Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Matthew Dennison

Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic and sensational possibilities of this encounter. Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She makes allusions to Wilkie Collins and throughout Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror (first published in 1992, now

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Ace of bureaucrats

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is a man whose name is now better known than his doings. Its syllables conjure a world-famous hotel, a prep-school, the former business class brand of Singapore airlines, a shonky packet of fags, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and Viz comic’s Raffles the Gentleman Thug. He also gave his name to a tropical flower that has the largest bloom on earth, and which gives off ‘precisely the smell of tainted beef’. Most of us will have had the vague sense that he founded modern Singapore (we’re half right about that), and a still vaguer sense that his was a life of glamour, buckle and

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled classical ideas about the merits of a space not so dissimilar to this in character. Best to make one’s desk in a room adjoining the bedroom, he said. That way, the writer need not leave his cell at all. In ancient Rome, even more so, nature was often considered a distraction. Both writers and artists

Steerpike Steerpike

Cash prizes

A veritable ‘who’s who’ of SW1 has been lined up to judge the inaugural Political Book Awards. Sky’s Adam Boulton, the Mail’s Simon Walters and Labour’s Chris Bryant will be joined by that nice Mary Beard. The awards are being run by Total Politics, the magazine published by Biteback Media, which, completely coincidentally, also publishes political books. Lord Ashcroft, who put up most of the cash for the Biteback venture, will sit on the judging panel. And so will a number of Biteback contributors, including Edwina Currie and Deborah Mattinson, although they will be awarding prizes in different categories from their own work. Unusually for an awards ceremony, and despite

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Anton du Beke

Stalwart of Strictly, winner of Rear of the Year 2011 and author of B is for Ballroom: Be Your Own Armchair Dancefloor Expert, dancer Anton du Beke is on this week’s Shelf Life. He tells us what he’s reading and which self help book would make him foxtrot for the hills. He tweets @TheAntonDuBeke 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods, by Hank Haney Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank, by Barbara Sinatra Steps in Time: An Autobiography, by Fred Astaire 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton 3). Has a

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

Jobs for the girls

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with

Jonathan Mcaloon

Back to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one lover… one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon… [had] never been drunk… never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone.’ Born at the end of the nineteenth century and dead a year before the Summer of Love, Robert labours in the American West, cutting timber for railroad tracks and then, when he’s too old for that work, carting people’s possessions around the countryside. The book’s chronology is loose, or, rather, Grainer’s whole life comes at us at

Friday

David Blackburn

Route to conflict? David Priestland’s Merchant, Soldier, Sage

David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns: ‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in embryonic form.’ It is fashionable, especially in heavily indebted Europe, to compare the uncertainties of the present with those of the 1930s. The Second World War is passing out of living memory and entering popular historical consciousness. Angela Merkel appeals to this when she warns that only the European project can guarantee peace; and Greek protesters

Thursday

Mark Mason

To take or not to take a pseudonym

Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover? Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his

George Chamier

Killing as entertainment

‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the killings carried out in the name of militant Islam. Even some of the assassinations within the author’s time frame are not considered – Olof Palme’s, for example, or the murders in Italy’s anni piombi in the 1970s and ‘80s. Newton’s central argument is that in the period covered assassination became less about political causes and

Jonathan Croall

Gielgoodies

Timothy Bateson Richard Burton was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic, but he was very nervous and not at his best. John came round to his dressing-room afterwards, to find him stark naked. ‘I’m so sorry, Richard,’ he said. ‘Shall I come back later when you’re better — I mean when you’re dressed?’   To Vivien Leigh, after she suggested playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet for a wartime concert party: ‘Oh no, Vivien! Only a great actress can do that sort of thing.’   To Alec Guinness, then a rising young star, on meeting him in Piccadilly: ‘I can’t think why you want to play big parts. Why

