Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Shiraz Maher

Memoir of an Islamist

It was a surreal experience to meet Maajid Nawaz for the first time. I had known of him for years and admired his bombast. He was a hero — not just my hero — but a hero to hundreds of young Islamist radicals. ‘Woah, this is the brother in Egypt, isn’t it?’ said an erstwhile comrade, listening to a cassette in my badly beaten Peugeot 106 as we drove through Bradford. That brother was Nawaz and it explained why neither of us had met him at that time. In late 2001 Nawaz had travelled to Egypt to learn Arabic as part of an undergraduate degree at SOAS but was now being

Emily Rhodes

Second to the right, and straight on till morning

Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated duvets, the camera snuck under one of the duvets to show a little girl, reading a book by torchlight. Reading under the covers was a wonderful part of my childhood, as I’m sure it was for many other book-lovers and the quotation from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, read aloud by J.K. Rowling, was an apt

Wednesday

Barry Forshaw

Don’t be beastly to thriller writers

Book lovers are always pleased when water-cooler conversation turns to the latest phenomenon in which a novel or author has had the kind of popular success that extends far beyond the usual book reading public. The general tenor of such discussions runs along the dyspeptic lines of: ‘Why aren’t people reading better books?’ I have heard the following: ‘I find it really depressing when I see an adult reading a JK Rowling novel on the tube’, and ‘Steig Larsson may keep you turning the pages, but what a shame he died before his books could be properly edited.’ And as for Dan Brown and E L James, they have almost

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger is one of the brightest young novelists in America, and she takes the Shelf Life hot seat this week. She suggests that Michael Gove should introduce English Literature GSCE students to international authors, and confides that she needs to read the self-help book she would like to write. Her latest novel, The Newlyweds, is published by Penguin (£12.99). 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Mysteries by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Paula Fox’s  YA novels, Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Shoes’ series. 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Henry Kissinger’s education

Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its editors cause for consideration as well as celebration. They have commissioned a series of essays on the questions prompted by the unnerving nature of the future. The themes of these essays — America’s place in the world, the West’s malaise, the constant tension between continuity and change — might be reduced to this sentence in

Paul Ormerod

Who will rule the 21st century?

This is a nice big question to ponder on the holiday beach or in the rented villa. A vast amount has already been written on the rise of China and whether the US will be replaced as the global superpower. And where exactly does Europe fit into all this? It is easy to make a case for American weakness. The twin deficits of the balance of payments and the massive public sector gap between expenditure and income, the increasingly divided and embittered nature of policy discourse in the country, growing cultural fragmentation. The image of a divided nation appears to be supported by what has happened to the choice of

Monday

Steven Mcgregor

The fictional House of Lords

The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell observed an, ‘ever-widening gap between the popular concept of a peer and the existing reality.’ He found greatest fault with nineteenth century novels and plays, ‘where a lord, silly or sinister, handsome or grotesque, is rarely allowed to strike a balance between extremes of conduct.’  Powell’s nineteenth century examples would certainly have included Gilbert and

Kate Hoyland

Mary’s secret

The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars of modern horror fiction — the vampire myth — was born during that same extraordinary holiday. Shelley and Mary had taken lodgings near Lord Byron, recently escaped from England following the scandal of his divorce, and — many speculate — incestuous affair with his half-sister. Accompanying him was his handsome and neurotic doctor, Polidori. In

Saturday

James Walton

Little Miss Sunshine

James Kelman is famously not a man fond of making concessions — whether to bourgeois interviewers, literary fashions, traditional punctuation or his own readers. Sure enough, his latest novel comes in familiar form: a continuous, chapterless slab of interior monologue from a working-class Glaswegian struggling against the un-remitting toughness of what a character in his last book of short stories called the ‘greatbritishsocialsystem’. True, the protagonist here does represent one departure from the norm, by being a woman — thereby allowing Kelman to add another layer of oppression to the usual mix. Even so, the only thing remotely quirky about Mo said she was quirky is the title. The plot

Caroline Moorehead

From Austria to Australia

Moriz Gallia from Moravia and Hermine Hamburger from Silesia met and married in Vienna in 1893, when the city was the third largest European capital after London and Paris. They were rich, from making and supplying gas mantles, and they were generous patrons of Vienna’s exceptionally lively artistic world. When their two daughters, Gretl and Käthe, fled to Australia after Kristallnacht, they took with them the finest collection of central European pictures, furniture, silver, glass, jewellery and porcelain to escape the Nazi looters. Good Living Street — the author’s translation of Wohllebengasse, the name of the fashionable street on which the family lived — is not only the story of

