Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Tristram Hunt

Caught between Marx and a monster

‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her speech was given.’ So Labour MP Robert Cunninghame Graham described Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, giving a speech to 100,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park at the height of the 1889 dock strike. ‘Brilliant, devoted and beautiful,’ agreed the trade union leader Ben Tillett. ‘During our great strike she worked unceasingly — a vivid and vital personality, with great force

Cressida Connolly

The cruellest present you could give a hated old in-law

It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her deathbed funny. The person with that gift is Roz Chast. Subscribers to the New Yorker will already be familiar with her marvellous cartoons, which often feature elderly and over-neurotic parents shouting dire imprecations to their rather dazed and mild-looking adult offspring. Their warnings tend to concern such mortal perils as crossing the road, running to answer the telephone or touching the handrail on public transport (the germs!). The subjects are from Brooklyn, but the appeal is universal: visiting a friend in Athens the other day, I saw a Chast cartoon

Molly Guinness

Lillian Hellman lied her way through life

Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’ wasn’t far off. Navigating through the hall of mirrors that Hellman left behind, trying to sort fact from self-aggrandising fiction, seems to have worked Dorothy Gallagher into a fury. Perhaps this book is her revenge. One of America’s most successful playwrights, Hellman had her first Broadway hit before she was 30. She was a close friend of Dorothy Parker and her long-term lover was Dashiell Hammett. Ardently left-wing, she was summoned before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions about her

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

A coming of age novel? Or an age of coming novel?

At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the sacred cows come home for bringing her super-brightness to bear on this most vital of subjects. Like the rest of the western world and its stepdaughters, I loved How To Be a Woman and was excited to see what she would come up with next; when I heard it would be a novel, I was a little underwhelmed, having read her previous attempt at Young Adult fiction, The Chronicles of Narmo. When I realised in

John Martin-Robinson

From Edwardian idyll to meetings with Nehru: the life of Lady Ursula D’Asbo

This is the Real Thing, an evocative account of English upper-class life throughout the 20th century. It begins amidst the Edwardian feudal splendours of Belvoir Castle, where Ursula d’Abo spent much of her childhood with her beloved grandfather ‘Appi’. At the coronation of George VI she was a maid of honour to the Queen. During the second world war she worked with 2,000 women making bullets. Postwar life was hardly less varied and amazing, with an other-worldly stay in princely India, and meetings with Nehru. Married life at West Wratting Park and Kensington Square, two beautiful Georgian houses she restored, was followed in her widowhood by five years with Paul

Aaron Ross

What are the Chinese up to in Africa?

Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In his new book, China’s Second Continent, the American journalist Howard French recalls meeting US officials in Mali to sound them out on the matter. Instead, he finds himself barraged by questions. ‘It would really be useful for us to know what the Chinese are up to,’ one American official tells him. ‘So far we’ve been limited to speaking with them through translators. We’ve got very little idea about any of this.’ Grasping the range and scale of China’s activities in Africa is indeed a tall order. Commercial deals are cloaked

Robert Chandler

Doctor Zhivago’s long, dark shadow

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion. Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, into an assimilated and highly cultured Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist; among the family’s friends were Leo Tolstoy, Sergey Rachmaninov and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak wanted first to be a composer, then a philosopher

Wednesday

Mark Mason

A novel for men who don’t read novels

Are you the sort of man – or is your man the sort of man – who’s always meaning to read more novels but never gets round to it? Proper novels, I mean, rather than your John Grisham/Andy McNab stuff. Well the book you’ve been waiting for is soon to be published: A Man Called Ove by the Swedish writer Fredrik Backman. Ove (pronounced ‘Oover’) was born on Backman’s blog, whose readers then demanded he write a novel about the character. Backman obliged, the result sold like hot smorgastartas in his native land and now it’s going to conquer the world. The reason it’s the perfect book for weaning men

Monday

Julie Bindel

Summer sucks

Who could possibly choose hay fever, insect bites and heat rash over an open fire, cashmere blanket and hot chocolate laced with brandy? Although I love the bright early mornings and blue sky I can’t bear the heat and all that comes with it. Give me winter over summer any day. But to admit my dislike for the most popular season will bring forth accusations of total madness and misery. The images conjured up by a mention of summer are, for most people, cold beer, ice-cream, gentle boat trips, evenings in the garden twirling the stem of a frosty glass of bone-dry wine, dipping into an outdoor swimming pool and

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

The book that turned me into Rod Liddle

We all have what Andy Miller calls a ‘List of Betterment’: 50 or so books that, if read, would surely make us a better person – book clubs, gulp that Pino down, and discuss. Granted, it’s tough being a bastard if your nose is always in a book. And from The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life, a memoir of 12 months spent working through a List of Betterment, it’s difficult to picture Andy Miller ever being a bastard. He’s a thoroughly amiable sort. The reasons he decided to take drastic action with said list are simple. He explains: ‘We have been working parents for

