Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Mark Mason

I’m a middle-aged man and I love colouring books

A few years ago, you may remember, the distressing news went round that George W. Bush’s library had burned down. Both books had been destroyed, and what was worse he hadn’t yet finished colouring one of them in. The gag relied on a snobbery about what is in truth a wonderful and noble activity. The moment my son became old enough to use colouring-in books I was reminded of just how relaxing they are. Choosing the right colour, drawing the initial line that somehow seems to stop you going over the edges (how does that work?), getting annoyed when your three year-old goes over the edges. Ah, the joy of

Sunday

Charlotte Moore

Spectator books of the year: Charlotte Moore enjoyed Barry’s novel on Irish drunkenness

Common People by Alison Light (Fig Tree, £20) is a shot in the arm for family historians like me. Her wise, wide-ranging interpretations of her family’s past elevate our dusty grubbings to the status of ‘real’ history. Sebastian Barry’s A Temporary Gentleman (Faber, £17.99) stood out amongst novels about Irish drunkenness, or drunken Irishness, because the grandeur of the prose made it soar. The most satisfactory re-reading of the year was Siegfried Sassoon’s Great War trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress. An interesting little find was E. Nesbit’s childhood memoir, Long Ago When I Was Young. The title suggests misty nostalgia, but the book is tough, frightening, devoid of

Christopher Howse

Spectator books of the year: Christopher Howse was sickened by Charles Saatchi’s collection of thoughts

Wonderful year for Pevsner, or rather for us who use the guides as we potter about. Four new vols: Bedfordshire, Somerset, Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, too big for the pocket, but a reasonable £28 a kick, thanks to Yale. A triumph of perseverance. Raymond Edwards’s biography Tolkien (Robert Hale, £25) is the best one could hope for while the letters and papers remain locked in the Bodleian. Tolkien embraced the northern theory of courage: ‘Defeat is no refutation.’ That was just as well, surrounded as he was by death, delay and failure. It was amazing that he wrote even The Lord of the Rings. Charles Saatchi’s collection of thoughts on photographs, Known

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Spectator books of the year: Melanie McDonagh embraces The Essence of the Brontës

Muriel Spark wasn’t only one of the great British novelists but a cracking literary critic and a lovely essayist. Her book on Mary Shelley is extraordinarily perceptive; ditto, but more fun, is her writing on the Brontës. Carcanet Press, having last year reissued the Shelley book, has now republished The Essence of the Brontës (£12.95), Spark’s compilation of their letters, with essays. It’s a joy on both fronts. Her piece on the siblings as teachers (‘genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble’) is mordantly funny — her sympathies are entirely with their pupils — while the selection of letters is very fine and occasionally downright

Lewis Jones

Spectator books of the year: Lewis Jones on Ian McEwan and narrow boats

Music Night at the Apollo: A Memoir of Drifting (Bloomsbury, £14.99) describes the year Lilian Pizzichini spent with her cats on the Adam Bonny, a narrowboat moored on the Grand Union Canal amid the factories and sink estates of Southall. The boat stays moored but, on a tide of cider and cheap vodka, and fuelled by skunk, cocaine and heroin, Pizzichini takes a wild and perilous voyage, encountering not only the local Punjabi and Somalian lowlife but also her own ‘white underclass ancestors’. It sounds grim, but it’s actually rhapsodic, funny and weirdly hopeful. Ian McEwan is usually impressive, and The Children Act (Cape, £16.99) is especially so. A subtly

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Spectator books of the year: Molly Guinness on the ‘oddly adorable’ New York dentist

What You Want, or the Pursuit of Happiness by Constantine Phipps (Quercus, £20). This is a deeply eccentric book — a novel entirely in verse set in a theme park that takes in the history of philosophy and the tale of a disintegrating marriage. In a few witty rhyming couplets, my cousin Constantine Phipps can sum up an entire character with all its foibles or a whole system of ethics. And shining through the parade of philosophers, psychiatrists, dead presidents and theme-park attractions is a sense of deep wisdom and reasonableness. Some of the verses, especially towards the end, are truly moving and beautiful. Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator books of the year: Sam Leith explains why The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters nearly lost him money

I liked Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (William Collins, £25) so much that — if I had had the first idea how to operate in a betting shop — I would have put a pony on it to win the Samuel Johnson prize. In the event, my incompetence saved me £25. But Nicolson was robbed. Here is a book bursting with enthusiasm, erudition and eccentricity: a travelogue, a memoir, a work of literary criticism and, at bottom, an archaeology of the western imagination. I found it completely thrilling. Also, in John Berryman’s centenary year I was delighted to see Farrar, Straus and Giroux reissuing his work in

Marcus Berkmann

Spectator books of the year: Marcus Berkmann reveals the only book this year he didn’t want to finish

As someone who spent several years writing TV reviews mainly for laughs, I kneel before the twin idols of Clive James and Nancy Banks-Smith, without whom I wouldn’t have had a career. As we all know, James is a touch under the weather these days, and it was probably for sentimental reasons that I found my way to A Point of View (Picador, £16.99, published in 2011), a collection of his contributions to the Radio 4 series between 2007 and 2009. Each of these talks, 60 in all, runs to around 1,600 words, and James appends an explanatory afterword to every one. They are magnificent, possibly even masterly and, added

Jane Ridley

Spectator books of the year: Jane Ridley on her favourite books about The Great War

2014 has been the year of 1914. In the same way that Christmas puddings appear in supermarkets in October, many of the contestants in the publishing race for 2014 defied starter’s orders and came out pre-maturely in 2013. What has been striking about the bumper crop of first world war books is the terrifically high standard. One of last year’s books which I’ve only just got round to reading in paperback is David Reynolds’s Long Shadow (Simon & Schuster, £9.99). Because the Great War seemed so meaningless, killing so many British soldiers for reasons which remain remote and obscure even today, it has always been especially difficult for the British

Thursday

Mary Keen

Is there anything new left in gardening books?

