Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Steven Mcgregor

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished business

It’s hard enough convincing people to read finished novels much less unfinished ones — though perhaps our cultural obsession with The Great Gatsby is reason enough to republish F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon. The partial manuscript now appears alongside his personal essay The Crack Up in one slim volume. Read the former but discard the latter. I loved Tycoon the first time I read it, though I’m a Fitzgerald addict and was once mistaken for his grandson one summer while drinking champagne at the Trois Couronnes in Vevey. I claim no relation and attribute the mistake to my Puritanical upbringing: that is, my being overdressed and

Mark Mason

Do we need to know what a character looks like?

How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she asked. ‘They go on and on. They never really add much, though. I usually pass over them.’ My initial reaction was: really? They never add much? I haven’t read NW yet, but my mind went back to The Autograph Man, Smith’s second novel. It only struck me halfway through that I didn’t know much, if

Mark Mason

Knowing your onions

Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston Blumenthal’s latest wheeze: instead the cure for piles advocated by William Buchan, 18th-century author of Domestic Medicine, now republished as Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (Bodleian Library, £14.99). The new title gives you a clue to Buchan’s general style (poultice again). He also recommended holding burns near a fire and rubbing salt on them, while mere bruising called for the application of cow dung. Gonorrhoea (‘the fruit of unlawful embraces’) could be defeated by rubbing mercury on the inner thigh. Bleeding was a particular favourite among Buchan’s armoury — he championed

Ben Hamilton

A way to somewhere else

Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact. Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and

John Martin-Robinson

A Charlotte Brontë of wood and stone

Sarah Losh is not forgotten (as the subtitle of this book suggests) in her own village of Wreay (pronounced ‘Rear’), south east of Carlisle in Cumberland. The locals refer to ‘Miss Sarah’ as if she were still alive, rather as they speak about Lady Anne Clifford at Appleby. Anybody who has visited the village and seen the extraordinary church built in 1841-2 by Miss Losh at her own expense will know why. Travellers are met with the apparition of a small Roman basilica stranded on a village green, embellished with mind-blowing carvings. They are partly inspired by fossils, obscure natural history specimens and esoteric symbols. The Losh graves in the

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 6 September 2012

Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a chilly self-awareness. The story opens when a seemingly perfect family becomes the victim of a murderous attack at their home. The two young children are smothered; the parents are stabbed in the course of a bloody fight in the kitchen that leaves the father dead and the mother wounded, perhaps fatally. The victims’ home is

Anthony Cummins

A red rag, or just bull?

Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but to feed punchlines: Guy’s agent dies backpacking in the Hindu Kush only so Jacobson can say that ‘a literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation’. The gag is typical for the sense of moral and aesthetic collateral damage left in its wake. Overstatement is key to Jacobson’s style, as if

Alan Judd

The English inquisition

Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age as a confident and assured success story. But to those involved it was far more precarious, with victory anything but assured and survival a daily challenge. Alford dramatises this by imagining Elizabeth’s assassination in St James’s Park, followed by invasion by the superpower, Spain. Aided by popular uprisings, the live burnings of Elizabeth’s ministers and

Andro Linklater

Selective vision

In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable conclusion of Professor Jerry Brotton’s exhilarating book. From Hereford cathedral’s Mappa Mundi, with its depictions of enigmatic griffins and bloodthirsty manticores and the Himannopods ‘who creep along rather than walk’, to Google Earth’s satellite view of the world showing it in such detail that the result rivals Jorge Luis Borges’s absurdist vision of a map

Adam Nicolson

A chronicle of brutality

In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of geese. So fierce was the demand for quills that many were pulled from living birds, a process that was agonising and sometimes fatal. Travellers in rural England occasionally found denuded goose bodies lying quill-less at the side of the road where the quill robbers had left them shocked to death. Only the invention of the

Wednesday

Humphrey Hawksley

Hot War in the South China Sea?

