Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

‘Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England’, by Neil McKenna – review

Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, impersonates a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls. Vaudeville performers in the Jagger mould love to put on lipstick and ‘false bubbies’ (as Neil McKenna calls them). Boy X-Factor contestants, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, present an almost Gloria Swanson-like image of adornment. Perhaps it is merely romantic to suggest that the stylised wigs and gowns worn by our bishops and high court judges also have a homoerotic component. The former Pope Benedict XVI’s ruby-red pumps were nothing compared to the faux ermines worn in the House of Lords. Frederick ‘Fanny’ Park,

‘O My America!’, by Sara Wheeler – review

You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of Antarctica, as she brilliantly documented in Terra Incognita, can cope with ageing and menopause? Wheeler herself was not so certain. In her restless, creative way, she met the advent of what she calls ‘the Frumpy Years’ by taking to the road, following the trails of six indomitable Victorian women across the United States. The combination of that nation of eternal makeover and of Wheeler’s travelling companions makes O My America! a curious and teasing book. Her work to date has

‘The Infatuations’, by Javier Marías – review

A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime. The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair

‘Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing’, by Jane Dunn – review

Jane Dunn is something of a specialist on sisterhood. She has — we learn from the dedication — five sisters of her own; she has already written a book about the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and another about the cousins Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now the du Maurier sisters are in line to capture the public imagination like the Brontës or the Mitfords, their group celebrity fortified by genuine claims to fame. The fascination for readers is the different character and destiny of each sister, plus their relationships with one another and with the dynamics of the family romance —  and few family romances have

The importance of Pakistan’s literary festivals

For a country often conceived of only in terms of its troubles with terrorism, extremists and bombs, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that, in Pakistan, all forms of cultural expression have long ceased. But, in the latest edition of Time, there’s an interesting piece by Omar Waraich about the cultural flipside of Pakistan that caught my eye. As the world’s attention has been drawn to Pakistan’s problems with Islamist militancy in recent years, a flurry of exciting new voices have stepped forward to share with their readers a more intimate and rounded look at the country and its people — winning many plaudits along the way. Waraich was

Interview with a writer: Lars Iyer

People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people naturally associating innovative, serious and challenging art with the marginal. This no doubt plays up to Iyer’s own theories about the climate of contemporary literature, but the reception of these books tells quite a different story. While his manifesto claims masterpieces cannot be produced in our age, and that no contemporary literature could be as important as anything by Samuel Beckett, critics call his books masterpieces and constantly compare him to Beckett. His characters lament

Review – Invisible Romans, by Robert Knapp

It’s tempting to reduce the Roman Empire to a roll call of famous men and their infamous deeds. The Republic toppled with Caesar on the steps of the senate; freedom of speech was curtailed as brutally as Cicero’s tongue; democracy became an act on Octavian assuming his stage name. However Robert Knapp, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, isn’t interested in that version of history. Like Mary Beard, who pottered around Rome deciphering inscriptions for the BBC, he’s concerned with ordinary folk. His Invisible Romans range ‘from fairly wealthy to modestly well-off and downright poor, male and female, slave and free, law-abiding and outlaw’. Between the super wealthy (the

Discovering poetry: Samuel Daniel and the art of outliving death

from Delia When winter snows upon thy golden hairs, And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear;    Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil not all unworthy; Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee; Here read thyself, and what I suffered for thee.    This may remain thy lasting monument, Which happily posterity may cherish; These colours with thy fading are not spent; These may remain, when thou and I shall perish.    If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby;

Bookbenchers: Nick de Bois

Nick de Bois is the Conservative MP for Enfield North, and is part of the Tory Class of 2010. He talks spies, Eurovision and Machiavelli as he tells us about his favourite books. 1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment? Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power 2) Which book would you read to your children? Harry Potter, good to read and good to listen too – win, win. 3) Which literary character would you most like to be? George Smiley – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 4) Which book do you think best sums up ‘now’? Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 5) What was the last novel you read? The Governor’s

Interview with a writer: Jared Diamond

In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states. Diamond says that if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, human beings have been wandering nomads for most of history. Therefore, if modern nations are relatively new concepts, we have much to learn from traditional cultures. Drawing on his experience of 50 years of field research in New Guinea, Diamond attempts to prove his thesis with a mixture of personal anecdotes and academic research. He claims the way people in traditional societies raise their children, spend their leisure