John McEwen

Our most exotic bird

The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie is a freelance journalist but his mission is to save tetrao tetrix britannicus (the britannicus added in 1913). He devotes much of his time protecting a black cock and a couple of  its grey hens on 1,600 upland acres in Galloway; and has written a diary combined with a history of the species, touching on the evolution of landscape and shooting, as well as conservation politics. Sterile tree farms (forest too good a word) now carpet a quarter of once nature-rich Dumfries and Galloway. The black cock with its lyre-shaped

Lewis Jones

Off the beaten tracks

In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on a wireless programme called Swing from London, and, though only a freelance, was excused compulsory enrolment in civil defence on grounds of his valuable contribution to the BBC (which then had two stations, the Home Service and the Forces Programme). In spare moments he pitched his ideas for new shows, such as This Too Too Solid Flesh: ‘The boys and I,’ replied Leslie Perowne, head of Light Entertainment, ‘have now digested your programme on the subject of corpulence … we

Bevis Hillier

… the bad, and the ugly

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings. In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote: David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put

Victoria Glendinning

The good …

Edna O’Brien would obviously never write a typical Irish ‘misery memoir’, though she has experienced more misery than is quite fair, even to the point of planning suicide. Country Girl is an emotional roller-coaster of a book, beginning with two disturbing dreams of her old home, setting the elegiac tone. Family life was a ‘ragbag of anecdote, hearsay, allegory and consternation’ in a large two-storey stone house among fields in Co Clare, every room and every object in which is summoned up on the page. Father had been prosperous, but was so no longer, and he drank. Mother, whose ways and sayings are recalled as if yesterday, was of poorer

Robert Stewart

Eager for the fight

Horatio Nelson is England’s most loved military hero. Marlborough is remote from our view, and the aristocratic Wellington was perhaps too stiff and unbending a Tory for popular taste. Nelson, by contrast, had an engaging personality and a colourful private life. The disabling wounds that he suffered and the affecting circumstances of his death in the midst of the country’s greatest naval victory have secured him in the national memory. The navy, at any rate, has deeper roots in national sentiment than the army; it was seapower, after all, that carried Great Britain and its empire to pre-eminence in the world. The second volume of John Sugden’s biography, covering the

Juliet Gardiner

One dank October dawn

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared. Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947. Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver. Petrzywaski was also middle-aged, a bespectacled

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 18 October 2012

Like mists and mellow fruitfulness, Val McDermid novels often arrive in autumn. The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown, £16.99) is a standalone thriller whose central character, Stephanie Harker, is a ghost writer who compiles the autographies of celebrities. Her relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a foul-mouthed reality TV star known to the nation as the Scarlett Harlot, begins on a professional level but soon lurches towards the personal. The novel opens after Scarlett’s death from cancer. Stephanie, now the guardian of Scarlett’s five-year-old son Jimmy, is held up by security at O’Hare Airport, Chicago.  A kidnapper walks off with Jimmy and vanishes into the blue. The story develops into a double narrative:

Christopher Meyer

A peacekeeping body at war with itself

It takes less than an hour to fly from Washington DC to New York City. But, if you are a diplomat, you might as well be travelling to a distant planet, such is the gulf in diplomatic culture between America’s capital and the United Nations’ headquarters. Whenever I went to see my opposite number at the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, I felt that I was entering a hermetically sealed universe, where ambassadors marched to an arcane beat governed by the mysteries of multilateral diplomacy. During my time in Washington, a new French ambassador arrived, who had been transferred directly from the UN. He confessed to me that, of all his postings,

Stig Abell

The growing pains of spirited youth

It is initially unsettling to read a new novel by an acclaimed author that is not really new at all, merely available in an English translation for the first time. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote Silent House way back in 1983. It was his second novel, and helped to cement his reputation as the rising star of Turkish fiction. It has since been translated into a variety of European languages, and has already lived its literary life as a multilingual triumph and mused-over example of Pamuk’s ‘early’ period. It is rather thrilling for us monoglot Brits to be able now to share in the experience. Silent House’s English