Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

The great Shakespeare authorship question

Was William Shakespeare just a nom de plume? The question is usually dismissed as boring, only of interest to snobs and cranks. Clever people, like the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, know better. But the old authorship debate has been given new life of late, thanks to the energetic writer Alexander Waugh, who is adamant that Shakespeare was not a poor boy from Stratford, but the aristocrat Edward De Vere. At a debate at Ye Olde Cock Tavern in London on Wednesday, Waugh and fellow author Ros Barber roundly thumped Professors Duncan Salkeld and Alan Nelson. The ‘anti-Stratfordians’, as Waugh’s side are known, are on a roll. On Sunday, it was

Wynn Wheldon

Half-poetry, half-prose, half-Belgian – and not half bad

Patrick McGuinness’s prose trembles on the edge of poetry, occasionally indeed tipping gently over into it. This is thoroughly characteristic of a book that does sometimes feel as though it might be an abandoned sequence of poems, reconfigured in often spell-binding prose. The title itself is poetic: who the ‘other people’ are and which ‘countries’ they come from is never wholly clear. However, perhaps this cavil is unjustified. Poetry, after all, inhabits a literary space in which fact and fiction merge or dissolve into one another, as they do in (or are made to by) memory, so the subtitle hints at what is to follow, which is an attempt to

Susie Dent

It’s not nice being used and abused

The term ‘psychological thriller’ is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum. In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful. In the novels of Nicci French, however, there is little ambiguity: their pattern is to deliver the mental shock-equivalent of a dead body, followed only later by a real one. It is an effective formula — as Alfred Hitchcock put it: ‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.’ Among the best of Hitchcock’s own psychological thrillers

Keith Baxter

Bitchiness gets in the way of the Gielgoodies

In the summer of 1955 a group of finals students trooped into a classroom at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. We had come to hear Ernest Milton talk about theatre. It was exciting to be in contact with a famous actor, even though Milton had not worked for some time. But better him than the man who taught diction, whose chief experience had been as a camel-driver in Chu Chin Chow. Milton was sitting on a chair in a long, old raincoat, a brown paper bag of groceries at his feet; his beaky nose sniffed us as we crowded into the room. Peter O’Toole was in the vanguard. He

Victor Sebestyen

Gavrilo Princip – history’s ultimate teenage tearaway

Amid the vast tonnage of recent books about the first world war this must be the most unusual — and one of the most interesting. The ‘Trigger’ of the title is Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old student dropout who shot the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street corner on 28 June 1914 and began the chain of events that led to catastrophic war a few weeks later. At first it reads oddly, a curious ragbag of material that seems disconnected. It is part a biography of ‘history’s ultimate teenage tearaway’, as Tim Butcher puts it, part an investigation into some of Princip’s surviving family members in Bosnia, an intensely

James Walton

John Crace digested – twice

Fiction ‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach. ‘Apparently,’ replied Florence looking up from the introduction to The 21st Century Digested, ‘the parodies of new books that John Crace has been doing in the Guardian since 2000 are now so popular that 131 of them have been turned into a hardback collection.’ ‘Impressive,’ murmured Paul. ‘But one thing worries me. Once even Crace’s fans see them all together, won’t they be forced to realise that he relies on the same handful of tricks for almost every novel he takes on?’ ‘You mean, like simply having the characters point

Lee Langley

Who’s raiding the fridge?

There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up serious spoiler alerts. The story demands an innocent eye; the gaining of knowledge should come page by page, and not be hurried. To set the scene: Shimura-san, a bachelor of 56, set in his ways, lives quietly in a house on the steep hillside above the Nagasaki dockyards. He has an undemanding job as a meteorologist, analysing weather patterns. One day, returning after work, hot, sticky and tormented by the clamour of cicadas, he notices, not for the first time, that a pot of yoghurt is missing from the fridge.

Duncan Fallowell

The fruitcake island of Sicily and its legion of literary visitors

At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from the vantage of Europe’s historically most stable society, have gazed with fascination at perhaps its least stable. There were already links between us in the age of the Normans, who conquered Sicily at roughly the same time as they conquered us. The revival of classical learning in the Renaissance made the English increasingly familiar with the Sicilian connections of Homer, Plato, Archimedes, Aeschylus, Pindar, Empedocles, Theocritus, Virgil and Cicero, and with the island’s mythological and classical geography. Shakespeare set several plays there. English travellers and reprobates were among the first

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Shooting prize-dispensing fish in literary barrels

Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in particular and, it may be presumed, the 2011 Man Booker Prize in especial particular. That was the year of the great ‘readability’ brouhaha in which — as every reviewer will point out — among many unexpected omissions from the longlist was Edward St Aubyn. He afterwards told an interviewer that ‘the Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the World Heavyweight Championship, which I’m not going to win either.’ Anyway, here’s this: a short little book about the ‘Elysian Prize’, whose sponsors are a ‘highly innovative but

John McEwen

How seriously should we take Ruskin as an artist?

