Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Chaplin & Company, by Mave Fellowes – review

The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her career, she has sold her mother’s house in Sussex and bought a scruffy old canal boat called Chaplin & Company, currently moored in Little Venice. In the flashbacks that follow, we learn about Odeline’s miserable childhood — albeit lit up by a few eureka moments — along with the history of her new floating home

Peter Parker

Francois Truffaut, by Anne Gillian – review

Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example, the quick succession of scenes establishing the friendship of Frances and Sophie is borrowed from Jules et Jim (1962), Jean Constantin’s music from Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) appears on the soundtrack, and a poster for L’Argent de poche (1976) is glimpsed on a wall just in the way significant posters and pictures appear in

James Mcconnachie

The Rocks Don’t Lie, by David R. Montgomery – review

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale. David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of his discipline from Aristotle to plate tectonics, showing how geological thinking has always been shaped by the great narrative of Noah’s flood. It is a grand tale, and told with verve and excitement. Montgomery also entertainingly surveys the archaeological and literary evidence for ancient Middle Eastern floods — each of which has been acclaimed, in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The tao of Ayn Rand

I’m now half way through Atlas Shrugged and I’m loving almost every moment. But Ayn Rand isn’t someone you read for pleasure, I’m beginning to realise. She’s someone you read so you can underline sentences and scrawl in the margins ‘Yes’, ‘God that is so TRUE!’ and ‘YES!!!’ For example, at the heart of the novel are three romances between heroine Dagny Taggart and a trio of driven, dauntless free marketeers. But you don’t pay them any serious attention — not even during the sex scenes, which you skip quickly past in order to get to the much more exciting bits about industrial relations. Partly, it’s because Rand isn’t much of

David Blackburn

My holiday from reading books is to read them as Caxton intended

On hearing that Easy Jet had changed its hand luggage allowance, two questions struck me. First, was the airline in league with the luggage makers’ guild? Second, which paperbacks would replace the hardbacks I was going to take with me to the beach? Such considerations may strike you as ‘old world’, a bit last century. ‘Why not take your Kindle?’ you rightly ask. One answer is that I spend every waking hour reading words on a computer. Fire up the screen and get comfortable for a long read; well, I’m supposed to be doing just that rather than write this piece, which is little more than an excuse to fantasize about the holiday

Ben Hamilton

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer – review

Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters. It begins in the mid-1970s, in Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for young people interested in the performing and visual arts. Run by a couple of bohemians, the camp is supposed to be an approximation of utopia, or, as one character remarks, the opposite of Lord

Richard Davenporthines

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood – review

The two opening volumes of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy have sold over a million copies. One of them managed to be shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in the nadir year that D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little won. Entitled Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), they depict planet Earth after humankind has been obliterated by a pandemic triggered by a newly devised pharmaceutical that arouses sexual rapture and retards ageing. A bioengineered humanoid species, the Children of Crake, however, survive: ‘free from sexual jealousy, greed, clothing and the need for insect repellent and animal protein’. In addition to a few surviving humans, Atwood’s teeming cast includes

Wynn Wheldon

There and Then: Personal Terms 6, by Frederic Raphael – review

Frederic Raphael is forensic in his description of the failures of successful people. He is enviously superior and he is partial to the clever oxymoron: ‘predatory caution’, ‘reticent curiosity’, ‘intimidating reassurance’. It is as though he cannot see an abstract noun without qualifying it with a contradictory adjective. It is a kind of shorthand cleverness, but a cleverness nonetheless. For Raphael is undoubtedly clever, and intelligent, and knowledgeable and smart (and, we learn, good at football, tennis and bridge). It is hard not to envy his certainties. This is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Diaries promise indiscretions, and the joy of gossip. I imagine Raphael’s peers will revel in his malicious

Andrew Taylor

The Red Road by Denise Mina- review

Denise Mina’s 11th crime novel, The Red Road (Orion, £12.99), is one of her best, which is saying a good deal. Set in Glasgow, it marks the return of Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, mother of twins, sister of a gangster and equipped with too many sharp edges to prosper in her career. She’s a key prosecution witness at the trial of Michael Brown, one of the city’s nastier criminals. The only trouble is, Brown’s fingerprints have turned up at the scene of another murder, committed while he was in custody. Simultaneously, a lawyer connected with Brown dies, and the corrupt and murderous organisation of which he was a part begins

Andro Linklater

Russian Roulette, by Giles Milton – review

Had Onan not spilled his seed upon the ground, he might have invented invisible ink. The possibility had not occurred to me until I read this account of the start of Britain’s intelligence services. Even then the implications seemed so startling as to be barely credible — that the entire trade in espionage, including the serried ranks of Cheltenham’s GCHQ, the massed battalions at Fort Meade’s National Security Agency, the MI5s, 6s and other shadowy digits, not to mention literature’s denizens, from Ashenden and Greenmantle to James Bond and George Smiley, owed its origin to solitary sex. Yet the source given on page 48 of Russian Roulette appears impeccable. Describing

