Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Victor Sebestyen

What price freedom?

One of the best-known contacts for many Western reporters covering Poland and the Solidarity protests of the 1980s was Konstanty ‘Kostek’ Gebert. A fine journalist who usually wrote under the name Dawid Warszawski, he seemed to know everyone in Warsaw, liked to talk late into the night about ideas and gossip, wore his vast learning lightly and had an invaluable gift for putting complex issues into broad perspective. Gebert’s parents were Jewish migrants to the US in the 1920s. They were loyal members of the American Communist Party for years and returned to Poland in 1947 to build socialism from the ruins of the second world war. When Gebert, born

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Pyrrhic victories

In 193 BC, Scipio met Hannibal at Ephesus, and asked him who, in his opinion, were the greatest generals of all time. Since he’d personally defeated Rome’s most dangerous enemy a decade earlier, he rather expected to be on his list. But Hannibal first named Alexander the Great; then Pyrrhus (who like him had come within a whisker of sacking Rome); and for his third choice — one can’t help but feel he was taunting the self-important Roman — himself. And what, Scipio expostulated, if I hadn’t beaten you at Zama? In that case, the Carthaginian replied with a smile, I should have placed myself first. Of course, as Anthony Everitt

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Leaving Sussex

I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating. Then I saw what the publicity people meant. Nicholson has broken out of his small, square two inches of ivory. His previous three novels were set over the course of a few days in the southeast of England. A typical chapter was called ‘Saturday’. Motherland spans 11 years, set in Sussex, France, India, Jamaica and New Orleans. Part One is called ‘War: 1942-45’.

Cressida Connolly

Growing up the hard way | 14 February 2013

Like the gingerbread house, these three novels seem at first to be a delightful and innocent place, entirely suitable for the three not-quite orphaned young girls who are Holden’s heroines. But, just as in a fairytale, safety is never assured. The very grown-ups who should be offering protection — a governess, a head teacher, even their own mother — may become suddenly unstable and capricious. What looks bright and cheery and full of hope may turn out to be perilous, even sinister. Home is not a constant. Written with an engaging immediacy, these are stories about children but, with their dark secrets, their frightening reversals, their alarming glimpses of sex

Justin Cartwright

The tragedy of a hamlet

Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. The subjects Crace tackles are varied, from a microscopic study of death (Being Dead) to an eremitic retreat in the Judaean desert (Quarantine). They all deploy a terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read. Some of them are dystopian (The Pesthouse), some are set in very faintly demarcated places, or places that we recognise because we have dreamed of them. Yet this

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Family differences

Andrew Solomon’s simple and powerful guiding idea in this book is that there are two sorts of identity that affect your place in the world. Your ‘vertical identity’ is what you share with your parents — and it usually, but not always, includes such things as race, religion, language and social class. Children are born with ‘horizontal identities’ too — which is to say, things that they don’t share with their parents but that they have in common with others elsewhere: being the deaf child of hearing parents, the schizophrenic child of mentally well parents, or the gay child of straight parents. Some of these horizontal identities are things that

Wednesday

Lynn Shepherd

How did you do? Answers to our Young Romantics quiz

Here are the answers to the quiz posted last week. The winner will receive a signed first edition of Lynn Shepherd’s new novel, A Treacherous Likeness, which was inspired by the Shelleys. You can read Andrew Taylor’s Spectator review of A Treacherous Likeness here, or subscribe to do so here. 1 Who as a child a) Sent a cat up in a kite in the midst of a storm – Shelley b) Lost his father at the age of eight when he died falling from his horse – Keats c) Was bullied by his eight older brothers – Coleridge d) Played in the very first Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s – Byron 2 Who a) Left

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Cricket’s the loser

Cricket glorifies some cheats. W.G. Grace often batted on after being clean bowled; such was the public demand to watch him. Douglas Jardine’s bodyline tactics revolutionised fast bowling: eventually making it acceptable to target the batsman rather than the wicket. Fielders “work” the ball. Batsmen stand their ground when convention asks them to walk. Cheating is part of cricket. But match fixing? The culprits live forever in infamy, and deservedly so. The cricketing authorities (the ICC) believed that match fixing had died ten years ago; but the News of the World’s sting on the Pakistan team in 2010 demolished those hopes. The sting suggested that the problem was deep. Rumours

Monday

Steven Mcgregor

War is not to be envied

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana. Given a setting in which rugged individualism is a generational mantle, it is not surprising

Friday

David Blackburn

In praise of Plum

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly. Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can’t do Wodehouse. My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Writing of walking

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on

Patrick Skene-Catling

A hero of folk

‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and after. A self-taught socialist, Woody wrote more than 3,000 songs, mostly in angry protest on behalf of millions of underdogs. As the ‘Dust Bowl Balladeer’, he became the legendary folk hero who inspired Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and many others. Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. When he was 15, his mother was institutionalised with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary cause of early dementia and other mental disabilities, which he eventually inherited. At 17, he moved to Pampa, a small town

Andrew Taylor

A choice of recent crime novels

Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He is devastated by the death from cancer of his wife, Lydia, the much-loved matriarch; but his children and grandchildren console him. The clan gathers for the annual bonfire weekend at their Devon holiday home. It all goes horribly wrong when baby Edie, the youngest grandchild and apple of everyone’s eye, vanishes one evening, along with

John Preston

Beautiful and damned

According to his mother, Neville Heath was ‘prone to be excitable’. He was that all right — and then some. In the space of two weeks in the summer of 1946, Heath murdered two women with such brutality that, as Sean O’Connor puts it with shuddering relish, ‘war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them’. The public were fascinated by him. Elizabeth Taylor reworked Heath’s story into a novel, Patrick Hamilton drew on it heavily for his Gorse trilogy and Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a film about the case, but had to ditch the idea when the studio decided it would be too revolting. Heath was fascinating mainly due to

Cressida Connolly

Love stories

Unfortunately for the reading public, most of Bernadine Bishop’s working life has been spent as a psychotherapist. Having published a couple of early novels, she put aside her pen, first to become a teacher, and then a shrink: it was only after cancer forced her retirement in 2010 that she turned again to writing. I sincerely hope she is in remission now, not only for the sake of her own health and happiness, but so that she can write as many more books as possible. Unexpected Lessons in Love is a wonderful novel, one of those rare books which leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of the human heart.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Indian giver

A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new, 16 old) are moving and hilarious, and they amount to an education. Take the term Native American, for example. Isn’t this the accepted way to refer to the author’s ethnicity? You’d have thought. Yet Sherman Alexie avoids it, referring to himself and his characters as ‘Indian’. Everything he writes is imbued with a consciousness of

Michela Wrong

Change of heart | 7 February 2013

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return

Andro Linklater

Winning the war with wheezers

The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as expansive, but today the carpets are unmistakably worn and the bathrooms are beginning to peel. In its own small way, the hotel illustrates the central theme of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Professor Paul Kennedy’s epochal history now more than 20 years old, that a dearth of economic resources progressively enfeebles the

Rupert Christiansen

The music man

When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth 800-page volume covering the decade before his death in 1976: deadly dull though these letters intrinsically are, the magnificent accompanying annotation and detailed apparatus make them richly revealing. Thus hobbled, Carpenter’s effort amounts to a broad-brush portrait and a gripping narrative, but also something of a rushed and unpolished job — unbalanced and half-digested, peppered

Wednesday

Andrew Petrie

Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor: beyond chemistry

Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun, however, it paired Montgomery Clift with the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and gave us a film that still grips more than 60 years later. Director George Stevens disparaged what he called Technicolor’s ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ quality, and monochrome is indeed more suited to the ethical grey area explored by the film: whether a man who plans a murder but can’t go through with it is as guilty as a killer. Clift and Taylor don’t have conventional