Emily Read

Blowing hot and cold

The landscape is treeless and windswept but spectacular, with volcanoes, glaciers and geysers, the climate and cuisine nearly always disagreeably challenging: it is sometimes hard to explain the affection and loyalty Iceland has inspired in so many visitors, from Auden and Isherwood in the Thirties to the academic and novelist Sarah Moss in 2009. She too was drawn back when, long after a memorable gap-year visit, she took a job at the university and returned to live there with her family. My family also lived in Reykjavik, back in the Sixties, when my father was posted there as ambassador. Holidays with our Icelandic and American friends were good fun. This

Andro Linklater

Fading ambition

‘Despite 30 years of war,’ remarked General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in 2009 of NATO forces in Afghanistan, ‘civilisation grows here like weeds.’ Unfortunately for the Afghans, their tribal, rural, autarchic civilisation that grows so readily has never been acceptable either to the western allies or to the Taleban. However much NATO’s military goal has altered in the ten years it has been fighting there — from driving out al-Qa’eda and their Taleban hosts, to pacifying the country for elections, to holding the fort for their product, President Karzai, to countering the Taleban’s growing insurgency, to defeating the Taleban’s increasing terrorism, to withdrawal in 2014 — the civilian aim has

Michael Carlson

Three shades of noir

In the days of cheap paperbacks, publishers sometimes printed two pulp novels in one volume, back to back. Ariel Winter has done one better, because The Twenty- Year Death consists of three novels, dealing with murders committed over the course of two decades, each told in the style of a great crime writer. The first is set in 1931 France, hommage to Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. A corpse found floating in the flooded drains of Verargent turns out to come from the local prison, from which there is no escape. Inspector Pelleter has just visited the prison to interview a serial killer he has arrested, and is drawn into the

Peter Parker

Blending the old with the new

Holker Hall is situated in a beautiful Cumbrian landscape within sight of Morecambe Bay, and in 1950 it became the second stately home, after Longleat, to be opened to the public. The house itself dates back to the 16th century, with a Victorian west wing replacing one that burned down in 1871. It is, however, the extensive park and gardens surrounding the house that have made it famous. Several generations of the Cavendish family have left their mark on this land, but the present garden is largely the creation of Hugh Cavendish — who was brought up at Holker and inherited it on his father’s death in 1972 — and

David Ekserdjian

The most Shakespearean of painters

Titian’s paintings have always been both loved and revered, and he is without question the most influential artist who has ever lived. In the 17th century, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez and Rembrandt were all under his benign spell, but even more remarkably over 400 years after his death his power continues to impress. It is not by chance that both the National Gallery and the Royal Ballet are currently celebrating Titian as a source of inspiration for newly created art, ballet and music, because he remains in so many ways the most contemporary of the Old Masters. In the world of art history, the study of Titian has given birth

Lewis Jones

American enterprise

The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ And its subtitle is a tribute to Alistair Cooke, who was a friend and colleague of Gill’s father, and ‘the most urbane, witty and readable journalist of his century’. Urbanity is hardly Gill’s forte, but he is often witty and always readable. ‘This book,’ he explains, ‘is the view of the New World from the Old.’ He might more modestly and accurately have called it ‘a view’, as it

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Heading for the rough

Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey Press, £10.99), the first book by the eminent literary agent David Godwin, shows what can happen when you let this essentially ludicrous sport into your life. In Chapter 1 he is a normal person, thinking he should do a bit more exercise, and taking up golf mainly because he can’t face the idea of cycling. Within scarcely a dozen pages he is golfer more than he is human, thrashing his way round seaside courses in a clearly doomed quest to ‘break 80’, when the upper 90s and low 100s are

Cressida Connolly

More table talk

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has a lot to answer for. In the months after its publication, it became the printed equivalent of holy communion: wheresoever two or three people gathered together to break bread, it was earnestly discussed. Shriver’s novel explored the possibility that a child could be born wicked; further, that it would be entirely possible for the mother of such a child actively to dislike her progeny. Whether the author set out to satirise the current western obsession with child-rearing, or simply to tell rather a chilling tale of American family life, Shriver produced a very readable and polished story. Now we need to

Jane Ridley

Another night to remember

At 6 o’clock on the evening of 16 October 1834 the old House of Lords burst into flames. By 3 a.m. most of the Palace of Westminster was a burned-out wreck. The Lords and the Commons, the Law Courts and the ramshackle mess of medieval offices, kitchens and houses which made up the Palace had gone up in smoke. Only Westminster Hall remained intact. It had taken roughly 500 minutes to torch over 500 years of English history. This disaster forms the subject of Caroline Shenton’s book. The crowd hailed the fire as retribution for the cruel Poor Law Act of 1834. Victims of social care cuts perhaps feel just

Friday

David Blackburn

Rereading Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to those of different inclinations. In all the dense weight of recollections and memorials published since Vidal’s death on Tuesday, I have not seen a sharper criticism of his writing and its preoccupations than that made by Spectator reader Walter Taplin in a letter to the magazine in 1982. ‘Sir, On page 13 of the Spectator