James Walton

Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright – review

Justin Cartwright is famously a fan of John Updike — and here he seems to owe a definite debt to one of his hero’s lesser known novels. In Memories of the Ford Administration, Updike interwove the sexual adventures of a 1970s history professor with substantial chunks from the professor’s notes on President James Buchanan, a man whose life Updike had earlier researched for his only play. In Lion Heart, Richard Cathar, an Oxford postgraduate and somewhat solemn philanderer, provides similarly lengthy extracts from his investigations into Richard I and the fate of the True Cross — which were also the subjects of a 2001 TV documentary by Justin Cartwright. As

Anita Brookner

A seamless whole

This short memoir deserves a longer review than this, encompassing, as it does, migration, intellectual excellence, a successful professional life, two marriages, children and an honesty and contentment not usually found in close proximity. Miriam Gross (née May), with a Jewish legal background (both her parents, who left Nazi Germany in 1933, were lawyers), was brought up in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, where she stayed until 1947. In Jerusalem she felt little affinity with other exiles, only with the landscape. From the start, she seems to have been clear-sighted to an unusual degree. Unfazed by her unmaternal mother, she drew close to her father, from whom she derived

Charlotte Moore

Another Restoration romp

Robert Merivel made his first appearance in 1989, in Restoration, Rose Tremain’s popular and acclaimed Carolingian novel. The passage of time has left the Everyman doctor sadder and theoretically wiser, but still in thrall to his master, Charles II, still priapic, still governed by ‘uncontainable appetites’. He sits in his chilly library at Bidnold, his Norfolk estate, contemplating life — will his own end through Loneliness, Poverty, Poisoning, Suicide or Meaninglessness? His decrepit manservant, Will, brings him a manuscript found hidden beneath his mattress; it is Merivel’s own account of his earlier years. It looked, to the chambermaid, ‘a mere Wedge, to hold fast the corner of the bedstead’. Will

Michela Wrong

The making of a president

When presented with a title of this kind, many readers think they know what to expect: drugged-up child soldiers, wince-inducing brutality, ranting demagogues, rebels in women’s wigs. This, thankfully, is not that book. It is something more nuanced, elliptical and elegant. Ghana is in a different league from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, its traumatised West African neighbours. Even before the recent discovery that it was sitting on large oil reserves, it was routinely hailed as one of Africa’s success stories. As the ‘first’ in the title makes clear, it has certainly been through its share of political upheaval since independence from Britain in 1957. But when President John Atta

Philip Hensher

Theatre of the absurd

Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove. And there are novelists who have a fascination with music, whose prose moves dynamically in response to musical form and sound. These writers can have set pieces, too, like the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Howards End, but can also pattern their work in imitation of another art form that moves through time, has climaxes

James Grande

Was it misfortune or carelessness?

James Wyatt was considered by George III to be ‘the first architect of the kingdom’, but he was also the unluckiest, or perhaps most careless, architect of his day. Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic extravaganza he designed for William Beckford, collapsed after just 25 years. He started building a new palace for the king at Kew, which was later blown up by George IV. His Tudor-Gothic remodelling of the Palace of Westminster went massively over budget, was deeply unpopular and employed a combination of timber and plaster that proved spectacularly flammable in 1834. And the commission that made Wyatt’s name, the assembly rooms of the Oxford Street Pantheon, was only 20

Ian Thomson

The poetry of the streets

For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of British cities quickened after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more West Indians migrated to Britain, and London was poised to become the most Jamaican city in Europe. Zadie Smith is well placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Born in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and a British father, she grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her marvellous new novel, NW, crackles with reflections on race, music and migration in Brent’s

Richard Davenporthines

Brotherly love

Twenty years ago Pat Barker won acclaim with Regeneration, her novel about shell-shocked army officers undergoing treatment at the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital for soldiers during the first world war. Her new novel is a close scrutiny of parallel atrocities of 1914–18. As in Regeneration, some characters are based on real-life figures. Several scenes are set in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, where the pioneer plastic surgeon Harold Gillies worked to rebuild the smashed or scorched faces of soldiers who had been fighting on the Western Front — ‘1,000 young men with gouged-out eyes, blown-off jaws, gaping holes where their noses had been’, as a visitor finds. Henry Tonks, Professor of Drawing

D. J. Taylor

Death of a hero

Sitting down to inspect the final volume of Pierre Coustillas’s monumental trilogy, I decided to start by counting the number of titles by or about George Gissing (1857–1903) that gleamed from the bookshelf hard by. There were 45 of them. Next, I decided to count the number of these items with which Professor Coustillas was in some way associated, either as editor, compiler or presiding genius. This realised a tally of 19, including such titanic endeavours as the Collected Letters of George Gissing (nine vols, 1990–1997) or the 600-page and now, alas, superannuated George Gissing: The Definitive Bibliography from 2005. As these statistics confirm, Coustillas is the staunchest defender, proselytiser

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Models of impropriety

Once upon a time, there was an art scholar called John. He spent his days admiring marble statues, his nights in praying that he might be allowed a real-life statue as his wife. And in due course, he met a beautiful girl. She was a bit younger than him, but that was OK, because it meant she would be easier to control. Her name was Good Reputation, which seemed promising too. But on the wedding night, John got a nasty shock. For on lifting her trousseau, he found that, unlike the statues in the museums, Good Reputation had pubic hair. He was aghast. Unable to consummate the marriage, he channelled