Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

The Spoken Word, Irish Poets and Writers – audio book

Here is further evidence that it is disillusioning, more often than not, to encounter close up any artist long admired at a distance. This generalisation applies to actors, musicians, painters and writers of all shapes and sizes, male and female. Coiffure and couture are rarely sufficiently haute; on the other hand, bohemian grooming and costumes are often rather scruffy. In advanced cases, there are dangers of rheumy eyes and bad breath. The Spoken Word, the British Library’s admirable series of compact discs of historic literary recordings of lectures, readings and discussions from the archives of the BBC, audibly reduces icons to curios on an ordinary human scale. The latest discs,

Owen Bennett-Jones

To Move the World, by Jeffrey Sachs – review

Jeffrey Sachs is the world’s best-connected development economist. An academic with highly developed communication skills, he has always managed to secure access to policy makers and to offer them advice. His record is controversial. Back in the 1990s he worked on Russia’s transition from a command to a capitalist economy. He advocated the approach that Yeltsin adopted — shock therapy. The result was pensioners on the streets selling off furniture, jewellery and even their clothes to raise cash for food. Whilst there were many other factors at play, it now seems obvious that China’s transition to capitalism was better handled. China didn’t take Sachs’s advice. More recently Sachs has argued

Oliver Rackham

The Man Who Plants Trees, by Jim Robbins – review

Remember the ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign? Forty years on, has anyone inquired into what happened to all those trees and how many are still alive? Since then, planting amenity trees has grown into an industry, and turns out to have its down sides. One is that little trees are imported in industrial quantities from other countries, as if they were cars or tins of paint, and inevitably bring with them foreign pests and diseases which destroy established trees. Globalisation of tree diseases has overtaken climate change and too many deer to become the number one threat to the world’s trees and forests. This book, by a scientific journalist,

Andrew Taylor

Crime fiction – review

‘We no longer believe in God but hope nevertheless for miracles,’ remarks Frederic Mordaunt, one of the characters of John Harwood’s third novel, The Asylum (Cape, £14.99). He’s being over-optimistic, as Georgina Ferrers, the niece of a London bookseller, soon discovers when she wakes in a strange bed to be told that her name is in fact Lucy Ashton and that the year is 1882.  It appears that she has admitted herself as a voluntary patient at Tregannon House, a Cornish mental asylum run by the charismatic Dr Straker. Tregannon, the ancestral home of the Mordaunt family, is tainted with madness; and the young heir, Frederic, assists Dr Straker in

Philip Hensher

How do you define a ‘northerner’?

Obviously, now that every high street in England looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same Australian rising inflection in speech, books of this sort are based on a false and wishful premise. But let us enter into Paul Morley’s game and ask the question he has asked again. What is ‘the north’ — or ‘the North’ — anyway? Obviously, as a geographical entity, we know (roughly) what we are talking about; we can argue about Derbyshire, but between Yorkshire and Scotland no one is going to dispute what the north is. Culturally, we may think we know what we are talking about, but all attempts to pin

Wednesday

David Blackburn

AM Homes’ May We Be Forgiven wins the Women’s Fiction Prize

AM Homes’ May We Be Forgiven has won the Women’s Fiction Prize, beating a strong field that included Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Kate Atkinson. Homes, who is an American writer, is something of an unknown in this country (certainly compared to Smith and Mantel). On receiving the prize, she said, ‘it’s my nature to think about big ideas and my gender shouldn’t prevent me from doing that.’ Her work concerns modern America. Sleepy academic types are disturbed. The normal vanishes. Homes has been compared to Jonathan Franzen, among others. Click here to find out if the comparison is an insult to Homes, an insult to Franzen, or simply a fair observation.

Paul Doherty

Death of a tyrant

For a king very conscious of his own power, who gloried in his status and commissioned famous artists to depict that status, Henry VIII’s death, in January 1547, was tawdry and pathetic, yet shrouded in squalid mystery. According to the accepted story, after being weak and ailing for some time, the king died in the early hours of Friday morning, 28 January 1547. However, the official proclamation of the king’s death was not made until the afternoon of Monday, 31 January. Henry apparently had great affection for Katherine Parr and adored his only son, Edward. Consequently, it is intriguing that as Henry slipped towards death, neither Katherine, Edward nor Henry’s

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris Johnson to write book about Sir Winston Churchill

Boris is to write a book about Winston Churchill. As Boris puts it in a cantering press release: ‘The point of the ‘‘Churchill Factor’’ is that one man can make all the difference.’ The point of the ‘Boris Factor’ is that only one man has the spunk to invite comparison between himself and Churchill. David Cameron is, evidently, self-assured; but he would not take such a risk. Confidence is Boris’ gift; over-confidence his enemy. BoJo and Sir Winston are, to an extent, kindred spirits: witty and determined, and chancers both.

