Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Benjamin Eastham

An introduction to Javier Marías

The fundamental purpose of the literary critic is to incentivise his audience to read books of which he approves. He has two means at his disposal. The first of those means is the recommendation by virtue of excellence, which can be reduced to the basic formula ‘look at this, this is very good, to read this will give you pleasure, excite you, improve you.’ It is very difficult, when writing about Javier Marías, a man who can lay defensible claim to being the greatest novelist above ground, to resist the temptation to simply copy out a lengthy passage of his prose and ask the reader to look at that, rather than

Lyndsay Faye

The language of criminals

The English language is, as English would have it, an odd duck.  Its nuances are capricious — to the non-native, maliciously so — but its lyricism widely praised. My preoccupation with language possibly stems from my first profession, that of a stage actress (throughout the course of this esteemed career, I made literally hundreds of dollars). Trained to mimic accents from public school Brit to Dixieland Southern belle, I was continually delighted by regionalisms. When I ceased auditioning and commenced scribbling, my fascination with ripe local slang never left me. When I decided to pen the tale of day one, cop one of the New York City Police Department, I

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Fights of the feminists

Naomi Wolf’s Vagina is not an organ so significant it needs italics; it is a book, and a catalyst for a swiftly assembled feminist lynch mob. In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny wrote, ‘Naomi Wolf’s Vagina is crassly attention-seeking… It’s upsetting to see a prominent feminist having what can only be described as a dramatic public meltdown.’ She had another go in the Independent: ‘Claims that the vagina is “not only co-extensive with the female brain but also is part of the female soul” are frankly offensive… today’s young women deserve better.’ In the Times Janice Turner complained that Wolf had ‘medically unnecessary major spinal surgery’ to restore her vaginal

Mark Mason

Our national obsession

If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list of official sports. We’d clean up at Rio. Strange, mind you, that we don’t actually know very much about the subject which consumes so much of our conversation. How rainclouds form, why lightning happens, where Britain’s first windmill was — that sort of thing. One man determined to put this right is Charlie Connelly. Bring Me Sunshine (Little, Brown, £12.99) is his anecdotal, layman-friendly exploration of the elements and what they do to us. Seathwaite in the Lake District, we learn, is Britain’s wettest inhabited place (140 inches of rain

Paul Binding

A snake in the grass

‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the

Alan Brownjohn

Pigeonholing the poets

Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin — and perhaps rather confused and unclear about what is happening now. Sampson herself is a notable poet, critic and editor who enjoys and admires a wide range of contemporary poetry, and Beyond the Lyric should assist any intelligent readers infected by her enthusiasms and wanting to update their knowledge. Her title makes a

Byron Rogers

More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background. Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29

Mary Kenny

Sweetness and light

Yes, shamefully, I did immediately look myself up in the index, since I had known Mary Robinson (née Bourke) when we were both young feminists in Dublin in 1970. Indeed, she sat in my Dublin flat sharing ‘conscious-raising’ sessions, and I published one of the first political interviews with her — which has been cited in all previous biographies of the lady. Our paths, to say the least, have diverged. She became President of Ireland (and annoyingly, a very good one), and has graduated to being one of the world’s great panjandrums, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with 49 honorary doctorates from universities all over the globe and honours

Cressida Connolly

Contrarian to the last

We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the end. The foibles of the dying are life-rafts thrown to their friends and family: proof that their uniqueness and the force of their personalities are stronger than death itself. Christopher Hitchens died as he had lived, holding court, boasting, arguing on the side of logic and reason, dismissive of religion and superstition alike; with great

James Walton

Over-cooked

Starting with Lemprière’s Dictionary — an unexpected worldwide hit in the early 1990s — Lawrence Norfolk has never been a man for the slim novella. Complicated of plot and huge of cast, his books generally serve up a combination of almost obsessively researched history and somewhat arcane mythology. Now, 12 years since his last one, comes John Saturnall’s Feast —  a novel, I think it’s fair to say, that doesn’t mark a radical change of direction. The year is 1625, and in the Oxfordshire village of Buckland the puritans are on the march. For 11-year-old John Saturnall, this is particularly worrying, because his mother Susan is widely (and, it would

William Leith

An exercise in torment

In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the relationships he had with other soldiers. His brain is full of lurid visions, the memories he is constantly attacked and ambushed by. But he can’t make sense of them, because he can’t find a way back to the person he was before the war. His story is an exercise in torment. Why did he join