The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock

For the last 40 years it’s been impossible to interview Anthony Hopkins without him doing his Tommy Cooper impression. He’s obsessed with the bloke, constantly interrupting Silence of the Lambs anecdotes to do Cooper’s chuckle and hand flicking and patter. He was, therefore, the absolutely perfect choice to play Alfred Hitchcock. Actually, the new film’s not that bad. It tells a good yarn about the director’s wife Alma rescuing both him and Psycho, not to mention the 800 grand of their own money they’d sunk into the movie. The other actors are so good that most of the time you can almost forget Anthony Hopkins is wandering around in the

AC Grayling vs God

‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives. But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse. They do not place advertisements on buses proclaiming that

The curse of the mummy

The former Soviet Union is so down on its economic luck that it can no longer maintain Lenin’s embalmed body. A brash official from rural China called Liu Yingque decides to buy the deteriorating corpse, create a red tourist attraction in his own county, and so make the area rich beyond its wildest dreams. Liu’s only difficulty is finding the millions of yuan necessary to purchase Lenin. He soon hits upon a solution: he recruits a performing troupe from nearby Liven, a village in which every resident is disabled in some way, and dispatches them on a nationwide fundraising tour. The travelling freakshow — featuring deaf-mutes exploding firecrackers next to

Of vice and verse

‘All human life is binary’, explains a Vestal Virgin to the time-travelling heroine of Ranjit Bolt’s verse novel, Losing It. Young and lovely, Lucy’s plan is to lose her virginity. Entertainingly delivered, it’s an engaging subject, universal and rich in comic scope. Bolt’s burlesque is a frolicsome addition to a scanty genre, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales via Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. He plunders deep erudition for this bawdy bildungsroman; not so much virtue rewarded as its abandonment thwarted. Desperate to be deflowered, Lucy takes up residence with her witch-like Aunt Alicia, complicit but capricious, in a gothically cast modern-day Hampstead (‘With more quaint nooks and strange dead

What dogs know about us

In Aesop’s fable of the Dog and the Wolf, the latter declares that it is better to starve free than be a fat slave, but the fact is that, without man, there would be no dog at all. When people eventually began to form permanent settlements, a new food source appeared: waste. Wolf packs, less fearful of man than others, less aggressive too, took advantage, and turned themselves into dogs. Natural selection works in mysterious ways. Years ago, before the gender police were on the prowl, this book’s top title would have been Man’s Best Friend, for the ‘genius’ that it describes is the dog’s talent for inter- action with

Hasty exit strategy

For years after the rug was pulled from under it, the British Empire — with a quarter of the globe, the largest the world has known — seemed an unfashionable subject for historians. Did they fear political incorrectness, or was it simply that they had to wait for sufficient archival material to emerge? Whichever, there is now some very welcome sprouting in this part of the historical garden, already well-watered by the Cambridge historian Ronald Hyam, and few shoots could be more welcome than Calder Walton’s important contribution. Walton draws on recently released MI5 files to reveal the role of intelligence in the transitions from colony to independent state. Decolonisation

Thinly veiled threats

No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and anal sex, is not a task many writers would relish. Sex and the Citadel is a bold, meticulously researched mini Kinsey Report, rich in anecdote and statistics. El Feki’s father is Egyptian and a devout Muslim, her mother a Welsh Baptist, who converted early to Islam. An only child, with fair northern features, she grew up in Canada and was raised as a Muslim. Having done a doctorate in molecular immunology and served as a member of the UN Global

The pleasure of reading Rumer Godden’s India

Rumer Godden’s prose tugs two ways at once. It is subtle, descriptive, and light, but also direct and unashamed of being turned inside out until darkness consumes it, rendering what was beautiful irrelevant and suddenly opaque. There is also a lot of it. Rumer Godden OBE (1907-1998) wrote over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction over a lifetime divided between England, where she was born, India, where she spent much of her young adulthood, and Scotland, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. Godden’s three best-known novels, Black Narcissus, Breakfast with the Nikolides, and Kingfishers Catch Fire are set in India. Flickering with the awe and

Roy Lichtenstein: comic genius?

Tate Modern promises that its forthcoming retrospective will showcase ‘the full scope of Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic explorations’, to which Spectator art critic Andrew Lambirth responded acidly: ‘I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.’ And it’s true that once Lichtenstein perfected his dot patterning technique in the mid-Sixties, he stuck with it until his death more than 30 years later. Alastair Sooke’s How Modern Art Was Saved By Donald Duck is available as a Penguin Specials paperback from Tate Modern; elsewhere, it’s in eBook format only. It won’t convince any sceptics of Lichtenstein’s infinite versatility, but it does make a case for him as a supreme examiner of style. ‘Perfected’ is