Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Zenga Longmore

Golden oldies

Jackie Kay, one of Scotland’s most celebrated living writers, is a woman of many voices. In her latest collection of short stories the voices mainly belong to women of middle to old age. Many are lonely, some are caring for barmy relatives, some are barmy relatives. Reality Reality’s most successful tales glow with a quiet radiance, touched as they are by the warmth of their creator’s heart. In ‘These Are Not My Clothes’, Margaret, a resident of an old people’s home, lives in fear of a sadistic matron who pinches and mocks her. Drifting in and out of reality, Margaret spends her time secretly plotting to ask the only kind

Penelope Lively

His own best story

A biography that is also a collaboration with its subject is something of a novelty. Here, Maggie Fergusson writes the life, while Michael Morpurgo contributes seven stories, each springing from the subject matter of the preceding section. Fergusson has previously written an excellent biography of George Mackay Brown, so has now moved from a detached consideration of a person no longer alive to work on and with someone very much around and active (who had himself proposed the idea of the book). In other words, this is a very different sort of project— and it could be said right away that this is no hagiography. Fergusson is much too subtle

Sophia Waugh

From Luxor to Heston services

This wonderful book is not a history of food in 100 recipes at all; it is a history of the world in 100 recipes, as seen through the medium of what we ate and how we cooked it. William Sitwell’s erudite work never drags and should not be seen as a collection of recipes (although these are clearly chosen with modern-day cooking in mind) but as a window into the appetites and ways of life of our ancestors. We begin in Ancient Egypt, with a way of making bread extrapolated from pictures on the walls of a woman’s tomb in Luxor. This is one of the joys of the book;

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Am I not God’s chosen?’

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK — something that Sir Harold, once editor of Murdoch’s classier Times, knows all too well. Most symptoms of the current red-top plague were rampant in Stead’s style of journalism: the claim to speak for the decent majority, the vow to drive bad people from office by exposing them, the conceit that those who run newspapers

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg

Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels, qui invented der irreverente lingua des Europanto, ‘eine mix van differente linguas sonder grammatica und regulationes,’ as el puts it sichself. Oui, c’est Franglais, aber more so and avec knobs on, und der late Kilomètres Kington ist doubtless revolvingante dans sa grave as I write. Marani, however, hast gehen even further que Kington and written un completa livre des short stories in diese bonkers lingua. Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot (Dedalus, £6.99) features cette ‘autentiquo europeane polizei’ solvingante des crimes and fightingante contra der evil, tout dans la cause de

James Walton

Don’t hold your breath

The case for Richard Ford isn’t hard to make. Ever since his breakthrough novel The Sportswriter in 1986, his multi-award-winning fiction has combined an unsparing intelligence with an unashamed high-mindedness about what literature can achieve — nothing less than a careful exploration of the best way to live. In some hands, this moral sense might feel self-conscious, sentimental or even faintly embarrassing. In Ford’s, it’s done with such measured skill that the impact is quietly overwhelming. Sentence by sentence, too, his prose is pretty much peerless. Every word that makes it onto the page has clearly been on trial for its life, before being triumphantly acquitted. The case against Richard

Christopher Woodward

Orpheus meets Escher

The landscape architect Kim Wilkie grew up in a house on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. ‘Things decayed as fast as they grew.’ Leather shoes would fur over with mould within hours if left outside. His father was posted to Iraq next. ‘Everything was brown.’ But stare long enough at the sand and you would see a coin, or a shard of ancient glass. Back home his parents bought the ancient flint and brick farm in Hampshire with which this book ends. Longhorn cattle graze beside the spiral grass mounds which are his best known signature as a designer of parks and gardens. In the last year of a

Philip Ziegler

Highbrows and eyebrows

Juliet Nicolson is a member of a literary dynasty second in productivity only to the Pakenhams. She is herself the author of two distinguished volumes of social history describing Britain immediately before and immediately after the first world war. This is her first novel. The danger of letting a social historian write novels is that the social history is likely to lie rather heavily upon the narrative. Nicolson is not guiltless in this respect. The characters in her novel are strikingly well connected. Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Vanessa Bell, Lord Reith, all have walk-on parts. Almost the only two literary figures of any social consequence who do not appear, indeed,

