Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Rachel Seiffert

A tale of impossible love: The End of Drum Time, by Hanna Pylväinen, reviewed

In the arctic borderlands in the 1800s Finns and Swedes have come to live among the Sami. Missionaries and traders, they have brought alcohol and Protestant teaching.  ‘Mad Lasse’ is what the locals call the preacher, and mostly they keep their distance, staying with their reindeer out on the tundra, following their ancient customs.  Some, though, have been awakened.  Hanna Pylvainen’s novel opens with Biettar, a Sami widower, brought to church by an earthquake – by a voice he heard among the tremors. In his fur trousers, stinking of smoke and reindeer, he falls to his knees before Mad Lasse, declaring himself with God. So the preacher exerts his pull,

Boyd Tonkin

Portrait of an artistic provocateur: Blue Ruin, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed

Whatever happened to the likely lads and lasses of the East London art scene at the high noon of Cool Britannia? Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, loads much else on to its ideas-rich plate – not least a pandemic yarn set in the panic-stricken spring of 2020. At its core, however, his plot traces contrasting afterlives from the Sensation generation. It reconnects three survivors – two male artists and the woman both loved – from a time when making conceptual art could feel like ‘a kind of social repair’, even a ‘utopian laboratory’. In his earlier career, Kunzru himself seemed to belong in a gilded group of younger British

David Profumo

Islands of inspiration: a poet’s life on Shetland

Shetland comprises an archipelago of some 300 islands and skerries situated roughly half way between London and the Arctic Circle. Stereotyped by many outsiders as bleak and somehow ‘on the edge’, according to the poet Jen Hadfield’s stylish memoir – about her 17 years of living there – it can be more illuminating to see these places as somehow central to everything. Visiting Foula, Hadfield overcomes her vertigo, finding the island ‘peaceful and dreadful’ all at once Storm Pegs is as much an account of the author finding new personal bearings as a series of magic lantern slides about insular life. The title alludes to a traditional piece of perforated

Saturday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Gavin Mortimer, Sean Thomas, Robert Colvile and Melissa Kite

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls reflects on the UK general election campaign and wonders how bad things could get for the Tories (1:02); Gavin Mortimer argues that France’s own election is between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’ (7:00); Sean Thomas searches for authentic travel in Colombia (13:16); after reviewing the books Great Britain? by Torsten Bell and Left Behind by Paul Collier, Robert Colvile ponders whether Britain’s problems will ever get solved (20:43); and, Melissa Kite questions if America’s ye olde Ireland really exists (25:44).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.  

Tuesday

Robert Colvile

Unless the Treasury is tamed, there’s no solution to Britain’s problems

The Tory era is not (quite) over yet, but already the obituaries are in. In particular, two new books from Torsten Bell and Paul Collier seek to bury not just Rishi Sunak and his cabinet but the whole economic approach that the Conservatives have taken since 2010, or perhaps even 1979. Let’s start with Bell – until very recently head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, and before that the man who, as Ed Miliband’s policy director, gave us the joy of the EdStone. Great Britain? sets out a comprehensive list of the ways in which we have become a ‘stagnation nation’: low investment, high inequality, insufficient house building, stingy benefits,

Guy Stagg

A brief glimpse of secretive Myanmar

Were trains to blame for the travel writing boom of the 1980s? When Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar was published in 1975, it sold 1.5 million copies and launched a publishing phenomenon. At first, long-distance train journeys conjured all the romance of the golden age of travel: leather luggage, first-class compartments and the billowing steam from an antique engine. But with each new imitator, the format became increasingly stale, and now train trips suggest the cushioned charm of Michael Portillo’s never-ending BBC series. Nevertheless, as Clare Hammond shows in On the Shadow Tracks, rail journeys can still take the traveller deep inside a country. The tracks are flooded, or

Susie Mesure

A sea of troubles: The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin, reviewed

Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce is still illegal in Ireland, unlike the rest of Europe. Izzy Keaveney, a housewife with two teenage children, ‘has the depression’ and has dragged herself to Sunday morning mass despite a hangover. She spent the previous evening at a dinner-dance, listening to her politician husband James give a talk about the importance of business in

Alexandra Coghlan

Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history

‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks… estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly

Hannah Walton

Afrikaner angst: Cato Pedder goes in search of her ancestors

‘Let me tell you about Jan Smuts,’ my grandfather, a doctor born not far from Johannesburg, would begin. And we, as children, would mutter and glance sideways and sink into our chairs. The story would go something like this: ‘Smuts was a Boer War leader, later feted by the English political establishment and central to international moves towards a liberal world order, a segregationist back home and reviled by the Afrikaner nationalists, who instituted formal apartheid from 1948. He was many things to many people, and his influence in South Africa and internationally was unparalleled in his time.’ My grandfather’s eyes would mist over and we would grunt responses about

Lee Langley

Runaway lovers: The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, reviewed

Watching Kevin Barry’s progress over the years has been a pleasure. His first novel, City of Bohane, flamboyant with tribal vernacular and savagery, was followed by Beatlebone, a beguiling surreal odyssey, and then Night Boat to Tangier, where two tired old crims wait and talk their way through the dark hours. Escaping Beckett’s long shadow, the vigil had a hint of redemption. Never has the lawless life been depicted with such wry sweetness.  What Barry celebrates above all is language, swooping from desolation to deadpan mirth in a phrase. Pain that lies too deep for tears can be assuaged by laughter. The award-winning novels were interspersed with collections of short

Clive Aslet

The atmosphere of a historic country house cannot be bought

The Historic Houses Association can congratulate itself. This pressure group for country houses, founded in 1973, has proved to be one of the most effective lobbying organisations of our time. When it came into being, the future, according to the architectural historian John Cornforth, was ‘full of gloom’ for the country house. The Destruction of the Country House exhibition of 1974 revealed the extent of the crisis, which had set in a century earlier with the agricultural depression of the 1870s. That was when aristocrats who had previously relied on the income from their estates built their hopes on landing a transatlantic beauty with ‘plenty of tin’. The supply of

Christopher Shrimpton

No Sir Lancelot: A Good Deliverance, by Toby Clements, reviewed

Sir Thomas Malory is not much of a knight. He lies; he is lecherous; he is bested in tourneys; he misses battles due to a dicky stomach; he inadvertently causes the deaths of his friends. He is no Sir Lancelot. But he has his talents, chief among them being his ability to spin a yarn, and he has won much renown for his retelling of the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, later to be published as Le Morte d’Arthur. Now he has the chance to set his own story straight. Well, straight-ish. A Good Deliverance is a sly and salty fictional account of the life and deeds

Chris Mullin

One damned thing after another: Britain’s crisis-ridden century so far

Asked about the greatest challenges he faced as prime minister, Harold Macmillan is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ The first quarter of this century has seen no shortage of events that have blown prime ministers off course. There was Tony Blair by 9/11 and the resulting war in Iraq; Gordon Brown by the financial crisis of 2007-8; David Cameron and Theresa May by Brexit; and Boris Johnson by Covid. With the exception of May, none of these people had any inkling, on taking office, of the bolts from the blue that would ultimately define their premierships. The idea behind George Osborne’s austerity cuts, that ‘we were all

Stuart Jeffries

AI is both liberating and enslaving us

Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping across a busy road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 when she was struck by a hybrid electric Volvo SUV at 40mph. At the time of the accident, the woman in the driver’s seat was watching a talent show on her phone. The SUV had been fitted with an autonomous driving system consisting of neural networks that integrated image recognisers. The reason Herzberg died was because what she was doing did not compute. The autonomous driving system recalibrated the car’s trajectory to avoid the bicycle, which it took to be travelling along the road, only to collide with Herzberg, who was walking

Toby Harnden

Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed as comically inept – a bunch of ‘clowns’ and ‘a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals’, as Richard Nixon put it. This has led to a dichotomy in CIA histories. On the one hand it is depicted as an all-powerful evil force, responsible for many of the world’s ills since its foundation in 1947. On the

Nicholas Lezard

Shalom Auslander vents his disgust – on his ‘grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious self’

The word is Yiddish, and is an expression of disgust. A decent translation of it into vernacular English would be ‘yuck’. Shalom Auslander has been feeling feh about himself for pretty much as long as he has been conscious. Born into a strictly religious family, with a mother given to quoting Jeremaiah and a father whose violence and cruelty were almost literally biblical, or at least strongly evocative of the Old Testament, Auslander grew up to be the kind of Jew who, when visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, writes ‘fuck you’ on a piece of paper and shoves it in a crack. It is more traditional for the pious

Saturday

Agnès Poirier

Matt Ridley, William Cook, Owen Matthews and Agnes Poirier

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Matt Ridley argues that whoever you vote for, the blob wins (1:02); William Cook reads his Euros notebook from Germany (12:35); Owen Matthews reports on President Zelensky’s peace summit (16:21); and, reviewing Michael Peel’s new book ‘What everyone knows about Britain’, Agnes Poirier ponders if only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad (22:28).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.  

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Mark Bostridge: In Pursuit of Love

41 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Mark Bostridge. In his new book In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter, Mark describes his quest to uncover the traces of Adele Hugo and the doomed love affair which cost her her sanity. He tells me how Adele’s story chimed in poignant ways with his own life and what it taught him about the unstable emotional contract between biographer and subject.

Tuesday

Agnès Poirier

If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad

A London-based foreign correspondent is probably not the target audience of Michael Peel’s latest book. Indeed, what Peel (himself a former Financial Times correspondent in Lagos, Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Brussels) discusses in eight lively, well-researched chapters won’t come as a surprise to any of his UK-based foreign colleagues: how Britain is perceived abroad; and how little it seems to permeate the national consciousness. This blindness – or the British inability to realise how they appear to others, as opposed to the image they have of themselves – often has foreign correspondents pulling their hair in disbelief. If only Britain knew how it was seen! One senses that Peel’s return

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

An insight into the American Dream: Table for Two, by Amor Towles, reviewed

Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor. Towles’s success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Two, all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril – protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness.