Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

Fact, fiction or farce? The American comic novel is becoming increasingly hard to define

The American comic novel is going through an odd phase. Just lately it seems like anything funny must sneak in behind an abstruse metafictional edifice, deployed, I suspect, by insecure authors who want to retain their jobs as teachers of creative writing. 10:04, Ben Lerner’s lopsided but often electric second novel, is the latest example of the comic genre via subterfuge, sprinkled with tricks and played so deadpan you might not know when to laugh. The narrator, who shares a first name with the author, is a resident of a New York City that is battered by storms, vulnerable to hurricanes and hipsters. He has health concerns which require regular

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: my favourite books of the year

I’ve been away in Oslo. Not the world’s most exciting destination, I have to say. And the locals really do talk and smile exactly like Frances McDormand does in Fargo. Anyway, as there’s still a few days left before Christmas I thought I’d mention a couple of my favourite books of the year, just in case any of you are still looking for ideas. Engel’s England, by Matthew Engel, is a survey of the old English shire counties, including those which have ceased to exist (such as Middlesex) and a whole bunch which have little more than ceremonial function. Engel mourns their passing, as should all right-thinking people, much as

Thursday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Are old fairy stories too scary for kids?

Moving house, stacking books in boxes, I came across a clutch of fairy books, Andrew Lang’s folk tales from around the world in their coloured cloth covers: yellow, brown, red, grey, blue. I picked up ‘yellow’, opened the cover and fell down a wormhole, away from 2014 into the past. My mother, as a child, had coloured in some of the book’s etched illustrations and I could see her kneeling, perhaps fireside, sawing away at the mournful knights in blue crayon. Then there was my own pre-teen self, mid-1980s, feeling strongly the injustice of being forbidden any further colouring in. As I turned the pages, images began to dislodge from

Mary Beard

How the smile came to Paris (briefly)

In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject was conventional enough: a self-portrait of the artist cradling her small daughter. The problem was that Vigée Le Brun was depicted smiling. You could even see her teeth. This was, as one critic put it, ‘an affectation which artists, connoisseurs and people of good taste are unanimous in condemning’. These outraged art lovers must have been rather out of touch with current trends. For, as Colin Jones shows in The Smile Revolution — his revealing history of 18th-century French smiling — the full-on, lips-parted sourire had been increasingly visible in

Daniel Hannan

All you’ll ever need to know about the history of England in one volume

Here is a stupendous achievement: a narrative history of England which is both thorough and arresting. Very few writers could pull it off. Either they’d have an axe to grind, or they’d lose perspective, or they’d present a series of anecdotes, or they’d end up in a Casaubonish pursuit of other historians’ errors. In fact, to get it right, you’d ideally be a mature and accomplished author, steeped in the facts, who was nonetheless tackling English history for the first time. Which is more or less what Robert Tombs, a professor of French history at Cambridge, is. ‘A writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without

Mark Amory

Juliet Townsend (1941-2014)

A new literary editor looks among his acquaintance for potential reviewers. There was no one I approached more confidently in 1985 than Juliet Townsend (who died on 29 November). She had been a friend for 25 years and run a bookshop since 1977 with her husband John. They had looked over my own books to see what could and should be sold and sighed heavily when The Ingoldsby Legends appeared — apparently there is a copy in almost every English country house and no demand at all. Townsend (pictured left in 1991) wrote an excellent children’s book on the Indian Mutiny, Escape from Meerut, and this neatly combined her two

John Hare

In the steppes of the ancients: travels on the Silk Road

It is difficult to fault this remarkable volume. The publishers have created a book of quality with stunning illustrations and lucid maps. It will, I believe, become a standard reference for all who study the complex history of Central Asia and the Silk Road. This is the second volume in Christoph Baumer’s projected four-book series on Central Asia and shows its author to be an extraordinary person, whose skills encompass those of an explorer, a geographer, a historian, an archaeologist and a photographer. Moreover, in each of these exacting disciplines he is no amateur. He displays the rare qualities of both an academic and a man of action. His sparkling

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

This ex-priest’s history of the gospels could unsettle the most faithful churchgoer

When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and ‘see her lips moving, only to glimpse the beads in her lap. I recall thinking that they slipped through her thumb and forefinger the way cartridges moved into machine guns’. There was nothing unusual about this: in 1970s England, as well as 1950s America, most devout Catholic ladies carried a rosary in their handbag. If you walked into church while the Legion of Mary were at prayer, you’d be deafened by their Hail Marys. It was a competitive sport. Whoever prayed loudest and fastest — usually an Irish biddy with

William Cook

German history is uniquely awful: that’s what makes it so engrossing

As I grew up half German in England in the 1970s, my German heritage was confined to the few curios my grandmother had brought here after the war: a signet ring, a cigarette case, a scrapbook with some missing pages…. She’d changed her name, she’d changed my father’s name, the nation she came from lay in ruins — but from this salvaged bric-à-brac I pieced together the story of my father’s German family, a story they’d done their best to bury in the country they’d left behind. Through a range of objects, large and small, from the Gutenberg Bible to the Reichstag, the director of the British Museum has done

Sue Prideaux

Hiding in Moominland: the conflicted life of Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish civil war. He did not like women. They were too noisy, wore large hats at the cinema and would not obey orders in wartime. Tove used to hide to spy on his all-male parties, where everybody got astoundingly drunk and attacked chairs with bayonets. ‘All men are chums who will never leave each other in the lurch,’ she concluded. ‘A chum doesn’t forgive, he just forgets — women forgive everything but never forget. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.’ Father and daughter had such a strained relationship that she sometimes had

