Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

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

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Arkansas tales

Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of phobias: of clowns, of old furniture, of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair. Brutally dyslexic, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Sling Blade, but writing a memoir, he says, would be beyond him. So, in an intriguing act of creative symbiosis, his friend Kinky Friedman, the Jewish country- singer and novelist, has taped him talking to friends late at night and turned these rambles into a book. The Billy Bob Tapes (Virgin, £18.99) has many of the flaws of ordinary ghosted showbiz memoirs. But Thornton has wonderful stories to tell, particularly

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Two iron ladies in the Andes

A long-exposure photograph of the night sky will show you something that you never see, however often you look at the stars: thousands of perfect curves, concentrically arranged around an invisible pinhead. Everything is wheeling slowly about a single point. A good book or a great adventure, fictional or real, often does the same. There is a fulcrum: a still, quiet centre to the tale. For me, for instance, in Orwell’s Burmese Days, the moment when, walking alone in the forest, John Flory sees a green pigeon, is that centre. On page 30 of Meriel Larken’s thrilling and moving real-life adventure, one that swishes us across continents, through jungles, up

Nicola Shulman

Poet of the middling sort

‘If you cn rd ths msg, you cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb’. So ran the advertisement for the Brook Street Bureau employment agency. It was the ubiquitous ornament of tube trains, buses and escalators in the 1970s, now seen no more and forgotten, at least by me, until Andrew Hadfield’s biography of Edmund Spenser whistled it back from the void. Here is Spenser’s career in a nutshell, according to the emphases of Hadfield’s study, a phenomenal work of scholarship and insight, if not itself a nutshell at almost 600 closely- printed pages. Hadfield is at pains to show Spenser, the pre-eminent poet of the 16th century,

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Not grinning but scowling

I am deeply envious of Chris Cleeve, so maybe everything that follows should be taken with a pinch of salt. This is a guy whose first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award and whose second nestled snugly in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. ‘Stunning,’ said the International Herald Tribune. ‘Stunning,’ said Newsweek. ‘Stunning,’ said Bookmarks Magazine. From the dust jacket of his latest, the author’s wry, clever, benevolent features (I just wish I were as nice as him) radiate calm: relax, they seem to say. I’m going to take you on a journey. All of which can only leave you thinking: wow. And: boy, this

Michael Howard

Whitehall’s murky recesses

Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election. My anticipation was heightened by his introduction, which promises an examination of the roles of myth and imagination in the writing of history. Of the many quotations we are treated to, the one which seemed best to reinforce that promise appears on the very first page, and comes from Enoch Powell: All history is myth. It

Anthony Daniels

For richer, for poorer

It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is not actually their ultimate goal. In fact, most people don’t have an ultimate goal. The authors of this book, father and son, seek to persuade us that we should devote more of our energies to things that are done for their own sake, that are good in themselves, rather than spend our lives on the

Philip Hensher

End of a dry season

The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years later; this third takes us only up to 1927, with a good 40 years of a busy professional life to follow. There may be a dozen volumes to go, and the undertaking in the end will rival the great Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters in scale. The editing of the Eliot letters is exemplary in

Paul Johnson

Fearsome and devilish

This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead of them accompanied only by his piper. But Sarah Fraser deserves to be acclaimed as a notable biographer, too, for she tells a complex and sometimes bewildering story which she has amassed from a vast quantity of often intractable material. This is a brave and meaty book. The years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688

Friday

Steven Mcgregor

Exiled at the Poetry Parnassus

While the Ancient Greeks ceased hostilities for the Olympic Games, this summer will be business as usual in many parts of the world. Exiled poets from Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, China, and Uganda presented their work yesterday afternoon at the Southbank center, participating in the ongoing Poetry Parnassus. Readings took place in the cavernous, skylit, Front Room at QEH. Yet the solemnity of spoken word kept being interrupted by river watchers on the terrace coming in to order more drinks at the bar or the walkie-talkie of the janitor as she made her way around the audience, sweeping up rubbish. Mir Mahfuz Ali, who was shot in the throat by a

Geraint Anderson

In the service of Mammon

The Libor scandal continues to shock, prompting bewilderment as well as disgust. The mood has turned against the City, with the FT suggesting that it ‘may be necessary to retire this generation of flawed leaders.’  In the piece below, Geraint Anderson, a former stockbroker and whistleblower, explains why his latest book, Payback Time, a story of people taking revenge on a bank they blame for their friend’s suicide, was inspired by the self-loathing caused by working for Mammon and the divisiveness which the crash has caused.      I did not write Payback Time for the money. This is not an attack on my publisher’s generosity, but a reflection of the

Thursday

The Spectator

Shelf Life special: The Skidelskys

Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without end.’ But what have this father son combination been reading while penning this and their other books? The answer is: rather more than just John Maynard Keynes. Robert Skidelsky 1) What are you reading at the moment? Laurent Binet, HHhH 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? J.B.Priestley, The Good Companions

Mark Mason

Letters to the author

Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did it. Publishing in the old days, before writers all had ‘web presences’, could be a lonely business, the only real feeling for how your book had been received coming from newspaper reviews and sales figures. Yet when contact is made there can be moments of beauty. There can also be moments of terror, and indeed