Shiraz Maher

Countering Terrorism in Britain and France, by Frank Foley – review

Have you ever wondered why we’re stuck with the radical cleric Abu Qatada? It’s a question the last four Home Secretaries will have asked as they battled, and failed, to deport him. Now Theresa May is learning just how stubborn the old curmudgeon can be. Indeed, the whole issue of deporting terror suspects is a difficult one. In the nine years that followed the 9/11 attacks, France deported 129 individuals considered to be threats to national security, while we removed just nine. The intransigence of British judges is not new. Long before the ‘War on Terror’ brought matters of international security to public attention, the French had been pursuing Rachid

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: John Donne, from deviant to Dean of St. Paul’s

Holy Sonnet 7, John Donne At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go – All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.     But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space For, if above all these my sins abound, ‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace When we are there. Here, on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good

Friday

Jonathan Mcaloon

Sheila Heti: ‘I did worry putting sex in the book would eclipse everything else’

There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in the book will have been transformed by art, and isn’t something that comes straight from an author’s imagination more autobiographical, more telling, than things that might have happened to them, anyway? But these serious maxims don’t always quell your desire for real-life incident or gossip. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, subtitled ‘A novel from life,’ had me googling paintings by Margaux Williamson: Heti’s best friend in real life and a character in her book. How Should A

Thursday

David Blackburn

Amateur fantasies and professional realities

As was to be expected, it rained. Drizzle was in the air at times yesterday when the Authors XI turned out to mark 150 years of The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (the latest edition of which the Spectator reviewed here). Sebastian Faulks, Ed Smith and Kamila Shamsie were among the players, all of whom were dressed in Victorian garb and wore joyous grins. The Author’s XI has a book out; an account of their tour recent of England. It is a gently beguiling book, revealing something of life, the writers and, of course, cricket. It’s a perfect match. As Sebastian Faulks puts it in the foreword: ‘Amateur cricketers tend to be vain,

Marcus Berkmann

The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, edited by Harry Mount – review

It’s just a guess, but I suspect that the mere sight of this book would make David Cameron gnash his tiny, perfect dolphin teeth until his gums began to bleed. What on earth can he do about Boris Johnson? What can any of us do? There’s something inexorable — irresistible even — about his progress,  and this slender volume of drolleries represents another small step on the increasingly well-lit path to ultimate power: what may come to be known as the ‘Boris Years,’ or even the ‘Boris Hegemony’. This book thus becomes more than merely amusing and entertaining (it’s both, needless to say); it becomes potentially significant. Future generations may

Duncan Fallowell

The Garden of Eros, by John Calder – review

John Calder is Britain’s most distinguished living publisher, and at the age of 86 he’s still at it. He first set up in business in 1949 and went on to publish 18 Nobel Prize winners, as well as classics and works on music. Why doesn’t he received a knighthood? Perhaps because his distinction lies chiefly in his role as champion of the avant garde. At a time when the heights of literary achievement are said to be the kitsch historical novels of Hilary Mantel, it is salutary to be reminded of a period not long ago when literature was a vital part of the contemporary world, replete with glittering transgressive

Stoker Devonshire

Henry Cecil, by Brough Scott – review

This is by far the best book on racing I have ever read. It combines a truly extraordinary story — one that no novelist would have dared to submit — with brilliant writing by an author who is almost as knowledgeable about horses and the turf as his subject. Sir Henry Cecil had a privileged upbringing and a not very successful academic career; by the age of 20 he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and it seems that it was nurture — his stepfather was a flat-race trainer— rather than nature that led him to horses. In view of his superhuman dedication to

Daisy Dunn

Russia: A World Apart, by Simon Marsden – review

Here are acres of desolate countryside, pockmarked by once great estates, ravaged by rot. Could it be much bleaker? Many aristocrats  fled Russia during the Revolution. Even Tolstoy’s family were affected, and while his estate today survives intact, that of his daughter-in-law and countless other members of the 18th- and 19th-century nobility were left to ruin in overgrown fields across the entire country. This book, part travelogue (Duncan McLaren), part photography book (the late Simon Marsden), restores these buildings and their monuments to our consciousness. Or at least what’s left of them. Many of the estates which lie between Moscow and St Petersburg have been eaten away by fire or

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This

Christopher Booker

Global Crisis, by Geoffrey Parker – review

Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and winters so abnormally hot or cold that their like was ‘never known in the world before’. These were the days of those London Frost Fairs, when the Thames froze so thickly that it could bear horses, coaches and streets of shops. This was the time of the Maunder Minimum, when for decades after 1645 sunspot

Joanna Kavenna

Everest, by Harriet Tuckey

This book, as the subtitle explains, makes a bold claim: Griffith Pugh was the ‘unsung hero’ of the 1953 ascent of Everest, his achievements neglected and nearly lost to posterity. Harriet Tuckey is Pugh’s daughter, so this assertion might be little more than a kindly attempt to revive her father’s flagging reputation. Yet, Pugh was clearly no ordinary father, and Tuckey’s advocacy on his behalf is correspondingly unusual. She casts her father as a ‘uniquely talented, turbulent man,’ ‘truly great,’ ‘difficult, bad-tempered,’ ‘rather cruel’ and ‘totally selfish’. Many pioneers are Janus-faced in this way — those fervent, half-mad, ambitious men and sometimes women who scale mountains, chart the uncharted and

Wynn Wheldon

Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, Beautiful Fools, by R. Clifton Spargo, Careless People, by Sarah Churchill – review

The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature, like Pride and Prejudice, that appeals as much to the general reader as to the literary bod. It’ll always be around, if not as a movie (there have been five since its publication in 1926) then as an opera or a ballet. Last year a staged reading ran for weeks in the West End, to critical acclaim. It is a short book — a long short story really — about wealth and sex and hope and disillusion and partying. These are the themes, too, of the lives of its author and his wife Zelda. Theirs was a relationship that