any recognisable methodology. Jesse Armstrong, on the other hand, although making his debut in fiction with Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals, is no stranger to writing success. He already has a

John Sutherland

No sex, please, in the Detection Club

‘The crime novel,’ said Bertolt Brecht, ‘like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’ He was thinking of the detective story and the tribute was truest in the ‘golden age’, between the great wars; the period covered, hugely readably, by Martin Edwards. Edwards’s primary subject is the Detection Club, whose members included the giants of the genre — G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham. Its rules (they loved rules) were given quasi commandment authority by one of the club’s founder-members, Monsignor Ronald Knox, professional churchman, amateur novelist. Most of the club liked to see themselves as ‘unprofessional’, as if fiction were like the annual ‘Gentleman versus Players’

Stephen Bayley

A narcissistic bore — portrait of the artist today

Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by Richard Cork, a veteran with a Cambridge education who enjoyed a distinguished stint as art critic at the Times. He is nicely old school: chatty and avuncular. The second is by Hans Ulrich Obrist of London’s Serpentine Gallery, ageing Swiss boy wonder of the art fair circuit with a head like a pink dome-nut. I have heard Obrist speak and could not detect any meaning in what he said, although he certainly said a lot. In classic Q&A template, Cork and Obrist tell us what it is to be an

Lewis Jones

Not a patch on our own Dear Mary

As Dear Mary so wittily demonstrates, our need for advice is perennial. But fashions change. Mary would probably take issue with The Handbook of the Toilette (1839), which advises that one should take a weekly bath whether one needs to or not, and also with the recommendation of Cassell’s Home Encyclopedia (1934) that ‘bloater cream’ makes excellent cocktail canapés. She would surely concur, though, with an observation from All About Etiquette (1879) that ‘a social party is not intended as a school for reform, or a pulpit to denounce sin’. To compile How to Skin a Lion Claire Cock-Starkey has consulted the British Library. She promises ‘medieval manuscripts’, but her

Patrick Flanery

Hope against hope

At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place, among its own kind, as if compartments for scientific specimens had been laid out across the land. Or, as Christopher Hope puts it in his caustic new satire, people were ‘corralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification’. Reminding us that ‘Jim Fish’ was a derogatory term for a black man in South Africa, Hope thrusts his eponymous hero, who fits no racial category, into this mad system of classification. To some, Jimfish appears ‘as white as newly bleached canvas’, to others ‘faintly pink or tan or honey-coloured’.

Henry Hitchings

All the men and women merely players

How many books are there about Shakespeare? A study published in the 1970s claimed a figure of 11,000, and today a search of the British Library catalogue yields 12,554 titles that contain the playwright’s name. But good short introductions to Shakespeare’s life and work are not exactly plentiful. Students and teachers are therefore likely to welcome this up-to-date overview from Paul Edmondson, a Church of England priest who works for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Although Edmondson covers the biographical ground succinctly, as well as discussing the plays and poetry in a style that’s discreetly authoritative, his approach is unconventional. Thus he dwells longer on the early, flawed The Two Gentlemen

William Cook

Are you sitting properly?

Funnily enough, after my editor sent me these three books to read, my guts started playing up. Suddenly, food seemed to go straight through me. At first I wasn’t bothered, but when it didn’t get any better I began to worry. I went to see my doctor. She told me to bring her a piece of poo to see if they needed to stick a camera up my bum. I realise this is probably the last thing you want to know, but that’s the whole point about the gut: no one wants to talk about it, or even think about it, until something goes wrong. These books set out to

Jonathan Meades

The more deceived

Louis the Decorator and his chums in the antiques trade use the word ‘airport’ adjectivally and disparagingly. It signifies industrially produced folkloric objects (prayer mats, knobkerries, masks, toupins, necklaces, tribal amulets, djellabas etc) which are typically sold by hawkers to departing holidaymakers. This is the basest level of fakery and is ignored by the otherwise doggedly catholic Noah Charney. Its defining characteristic, however, is tellingly akin to that of the multi-million-dollar scams that fascinate him in The Art of Forgery. The duped party is often not all that duped. He is, rather, mutely complicit with the swindler and has faith — that is to say a belief born in witting

Clare Mulley

The beginning of the end

Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium foil more usually dropped from planes to jam enemy radar signals. The following morning a wave of Junkers dropping magnesium flares led the German Christmas Day onslaught, soon answered by American P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with machine guns. On the ground, following reports of appalling atrocities, the battle was

Wednesday

Andrew Petrie

Behind the beat

Tony Barrell can’t play the drums, but he’s in awe of those who can. ‘A band without a drummer is like a rocking chair that somebody has cruelly bolted to the floor,’ he writes in Born to Drum’s introduction. ‘While it may appear to rock, it actually doesn’t.’ Those who thrill to the sounds of anyone from Black Sabbath to the Buddy Rich Big Band would agree, but Barrell also aims to reach readers to whom names like these mean nothing with an inquiry more psychological than musical, namely: who would be a drummer? In his first two chapters, entitled ‘Into the Asylum’ and ‘Working-Class Heroes’ respectively, Barrell rolls out

Thursday

Jane Kelly

Victim status

I was riveted to read about Ione Wells, an Oxford student, aged 20, who was savagely attacked on a London street. She then wrote about the experience for her university paper and has now hit the national news, prompting other students to write about their experiences too. Ione has kick-started her career as a journalist, and discovered that a woman reporter can often do well by cannibalising her own life, as long as she is a good writer, which Ione seems to be. Her story was interesting to me because in 1982, just after I came to London, I was attacked while walking home in south London. It was a

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

No man is an island

Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford’s philosophical polemic about how virtual reality is impinging on real reality. Actually, his targets in this book are Descartes and John Locke, with whom, he reckons, the rot started when it comes to thinking about the human person as a cerebral calculating machine, divorced from his own body and from the world around him. But he’s got it in for corporate capitalism, too, and its manipulation of our attention by hijacking every communal space — aural and visual — to get us to buy things. Perhaps I’m not quite

Ruth Scurr

All the pomp of family life

The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking distance from an unnamed town on the coastline of County Clare, is home to the Madigan family. At the centre of the family is Rosaleen Madigan, the matriarch: ‘A woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected.’ The novel begins with the thwarting of one of Rosaleen’s expectations. She has taken to her bed in 1980 after Dan, the eldest of her four children, has announced that he is going to become a priest. Each of the first four chapters

Nigel Jones

The devil’s devoted disciple

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children, in the Berlin bunker, the ‘little doctor’ is still a byword for the black arts of political spin and politicians regularly accuse each other of telling fibs ‘worthy of Goebbels’. The Nazi specialist Peter Longerich, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers a compelling chronicle not because he writes with sparkle —

Harry Mount

Two wheels good

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and certainly addicted in my need to have a daily bike ride. But I can see why people — and drivers in particular — hate some of us: for our smugness, our need to keep on moving through red lights and along pavements. It isn’t like this in Holland, where bicycling is so embedded in daily life that most drivers are bicyclists and vice versa; where mutual understanding leads to mutual respect. Why do bicycles have this effect? Of intense affection among some, hatred among others; of mass use in some