Like the deserts of the Middle East, the barren islands of the South China Sea now loom as a new theatre of war.  Asian countries, indeed America, too, are at odds over how to deal with this power-play by a rising China — if that’s what it is; or scramble for maritime minerals; or as recently witnessed in Chinese cities a resurgence of nationalism and loathing of Japan. The South China Sea brings in China, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, little Brunei and unrecognized Taiwan. They represent the glittering success story of the developing world, the Tiger economies, the shared goal of wealth and education, the peaceful transitions to democracy

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Patrick Hennessey

Patrick Hennessey was a founder member of the Junior Officers’ Reading Club, formed when the Grenadier Guards toured Iraq in 2006. He is the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club — the story of how a ‘wise-arse Thatcherite kid’ became a thoughtful soldier. It is among the best examples of British military witness written since 1945. Hennessey, now a barrister, has recently penned a sequel of sorts, called Kandak: Fighting With Afghans. It is published by Penguin tomorrow. He has answered this week’s Shelf Life questionnaire.  1) What are you reading at the moment? I’m finally getting round to reading Life and Fate which is, so far, living up

Miranda France

Frank Johnson, a magnum and me

The 1996 Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize was won by Miranda France. Here, she shares her experience of winning the award and visiting the Spectator office and then-editor Frank Johnson to get her £3,000 cheque.   Miranda France has since had four books published. Her Shiva Naipaul-winning entry, ‘Bad Times in Buenos Aires’, can be read here. To find out more about the Shiva Naipaul award, and how you can enter, click here.     I clearly remember the day I won the Shiva Naipaul prize in 1996. My husband and I were renting a place off London’s south circular, a slightly grim maisonette where cushions were attached to the

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

The language of patronage

Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant when I first encountered it three years ago. I’d been drafted in to persuade a wealthy businessman at an art auction that taxidermy was a foolproof investment when I was informed that he wanted to invest in something a little livelier, in me. The intervener in this matter explained, with all the flamboyance of a Plautan pimp, that his client was willing to whisk me away to dinner and even pay my doctoral fees, but that after a

Richard Freeman

Midway: The overlooked battle

For many of us the Battle of Midway is just one more Hollywood spectacular in, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, a far-away sea of which we know little. But having recently taken a closer look at the battle I am struck both by what was at stake and what the consequences of the American victory were for the Allies at the time and geopolitics since then. When the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 they sank four battleships, destroyed 188 aircraft and damaged 159 other planes. Because, by sheer chance, there were no American carriers at Pearl Harbour on that day, the Japanese failed in

Monday

Austen Saunders

John Cleveland: discovering poetry

‘Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford’ ‘Here lies wise and valiant dust, Huddled up ‘twixt fit and just: STRAFFORD, who was hurried hence ‘Twixt treason and convenience. He spent his time here in a mist; A Papist, yet a Calvinist. His prince’s nearest joy, and grief; He had, yet wanted all relief. The prop and ruin of the state; The people’s violent love, and hate: One in extremes loved and abhorred. Riddles lie here; or in a word, Here lies blood; and let it lie Speechless still, and never cry.’ If Nick Clegg lived in bloodier times he might have ended up like Strafford by now. Executed on the eve

David Blackburn

Naomi Wolf, Marie Stopes and grand deceit

‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J. Ellory, the well-regarded and critically acclaimed crime writer, has been caught penning rave reviews of his own work, and damning that of his rivals, under various pseudonyms on Amazon. Ellory ‘wholeheartedly’ regrets the ‘lapse of judgment’. The story recalls Orlando Figes’s dishonesty with Amazon reviews. Now as then, I’m at loss to understand why someone of Ellory’s reputation felt compelled to dive to this kind of petty chicanery. The additional sales garnered by positive Amazon reviews must only be a

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Bookbenchers: Tim Farron | 2 September 2012

Liberal Democrat party president Tim Farron is on the books blog this evening sharing his favourite reads. He reveals which book he feels best sums up ‘now’ (which we hope for his sake says nothing about the state of his party), and says he’d most like to be a woman exploring outer space if he could choose to be a literary character.

The Spectator

Bookbenchers: Tim Farron

Tim Farron is president of the Liberal Democrats and shares his reading list with Spectator readers. Hopefully he is not thinking of the state of his own party when he suggests Lord of the Flies as the book that best sums up ‘now’, but in case he is, the next book he plans to read is all about ‘the empty promises of love, money and power’. 1) Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo. 2) Which book would you read to your children? Currently reading The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis. 3) Which literary character would you most like to be?

Friday

J P O'Malley

Roger McGough interview

As Roger McGough approaches 75, his latest collection of poems As Far As I Know shows him writing with the same blend of mischievous word play, subversion of cliché and distinctive sense of humor that makes him one of Britain’s most popular poets. McGough became a prominent force in the late 1960s when his poems were included in ‘The Mersey Sound’: a Penguin anthology that has since sold over a million copies. To date, McGough has published over fifty collections of poetry for both adults and children. His work has always reached a wide audience due to its incredible accessibility. Along with Mike McGear and John Gorman, McGough, was a