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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

A consummate craftsman

It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange, dirty artefacts among the glossier SF-tinged material. Tenth of December is such a strong collection because the wackiness is mostly kept at bay. These are stories about people who are trying to do the right thing in an ungrateful world, and there is less of the shrill goofiness that comprised much of his previous collection,

Patrick Skene-Catling

Pig in the middle

With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large, who was born in Dublin and educated partly at St Columba’s, — a boarding school modelled on English public schools — is a historical social observer of merciless accuracy and caustic wit, moderated with just a touch of nostalgia. He has written a wonderfully entertaining novel about the decay of a traditional Irish big house

Fiona Maddocks

His own man | 10 January 2013

Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure that his name stays in the frame of 20th-century British musical life forever. Yet this self-effacing figure, quick to praise others above himself, has rarely enjoyed the spotlight. He deserves his own twirl. A new collection of writings, letters and interviews, edited by his one-time pupil Peter Dickinson, offers an easily digested introduction to the

Caroline Moorehead

Apocalypse now | 10 January 2013

In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going home, Mogadishu is being rebuilt and the pirate menace, if not exactly under control, is being contained. It may be so. But the country Fergusson describes is the stuff of nightmares. In 1960, the former British protectorate and Italian colony united to become an independent Somali republic, under a civilian government. Nine years later, General

Jane Ridley

Taking a pop at the Queen

On 10 June 1840 an 18-year-old out-of-work Londoner named Edward Oxford cocked his pistol and fired two shots at Queen Victoria as she made her daily carriage drive with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill. Oxford was mobbed by the crowd, who shouted ‘Kill him!’ He was charged with high treason. Though he claimed that his cheap flintlock pistol was loaded, no ball was ever found. Oxford, who (according to Prince Albert) was ‘a little mean-looking man’, delighted in the attention the shooting brought him. During the trial the family insisted that he was mad. He was found guilty but insane, and sentenced to confinement for life in Bethlem hospital. Oxford

Margaret Drabble

Her fighting soul

The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and, most enduringly and curiously, with her husband, the legendary R. D. Smith, known to all as ‘Reggie’. Manning is rightly best remembered for her largely autobiographical novels describing the second world war, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, which gained an afterlife in a memorable 1987 BBC television series. These volumes cover Manning’s marriage

Philip Hensher

An almost perfect catastrophe

Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a puppet emperor, and three years later were massacred. The story goes that only one man, Dr Brydon, survived the march back from Kabul to Jalalabad. Actually, there were a few more survivors, though not many. The celebrated canvas of Dr Brydon’s solitary arrival, Lady Butler’s ‘The Remnant of an Army’, has stuck in the communal

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year. Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany – are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Life of Pi asks questions of man, not God

I’m conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book, and then I’ve compared notes. Jonathan Kim has derided what he saw, at least from the perspective of the metaphor: ‘Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence

Monday

Peter Robins

Historical directories: Street View for time-travellers – Spectator Blogs

Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn’t an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’ and the beauty of holiness

‘Prayer’ Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days-world-transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed, The milky way, the bird of paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, The land of spices; something understood. St Augustine argued that Christians pray for themselves, not for God. God is self-sufficient

Saturday

David Blackburn

The more Shane Warne practised, the more magical he got

It was a placid start. A tubby kid with peroxide blond hair approached the crease in 6 easy steps. He skipped into the air and pulled his arms backwards to build forward momentum. His left leg hit the ground and he began to rotate his shoulders from right to left. This motion brought his right arm up through the air in a wide arc. He had to hold his left arm out in front of him for balance as the shoulder-turn accelerated. His hips began to follow in the direction of his shoulders, bringing his right flank around to the left. His right arm extended above his head and neared the

Thursday

David Blackburn

Which words would you ban?

Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’. Words are recommended by members of the English speaking world, and then selected by the university. Top of the list is ‘fiscal cliff’: the catchall phrase for the various political (and cultural) difficulties that have arisen from America’s fiscal and economic crises. Opinion is split on which of ‘fiscal’ or ‘cliff’ is the greater offence. Other irate correspondents object to the vague metaphor: is America trying to scale the cliff or trying not to

Roger Lewis

The Diana effect

My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.’ Diana’s ambition was to have ‘a big house, a swimming pool and a cream telephone’. She achieved these, plus psychopathic husbands, bankruptcy and an early death from cancer. It is a wonderfully sleazy and vivacious tale, told in po-faced fashion by Niema Ash in Connecting Dors (Purple Inc Press, £14.99). No fool, Diana ‘always

John Preston

The further tragedy of unknowing

Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He did not discuss the possibility of his own death.’ A month later, she returned from the newsagents to see a casually dressed man outside her house ‘apparently loitering with some intent’. He explained that he was a major in the Army and asked if they could talk inside. Two days after that, Evison was being

Philip Ziegler

More Lothario than Hamlet

Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is different. At one point he refers to himself as ‘a struggling actor approaching middle age’. (His wife somewhat brutally agreed: ‘Let’s be honest, you’ve had your chance as an actor, and at 40 you still haven’t made it.’) Faulkner (the nickname ‘Trader’ being bestowed on him in recognition of his prowess in stealing his Australian

J P O'Malley

A chapter of history

Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a young woman, fond of her freedom, who is betrothed to a respectable New England mill-owner. Isabel is unexpectedly rescued from this engagement, however, and taken by her aunt to Europe. Soon she inherits a fortune, which will bring with it, she believes, the independence she craves. But then, in Italy, she falls for the fascinating

Molly Guinness

Women, beware these women

When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation, and get the fabulous payoff: a guy who is crazy about you!’ Time and again, women have thought they could ignore just one of the Rules, only to find themselves paying $300 for an emergency consultation with Fein and Schneider. When their first book of Rules came out in the 1990s, it was a surprise

Piers Paul-Read

Horrors too close to home

Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing. W.G. Sebald was a German academic and later a writer who lived most of his life in

Lewis Jones

Dirty tricks campaigns

There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English Affair, which is set to become the standard work. He has found new material — the police files on Perec Rachman and Charles Clore, for example — and, as his subtitle suggests, he is big on historical context. His book is elegantly arranged in two parts, the first and longer of which is devoted to