Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Zenga Longmore

The Quickening, by Julie Myerson — review

The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister husband, Dan. Rachel’s ghostly journey begins when Dan suggests a holiday in Antigua. Even though Rachel has a creepy premonition when she sees a photograph of her Caribbean destination, she’s not deterred. Of course, strange things happen when they arrive. Psychic taxi- drivers mumble cryptic warnings. A clairvoyant waitress tearfully begs Rachel to leave the island. Light-fittings fly off the walls. Shadowy figures lumber along sunlit beaches. Locals are murdered in mysterious circumstances. The other English tourists dismiss Rachel’s fears as the crazed delusions of pregnancy — until the surprise

Jane Rye

The Undelivered Mardle: A Memoir of Belief, Doubt and Delight, by John Rogers — review

This ‘wry soliloquy’, as Ronald Blythe calls The Undelivered Mardle in his introduction, is quite unlike anything else, although its ostensible subject, the history of a small Suffolk farmyard church and its parish (accompanied by three excellent maps) might suggest otherwise. Asked to give a talk or ‘mardle’ to raise money for the priory church at Letheringham, and having established that he might ‘question the sense of preserving such relics’, John Rogers paid a series of meditative visits over several months. On the day he was to deliver the mardle he had a heart attack; afterwards, ‘feeling rather feeble’ and aware that as a public speaker he was ‘unpredictable’, he

Andro Linklater

The Real Great Escape, by Simon Read — review

The scene is chilling. Four men stand in the snow, all in uniform. The men are in pairs, one in each pair holds a pistol to the head of the man in front. Behind them two parked cars, 1940s models; in front a snow-filled ditch. What happens next? The right answer depends on which scene you are watching. The one reproduced in both these books (and above) occurred in February 1946, and was a reconstruction staged by RAF police hunting for the killers of two men, Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green. Afterwards, all four participants and the man who took the picture got back in the

Bevis Hillier

Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review

Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something missing: he had not adequately covered the years between 1935, when he was born, and 1967, when he became director of the National Portrait Gallery — as the Daily Mail put it in 1969, ‘Britain’s most improbable civil servant’. He has written this book to remedy the omission. That it is published by the Bodleian is yet another feather in Strong’s fedora. If you were in the anti-Strong faction (I am not, but it does exist), you might summarise the

Sebastian Payne

To Save Everything, Click Here, by Evgeny Morozov — review

Technology may not have taken over the world, but it is making quite good progress in taking over our lives. Thirty years ago, receiving a phone call was the height of communication stimulus. Now, we are programmed to expect several emails an hour and can become anxious if we don’t receive them. It’s worse than a bad habit. Scientists suggest the constant distractions offered by technology have even altered the chemical balance in our brains. The information revolution has made us more connected, switched-on and informed than ever before. Thanks to near-universal access to the internet, humans can access almost every piece of knowledge accumulated by mankind in the blink

Philip Hensher

West’s World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rececca West, by Lorna Gibb — review

Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in the minds of critics, and she has no secure literary status.’ It is always dangerous to declare what posterity will think, but West does seem to be on the slide. Some of her books are in print. They now seem quite mixed in quality. Of her novels, The Fountain Overflows is probably the best: a

Wednesday

Nigel Jones

Atlas of History’s Greatest Military Victories, by Jeremy Harwood – review

Final proof – if any were needed – that Englishmen are not made of the same mettle as their rough, tough ancestors is provided on the website of the Towton Battlefield Society, who have cancelled their annual re-enactment of England’s bloodiest battle this Sunday ‘for safety’s sake…’ on the grounds that the battlefield has been waterlogged by this year’s unremitting wet weather. This is an irony of ironies. For those who fought the original battle on the high Yorkshire plateau of Towton on Palm Sunday, March 28th 1461, during the Wars of the Roses, were not constrained by the same health and safety fears. Instead, between 50-80,000 men stood toe

Tuesday

Simon Akam

21 books for a godson, pt. 2

This post is the second half of a list of 21 books that a man might give to his godson on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday.That is novels done. The bespoke bookcase is more than half loaded; 12 slots are full, nine remain. I conceive the selection of other titles as a complement to the novels we have already chosen – an acknowledgement too, if you like, that the novel is the highest of all art, let alone book, forms and other texts should therefore pay homage to it. Having ended prose fiction with a novel that pretended to be a long poem we will now begin the best

Monday

Simon Akam

21 books for a godson, pt. 1

There is much to be said for godfathers. They offer the wisdom of maturity without the complications of direct filial ties. Likewise there is much to be said for 21st birthday celebrations, the last relic in our ossified, post-industrial society of the adulthood rituals of traditional peoples. However, it is the fusion of these two noble quantities that gives the most pleasing outcome. The godfather’s 21st birthday present to his godson marks a notable point in the annals of gift giving, unmatched since the general demise of dowries and Danegeld.  The occasion suggests gifts with an Edwardian tone, badger hair and ivory shaving tackle or rawhide hand luggage; stout apparatus

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview with a writer: Jaron Lanier

