Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

James Joll

The man who was mistaken for a deer

‘And anything by Michael Connelly’ were the final words of advice from one of my best friends in discussing books to read one summer. I’ve been hooked ever since by a master of narrative tension, complex but believable plotting and three-dimensional characters. Luckily Connelly is a prolific author of detective and investigative fiction with a number of protagonists who sometimes appear in each other’s books. His latest novel maintains the same high standard and relentless forward impetus that keeps one turning the pages. Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch, a Vietnam veteran, has had a distinguished but somewhat bumpy career as a detective and is now deployed in the Open-Unsolved unit of the

Stephen Bayley

Jeff Koons’s latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel

Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager rather than a tormented creative soul. The Koons brand includes a stainless steel bust of Louis XIV, a red aluminium lobster and balloon dogs, plus countless knock-offs of novelty-store dross. It is tempting to think Koons a vulgarian and condemn his art as crapola, but to do so would be lazy. There’s no point in criticising him for his cynical exploitation of the credulous art market, since that is exactly his intention. Futile to damn him as vacuous; he’d be flattered. All artistic achievement can be assessed in terms of

Molly Guinness

Lolita’s secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite

Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of writers’ feuds and resentments. Reading Literary Rivals is a curious experience; from the quotations and bare facts you can just about make out a version of reality, but it’s fighting so hard against the author’s interpretations that it’s sometimes obscured altogether. It feels as if Bradford has done his research with a baleful monocle pressed to his eye, giving a ghastly pallor to everything he reads. When Dickens read Thackeray’s review of his work, he wrote to thank him, but when Professor Bradford read the same review, he saw nothing

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: tips of the slung — or poems as the Revd W.A. Spooner might have written them (plus: an author’s acknowledgments page with a twist)

The diminutive, myopic Revd W.A. Spooner was the inspiration behind the recent call for Spooneristic poems. The long-time warden of New College, Oxford bequeathed us such comic gems as ‘The Lord is a shoving leopard’ and ‘kinkering kongs their titles take’. Not everyone was laughing, though. ‘Am I the only one who finds this exercise extraordinarily difficult?’ wailed Brian Murdoch. He’s got a point. Judging the entries was a brain-addling process, so goodness knows what torture it must have been to write them. Still, it was a large and lively entry. The winners are rewarded with a well deserved £25 each. Sylvia Fairley snaffles £30. Sylvia Fairley Send my abandoned

Thursday

Jack Castle

Ezra Pound – the fascist years

‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, /Jumbled boulder and weed’, was Basil Bunting’s 1949 opinion of Pound’s Cantos; but as the sometime friend of Pound continued: ‘There they are, you will have to go a long way round / If you want to avoid them.’ This judgment has proved wise. Here we are in 2014, not avoiding one of the most contentious figures in 20th-century literature: poet, midwife of Eliot’s The Waste Land, economist, translator, committed Fascist, anti-Semite, avid supporter of James Joyce and Mussolini, later alleged traitor to the United States of America and —

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

When Irish nationalism meant sexual adventure

One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past, only more so. It’s a natural human tendency to project the outcome of events backwards, ignoring the fact that the arc of history really doesn’t work like that. In the case of Ireland that tendency to see the past in terms of outcomes is particularly misleading. The state that came about less than a century ago as a result of the Easter Rising, the war of independence and partition was socially conservative and strongly Catholic. Roy Foster’s achievement is to show that this need not have been so. This book

Andrew Barrow

Why prefabs really were fab

Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to manufacture half a million of them to ease the new housing emergency caused by enemy bombs and the continued growth of inner-city slums. He went on to claim that these easy-to-assemble, factory-made bungalows would be ‘far superior to the ordinary cottage’. Readers of this richly illustrated, hard-hitting little book will find that Churchill was right. The new prefab — an early prototype immediately went on show at the Tate Gallery, of all places — did not meet the approval of George Bernard Shaw, who called it ‘Heartbreak House’ and that

Ted Hodgkinson

Detective drama Dostoevsky-style

In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s, doublings abound, though their meanings are rarely resolved. As with his great contemporary Nabokov, this hall-of-mirrors effect provides a pleasant means of exploring the fragmentary and illusory self. But it is Dostoevsky, and his novel The Double, that really loom larger here than Nabokov. Gazdanov shares Dostoevsky’s penetrating psychological insight, and is drawn to characters in the midst of a breakdown. While Gazdanov seems in thrall to these vastly different novelists, he has his own utterly distinctive voice. First published in 1950, The Buddha’s Return is a deceptively slight novel,

Sofka Zinovieff

A woman who wears her homes like garments

Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang yourself. Our homes reflect our characters, social milieux and finances, but we also reflect them. Leonard Woolf wrote that a house ‘has an immense influence on its inhabitants’, and contended that Monk’s House (where he lived with Virginia Woolf from 1919–1941) was ‘the most powerful moulder’ of how they had lived their lives. Taking a lead from this notion, Margaret Forster has produced a memoir focussing on the homes she has lived in throughout her 76 years. This is no history of the buildings or who came before, like Julie

John Preston

The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie

The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn comes inevitably to mind here, as does the Earl of Warminster — ‘Erry’ — in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. As his name would suggest, Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet ‘Jack’ Hastings, the 16th Earl of Huntingdon, emerged into the world bedecked with promisingly absurd trappings. And for a time it looked as if his life would follow a predictably conventional path. But then everything changed. After some routine torturing by his nanny — she branded him with an iron — he went to Eton. There,

