Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Thirza Wakefield

The World is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg – a review

‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the age of 84. Few directors understand this better — this matter of good and bad ‘timing’ — than the maker of Performance, Roeg’s debut film of 1970. Even starring Mick Jagger — then the centrefold of popularity — the film stunned critics by its experimental otherness: they hated it. By now, though, opinions have changed and Performance — once, out of its time — is upheld, along with Roeg’s other works, as among the greatest and boldest examples of British cinema. Roeg, however, has only ever been consistent in his

Philip Hensher

Churchill and Empire, by Lawrence James – a review

A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of the day, when everything that really mattered had already been handled, and being subject to a series of trivial dismissals, outbursts of comic rage, and with little effort made to understand what might be an appropriate way to govern these immense territories. I am sorry to place a limit on anyone’s admiration for Churchill, but

James Mcconnachie

What do conductors actually do? Review of ‘Inside Conducting’ by Christopher Seaman

Conductors love telling stories, especially stories about other conductors, and every chapter of this otherwise determinedly pragmatic book begins with one. Perhaps the most telling concerns a ‘famous conductor’ who mistakenly gave a massive downbeat in a bar that was supposed to be silent. The orchestra, reading the score correctly, did not play. Voice from the back of the violas: ‘He doesn’t sound so good on his own, does he?’ The anecdote illuminates the driving question behind this book, the one we’ve all wanted to ask while fearing to sound ignorant: what do conductors actually do? Some are sceptical. The Polish pianist André Tchaikowsky told Christopher Seaman that he never

Marcus Berkmann

Across the Pond, by Terry Eagleton – a review

The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an admirable rate. Across the Pond (Norton, £9.99) is subtitled ‘An Englishman’s View of America’, and begins with a rigorous justification for the use of national stereotypes in writing about a country’s population. Eagleton then proceeds to make hay with these stereotypes in typically combative style and to consistently amusing effect. ‘America is a country where it’s difficult to do things by halves. Some people are surreally fat, while others are life-threateningly thin. Some think of nothing but sex, while others seem to regard sex as more reprehensible than genocide.’ He’s

Mark Mason

The slow slide into senility

Senility is a cunning mistress. She’s always finding new ways to twist your melon, man. The latest trick she’s playing on me is Western House Syndrome. I should point out before we go any further that I’m not talking about real senility. Still only in my early forties, I have just as strong a grip on reality as any man of that age with a young child stealing more of his sleep than he feels comfortable with. But even a relative whippersnapper like me knows the gentle failings of memory which get that little bit more noticeable every year. They’re only at the ‘have I put sugar in that tea?’

William Leith

Sane New World, by Ruby Wax – a review

Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left town’. She says: ‘I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled.’ She tells us what it’s like to fall apart, why she thinks so many people fall apart, and what you can do if you start to fall apart yourself. ‘The feeling is that of being a corpse,’ she says. It happens because our brains are not adapted to live in the relentless global village we’ve created. And: ‘YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK.’ More on this last bit later. It takes courage

Rachel Redford

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 4 – a review

This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time that an audio version has been produced. Granta’s American editor, John Freeman, introduces the collection:  three complete stories and 17 excerpts from work-in-progress from all 20 novelists, half of them read by the authors themselves. The result is a tremendous extra dimension of reality. Sunjeev Sahota quotes Salman Rushdie: ‘To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.’ These 20 novelists, including Sahota, have certainly done so,  with settings including Somalia, old Beijing, drug experimentation on the Burma-Thai border, Yorkshire in flood, Ghana and, in a quarter of

Andro Linklater

Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel – a review

During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish church of Sudbury in Suffolk: ‘We brake down a picture of God the Father, 2 crucifixes and pictures of Christ, about an hundred in all.’ The Taleban’s decision in 2001 to blow up two gigantic statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan was more spectacular but not different in kind. War gives licence to such subterranean urges. In an order issued exactly three centuries after Dowsing’s expedition, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, explained why great art needed to be protected. ‘Works of

James Walton

The People’s Songs, by Stuart Maconie – a review

For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues, he’s proved himself a fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful — often all at the same time. In his previous book to this, Hope and Glory, he made a creditable if slightly heart-on-sleeve attempt at British social history. And, as anybody who’s listened to his radio shows will know, few people combine such a serious knowledge and love of pop music with such a refreshing lack of snootiness about it. Not only that, but in the introduction here he tells us that he’s always wanted to write ‘a reliable,

Joanna Kavenna

The Long Shadow, by Mark Mills – a review

Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House of the Hanged. The Long Shadow is written in a different mode. It is set in a highly recognisable present; it is a clever, teasing hybrid of genres (psychological thriller, dark comedy, Pardoner’s Tale and dystopia); and it is fraught with tensions about money, class and the super-rich. The protagonist, Ben, is a well-nigh washed up screenwriter in his early forties. His wife has fallen in love with a successful businessman; Ben has been forced out into a seedy flat in a demoralising part of London. He passes the time

Wednesday

Humphrey Hawksley

Accidental dictators

Two flashpoints have emerged recently, threatening regional wars and pitting global powers against each other. They happen to be run by accidental dynastic heirs, each representing a new generation of dictatorship whereby sons inherited jobs which they might never have wanted. One is North Korea, which draws in the competing wills of Beijing and Washington with the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific. The other is Syria, where Russia and America are holding each other in check over influence in the Middle East. Syria’s Bashar al Assad  began his career as a competent junior ophthalmologist, training at the Western Eye Hospital in London, until he was plucked away in 2000