Jason Goodwin

Spirit of the wild water

I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power of this book that I suppose Miriam Darlington must have summoned him for me. Here she is, evoking her own first encounter: I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent. He runs and makes a direct gallop for the shoreline. He moves

Richard Ryder

A way with clay

Most cultural tourists, apart from the Japanese, skirt the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent.  They are wrong. The bottle kilns have tumbled and the smoke-ridden skylines are no more. Yet museums teem with quality. And remaining pottery firms disclose glimpses of the design and craftsmanship admired throughout the city’s history. The founding father of Stoke’s global pre-eminence was Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the most talented all-rounder among British industrial revolutionaries. His achievements are the subject of A.N. Wilson’s latest novel, The Potter’s Hand. It closes with Wedgwood’s death. Nearly 30 years ago Wilson completed a biography of Hilaire Belloc, an even more prolific writer than he himself. He explained that towards the

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Freedom undermined by termites

I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar — and typically brilliant — writings. I particularly enjoyed the essay ‘Of Termites and Mad Dictators’. In analysing the threats to our freedom he says: ‘It is difficult now to imagine a modern university intellectual saying something as simple and unequivocal as ‘I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest started out as a 16-year-old rapper in London. Now she performs the spoken word, reading her poetry, rhymes and prose to stage audiences across the world. She has also written a play called ‘Wasted’, which toured Britain earlier this year. She is involved in a spoken word project at the Battersea Arts Centre. You can find more details by visiting her website, katetempest.co.uk. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I’m reading Robert Walser Selected Stories and a book of plays by Martin McDonagh. Also Christopher Logue’s War Music. 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Le Guin

Peter Guest

Africa’s growth spurt

When South African police opened fire on striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine, it had all of the hallmarks of the bad old days of the continent – the tangled and violent business of pulling metal from the ground in the “Dark Continent”. The events at Marikana were symptomatic of the fractious politics of labour in South Africa, the uncomfortable alliances forged in the anti-apartheid struggle that have not resolved themselves in peacetime. However, at their root they have the simmering tension caused by the unequal distribution of economic opportunity that is not restricted to South Africa. The mining sector there, and elsewhere in the developing world, is nearly

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Booker Prize shortlist announced

The 2012 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The runners and riders are: Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books) Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber) Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt) Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury) Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber) The Booker longlist was ambitious, a challenge to readers that was high-brow and out of touch as the world went mad for E.L. James’s easy mix of spanking and wanking. The judges have continued in this high-minded vein with the shortlist, self-consciously so. Chairman Sir Peter Stothard said: ‘We loved the shock of language shown in so many different

Matthew Richardson

Modern life in verse

Julia Copus’s new collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans exists in four parts, each in their own way circling the theme of loss. Two parts – ‘The Particella of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’ and ‘Hero’ – take on historic themes, the first inhabiting that of a man in 1791 ‘translating direct from the silence’ of Mozart’s shorthand for The Magic Flute while also caring for Mozart’s wife, Constanze. The second channels history too, in this case an Ovidian past made new, rejigged for a few pages in contemporary idiom. Both brief sections work well. But the collection really gets going in the two other larger sections – ‘Durable Features’ and ‘Ghost’

Monday

David Blackburn

A tale of two Smiths: Zadie Smith and The Smiths

It is lit-fiction season: that time of the year of when the premier novelists of the age dominate the market. Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks and Rose Tremain all have new books out, and Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoirs are to be launched this week, so many newspapers are devoting themselves to regurgitating stale observations about The Satanic Verses ahead of the main and keenly guarded event. Of the new books, Zadie Smith’s NW is garnering the most plaudits, or at least that seems to be the case. Philip Hensher awarded the ‘rich and varied’ book 5 stars in his Telegraph review, marking the ‘virtuosity of Smith’s technique’

Friday

J P O'Malley

Howard Jacobson interview

While Howard Jacobson’s prose works are renowned for their wit, energy, and self-deprecating, priapic jokes, his latest book, Zoo Time, is perhaps his most light-hearted to date. The protagonist is a struggling novelist, Guy Ableman: a red-blooded male with a penchant for the filth-merchants of English literature. Ableman has two predicaments: the first is his inability to sell any books. The second is his wish to sleep with Poppy, his alluring and sophisticated mother-in-law. Although the book is meant to be read with the smarmy, tongue and cheek tone that Jacobson has become famous for, the novel also passes judgment on a more serious matter: the crisis that has befallen