Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Caroline Moore

Lurid & Cute is too true to its title

One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book, particularly if it comes into the category of ‘not a suitable present for your great-aunt’. I always dislike this duty, since it spoils surprises, which are the essence of enjoyment in reading; but Adam Thirlwell’s first novel, Politics, did perhaps require a few alerts. The title gave no clue that it was about a sexual threesome, and would have introduced the putative great-aunt to rimming, undinism, and an exhausting range of esoteric practices. The flavour of Thirlwell’s third novel, however, Lurid & Cute, is blazoned on the cover. You can’t

Molly Guinness

Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will Boast spent years trying to turn his life story into fiction, but eventually gave up and wrote an autobiography. In Epilogue, he describes how his mother died of brain cancer when he was in his first year of college; two years later, his younger brother Rory was killed in a car crash, then his father set about drinking himself to death. Later, he discovered that his father had had two sons from a secret previous marriage, so he tracked them down and made friends. Boast certainly has plenty of material

Richard Walker

The real mystery is how it got published

As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless enterprise involved things like staining paper with tea or vinegar, together with plenty of burning, and creasing, and copying of random texts with a scratchy old inkwell pen. Typical silly small boy stuff. Reading this book on a collection of maps supposedly derived from Marco Polo suddenly brought it all back — especially the silliness. Now Marco Polo is a figure wreathed in some mystery. He was known from the 14th century as the first European to report in detail and from personal experience on that fabulous world called ‘Cathay’,

John Sutherland

David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man

This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends with his breakthrough novel, Changing Places, in the rather better year, 1975. A master-practitioner of narrative, Lodge chooses to write with an artful flatness which recalls Frank Kermode’s similarly self-depreciative memoir, Not Entitled. Lodge’s career was, formatively, in the same provincial, first-generation university orbit. Unlike Kermode (for whom it proved a dubious experience) Lodge never let himself be headhunted into Oxbridge. He turned down the inevitable mid-career offer because, principally, he believed it would be bad for his fiction. And he didn’t think he belonged at high tables. Lodge first

Allan Mallinson

A major-general names the guilty men

The author of this primer to the long-overdue Chilcot report, a retired sapper (Royal Engineers) major-general, nails his colours to the mast in the opening paragraph. The British High Command made a number of judgments with poor outcomes in the decade from 2000 to 2010 when fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan… The outcome in some eyes has been humiliation, accusation of defeat in Basra, an unexpected high level of conflict in Helmand and significant loss of life for our servicemen and women as well as local civilians — so far, without the compensation of it all being worthwhile. As a result: The UK’s military leadership has lost much of the

Sean Mcglynn

The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind

For those who imagine the medieval period along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail — knights, castles, fair maidens, filthy peasants and buckets of blood and gore (you know, all the fun stuff) — Johannes Fried’s version may come as something of an aesthetic shock. His interests lie in the more rarefied world of theologians, lawyers and philosophers. So while the kings and emperors of the Middle Ages are afforded largely thumbnail sketches, it is the likes of Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham and Peter Abelard that attract Fried’s closest attention in his study of the ‘cultural evolution’ of the Middle Ages. Fried, the éminence

Andre Van Loon

The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar

One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear the master, the stranger questioned Tolstoy about his latest beliefs. Satisfied, he left later that day. But then he returned with a written confession. He was an undercover policeman, sent to check on what Tolstoy was up to. Deeply ashamed of his deception, he begged for forgiveness. This vignette, recounted by Alexandra Popoff in her new book about Tolstoy’s later life, perfectly captures the author’s power. Whether through his fiction or radical Christianity, Tolstoy could fascinate and compel in equal measure. Though the government spy was dismissed for his bungling,

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: Not Richard Dawkins’s Book of the Year (plus: literary agony uncles and aunts)

The recent call for publicity blurbs that sell the bible to a modern audience attracted a host of new competitors as well as the old-timers. Kieran Corcoran’s entry presented Jesus as a social media sensation — ‘He used to have 12 followers but now he has TWO BILLION!’. Derek Morgan’s pitched the Good Book as the go-to self-help manual: ‘Going to a garden party and nothing to wear? Trouble finding accommodation at peak season in a small town in the sticks? A house on a flood plain and weather forecast looks bad?…’. And Josh Ekroy had his sights on the how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people market: ‘Just quoting this book at home and in

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

David Sedaris was right: litter is a class issue

David Sedaris is my new hero. Not because he’s such a funny writer, but because he’s obsessed with litter. He told a group of MPs last week that he spends up to five hours a day picking up fast food containers and fag ends around his home in Pulborough, west Sussex. Thanks to his unstinting labours, he’s become a local hero and has had a rubbish lorry named after him. I’ve some way to go before I qualify for such an honour, but I do my bit. For instance, on Monday I spent an hour clearing the litter from the flowerbed outside the West London Free School in Hammersmith. This

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Truth, Lies, Diana review: it was a cover-up!

Truth, Lies, Diana Charing Cross Theatre, in rep until 14 February John Conway’s sensationalist play, Truth, Lies, Diana, is a forensic re-examination of the circumstances surrounding the princess’s death in 1997. The issue of Prince Harry’s paternity, which earned the play much advance publicity, reaches no conclusions. James Hewitt co-operated with the show and Conway portrays him as a decent twerp ruthlessly smeared by shadowy puppet-masters (‘men in suits,’ Conway calls them), who set out to destroy his credibility. Hewitt admits that his trysts with Diana began at least a year before Harry’s birth. But is the Cad the dad? Hewitt’s keeping mum. Conway’s research into the crash revives various antique rumours: Diana was pregnant;

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Standing firm is the price of civilisation. Are we still ready to pay it?

Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly idyllic place rural England must have been (at least for a young man of independent means) in the run-up to the first world war. Sassoon wrote it, of course, in middle age after he’d served his time in the trenches. But none of his wartime experiences are allowed to colour the innocent tone of his fictionalised memoir. As far as his narrator George Sherston is concerned, the bliss is going to last for ever. Because the first world war is now very familiar history, the mistake I think we’re inclined

Jane Rye

Patrick George: painting some of his best work at 91

‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is 91, still painting ‘some of the best work he’s ever done’, in Andrew Lambirth’s view. ‘His principal aim is to point out, to those of us less well-trained to observe, how marvellous the appearance of things is, and he does this through exquisite landscapes, figure and still-life paintings, of unassuming but stringent beauty.’ After four years in the Navy (he commanded a landing craft in the D-Day landings) George went to Camberwell art school where he imbibed the strict measuring technique associated with William Coldstream, which he has continued to

Philip Womack

Time-travel, smugglers, arsenic — what’s not to like in Sally Gardner’s novel for teenagers?

Which of us, as an adolescent, did not experience at some point a terrible sense of not belonging? Which of us did not yearn for a door to open into a place entirely elsewhere? At that liminal time in our lives, we constantly search for new thresholds, over which we might find ourselves — or another. For most of us the door lies in our imaginations; for A.J. Flynn, the hero of Sally Gardner’s striking, elegant new time-travelling novel for young adults, it actually exists, in the unprepossessing environs of the post office centre in Mount Pleasant. A.J. is the heir to a key to a door which leads backwards

David Sexton

The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel, imagining an Islamic government taking power in France in 2022, has been widely assumed to be an act of pure provocation. He is, after all, the author who faced legal trouble after having said in an interview in 2001: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’ Soumission (Submission) was announced quite suddenly by Flammarion in December for the first week of the New Year, with an initial print run of 150,000 copies. So keen was the interest that it was pirated online before publication. It’s an event — but a literary event, it turns out. For Soumission is a fine, deeply literary work, not

David Crane

William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?

In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had been sent by the Bibliothèque Imperiale to bid on their behalf at the sale of the Savile collection of rare manuscripts, and though he did not have the funds to compete with the big players at the auction, he did at least manage to see, before it disappeared for the next 20 years into the insatiable collector’s maw of Sir Thomas Phillipps, a rhymed verse chronicle of 19,000-odd lines in Norman French that was to become the great obsession of his life. The rediscovery of the History of William Marshal,

Hermione Eyre

Politics as an aphrodisiac: the secret of the Disraelis’ happy marriage

The long, happy and unlikely marriage of the great Conservative leader Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne, 12 years his senior, is analysed thoughtfully in Daisy Hay’s new book. Reading between the lines, it is possible to see the Disraelis as a Victorian power couple not unlike the Underwoods in Netflix’s remade House of Cards — he, high on his own oratory; she, a valuable campaign asset; together, a marriage that is child-free and (with his sexuality in question) built on blackberries at bedtime. Yet — here’s the twist — they truly loved one another. The Underwoods are bound together in sinister ambition, but the Disraelis make an inspiring emblem

Duncan Fallowell

An ill-waged war against the war on drugs

Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those of a creative kind by high-profile writers: De Quincey, Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux, William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda. The most useful, so far as social policy is concerned, are those by low-profile operators in the field: scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, police. The least interesting or useful prove to have been the polemical books in neither category, so I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of this one, written by a political journalist, and hyped by Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Fry and Naomi Klein. My unease was aroused, but not

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world

Proust had his cork-lined bedroom; Emily Dickinson her Amherst hidey-hole; Mark Twain a gazebo with magnificent views of New York City. Where, then, did the father of English poetry do his work? From 1374 till 1386, while employed supervising the collection of wool-duties, Chaucer was billeted in a grace-and-favour bachelor pad in the tower directly above Aldgate, the main eastern point of entry to the walled city of London. ‘Grace and favour’ makes it sound grander than it was. With the help of a wonderfully ingenious pattern of inferences — in particular an architectural drawing from 200 years later which happened to include a sketch of Aldgate’s north tower at

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

This Winter Journey goes far beyond expectation

You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural phenomenon and wood sculpture in Renaissance Germany, essays on Samuel Beckett and the history of the mail coach, and the rather forbidding ‘Regulation of floral organ abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana’. Intrigued? Who wouldn’t be? As academic disciplines go, musicology was a slow starter. It took until 1985 for Joseph Kerman to startle academics into looking

Cressida Connolly

Rugger, Robin Hood and Rupert of the Rhine: enthusiasms of the young Antonia Fraser

Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had somehow skipped infancy and emerged instead from a celestial cloud, surrounded by hordes of trumpet-wielding cherubim, a fully-formed Venus in pink and gold and white. Turreted castles, a constant shower of sovereigns, a title, a jewelry box whose contents might have made Liz Taylor wince: this was the milieu suggested by her tremendous beauty and mysterious half-smile. My History, a captivating memoir of her childhood and early youth, proves otherwise. In fact Antonia’s father, Frank Pakenham, was a second son who married the very clever daughter of a Harley Street