Thursday

William Leith

Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of

A.N. Wilson

A divine guide to Dante

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But,  like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw. The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London, she has been lighting up the genius of Dante for us all her professional life, especially his politics. But this book is just as accessible to a general reader as it would be a source of wonder and envy to scholars. It is mainly concerned with the Comedy, but it expounds much of Dante’s other

Andrew Taylor

Maigret’s new clothes – this month’s best new crime novel, published 1931

The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the French by Sam Taylor; MacLehose, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16). More than two million copies have already been sold. Its author, Jöel Dicker, is apparently ‘Switzerland’s coolest export since Roger Federer’.The novel, which is billed as a literary thriller, has been garlanded with ecstatic reviews and prizes on the continent. It’s the story of a young, successful but blocked writer who tries to re-energise his muse by visiting Harry Quebert, the Great American Novelist who put him on the road to fame. Harry lives in a beachside house in Maine. Unfortunately,

Ben Hamilton

J.K. Rowling is just too nice – and too lucky – to satirise publishing

J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a rare set-up for crime fiction. Authors, no matter how grungy and streetwise they pretend to be, spend most of their time doing dreary things with people they dislike in the name of selling books. They are itching to put their agents, publishers and fellow authors on the page so that they can slay them. Thing is, if you’re the most famous author in the world, bearing a grudge against publishing might look a bit ungrateful. Rowling realises this and adjusts her approach accordingly. The Silkworm is a soft, toothless, inept

Alan Judd

The cold, remote plateau of Vichy France where good was done

It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome or too familiar, or because — in Solzhenitzyn’s memorable phrase — you need only a mouthful of seawater to know the taste of the ocean. No: my reluctance to contemplate that world, even as a distant spectator, is because it was so awful and the detail so compelling that I’ll be unable to put the book down. It will echo inside my skull for as long as I inhabit one. So it is with this vivid account by Caroline Moorehead of remote mountain villagers high up in France’s Massif Central

Ian Thomson

Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’

A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at. The Errol Flynn estate, an expanse of ranchland outside Port Antonio, was grazed by tired-looking cattle. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ Wymore said to me as I walked into her office after knocking. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’ I took in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 Wymore had divorced Flynn, who died the following year

Jeremy Treglown

The gentle intoxications of Laurie Lee

He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider with Rosie; in the love of some passionate, clever women, whose guidance and support get rather less than their due in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning; and in having survived the Spanish civil war — the subject of A Moment of War — despite seeing action (though on his part this involved more seeing than action) in the terrible last battle of Teruel, and being imprisoned three times as a suspected spy. Behind and beyond all that, he was lucky in his gifts: charm, which included a knack

Philip Hensher

Thug, rapist, poetic visionary: the contradictory Earl of Rochester

Despite being an earl, Rochester is very nearly a major poet. His poems and letters were torn up by a zealous mother after his death, bent on destroying anything obscene or scandalous. A good deal was lost, but a lot was passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied (it was never printed in Rochester’s lifetime). His full development as a poet cannot be traced, but some of what survives is tantalisingly rich, and has fascinated many subsequent writers. He is one of those rare poets who come to mean much more to later generations. ‘Upon Nothing’ bears a bleak relationship to the end of Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, and, very powerfully,

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: compose an elegy for an endangered profession (plus Jack Kerouac gets the golfing bug)

Competitors rose admirably to the recent challenge to step into the shoes of a well-known writer and submit a poem or piece of prose in praise or defence of something unexpected. It was nice to glimpse a lighter side of Leonard Cohen courtesy of Martin Parker’s twist on ‘Bird on a Wire’, and Alanna Blake submitted a well-made Wordsworthian tribute to wind farms. Ernest Hemingway came out for the League Against Cruel Sports and against sobriety, and in J. Seery’s entry Barbara Cartland showed her true Marxist colours: ‘There is no phrase in English more sensuous than “dialectical materialism”’. Other stellar performers were John Samson, Josephine Boyle, C.J. Gleed and

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Great literary tea parties (oh, and ours)

Every summer this magazine invites some of its (randomly selected) subscribers to tea in the garden. Every Englishman loves tea and the pages of English literature are richly adorned with tea-time scenes. Perhaps the most gluttonous teas are to be found in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. From her exile abroad, the narrator remembers tea-time at Manderley with relish: ‘Those dripping crumpets, I can see them now. Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping-hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavoured and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion bursting with peel and raisins.’ Tea at Manderley is not