‘Whither the novel’ was a great dinner party topic in the 1960s. It is a question less aired these days, when novels come in strange and varied forms. From Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, set in the 11th century andwritten in cod Olde Englisshe, to the versifying of Constantine Phipps (much chosen as ‘book of the year’), there is plenty to please us all. Gardening books, however, have now reached the whithering stage. Samey, samey, samey is what they are, and this year even that most traditional of booksellers, Heywood Hill, has lamented the lack of anything new in the horticultural line. There are the inevitable huge picture books, the horticultural

Catherine Brown

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s — are regaled by picturesque extracts from Vita’s landscape poems, and moving professions of love to and from her husband Harold Nicolson. Matthew Dennison’s title, Behind the Mask, indicates his ambition to get beyond such projections to something more real. But the metaphor is unfortunate. There was no single image that Vita adopted or which others imposed on her — nor a single real self which has been concealed until now. Dennison knows this. He interprets Vita in terms of a split between the reserve inherited from her English father Lord

Boris Dralyuk

Emmanuel Carrère: a poet and psychopath doing his best to further destabilise Ukraine

If Eduard Limonov, the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s utterly engrossing biographical ‘novel’, hadn’t invented himself, Carrère would have had to invent him. This is not to say that Limonov, one of the most colourful and controversial characters to have emerged on the Russian literary and political landscapes in the last half century, is a liar. Quite the contrary. At any given moment — be he an adolescent hoodlum in the industrial Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the 1950s and 1960s, a promising poet in Moscow in the relatively peaceful but stultifying Brezhnev years, a resentful down-and-out-émigré memoirist in punk-era New York, a mercenary with the Serbs at Sarajevo in the

Graham Robb

Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in France, France is ‘the sick man of Europe’. The land of liberty was once admired by the whole world. Then came May ’68, feminism, immigration, consumerism and homosexuality. On the surface, nothing has changed; espressos are still being plonked down on zinc counters, and ‘the legs of Parisian women still turn heads’. But ‘the soul has gone’. Gays and Muslims are taking over, and France is ‘dissolving in the icy waters of individualism and self-hatred’. The blurb calls Le Suicide français an ‘analyse’, but there is nothing analytical about it.

Cory Doctorow

The Anonymous ghost in the machine

Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon. At first glance, you might think that the Anonymous story — the Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing, meme-spewing, terrifying, hilarious non-collective that hacked the church of scientology, the government of Tunisia, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the Pentagon (for starters) — is a story about computer security, or youthful alienation, or political activism. But political activism isn’t anything new, and

David Ekserdjian

The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books

Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £53.95) examines its hero’s career from his extraordinarily accomplished — and resolutely conventional — teenage productions, by way of his glorious middle years, on to the final works, which were created when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Lavishly illustrated not only with works by the artist, but also with photographs of him and his friends, it does full justice to his towering — if not always entirely lovable — achievement. A broadly similar approach to another modern great

Mark Mason

Did anyone ever really love Bob Hope?

Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the guy in their book blows everyone else out of the water? Bob Hope, claims Richard Zoglin in this biography, was the most important entertainer of the 20th century. In fact, he adds, you could argue that Hope was ‘the only important entertainer’. Can Zoglin really believe this? Is he really telling Chaplin, Sinatra, Elvis, Monroe et al to roll over? Even if you made the ‘only important …’ boast about one of those people it would sound absurd. Making it about Bob Hope sets you up for a 486-page fall.

Sophia Waugh

God, aliens and a novel with a mission

They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God. A raft of readers hate sci-fi, and probably more sheer away at the very idea of a novel about a missionary. And yet… And yet The Book of Strange New Things works. It is in many ways extraordinary; its narrative drive, its lack of sentimentality, its occasional (emotional) brutality, its humour (albeit rare) all add up to a novel which is both intelligent, thought-provoking and as readable as a potboiler. Peter, ex-junkie, loving husband, cat-lover, sets off on a journey. The novel opens with his farewell to his wife, and

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Songs for the road: through his music and his classic car collection Neil Young hopes to escape his childhood traumas

Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil Young, who played him a song detailing his extensive drug-related experiments (with grass, cocaine and amphetamines). At the end of the performance, Dylan remarked drily, ‘That’s honest.’ Young still laughs when he remembers this. Partly it was because Dylan, who had done some experimenting himself back in the day, knew where Young was coming from.

Marcus Berkmann

The 10 best loo books of 2014: why we sing so much better in the shower and what became of Queen Victoria’s children’s milk teeth

Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I know favour ‘bog books’. And having written one or two books myself that teeter on the edge of frivolity, I know that for your book to be kept in what Americans call the ‘bathroom’ is essentially a compliment. As long as it’s there to be read, of course. Oddly enough, the two best loo books of the year I have already and separately reviewed in these pages. The Most of Nora Ephron (Doubleday, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16.50) is an immaculately chosen compilation of the late American humorist’s journalism, blogs, meditations

Andrew Taylor

Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work

If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the crowd. Cayetano Brulé, the hero of The Neruda Case, sets himself a course of Maigret novels on the advice of his first client, Pablo Neruda. ‘If poetry transports us to the heavens,’ the aged poet remarks, ‘crime novels plunge you into life the way it really is.’ Brulé, a Cuban exile in Chile, has now appeared in six detective novels by Roberto Ampuero, a Chilean professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa. The Neruda Case is the most recent; it is also the first in the fictional chronology