Andrew Gimson

No time for bogus pieties

This is the shortest political memoir I have ever been sent for review. It is a marvel of concision: 27 years in the Commons set down in only 168 pages. Can any Spectator reader point to a briefer example of the genre? Yet I confess that I opened Confessions of a Eurosceptic with a degree of trepidation. David Heathcoat-Amory’s style owes nothing to that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He writes with patrician flatness. It would not occur to him to ingratiate himself with his readers by purporting to tell us everything about his inner life. Not that he dodges deep emotion: the four pages in which he recounts the suicide of

Philip Hensher

A gallery of grotesques

After the turn-of the-century memoir Experience, Martin Amis’s career has been widely perceived as somewhat rocky, shading into moments of disaster. If Experience, with its triple narrative of father, teeth and Fred West, was regarded as a compelling and masterly whole, Amis’s subsequent novels and non-fiction have not been as widely admired. Yellow Dog was quite a mess, getting some terrible reviews. The return to the knockabout vulgarian comedy that had made Amis’s name just lacked conviction. House of Meetings was more generally admired, being a fictional offshoot of a bizarre exercise, the non-fiction Koba the Dread. Both books were concerned with the crimes of Soviet Russia. The Pregnant Widow

John R. MacArthur

His finest years

Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the world, did not then make a call to his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev; nor did he confer with aides, or have his secretary place calls to the leaders of Congress, or issue an executive order. Instead, Johnson’s initial action was to phone, himself, the offices of the US Senate and order the desk he used

Friday

Anna Baddeley

The art of fiction: Jonathan Franzen, essayist

Do great novelists make great essayists? Not in the case of Jonathan Franzen, at least according to Phillip Lopate, who reviewed Franzen’s new essay collection Farther Away for the New York Times. Lopate is a fan of Franzen’s but feels his non-fiction pieces – though entertaining and interesting – are ‘not nearly as strong as his novels’. He sets out some reasons why: ‘While his prose is always cogent, he is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit. His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and character development. By contrast,

Thursday

Mark Mason

A conversation across the centuries

E-books are going to win. Anyone who’s seen a bus or a train carriage or a café lately knows that: Kindles everywhere, as though they’re breeding. And that’s as it should be. Stand in the way of convenient technology which people want, and you’re in the same position as every refusenik from the Luddites to the newspaper unions of the 1980s. But before the printed book takes its final bow, and retreats to its status as endearing novelty, let’s take a look at the sort of experience we’re going to miss. A friend recently came across a single volume from an 18th century Spectator series, and knowing of my scribblings

J P O'Malley

Interview: John Irving on writing sexuality

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic.

Wednesday

Richard Foreman

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other ‘great’ character

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest

David Blackburn

Amis: Porn is an attack on love

Pornography is in the news, and Martin Amis has been thinking about pornography. Those two facts are not related, not necessarily. Tomorrow’s issue of the Spectator contains an interview with Amis, who is on vintage form. Pornography, he says, is an attack on love; it is the repudiation of significance in sex. Pornography has, he says, created a ‘big disconnection for human beings’ between their conceptions of sex and its biological realities. He says, ‘There is no more talk of love in porn than there is about having babies. It’s as if you made babies by some other way, like sneezing.’ I recommend reading the interview when it is published

Tuesday

Matthew Quirk

Dirty secrets

‘Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerries under the table. Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet. And they’re very, very

Daisy Dunn

Out of the deep

It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed Infidels — the very Turks, perhaps, their men had recently defeated off the Gulf of Corinth in 1571.  For a struggle so bloody, the Battle of Lepanto that inspired El Greco’s painting makes a relatively cameo appearance in David Abulafia’s masterful human history of the Mediterranean Sea. Even now in paperback, The Great Sea is

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Thomas Wyatt’s dangerous games

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they have put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise Twenty times better: but once in special In thin array after a pleasant guise When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,

Fleur Macdonald

Across the literary pages: Amis Asbo special

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn’t sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo – Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav –  and his lottery win, it seems written to offend … even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &”was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks.