Book Reviews Archives

Thursday

8 May 2014

Judge a critic by the quality of his mistakes

What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one way or another, to read books all my life’, yet he does not regard himself as well read in the genre of novels. With two million languishing in the British Library vaults, nobody could be, he insists. And although the publishers have given it the subtitle ‘A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities’, the author declares in his admirably succinct preface: ‘This book is not a guide.’ He’s right. It is an engaging game, or a compendium of games (as the Gamages Christmas catalogue used

Ian Thomson

Exclamation marks, no; aertex shirts, yes!

Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark Blues Brother suit. He looks like a poseur, and indeed studied drama at Rada. Lynn Barber, the ‘celebrity interviewer’, is the self-acknowledged scourge of pomposity and pretension. (Melvyn Bragg, among others, has felt the lash of her schoolmarm tongue.) Like Meades, Barber grew up in early 1950s middle-class England. An only child, she found a way out of the bridge/ canasta tea parties and sherry-tippling of Twickenham, her childhood home, to become a staff writer on Penthouse girlie magazine; her first book, published in 1975, was a sex manual entitled

David Crane

Look again – the first world war poets weren’t pacifists

If the poets of the first world war probably enjoy a higher profile now than they have done at any time in the last 100 years, it has not been a smooth passage. When Wilfred Owen was killed in the last week of the fighting he was still virtually unknown, and even 25 years later in the middle of another war, when the ludicrous Robert Nichols — the man Edmund Gosse had once seen as a new Keats and Shelley combined — brought out his anthology of first world war poetry, there was still room for only four poems by Owen and none at all by Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas

Hilly Janes

Dylan Thomas: boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman?

Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one of the greatest literary talents of the 20th century? Or all of these? Fifty years ago (in November 1964) the writer Constantine Fitzgibbon grappled with these questions in The Spectator as he completed the first full-length biography of his friend the poet. The article was illustrated by my late father, the artist Alfred Janes, a mutual friend (Thomas had a lot of them). It was one of three portraits that he made of his contemporary, whom he had first met in their ‘ugly, lovely’ hometown of Swansea in the1930s. This

Wednesday

7 May 2014

Samuel Williams

The death of the reading library

‘Quiet Zone: No Laptops Please’. So read the paper signs stapled as an afterthought in a dust-cloaked corner of the Radcliffe Camera. The Rad Cam is the magnificent Palladian dome at the heart of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Set in sunlit Radcliffe Square, and surrounded on all sides by gargoyles, pinnacles and the city’s dreaming spires, it coruscates greatness. From the cobblestones below, one cannot help but feel that one is looking at the very apotheosis of the thinking world. What isn’t obvious, however, is that the Rad Cam is actually a symbol – albeit a very well-disguised one – of the death of a cherished cultural institution: the reading library.

Tuesday

6 May 2014

Ed West

Darwin’s unexploded bomb

‘This book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.’ So writes Nicholas Wade, the British-born science editor of The New York Times, in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance. For some time the post-War view of human nature as being largely culturally-formed has been under attack just as surely as the biblical explanation of mankind’s creation began to face pressure in the early 19th century. What Steven Pinker called the blank slate view of our species, whereby humans are products of social conditions and therefore possible to mould and to perfect through reform, has been undermined by scientific discoveries in various areas. But

Lucy Vickery

‘Great’ books best left unread: Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Catch-22…

Martin Amis compared Cervantes’ Don Quixote to ‘an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies’, while Kathryn Schulz, book critic for New York magazine, poured scorn on The Great Gatsby, describing it as ‘aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent’. Cult contemporary bestsellers have also drawn contempt. In last year’s Spectator Books of the Year Thomas W. Hodgkinson recommended giving a wide berth to Paulo Coelho’s chart topper: ‘The Alchemist is surely the worst book I’ve read recently. The tale of a simple shepherd boy (ah, aren’t they all?) in search of enlightenment, it’s essentially a self-help book

Thursday

1 May 2014

Hugo Williams

A cult of inspired amateurishness that seized the 60s

The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing up. When I first met them, my opinion of art was fixed firmly against what I thought of as amateur. I came from a theatrical family, dedicated to extreme professionalism and mockery of anything less. Whether it was holiday pantomimes, school plays or cabaret flamenco — anything short of Yehudi Menuhin and John Gielgud — we would be told how ludicrous they were, how comically inept. It seemed to be the only thing my parents agreed about, and so we went along with it. How we laughed! They would wrap

Steerpike

Is Johann Hari ghost-writing Russell Brand’s ‘revolutionary manifesto’?

Whispers reach Mr Steerpike that disgraced journalist Johann Hari has been tasked with ghost-writing Russell Brand’s next book, the much-dreaded revolutionary manifesto to ‘establish a personal and global utopia’. Mr S asked Brand’s publishers Random House for clarification. At first they wouldn’t comment; but then a publicist said that was the first she’d heard of it, and insisted that Brand will be writing the book himself. What a pity. Mr S can think of nothing better than a revolutionary tract written by Johann Hari in the voice of Russell Brand. After all, Hari has form when it comes to impersonation.

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

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

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)