This stout and well-designed volume nicely complements Tim Hilton’s classic biography of John Ruskin. It is the catalogue for the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (till 11 May) and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (4 July–28 September). A Scottish venue is especially appropriate. Ruskin (1819–1900) was a Londoner but proudly Scots by descent. He retained the slight Scottish accent of his father, a successful sherry merchant, who had been brought up in Edinburgh; and already at nine drew a highly competent map of Scotland, which is illustrated but regrettably not exhibited. In common with the fashion of his time, the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The book that brought out the Lady Bracknell in me

I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down properly and punctuated to within an inch of their lives. Not so Jonathon Green, who has the same relationship with slang as Jordan does with eating wedding cake in a thong; five books about it published and another one in the pipeline. According to Wikipedia, Green is often referred to as ‘the English-speaking world’s leading lexicographer of slang’, and has even been described as ‘the most acclaimed British lexicographer since Dr Johnson’. I’ve got a bit of a problem — or ‘beef’ — with people (generally public-school men, like Green)

Harry Mount

To be topp at lat., throw your Cambridge Latin Course away

The wisest words about learning Latin were said by that gifted prep-school boy, Nigel Molesworth: ‘Actually, it is quite easy to be topp in lat. You just have to work.’ But things have changed since Molesworth learnt Latin at St Custard’s in the 1950s. Over the last half-century, the work has been extracted from Latin learning and, without the work, the whole point of the language disappears. As Gwynne’s Latin — an uplifting throwback to the good old days — reveals, many schools now don’t teach the vocative case. In the Cambridge Latin Course, used in 85 per cent of schools, you learn the nominative, accusative and dative cases in

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Tales of the inconsequential

My cache of conversational titbits has been considerably boosted by the most recent challenge that I threw down to Spectator readers. I asked for an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information, and I now know that Zanzibar is the world’s largest clove producer, and that 99 per cent of Estonians have blue eyes. Thanks, for those morsels of trivia, to J. Seery and Nicholas Hodgson, both of whom submitted fine entries. Patrick Tyson-Cain, Sergio Michael Petro, Albert Black, Walter Ancarrow and Charles Curran also narrowly missed the cut. Basil Ransome-Davies, who is on stellar form at the moment,

Thursday

Caroline Moore

An escape from New South Wales

Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from a camp in New South Wales. This intrinsically thrilling incident, triggered by a fascinating clash between mutually uncomprehending cultures, is an obvious gift to a writer. There may be some who claim that any novelist could therefore have produced an interesting fictional version of it; but this is like saying that anyone could have made a landscape out of the fine park at Blenheim. Keneally spotted both the tale and its possibilities, which in itself is a truly enviable talent. His imagination is fired by the incongruities of the camp

Mark Mason

The train stations that don’t really exist

In 1964, as part of his railway cuts, Dr Beeching ordered the closure of Duncraig, a small, little-used station in the Scottish Highlands. The train drivers working the line simply ignored him. They continued to stop there, and the station remains open to this day. A world where nothing ever changes, or indeed happens — this is just the sort of world that appeals to Dixe Wills. His latest travelogue takes in 38 of the 150 or so remaining ‘request’ stops on Britain’s railway network. I didn’t know such things existed at all, but apparently there they are (including Duncraig), only seeing action as and when a passenger informs the

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 24 April 2014

Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to Burn (John Murray, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £10.99) is a dystopian thriller set in an all-too-plausible version of contemporary London. Three members of the establishment have shot dead innocent bystanders. The weather is broiling. A plague-like virus known as ‘the sweats’ spreads, bringing panic in its train. Stevie Flint, a cynical TV presenter on a shopping channel, is one of the few survivors. She contracts the disease shortly after stumbling on her boyfriend’s body. The boyfriend, a surgeon who apparently died of natural causes, had concealed a laptop in her loft

Simon Baker

The gambler’s daily grind

Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau. Aptly, since he is in a place filled with mock-Venetian canals and poor reproduction paintings, he himself is a fake: the man is not a real lord, and the money is not his own. He is a disgraced solicitor of modest origin, who ran off with a client’s savings after befriending her. Lawrence Osborne’s novel is a bleak and enjoyable account of someone who, perhaps through unacknowledged guilt, finds bitter solace in losing and in driving himself towards extinction. Narrated in an urbane, knowing, faintly old-fashioned tone, the story moves

Richard Ryder

What most imperilled country houses in the 20th century was taxes and death duties, not requisition

Servicemen used paintings as dartboards.   Schoolchildren dismantled banisters and paneling for firewood. Architects from the Ministry of Works acted like pocket Stalins. Sarcophagi were dumped in gardens beside beheaded statues. And overhead, Luftwaffe Dorniers droned with menace. Such hazards ravaged requisitioned country houses during the last war. Yet nothing imperilled them more, in the 20th century, than super-taxes and the rattle of death duties. When the country houses were handed back, the majority were defiled as well as decaying from leaking roofs and dry rot. Cash-poor owners, already penalised by towering taxation, could not afford to carry out major repairs to their caves of ice — to borrow from Coleridge

Philip Hensher

Up close and personal | 24 April 2014

What should a writer write about? The question, so conducive to writer’s block, is made more acute when the writer is evidently well-balanced, free of trauma and historically secure. It is made still more urgent when that writer is solipsistic in tendency and keen to write, not about the world, but about perceptions of the world. Two American authors of the same period arrived at different solutions to the problem. Sylvia Plath, in her husband Ted Hughes’s assessment, first found nothing worth writing about, and then deliberately encouraged demons and hitherto controlled minor difficulties until they flared up and killed her. John Updike, on the other hand, had an immensely

Ursula Buchan

Beauty in beastly surroundings

The vast majority of books written about British gardens and their histories are concerned with large ones, made and maintained, sometimes over several centuries, by people with money. ’Twas ever thus. In this country, recognisable gardens began in monasteries, as well as the surroundings of palaces and noblemen’s houses, and it is only in the last couple of centuries that the middle classes have got into the act. As for the poor and dispossessed, theirs has been a very different story, too rarely told. Which is why Margaret Willes’s The Gardens of the British Working Class is so welcome, since the author brings together much scattered and hard-to-find information on,