Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

Old lovers…

If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own — Ancient Light contains ingredients certain to please Banville aficionados. ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions,’ the novel’s narrator tells us at the outset. On the instant we are transported back through four decades of Banville’s writing: ‘We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past,’ he

David Ekserdjian

Live on in paintings

Like all self-respecting geniuses, Raphael (1483-1520) died young at the age of 37. For over a decade, he had been based in Rome, and had enjoyed fame, wealth and success beyond the dreams of almost any other artist of the day (Leonardo and Michelangelo were his only rivals). His standing in the highest circles — and above all in the eyes of the Pope — meant he was accorded the unprecedented honour, for one of his artistic calling, of being buried in the Pantheon. Artistic celebrity of this order did not guarantee the preservation of biographical minutiae, however, and we know almost nothing about what Raphael was actually like. The

Richard Davenporthines

Preaching to the converted

Jonathan Franzen is a pessimist with a capacity for quiet joy. In a revealing passage in this collection of essays, reviews and speeches he writes of his fellow novelist Alice Munro: ‘She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion’. Explaining this, he apes the General Confession in a church service. Reading Munro makes him reflect ‘about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death’. The stealthy theme of Farther Away is Franzen’s secularised religiosity. He honours obscure priests of his

John Gimlette

A corner of every English field, forever foreign

The story of the English countryside is richly exotic. We’ve always known that foreigners have shaped this land: traders, settlers and, most importantly, invaders. But scratch the surface, and the detail is remarkable. Who’d have guessed that the so-called ‘Amesbury Archer’ (a 4,000-year-old corpse, found near Stonehenge) actually started life in the Alps? Or that Neolithic England was a hub of European trade? What’s more, archaeologists now think that our landscape was formed not by the Romans (as previously thought) but during the Bronze Age.Back then, a huge, mysterious and varied population had deforested the countryside, tamed it, tilled it and made themselves rich. All the Romans did was make

Andrew Petrie

From our own correspondent

‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland (Oneworld, £10.99), and, given that he has also observed the methods of warlords from Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, his word counts for something. Though he acknowledges the journalistic allure of ‘shouting into microphones over the din of exploding ordnance’, Bryant’s memoir of his time as Auntie’s man in South Asia (and Washington, and Sydney) is refreshingly free of the macho stuff. Instead, he is concerned with analysing (not to say justifying) the changes in news presentation during his time on our screens, from the growth of post-Diana ‘how do

Sarah Burton

Marilyn was murdered

In The Mill on the Floss, having been given a ‘petrifying’ summary of Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil by young Maggie, Mr Riley challenges Mr Tulliver with allowing his daughter access to such dangerous reading material. A perplexed Tulliver explains: Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale.They was all bound alike — it’s a good binding, you see — and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday’ (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy). ‘And there’s a lot more of

Sean Mcglynn

Revolutionary in spirit

A few years ago, a French reader congratulated me on my marvellous biography of Napoleon. Yes, I agreed, it’s a terrific read — an absolute blinder. But I had to be frank and reveal that, alas, I wasn’t Frank. I confess to being a little envious of my approximate namesake, Frank McLynn. A hugely successful popular historian who has the freedom to write on just about any subject he damn well pleases: Marcus Aurelius, the Burma campaign, the battle of Hastings, Jung, the Wild West. He even has a sideline on Hollywood greats. With some two dozen books to his name, he has clearly grasped the baton from Christopher Hibbert.

Friday

Anna Baddeley

The Spectrum – the week in books | 6 July 2012

UP: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE Faber’s new Shakespeare’s Sonnets app is rated 12+ on account of its ‘Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity’. After watching Andrew Motion’s  come-to-bed reading of Sonnet 142 we’re surprised it escaped an X-certificate. Who needs 50 Shades when you’ve got the third sexiest poet laureate (after Ben Jonson and Ted Hughes) wearing nothing but polka-dot pyjamas and braces? ‘Love is my sin’ indeed!     UP: 60s SUMMER READS Now’s the time of year when literary pages replace serious stuff like reviews with drivel about what famous people are reading on their holidays. A depressing symptom of our celeb-obsessed age, it’s tempting to think, but a glance

Rachel Halliburton

LA gangs, Arab feminists, and learning Classics

‘There are more people teaching Ancient Greek in China than there are in Britain,’ declares Professor Edith Hall from the distinctively academic chaos of her study at King’s College, London. ‘Now you can either wring your hands about this, or do what I intend to, and go and talk to them! At the Zhejiang University [one of China’s C9 universities, their Ivy league] they’re translating Greek philosophy — Plato and Aristotle. They’re also looking at ancient Athens with a view to instituting a big discussion about democracy. This is the next frontier for Western classics.’   Professor Hall is in a particularly strong position to appreciate the irony that while

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

A knight’s tale

I can’t help thinking that the literary editor is having a little chuckle to himself, in his own private way, as he hands me Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way to review. What he knows is that, for my sins, I have never been anywhere near the Pennine Way, the long stretch that runs from Edale, Derbyshire, to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border. And yet here it is in my hand, a travel diary of sorts, dedicated to Simon Armitage’s 2010 sweaty ramble ‘backwards’ from the Scottish end to his hometown, Marsden, situated near its beginning. Thankfully, neither familiarity with the moors nor a particular

Emily Rhodes

Out of the ashes | 5 July 2012

One of the saddest parts of a bookseller’s job is telling a customer that the book they want is out of print. This book is obviously very dear to them; more often than not they want a duplicate copy to give away to a friend or loved one. The eager, excited look in their eyes turns to disbelief, followed by slow grim acceptance, and then there’s the gradual setting in of mournful gloom.  Even if I offer to try to track down a second-hand copy, they often still find it hard to come to terms with the fact that this book – so dearly loved by them – wasn’t loved