Justin Cartwright

The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed

Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something resonant, evoking a connection with the land and its meaning. Marsden is obsessed with pre-history and the beliefs and practices of the earliest inhabitants of Cornwall. He cites with approval someone’s judgment that written history is a palimpsest and he is demonstrably eager to see what was written over. Although his area of special interest is Cornwall, he describes expeditions to other European countries in search of a kind of kinship of belief and practice among them. His book is also a personal account of renovating an old but enchanting

Tom Hodgkinson

Tolstoy’s favourite novel is a guide to being idle

Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s eponymous hero cannot see the point of doing anything at all, and spends his time lying in bed or wandering around his St Petersburg flat in his beloved oriental dressing gown, bickering about the dusting with his manservant. The newspaper on the desk is a year old; flies buzz from the inkwell. Oblomov broods; he worries; he thinks. The book’s author, Ivan Goncharov, is perhaps little-known now, but in its time Oblomov was hugely popular in Russia. Tolstoy, that venerable, saintly moralist, was deeply in love with it, writing: ‘Oblomov

Justin Marozzi

Is it boring being the god of the sea?

Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink of an eye, to address the great immortal deities? The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, now entering his ninth decade and never knowingly lacking in chutzpah, is not one to be deterred by such considerations. Nooteboom is an immensely civilised and civilising writer, rich in curiosity and armed with a dazzling literary style. Those who already know his writing will not be surprised to discover that on the page, if not in the briny, he is more than a match for the trident-bearing earth-shaker, god of the sea. Notionally written every

Richard Davenporthines

How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions

There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is the history of European ultra-reactionary repression and police espionage in the half-century after the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789-93. The instability of popular opinion, the destructiveness of angry, ignorant populism and the wretchedness of timid, suppliant leadership are laid bare by him. Yet his deadliest strictures are against the rigid, fear-driven, authoritarian reaction of the propertied classes, which he demonstrates was lethally counter-productive as well as often absurd. Phantom Terror is full of suggestive instances that will set readers thinking about contemporary constitutional quandaries, threatened liberties, hysterics about

James Walton

From working-class heroes to Disney World mascots: the sad fate of the Chilean miners

On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour shift. They came out again 69 days later, to be greeted by the country’s president in front of a worldwide TV audience of around 1.2 billion. A group of workers who, in many cases, had never left the local area in their lives were now global heroes. At the time, it was embarrassingly easy to see their rescue as simply the sort of good news that makes us all aware of our shared humanity. Héctor Tobar’s book, though, is a sharp reminder that the truth was a lot more complicated

Mirabel Cecil

My mad gay grandfather and me

Family history is all the rage at the moment — finding out about one’s ancestors, digging back into one’s roots. Sofka Zinovieff has written the strange, and strangely moving, tale of her family’s unorthodox relationships. By turns comical, tragicomical and melodramatic, her book often reads much like fiction, and she recounts it like a novel. The principal characters are: Gerald Berners, born in 1883; his lover, nicknamed the ‘Mad Boy’, Robert Heber-Percy, born in 1911; the author’s grandmother, Jennifer Fry, born in 1916; and the author herself, born in 1961. Zinovieff expertly interweaves their unlikely history from late Victorian England until the present day, leaving the reader on the last

Tuesday

Philip Sidney

Why you should never meet your heroes

As we become steadily accustomed to life in the Age of Celebrity, it’s become a truth that, as Mark Mason put it in the Speccie last month, ‘meeting your heroes is almost always a bad idea’. Reading the letters page in the London Review of Books, it seems that this advice extends to visiting any place associated with your heroes. Last summer Max Long, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, arrived at Patrick Leigh Fermor’s old house at Kardamyli in Greece, hoping to pay homage to one of his heroes. His visit, he reports, was unideal: ‘To the hairy, shirtless, sandalled old man who occupied Paddy’s studio as though he

Monday

Daniel Harris

Why are sports biographies treated differently to other works?

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has been running in London theatres for 62 years straight – a period that spans more than 25,000 performances. As is traditional in the genre, it ends with the suspects gathered together for a shocking denouement, during which the detective unmasks the murderer, to general horror. Despite the number of times this has happened, the identity of the killer is apparently ‘the best-kept secret in show business’; at no point has any reviewer felt the need to reveal that the butler did it. On the other hand, the publication last week of two autobiographies – one by Kevin Pietersen and one by Roy Keane – were treated quite

Thursday

James Howardjohnston

The Guru of Late Antiquity speaks again

Nearly 50 years ago we made our way into an inner place, a semi-subterranean room, in a peculiar college. A smallish, round-faced man was beginning to give tongue. Each week he drew multi-coloured patterns in the air, words flitting about like luminous bats in a night sky. We sat bewitched. There was suspense too, since from time to time a stammer threatened to stop all speech. He took us back to a world far removed from our own — there was more than a touch of Pullman magic as he made an incision and we crossed into his world. First we found ourselves in the Middle East in an era

Andrew Taylor

Hercule Poirot returns – and yes, he’s as irritating as ever

First, a confession. I have never cared much for Hercule Poirot. In this I am not alone, for his creator felt much the same way, describing him as a ‘detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’, albeit a creep with remarkable commercial staying power. Fortunately, my prejudice doesn’t affect enjoyment of the brilliantly constructed plots and the unobtrusively effective storytelling. But I find it far easier to warm to Miss Marple. Poirot is, after Sherlock Holmes, the most celebrated fictional detective in the world. It was only a matter of time before the Agatha Christie estate allowed him to be brought back to life. Continuations have become big business in recent