Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

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

Wednesday

Jessica Lambert

Losing Your Mind – The Novel That Induces Insanity

Nobody wants to go mad. We try to live healthy lives so that we won’t die slowly of lung cancer or quickly from a heart attack. But what we let ourselves worry about less – because there is so little we can do to protect against it – is living long enough to have our minds cruelly betray us, leaving us trapped in bodies that still work but in a world that no longer makes sense. In Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom dementia has become an infectious disease amongst the elderly, with every patient who checks into a certain Manhattan clinic developing what “the hospital’s spokesperson, for lack of a

Tuesday

Olivia Dakeyne

How long until novels are published with video inserts?

In Charlie Kauffman’s Bafta lecture (a startlingly honest reflection on film writing, and well worth a listen), the screenwriter, producer and director stresses that it is of the utmost importance, when embarking on a screenplay, to write something that could only be portrayed in the form of a film, and in no other medium. He is, of course, right: for writing a screenplay, in a purely technical sense, is different and distinct from writing in its other forms. You rarely have authorial narrative and do not overly embellish with descriptions. Rather, you must distil the essence of the piece into dialogue and action. You must then describe the visual world

Monday

Austen Saunders

Is England too good for the English? Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt seems to think so

From Shakespeare’s Richard II, lines spoken by John of Gaunt. This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, this nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared be their breed and famous by their birth,

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 23 August 2013

For many people, stories and story-telling formed the basis of their childhood. But there are others whose childhood is devoid of books, and it’s these children that Oxford’s new Story Museum aims to help. As Robert Gore-Langton puts it, ‘beyond [Oxford’s] dreaming spires is an urban hellhole of burning cars, despair and unemployment’, and, he points out, ‘it is ranked number 32 in Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK.’ In his piece, he talks to Anne Fine, Amanda Mitichison, Terence Blacker and Keith Crossley-Holland on the joy – and importance – of reading aloud. Below is just one of The Story Museum’s attempts to get children

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Tangier, by Josh Shoemake – review

This may sound a little orientalist, but Tangier has some claim to being the most foreign city in the world. Back in the day, its position at the northernmost tip of Africa was regarded as the edge of civilisation — more than that, as the edge of what was known, the edge of everything. Here were the Pillars of Hercules, which in addition to performing the important function of holding up the sky, were said to be engraved with the words ‘nec plus ultra’: beyond this, nothing. Since its foundation in the 5th century BC, the city has been variously controlled by the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Arabs,

Richard Ryder

A Classless Society, by Alwyn W. Turner – review

The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement. John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was right: some animals are more equal than others — even in death. Orwell shares an Oxfordshire churchyard with Herbert Asquith. It was an insipid decade when managerialism triumphed over leadership. Ideas and intellectual rigour were kept in check, and institutions were repeatedly assaulted. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this inertia may have been

Hywel Williams

The Huguenots, by Geoffrey Treasure – review

France’s early 21st-century Protestants are eco-friendly, gender-sensitised and respectful of the Fifth Republic’s laïcité. But their ancestors were a less accommodating lot. La réforme in the France of the 16th century was well-educated, predominantly urban and organised as part of a pan-European Protestant movement which set out to subvert the territorial sovereignty of Catholic princes. Its leaders included some of the French aristocracy’s boldest spirits, whose dynastic ambitions to exercise an earthly dominion blended easily with the dogmatic confidence of Protestantism at its most driven and alluring. Lutheranism made an initial impact through the circles of humanist opinion in Paris and other centres of enlightenment — such as the courts

Clarissa Tan

The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul prize for outstanding travel writing is open for entries

The Spectator, as it does every year, is offering you good money to write about your travels. What’s more, our £2,000 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — named after the late Trinidad-born writer and brother of VS Naipaul — is not awarded for travel writing in the conventional sense. You need not have gone anywhere highly exotic or far away: the prize is for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer.’ You can write from outer space or from your back garden, what we’re looking for is writing that is fresh, current, different, intelligent, incisive, witty, sad or funny — or all of those things.

Daisy Dunn

What might link Cleopatra, Augustus, Constantine, Barbarossa, Tamerlane and the Farnese?

The stone called sardonyx looks a lot more fragile than it actually is. It’s luminous like glass, but hard like steel, which explains why so much of it has survived from ancient times. Fame being a relative word, one might describe Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese by Marina Belozerskaya as a biography of the most famous sardonyx object in the world, the Tazza Farnese, an ancient libation bowl made to hold offerings to the gods. At least one of the many people who inherited it aimed to change that function. Around the time Romanos II, son of Constantine VII, was ruler over Byzantium, someone drilled through

Emily Rhodes

Lose weight the Muriel Spark way

Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from Mrs Hawkins, the heroine of Muriel Spark’s wonderful novel A Far Cry from Kensington. Mrs Hawkins, with her unfortunate ‘Rubens quality of flesh’, only starts to worry about her weight when she gets a new job and notices that all her colleagues suffer from some kind of affliction. These range from stammers to stomach ulcers, pock-marked faces to war-wounds, and so, lying awake one night, she wonders what her own ailment might be. She gets out of bed to look at herself in the mirror: ‘I stood there, massive in my

Anthony Cummins

Red or Dead by David Peace – review

The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help explain why his new one avoids invention wherever it can squeeze interest out of such stony matters of record as team sheets and attendance figures. Red or Dead follows the legendary manager Bill Shankly from his arrival at Liverpool — second-division stragglers in 1959 — to his death in 1981, seven years after retirement, having built a league-winning team that went on to rule Europe. Seldom does a novel, dedicated at such length to a single life, venture so scarcely into the mind of its subject; the gamble is that

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The Good Nurse, by Charles Graeber – review

Charles Cullen, an American nurse, murdered several hundred patients by the administration in overdose of restricted drugs. Hospitals should be safe places but they are actually rather dangerous: mistakes are made, accidents happen, medics may be careless or just exhausted. But although many patients die when they should have recovered, very few die at the hands of a psychopathic serial killer — so far as we know. The trouble is, we often don’t know. There could be a Cullen working and murdering in a hospital near you. Look up ‘Healthcare professionals convicted of murdering patients’ on the internet and you find 39, and note the ‘convicted’. Many have merely been

James Kirchick

This Town, by Mark Leibovich – review

Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two years before its release. Sparking that interest was the revelation that a young, ambitious Capitol Hill press aide, whom Leibovich had been cultivating as a source, was secretly forwarding him emails that provided an insight into how Washington really works. That story was broken by Politico, the political web portal founded in 2007 that has