Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has

Jane Austen’s pinny

This is the third entry in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the other instalments here. It’s almost two years since the Bodleian celebrated its hard-fought acquisition (nail biting auction) of Jane Austen’s manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons. Thank you again National Heritage Memorial Fund, Friends of the Bodleian, Friends of the National Libraries, Jane Austen Memorial Trust and all supporting Janeites everywhere. Once a manuscript has been fetched into the bosom of the Bodleian, repaired, shelf-marked, and safely housed, it needs to be studied. So it was that at a seminar with Professor Kathryn Sutherland,

Jesse Norman interview: Edmund Burke, our chief of men

When he arrived in London, Burke had a very brief career in law. He soon dedicated his time to critical thinking, writing and politics. Burke published a number of ground breaking books, including: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his new book, Edmund Burke, Jesse Norman dissects Burke’s outstanding intellect, and his career. He then asks how these ideas might be applied to modern politics. Jesse Norman is Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. In 2012 he was named as the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year. He is a member of the Treasury

Kindling by the pool – the changing face of holiday reading

I’m writing this by the pool in Greece. It’s not a pool I own, you understand (though give it a couple of years and we might all be able to afford one). No, it’s the pool in the resort to which my partner and I have repaired for a week, safe in the knowledge that our son can be deposited in the excellent childcare facilities every afternoon, trapping him until such time as we deign to return and collect him. (You have to give a pre-arranged password to prove you’re the parent, by the way – one couple chose the place in which said child had been conceived. I con

All Together Now, by David Rowley – review

Too many Beatles books? In my house there’s always room for one more, and this week’s addition is All Together Now (Matador, £9.99), an ABC of Beatles’ songs by registered Fabs geek David Rowley. This is his third book on the subject, for like many repeat offenders, Rowley has spent more years writing about the Beatles than the Beatles spent being the Beatles. His competition is Ian McDonald’s legendary Revolution in the Head, a chronological, rigorous and shamelessly tendentious analysis of the songs that irritates some readers by being just a bit too much like the old NME. This is a much simpler book, less stylishly written for sure, but

The Hive, by Gill Hornby – review

Who would have thought that the idea for a novel about mothers at the school gate would spark a frenzied bidding for world  rights? Not a subject to make the heart race, surely, but race publishers did for a first novel by Gill Hornby, whose inspiration it was. Plainly she did her research at a school gate, and her acute ear has captured every nuance of the motherly buzz that will be universally recognised. Heavens, they’re a lively lot, and how they talk — all in a language that is particular to forty-something mothers. They share a vocabulary — keenos, newbie, yikes, oops.soz, bagsy, delish. The words ping off the

All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld – review

Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description more or less fits this second novel, although here a reticent woman takes the place of three generations of silent men. All the better: we expect men (in fiction at least) to be strong silent types, while women protagonists tend to err towards chattiness and disclosure. In this as in other regards Wyld is a writer who reconfigures the conventions of storytelling with a sure-footedness and ambition which belie her age. Even her name is good, suggesting an untamed paradise

The Tank war, by Mark Urban – review

In November 1941, Sergeant Jake Wardrop narrowly escaped being killed when his tank was crippled in the midst of a catastrophic battle in the north African desert where the armour and artillery of Rommel’s Afrika Korps destroyed scores of other British tanks. ‘It wasn’t a very healthy position to be in’, he wrote in his diary that evening, ‘but it could have been worse; at least it wasn’t raining.’ When he came across this mordant comment in the course of his research, Mark Urban must have realised that he had struck gold. Aiming to tell the story of the second world war through the eyes of one unit, he had

Inferno, by Dan Brown – review

The other day, while shopping in Tesco, I was surprised to find copies of the Inferno for sale by the checkout. ‘Oh dear’, I declared, ‘who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ It was not Dante of course, but Dan ‘Dante’ Brown, whose latest extravaganza, Inferno, tips a nod to the Florentine poet’s medieval epic of fire and brimstone. Inferno, a bibliographic thriller in the Umberto Eco mould, is the fastest-selling novel of the moment. But let us be clear. Where Dante’s Inferno was ‘awful’ in that archaic sense of the word (still valid in Italian) of inspiring awe, Brown’s is merely awful. Correction: very awful. ‘A powerfully built