In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we continue on our present path, where we think of computers as passive tools, instead of machines that real people create, our myopia will result in less understanding of both computers and human beings, which could cause the demise of democracy, mass unemployment, the erosion of the middle class, and social chaos. Lanier encourages human beings to take back control of their own economic destiny by creating a society that values the work of all industries, and not just

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian – review

‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country. British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense. It claimed they were best

Walter Ellis

Rifleman by Victor Gregg is a book you ought to read

I live in New York and until this month I had never heard of Victor Gregg, the World War II veteran whose 2011 memoir, Rifleman, was hailed as possibly the most honest and outspoken ever written by an enlisted soldier and ‘an outstanding book that deserves to become a classic’. Gregg is 93, which is an achievement in itself, but bright as a button. When I heard an interview he gave recently to the Today Programme replayed on National Public Radio, I was reminded of Stanley Holloway playing Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady. In fact, the only role Gregg ever played was that of a working man who, through no

Marcus Berkmann

Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey – review

We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you’re going to be under three feet of snow every December.’ Perhaps appropriately, then, he has written quite a whimsical little book, scarcely longer than a pamphlet, exploring the glorious oddness of British weather with characteristic elegance and perspicacity. East Anglian gales, ‘ranting uninterrupted from the Urals’, are ‘a sight more brazen than the tree-top gossip of the Chilterns’. As Britons we ‘expect

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mr Speaker: The Office and the Individuals since 1945, by Matthew Laban – review

The sheer workload. That’s the first big surprise in Matthew Laban’s absorbing history of the Speakership since 1945. Typically, the Speaker rises at dawn and holds several hours of preparatory meetings before parliamentary business starts after lunch. Though helped by two deputies, the Speaker must remain on duty into the small hours. Loneliness and overwork have created casualties. Horace King (1965-1971) liked an early-evening stiffener consisting of half a pint of sherry enlivened with four fingers of Armagnac. As he staggered towards his ceremonial perch one night, he was heckled by Labour’s chief whip, Bob Mellish. ‘Horace, I’ll have you out of that chair within three months.’ ‘How can you

Andrew Taylor

The Dance of the Seagull, by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli – review

In the first six pages of Andrea Camilleri’s new novel, Inspector Montalbano drinks at least four cups of coffee and watches a seagull dance to its death in front of his verandah. Its beak pointing at the sky, the bird spins in its last agony. Afterwards, the inspector places its corpse in a plastic bag, swims into the sea and commits it to the deep. It’s an arresting, eccentric episode which, together with the coffee, gives a glimpse of what lies in store. Montalbano is never far removed from his next cup of coffee. He’s also strangely sensitive, alert to the nuances of life and death; his imagination often tips

Jonathan Mirsky

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig – review

Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages. Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He

Daniel Swift

Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, by David Schalkwyk – review

The so-called ‘Robben Island Bible’ is one of the holy relics of Shakespeare criticism. It is a copy of a 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, kept by a political prisoner on Robben Island, the notorious island jail off Cape Town, during the 1970s and 1980s. The possession of such a book was against the rules, but its owner, Sonny Venkatrathnam, convinced the guards that this was a Bible, and inside the prison it functioned as something like a holy text. The inmates passed around the collection of plays and poems, and 34 signed their names next to a favourite passage. Apartheid was founded upon division. In sharing the Robben

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Confronting the Classics, by Mary Beard – review

The Emperor Augustus, ruler of the known world, once spotted a man in the street who looked a bit like himself. ‘Did your mother ever work at the palace?’ he asked him roguishly. ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘but my father did.’ Augustus could have had the man killed for this scurrilous (and slightly surreal) insinuation, but fortunately he had a sense of humour. As too, Mary Beard tells us, did the Emperor Elagabalus, who used to seat his dinner guests on cushions that, unbeknownst to them, were full of air. As the meal progressed, a slave secretly let the air out, so Elagabalus could enjoy the sight of his companions

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, by Eric Hobsbawm – review

Like many posthumous books from distinguished thinkers, this isn’t one. A book, I mean. Not really. The problem is that nobody seems to buy cobbled-together collections of previously published essays, talks and book reviews. The thing to do if you’re a publisher, therefore, is to give it a title that makes it sound like a book, shoehorn the content into vague, grand-sounding sections (‘Part I: The Predicament of “High Culture” Today’; ‘Part II: The Culture of the Bourgeois World’; ‘Part III: Uncertainties, Science, Religion.’; ‘Part IV: From Art to Myth’) and put it between hard covers for 25 quid. That said, the situation’s not quite as bald as all that.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Budget Day: should our times really be called ‘the age of austerity’?

It is Budget Day. Prepare for another barrage of “messages” about the virtues or perils, depending on your point of view, of ‘austerity’. From where has this ubiquitous term come? And should it apply to our times? Dot Wordsworth, our language columnist, has some answers: ‘If we are invited to think we are experiencing austerity, despite the heaps of cheap clothes in Primark or expensive food in Waitrose, then it is Mr Cameron’s doing. In April 2009, not so long ago, at the Conservative spring conference (that needless enterprise) he promised an ‘age of austerity’. In the same speech he promised a ‘People’s Right To Know’, a plan under which