Tuesday

Walter Ellis

J.K. Rowling’s “Robert Galbraith” trick reveals nothing of how publishers really treat unknown novelists

Is it okay for struggling authors to talk about promotion and marketing and how they are dealt with by publishers? Apparently so.  The aspiring novelist Robert Galbraith knew rejection. His first novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was rejected by Orion and other publishers before it was printed in April by Sphere, a prestige imprint of Little Brown, one of the biggest names in fiction. He must have been beside himself when his little detective story was singled out for praise by Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Alex Gray – all leading practitioners in the genre. The icing on the cake probably came when The Times, the Mail and Publishers Weekly joined

Austen Saunders

Alexander Pope, mock-epic, modernity and misogyny

from The Rape of the Lock And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, Each silver vase in mystic order laid. First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores With head uncovered, the cosmetic powers. A heavenly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears; The inferior priestess, at her altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumbered treasures ope at once, and here The various offerings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil. This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise

Friday

The Spectator

The week in books | 12 July 2013

The latest issue of the Spectator is full to bursting with sparkling and varied book reviews. Here are some extracts from those reviews: Sam Leith reviews two new books (one by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young, the other by Dick Legend) that, to some extent, debunk the Tory legend of Benjamin Disraeli. ‘Disraeli…, as Hurd and Young see it, was … ‘one of the first career politicians’, for better and for worse. For better: he understood the importance of party discipline; it was on his watch that Conservative Central Office came into being to manage elections and water the grass roots, and on his watch that the parliamentary party started

Thursday

Mark Mason

The Authors XI, by The Authors Cricket Club – review

We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors XI by The Authors Cricket Club, with a foreword by Sebastian Faulks (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Instead there’s ‘Passchendaeleian’ and ‘Ballardian’ (of pitches), ‘burst-sofa torsos’ (of themselves) and the observation that the French revolutionaries’ cry of ‘Aux armes!’ sounds uncannily like ‘howzat?!’ The team of cricketing writers tackle a chapter each, combining match reports from their 2012 season with reflections on different aspects of the game (class, broadcasting, kit, youth and so on). If you play you’ll sympathise with their need for relay fielders to get a throw from the boundary to

Clare Mulley

She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones – review

The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’. As quickly becomes evident, the real thing was more than a shade superior. Like the fictional Gray, Witherington had determined to serve behind enemy lines in France with the dual aims of fighting the Nazi occupation of her adopted country, and being reunited with the man she loved, in Witherington’s case her fiancé, the escaped French POW Henri Cornioley. Unlike Gray, however, Witherington would quickly achieve both her public and private missions, meeting up with Henri within just days of her arrival. ‘Her story is a true romance,’ one wing

Honor Clerk

Seaweeds, by Ole G. Mouritsen – review

On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to pay homage to ‘the Mother of the Sea’. There is a shrine and an altar for votive offerings but this is not a religious rite. The mother in question is Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, a Lancashire- born algae researcher who, in 1949, discovered the life-cycle of porphyra umbilicalis.  Not, perhaps, front-page news in the occident, but this was the key to the cultivation of that dark green papery wrapping around the outside of sushi that is consumed in one form or another in every Japanese household: nori. Kathleen Drew-Baker died in

Victoria Glendinning

The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, by Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell

The Charleston Bulletin was a family newspaper produced between 1923 and 1927 by the teenaged Quentin Bell and his elder brother Julian — who soon dropped out, leading Quentin to recruit his aunt Virginia Woolf. At that time enjoying her most prolific period as a novelist, she collaborated with him on special issues which they called Supplements, for circulation at Christmas among the family and friends whose foibles and mishaps are chronicled in its pages. Professor David Bradshaw in his preface suggests that ‘it may not be ridiculous’ to link the ‘skittish abandon’ of the Supplements with the sense of liberation that Woolf felt in having found her fictional voice

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard – review

‘Who the hell is Disraeli?’ This, as a gleeful footnote in Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s new book reminds us, was the response of John Prescott when asked on television what he made of Ed Miliband’s speech last year extolling the virtues of Dizzy’s world-view. Actually — as their book goes on to make clear — Prescott asked the right question. Who the hell was Disraeli? He certainly wasn’t anything close to what posterity — in search of a Tory Great Man — has made of him. Not only, they tell us in this vigorously debunking romp through his political life, did he never use the phrases ‘One Nation’ or

Steerpike Steerpike

Dame Gail Rebuck – tax cutter

The Queen of Publishing, Dame Gail Rebuck, abdicated earlier this week when she stood down as chairman and chief executive of Random House. Dame Gail will take up the somewhat more emeritus position of chairman of the UK arm of Penguin Random House — the literary world’s new super-group. Her Majesty will use some of her spare time to chair the Cheltenham Literary Festival. She has been making remarks about these changes over the last couple of days and Mr Steerpike was interested to learn that this firm Labour supporter, the widow of Philip Gould, is a tax cutter. She said that bookshops (which she believes to be ‘cultural showcases’) should be given tax