A Sting in the Tale, by Dave Goulson – review

We need more conservationists like Dave Goulson. Cack-handed animal killers, that is. As a child in the 1970s Goulson tried to dry out some ‘bedraggled’ bumblebees which had got caught in a thunderstorm. He put them on the hotplate of the electric cooker and set it to low. Then he went off to feed his gerbils. Only the smell of smoke reminded him of the now-toasted bees. His fish tank contained an electric heater whose waterproof casing he managed to break, thereby electrocuting his scaly friends. The garter snake was more fortunate — it only got tangled up in the sellotape with which Goulson had inexpertly tried to secure the

Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala – review

Sonali Deraniyagala’s horrific book Wave, about her experience in and after the 26 December 2004 tsunami that struck the south-east coast of Sri Lanka, is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read. All year round, day and night, if you looked down that long two-mile line of sea and sand, you would see, unless it was very rough, continually at regular intervals a wave, not very high but unbroken two miles long, lift itself up very slowly, wearily, poise itself for a moment in sudden complete silence, and then fall with a great thud upon the sand.  That moment of complete silence followed by the great thud,

Bosworth, by Chris Skidmore – review

Although Richard III was five foot eight, his spine was so twisted he stood a foot shorter. Imagine him hacking his way towards Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth; a furious human pretzel, ‘small in body and feeble of limb’, as a contemporary noted, he cut his way towards his rival ‘until his last breath’. Earlier this year, five million people watched the Channel 4 programme The King Under the Car Park which first revealed that Richard really did have slight bones, and one shoulder higher than the other, as the earliest sources had always claimed. It caught the national imagination with the details of the injuries he suffered

The Iraqi Christ, by Hassan Blasim – review

There is much about Hassan Blasim that demands attention. He is an Iraqi. He escaped from Saddam’s dictatorship in 2000 by walking to Iran and smuggling himself into Europe. He has a confident, almost intimidating demeanour. And with the growing stack of literature about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all penned by westerners, there is an important space for Blasim to fill. The Iraqi Christ is his second collection of short fiction, the first being The Madman of Freedom Square, both translated into English by Jonathan Wright. Blasim has been called, ‘the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’. It is is not his identity, how-ever, but the quality of

Red Nile, by Robert Twigger – review

When Bernini designed his fountain of the four rivers for the Piazza Navona in Rome in 1651 he draped the head of the god of the Nile with a loose piece of cloth, to denote the fact that its source remained unknown. Tracing the sources of both the Blue and the White Nile would become one of the most heated and consuming of all Victorian quests and the adventures and tribulations of the men — Petherick, Stanley, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Speke — and one woman, Baker’s Hungarian slave wife, Florenz, have provided rich material for many generations of writers. What Robert Twigger brings, in this great bag of a book,

All That Is, by James Salter- review

Some authors’ lives are a great deal more interesting than others — James Salter’s, for one. Born in 1925 and educated at West Point, a fighter pilot in Korea and afterwards in Cold War Europe, the chiselled flyboy soon jettisoned this for writing and became a cosmopolitan and a worldly adventurer. He made a film in the Alps with Robert Redford, and climbed at Chamonix to produce what was meant to be another film but became the novel Solo Faces. He had homes in Aspen and the Hamptons, frequented the parlours of Paris and Rome but was always, always, too reticent, and, by his code, too honour-bound to divulge all

Sam Leith

Feral, by Geoge Monbiot – review

One of the greatest difficulties environmental activists have always had in the war for hearts ’n’ minds is that they so often seem priggish and negative. Everyone knows what they are against (central heating, fun, cod and chips, James Delingpole etc). Fewer people know what they are for. Here, therefore, is George Monbiot’s attempt — shot through — no, positively ravished — with personal feeling — to tell us. He offers, he says, a set of ideas ‘not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it […] to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.’ ‘Rewilding’, in his definition, means something different from ‘stewarding the environment’ or ‘conservation’: the idea

Michael Sandel interview: the marketization of everything is undermining democracy

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his  ‘Justice’ course, which he has taught for over two decades. Sandel first came to prominence in 1982 with his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. The book offers a critique of liberalism, arguing that individuals’ needs are rooted with a sense of community and obligation to others, rather than the self. Last year, Sandel published What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. When one initially begins to read this book, it seems as if Sandel is simply stating the obvious. He asks questions that many of us think about

Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to