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Cityboy

Geraint Anderson still has an axe to grind. Filthy lucre is corrupting public life, and the City’s casino banks continue to spoil all who come near them. Their venality is the subject of his latest book, Payback Time – of which he wrote in these pages last week. He is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he’s into (the Marquis de Sade) and what he’s not (Rick Santorum). He tweets @cityboylondon 1) What are you reading at the moment? William Golding’s Lord of the Flies…again 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? See above as well as page 72 of James Herbert’s The Rats

Matthew Adams

Nabokov’s true love

When Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished book (not quite a novel, not quite a novella) The Original of Laura was posthumously released in 2009, consternation over whether it was right to publish the work at all — Nabokov had instructed that it be destroyed after his death — swiftly gave way to consternation over what the work contained. And what the work contained was yet more evidence that Nabokov’s interest in very young girls was, well, something rather more than an interest.   Here was a figure who was not so much possessed of the ability to send planets spinning (Nabokov’s definition of the real writer) as he was the ability to

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Government, the enemy

‘I should not have written the book,’ said Anthony Burgess in 1985 of his most famous work, A Clockwork Orange (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year). Burgess’ disavowal was total. The novel, he said, had been ‘knocked-off for money in three weeks’. The book was overhyped, ‘misinterpreted’. That alleged misinterpretation owes much to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, or at least that is what Burgess claimed. He said that Kubrick’s interpretation was ‘interesting’, which was not a complete compliment. Burgess had offered Kubrick a script based on the British edition of the book, which Kubrick ignored in favour of a screenplay adapted from the American edition, which excluded the positive

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Better in Black

It is almost twelve months ago, following the below-par A Death in Summer, that I wondered aloud on these pages whether Benjamin Black (aka Booker-winner, John Banville) had what it took to write a crime series. A resounding yes comes in the form of the fifth instalment — sixth novel overall, after the 2008 stand-alone The Lemur — of the Quirke series, Vengeance. Black has finally rediscovered the formula that made his debut, Christine Falls, so memorable.   To be sure, crime fiction purists will still bemoan the absence of standard clue-laying. The novel begins with the suicide of businessman Victor Delahaye, witnessed by his business partner’s son, Davy Clancy,

Fleur Macdonald

Across the literary pages: Of life, love and death

John Banville’s reputation as a master stylist and serious novelist wasn’t done any harm by the weekend reviews for his latest book Ancient Light. Familiar riffs on his usual leitmotifs guaranteed the standard standing ovation. ‘It is written in Banville’s customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery,’ Alex Clarke commended in the Guardian. While Patricia Craig in the Independent applauded that: ‘Many of John Banville’s customary concerns are present in this bedazzling new novel: memory and invention, questions of identity and make-believe, names and aliases, transgressions and transformations’. More unexpected however — given the rather dour face he sports for photo-ops – was his rather fun interview

Sunday

Jerry Hayes

Practically a Conservative

Francis Elliott and James Hanning’s latest update on all things Cameron, Cameron: Practically a Conservative, is a masterclass of painstaking research, balance and a great store of anecdotage. Is he the slick PR man with more U-turns than a military lavatory block? Is he a ruthless and arrogant privileged bully? Or is he unimaginative and rather pedestrian in thought and deed? Or is he a prisoner of a hunting, shooting and country house upbringing? If you want to get the beginnings of how to understand what makes Cameron tick, you should read this book. Even if you would prefer that his political corpse was found mangled under a number 11

Paul Abbott

Wanted: A British comic book industry

Viz magazine. The Beano. Judge Dredd. 2000AD… But that’s about it. Why doesn’t Britain have a comic book industry? Try an extended metaphor: Think of all English literature, laid out like a vast library. Ten thousand Romantic novels by Trollope. Cupboards crammed with textbooks on Shakespeare. Ubiquitous thumbed paperbacks of Harry Potter, Narnia, the Lord of the Rings. And enough soft porn to fill an Olympic swimming pool. But the shelf – if there was even a shelf – of British comic books would be nasty, brutish, and short. Why is this? Are we somehow less talented than our square-jawed American cousins? Certainly, there is no shortage of appetite here

Saturday

Molly Guinness

A Valparaiso romance

More than 150 years after her last publication, the narrator of this novel, the travel writer Maria Callcott, has taken up her pen to tell all about her friendship with Admiral Cochrane. Freed from the shackles of 19th- century propriety, she can finally reveal what really went on during that Chilean interlude. The affair develops against a backdrop of the naval ex-pat scene in Valparaiso, exciting developments in steam power, the 1822 earthquake and a lot of charming natives. It’s as much a record of 19th-century Chile as a drama, and Rachel Billington gives a real sense of the beauty and atmosphere of Valparaiso and its surroundings. The romance proceeds

James Grande

Another taboo subject

Lionel Shriver finished The New Republic in 1998. ‘At that time’, she writes in a foreword, ‘my sales record was poisonous’ and American publishers showed little interest in novels about terrorism. Both things changed: the next novel she wrote was the phenomenally successful We Need to Talk About Kevin, while ‘post-9/11, Americans became if anything too interested in terrorism.’ The New Republic stayed in a drawer, ‘because a book that treated this issue with a light touch would have been perceived as in poor taste.’ This explanation is not entirely convincing. Set in a fictional appendage to Portugal, The New Republic is a long way from The Satanic Verses, and