Anthony Sattin

A treasure-trove of grisly Arab tales may appeal more to an Isis fighter than your average British reader

The marvellous tales of the title are not just confined to the contents of this book, for the travels and travails of the lone manuscript in which they were inscribed are also something of a wonder, and deserve to be told. The original collection appears to have been composed in the 10th century, and it is easy to imagine some of these stories doing the rounds of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus while the crusaders were making trouble in the neighbourhood. This particular version of the stories was written down in the 14th century, probably in Cairo, for that is where the manuscript can be traced. In 1517 when the Renaissance

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Grimms’ fairy tales: the hardcore version

Child murder, domestic slavery, abusive families, cannibalism and intergenerational hatred — what could be better for the festive fireside than a new edition of Grimms’ fairy stories? There hasn’t been a straight translation in English of the original 1812 edition; most retellers in English relied on revised versions by Wilhelm Grimm. Now Jack Zipes has produced the complete first edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. It’s a good translation, faithful to the simple character of the originals. It’s been well received by the fairytale industry, writers and academics who like to remind us that the original versions were rawer than Wilhelm’s family-friendlier edition of

Simon Heffer

Cambridge, showcase for modernism (and how costly it is to fix)

The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon it will be time for the revisions to be revised: it is 30 years since the new London: 2, for example. Aficionados have keenly awaited the Cambridgeshire volume, the latest in the series, because of the substantial new building undertaken by Cambridge University since Pevsner himself last catalogued it in the early 1970s (his first edition appeared in 1954). For most people the county is summarised by two buildings: Ely cathedral, ‘the ship of the fens’, and King’s College chapel. Both were admired by Pevsner, who reserved much of his

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Wonder Woman: feminist symbol or the ultimate male fantasy?

It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped develop wireless communication, or Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger who also invented the artificial heart. (If only he’d played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz!) William Moulton Marston created both the cartoon heroine Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine, though by the time I had finished this book I was wondering how he found the time or the energy to do either. To my generation, Wonder Woman is most famous for being

Eric Weinberger

After the trilogy (and the hurricane): the likeable return of Frank Bascombe

The story of Frank Bascombe, a sports-writer turned estate agent but always a New Jersey homebody, has already taken Richard Ford nearly 30 years and three volumes to tell, totalling 1,300 pages — longer than War and Peace. But for Frank, aged 68 (and for Ford, aged 70), it’s not over. In the autumn of 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New Jersey shoreline. And though Bascombe is retired from real estate and living safely inland in Haddam (the town where his first-person chronicles began, in 1986, with The Sportswriter) he is not unaffected by the devastation. In the four long stories that comprise this fourth Bascombe volume, he learns that

Craig Raine

Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his audience. Counterintuitively, we like the imposition of imposture. We connive at deceit, at replication, for the release of neurotransmitters, the flood of endorphins — the brandies of the brain. I once heard Peter Ustinov on a chat show replicate the sound of an electric bell being pressed. Pleasure on a different, even more vertiginous level. The audience was convulsed. Unless a poet can produce this ungainsayable instant delight in the reader, this drench of dopamine, the poetry is automatically of the second order. (We expect less of our novelists, though

Viv Groskop

Transnistria: a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic

Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between Moldova and Ukraine, it doesn’t have a bad reputation. It has no reputation. As Rory MacLean, the author of the ‘across-the-old-Iron-Curtain-in-a-Trabant’ bestseller Stalin’s Nose, explains: ‘Transnistria is a breakaway republic of a ba lot smaller than Devon. And it is recognised by no country in the world except itself. You could indeed be forgiven for thinking that Transnistria is a made-up place (and at times the author of this book almost treats it as if it is). In the wake of the dissolution of the USSR, Transnistria declared independence in

Roy Strong

The quirkiest garden book Roy Strong has read in years

Incredulity is rarely a word that crosses my mind when it comes to garden writing. This genre can, of course, be quite straight-forward and descriptive, like Miss Jekyll’s rather boring volumes. It can equally be wildly funny, as when Anne Scott-James and Osbert Lancaster hitch their respective wagons to horticulture and produce a spoof history. But where, oh where did Sam Llewellyn’s exotic aberration spring from? Is it fact or fiction? I don’t think I ever decided which. This is one of those books where you spend the whole time worrying less about what’s happening in the kitchen garden in spring and more on trying to work out what the

Nell Gifford

Roll up, roll up! A history of the circus from Ancient Egypt to the present

Linda Simon’s compact and colourful circus history is, in many ways, a jewel of a publication. It is hard to say anything new about the circus because almost impossible to uncover quotes and stories that cannot be found in other books. The circus itself — disregarding the circus of ancient Rome — is a modern form and so the stock of images available for this type of illustrated history is quite limited and well known. But here are some interesting photographs of ceramic Mexican acrobats, and an Egyptian fresco of a female contortionist which back up one of Simon’s themes: using the body as a spectacle is an ancient impulse,

Monday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: rapping poets laureate (plus: give a villain a makeover)

The latest competition invited you to follow in the footsteps of Andrew Motion, who as poet laureate wrote a ‘rap’ to mark Prince William’s 21st birthday. It was bad enough to feature in a Telegraph piece by Charlotte Runcie on the worst poems by great writers and commenters on the BBC website were equally unimpressed: ‘Is that rap with a silent ‘c’, then?’ Bill Greenwell’s rapping John Betjeman takes the extra fiver this week. Betjeman has form. On his delightful 1974 album Banana Blush he reads his poetry against a backdrop of music by Jim Parker. John Peel was a fan and ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was named single of the