Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Alan Judd

A narrow escape

C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court. But he has also written two successful novels with 20th-century political themes. The first, Winter in Madrid, is a compelling evocation of Spain in 1940. His latest, Dominion (Mantle, £18.99), is set in Britain in 1952. But not the Britain we know; rather, one that made peace with Germany in 1940, with Halifax (pictured) rather than Churchill becoming prime minister, succeeded by the aged Lloyd George (an admirer of Hitler) and then Beaverbrook. By 1952 Britain has fallen increasingly under Nazi dominion, elections have been suspended and the opposition —

Ian Thomson

Erratic historian of alternative pop

Julian Cope, the well-read jester of English pop, was the founder member of the 1980s art-rock combo The Teardrop Explodes. With his antic appearance (Rommel overcoat, wild tawny hair), he falls into the erratic genius category. Drugs have played their part. By his own account, Cope has undertaken some dangerous chemical expeditions to the mind’s antipodes by means of lysergic acid. Yet he is no tiresome advert for drug-induced excess (still less for English whimsy). He is a recognised authority on the neolithic culture of Britain, for one thing, and has written two winningly eccentric volumes of musicology, Krautrocksampler and Japrock-sampler. Copendium, his humorously titled history of alternative popular music

Christopher Howse

The beating of heavenly wings

How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards? It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and wings spread out, shielding the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where the very glory of the Lord, the shekinah, descended with dangerous power. For Philo of Alexandria, a Platonist interpreter of Jewish belief, they were the same cherubim that guarded the gates of Paradise (from which mankind had been banished). Valery Rees does

Aidan Hartley

Years of living dangerously

The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer diversity of birds. While still at school he began recording birdsong and then shot 8mm home movies of the snakes he collected. Root makes his rise to becoming the world’s greatest wildlife film-maker seem eccentric and easy. A lucky break started him working for Armand Denis, producer of the early TV series On Safari. On

Philip Mansel

Sublime port

Ports can challenge national stereotypes: think of the difference between St Petersburg and Russia, or Naples and Italy. Since England is so small, and London so big, few English ports have generated their own identities. In France, however, despite the alleged stranglehold of Paris, ports such as Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille have remained remarkably different in culture and character. Of them all, Marseille is not only the oldest city in France — it was founded by  Greeks in 600 BC — but also the most independent; in 1907 Jules Charles-Roux called it ‘a separate republic, neither national nor French’. Incredibly David Crackanthorpe’s wise, erudite and sensitive book on Marseille is

Peter Parker

The land of lost content

Published at the author’s expense in 1896, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad did not at first attract many readers. It was only after it had been taken up by an ambitious young publisher called Grant Richards that it began to sell. The poems’ popularity increased further when English composers, deciding that they had found their own Heine or Müller, began setting them individually or as song cycles. Between 1906 and 1911 the average annual sale rose to more than 13,500, and by the time the first world war broke out the book was reputed to be ‘in every pocket’. Its themes of love and loss, of nostalgia for a ‘far

William Leith

Safety in danger

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces and strange events. If we think we can control or predict these forces and events, we’re sorely mistaken. One minute, we think we’ve mastered the business of lending money and hedging our bets; the next, the economy crashes. One minute, we invent a way to send a message on a computer; the next, porn is everywhere and the music business is finished. One minute, we’re a bit plump; the next, we’re obese, and heading for a diabetic meltdown. We always

Lewis Jones

Agonies and ecstasies

William James considered an hallucination to be ‘as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there’, except that the ‘object happens to be not there, that is all’ — an admirable definition, and a favourite of Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist, who has written what he calls ‘a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations’, which he thinks are an essential part of the human condition. He excludes schizophrenic hallucinations, on the grounds that they demand separate consideration, but includes every other kind. Some are induced by sensory deprivation, such as isolation and darkness — ‘the prisoner’s cinema’ — or visual monotony, as experienced

Marcus Berkmann

A choice of stocking-fillers

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing something for people to buy for other people who would rather have been given something else. Having produced one or two of the things myself, I suspect that most Christmas books aren’t even opened, let alone read. And possibly for good reason, because the majority of them are crushingly mediocre. Here, though, are a few

Jonathan Mirsky

The plot thickens | 6 December 2012

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or … as a primer in a particular field, or to provide a new angle on an old subject. You can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee. So what do you get from this Special? John Garnaut, an Australian journalist who specialises in Chinese affairs, describes here, in

Jane Rye

Tormented talent

We know a great deal about Keith Vaughan both as a painter and as a man, from the journals he kept between 1939 until his death in 1977. They have been described as ‘one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the 20th century’, and provide a fascinating record of an artist’s thoughts and working habits, and of the technical and philosophical problems facing a painter (particularly a figurative painter, and more particularly a homosexual figurative painter whose primary subject was the male nude, individually and in groups) in the 1950s and ’60s. He was ‘a stoic puritan by nature’, consumed by self-doubt in all fields (despite a highly

Philip Hensher

Boxed and stalled

What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s fashion. The most read novel of 2012 is Fifty Shades of Grey. But nobody would regard that as an exemplar of the novelist’s art, or think of it as trendy in any way. The link between popularity — or ubiquity — and importance is a complicated one. Here, in an ingenuous way, is an object

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Graydon Carter

Editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He reveals a predilection for Herman Wouk, an in depth knowledge of certain sections of the Eaton’s catalogue and a fondness for a particular character in P.G. Wodehouse. What are you reading at the moment? Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk As a child, what did you read under the covers? I grew up in Canada, where the nights end early, and a child’s day does as well. So pretty much all my evening reading was done under the covers. A lot of Hardy Boy mysteries. And the Eaton’s catalogue. For the lingerie ads. Has a book ever

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Zoe Heller versus Salman Rushdie and Joseph Anton

The literary world anticipates Salman Rushdie’s response to Zoe Heller’s cauterisation of his memoir, Joseph Anton, in the New York Review of Books. Heller’s pointed review is deeply considered. It is a delight to read, even though some of its arguments are uneven and some of its conclusions are trivial next to the themes of Rushdie’s unlovely yet important book. Heller is, in my view, right to slam the grandiloquence of Rushdie’s ‘de Gaulle-like third person’ narration. The technique succeeds in alienating Joseph Anton (Rushdie’s secret service nom-de-guerre) from normality; but its relentless oddness irritates to the point where the reader might lose sight of the fact that Joseph Anton is actually Salman

Anthony Adolph

Henry Jermyn – the hidden power behind Charles II’s throne

350 years ago, Charles II ruled over a Britain whose destiny – as a world power or a defeated backwater – was intricately tied to its relations with Europe. The King’s chief minister was the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sober and high-principled, Clarendon favoured alliance with the Hapsburg powers of Spain and Austria simply because they were the most powerful rivals of France. But Charles II did not pursue such a policy consistently. Throughout his reign, Britain’s relations with France vacillated between open hostility and close friendship. Why? A close study of the original records reveals a triangle of very human relationships at work in the Stuart

Monday

Austen Saunders

300 years of hating party politics

‘Whig and Tory Scratch and Bite’, by Aaron Hill Whig and Tory scratch and bite, Just as hungry dogs we see: Toss a bone ‘twixt two, they fight, Throw a couple, they agree. Tribal party politics are three-hundred years old in Britain. So is the fashion for satire which aspires to rise above it all. The British people have been dealing with political parties since the 1670s. It was then that a faction led by the Earl of Shaftesbury tried to have Parliament pass a law to prevent Charles II’s brother James from succeeding to the throne. Charles had no legitimate children so James was next in line. He was

Friday

Jack Van-Burholdbind

In defence of Giles Coren

Giles Coren’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator has caused a stir in the world of graphic novels (‘comic books’ to the uninitiated). He notes that two excellent comics, Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot, have been included on the shortlist for the Costa book awards. This is absurd, he says, because comic books are ‘their own thing’ and do not need a tweedy literary prize to justify their existence. As a regular reader of graphic novels, I say ‘Amen to that, Giles.’ However, some of the brethren seemed to have missed the argument.

David Blackburn

Mike Newell’s Great Expectations will leave you with great questions

You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on television and the radio. Even the press has found time to divert its manic attention from Sir Brian Leveson’s clever, clever musings to review the film. The coverage asks the question, do we need another adaptation of Dickens’ well-studied classic? There are plenty of views but few of them bother to consider the novelty of

Thursday

Mark Mason

Bad Sex Award

Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so think yourself lucky.) Hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Norman Mailer and Rachel Johnson are, inter alia, Tom Wolfe and Craig Raine. Wolfe must be a strong contender, his Back to Blood containing the sentence: ‘Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was

Mark Mason

Classic Coe

You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am known for many things,’ he says. And ‘I’ve always been able to read people pretty well.’ ‘Good athletes tend not to be good ball players, but I may be the exception that proves the rule.’ A crowd gets ‘classic Coe being Coe’. He even praises his own handwriting. Other people receive plaudits, but only for bringing out the best in Seb. Chief among these is the second-most important person in Coe’s life, his late father Peter, the athlete’s trainer for